Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles: feminist political ecologies of land and body in Panama

Abstract

On the Panamanian Caribbean coast and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, foreign direct investment via residential tourism development drives land displacement. As land insecurities grow, particularly for local Indigenous and Afro-Panamanian peoples, ongoing dispossession is not simply about land, but rather simultaneously about land, people and their bodies. In Bocas, foreign land enclosures are infused with imaginaries, which take for granted Black female servitude and Black landlessness. Such imaginaries seemingly lock economically “poor” Afro-Panamanian women into particular kinds of work. To illustrate, I entangle feminist political ecological assertions that struggles over nature are embodied struggles, with intersectional and relational understandings of land and body. To do so, I draw insights from postcolonial, decolonial and Black feminist critiques of coloniality and settler colonialism. Building from this literature, I seek to show how a logic of elimination operates within the legal geographies of residential tourism development. In doing so, I highlight the historical and contemporary ways in which Afro-Panamanian women are naturalized as criadas (maids), a process that accompanies land enclosure. Blending ethnographic and historical data collection, I seek to illuminate how Afro-Panamanian women's livelihood struggles reflect both their acquiescence to residential tourism development, and their resilience in the face of Bocas' anti-black patriarchal coloniality. Thus, I argue that Afro-Panamanian women's desires for inclusion and belonging in Bocas' tourism enclave – a project that seeks to eliminate Indigenous and Black relations to coastal lands and foster their embodied subjection to foreign nationals – simultaneously reflects their struggles for the right to remain on the coast.

Full text

Geogr. Helv., 77, 327–340, 2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-77-327-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Swiss human geographies lecture 2019
tourism troubles: feminist political ecologies
of land and body in Panama
Sharlene Mollett
University of Toronto Scarborough, Department of Human Geography & Global Development Studies,
Toronto, Canada
Correspondence: Sharlene Mollett (sharlene.mollett@utoronto.ca)
Received: 31 December 2021 – Revised: 20 July 2022 – Accepted: 21 July 2022 – Published: 15 September 2022
Abstract. On the Panamanian Caribbean coast and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, foreign direct investment
via residential tourism development drives land displacement. As land insecurities grow, particularly for local
Indigenous and Afro-Panamanian peoples, ongoing dispossession is not simply about land, but rather simultane-
ously about land, people and their bodies. In Bocas, foreign land enclosures are infused with imaginaries, which
take for granted Black female servitude and Black landlessness. Such imaginaries seemingly lock economically
“poor” Afro-Panamanian women into particular kinds of work. To illustrate, I entangle feminist political ecologi-
cal assertions that struggles over nature are embodied struggles, with intersectional and relational understandings
of land and body. To do so, I draw insights from postcolonial, decolonial and Black feminist critiques of colonial-
ity and settler colonialism. Building from this literature, I seek to show how a logic of elimination operates within
the legal geographies of residential tourism development. In doing so, I highlight the historical and contempo-
rary ways in which Afro-Panamanian women are naturalized as criadas (maids), a process that accompanies
land enclosure. Blending ethnographic and historical data collection, I seek to illuminate how Afro-Panamanian
women’s livelihood struggles reflect both their acquiescence to residential tourism development, and their re-
silience in the face of Bocas’ anti-black patriarchal coloniality. Thus, I argue that Afro-Panamanian women’s
desires for inclusion and belonging in Bocas’ tourism enclave – a project that seeks to eliminate Indigenous
and Black relations to coastal lands and foster their embodied subjection to foreign nationals – simultaneously
reflects their struggles for the right to remain on the coast.
1 Introduction
On the Atlantic coast of Panama and the Bocas del Toro
Archipelago, (pop. 18 000) Angelo Martinez and his family,
proud Afro-Panamanian people, own and operate a small ma-
rina on the shore of the family’s private cay. Each Saturday,
Angelo’s marina is the site of Afro-Panamanian hospitality
where Liala, Angelo’s 28-year-old daughter leads her family
in hosting a long-running weekend BBQ where patrons enjoy
grilled lobster, conch, octopus and beloved catacones (fried
plantains). With Afro-Caribbean music bellowing across the
calm waters of the Caribbean Sea, the Martinez’s weekend
BBQ attracts a largely white, affluent and foreign commu-
nity, many of whom own significant land, homes and hotels
throughout Bocas.
Panamanian law provides the legal pathways for foreign-
ers to purchase land throughout the country (Spalding, 2017).
In contrast, over the last 20 years, domestic populations
across the archipelago, like the Martinez family and many of
their Indigenous, mestizo and Black neighbours, experience
land tenure insecurities and shrinking access to nature. In de-
fence of their place on the coast, local Bocatoreños are forced
to square off against increasing pressures from foreign land
developers, affluent migrants-cum-“residential tourists”, and
the Panamanian state (Spalding, 2011; Thampy, 2013; Mol-
lett, 2016). For example, during one of their weekend BBQs,
a Canadian couple, returning marina tenants, asked Angelo
Published by Copernicus Publications for the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich & Association Suisse de Géographie.

328 S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles
to borrow some land behind the dock to grow fruits and veg-
etables. Angelo agreed to loan them a small parcel and he and
his sons cleared the land and mulched the soil for planting.
Then, the couple asked Liala to plant and maintain the gar-
den. In addition to a list of vegetables, the Canadians asked
Liala to plant two packages of wildflower seeds previously
purchased in Canada. Liala notes, “they asked me to plant a
little Canada in Bocas”. During their 10-month stay, Liala
tended to the garden and regularly hand-washed the cou-
ple’s laundry as she claims, “[the woman doesn’t] know how
to do laundry without a machine and says it’s too heavy to
take into town!” (Mollett interviews, 2011). While Liala re-
ceived the standard USD 3 per hour, for washing, her work in
the garden went un-remunerated. Then, after many months,
Angelo abruptly instructed her to remove the plants from
the garden. According to the local municipality, the Canadi-
ans were attempting to purchase his “borrowed” plot, seem-
ingly without his knowledge or benefit. After their failed at-
tempt, Angelo expressed relief in protecting his land “against
gringo land invasions”. Indeed, since the early 2000s many
local Bocatoreños, particularly Indigenous Ngäbe and Afro-
Panamanian residents, have lost hundreds of hectares of land
as affluent migrants, predominately from North America and
Europe, use a variety of legal and extra-legal tactics to grab
land and “settle” in Bocas (Mollett field notes, 2012, 2013;
Mollett, 2016; Impacto Films, 2011; Spalding, 2011).
Critical geographers maintain that in many locales, colo-
nial logics of power underpin contemporary tourism develop-
ment (Kothari, 2015; Emard and Nelson, 2020). These logics
privilege affluent foreigners through incentivized land poli-
cies while disenfranchising domestic local populations from
family lands and common resources (Devine, 2017; Ojeda,
2012; Kothari, 2015; Hayes, 2015; Emard and Nelson, 2020;
Loperena, 2017). Residential tourism development is a case
in point. In fact, residential tourism, namely “a mix of per-
manent and temporary mobilities” (van Noorloss, 2013:571),
describes a process whereby foreign migrants travel to places
like Panama, with the purpose of establishing permanent and
supplementary homes and real estate investments (Hayes,
2015; McWatters, 2009; Mollett, 2016). This tourism model
is sanctioned by global development organizations and pre-
sented as an effective method to attract foreign direct in-
vestment, spur land markets, and generate employment, of-
ten rhetorically pitched “in the name of the poor” (Panama,
2009; Gómez et al., 2009). While “poverty reduction” is a
common justification for many kinds of tourism develop-
ment, there is a paucity of research attentive to how resi-
dential tourism development is complicated by extant settler
colonial power relations embedded in both policy and place
(for exceptions see Mollett, 2016, 2017; Loperena, 2017). It
is in this way, for Indigenous Ngäbe and Afro-Panamanian
residents, tourism troubles.
Indeed, Latin American countries are settler colonial land-
scapes (Poets, 2021; Zaragocin, 2019; Correia, 2022; Mol-
lett, 2021b; see also Speed, 2017; Castellanos, 2017; Gott,
2007). I understand settler colonialism, in borrowing from
Morgensen, as “the social processes and narratives that dis-
place Native people while granting settlers belonging to na-
tive land and settler society” (Morgensen, 2010:117). I am
particularly interested in the “logic of elimination” posited as
a central organizing principle in settler landscapes which ac-
cording to the late Patrick Wolfe not only “strives for the dis-
solution of native societies” but “destroys to replace” (Wolfe,
2006:388). While in Bocas, a logic of elimination works to
displace both Indigenous Ngäbe and Afro-Panamanians, I
focus on Afro-Panamanian women. I do so for at least two
overlapping reasons: first, I seek to complicate the reproduc-
tion of settler–native binaries in geographic scholarship on
settler landscapes (see Day, 2015; King, 2019; Pulido, 2018).
In so doing, I acknowledge Lowe’s insistence that “the oper-
ations that pronounce colonial divisions of humanity – settler
seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession,
and racialized expropriations of many kinds – are imbricated
processes, not sequential events” (Lowe, 2015:7). Second,
following Indigenous, Black and decolonial feminist schol-
ars writing on the Americas, “a logic of elimination” does
not only play out on the land, but on subaltern bodies, includ-
ing Afro-Panamanian women (Goeman, 2009; King, 2019;
Simpson, 2016; Zaragocin, 2019).
Research for this paper blends ethnographic and histori-
cal data collection to demonstrate how intersectional power
structures people and place in enduring ways across time
and space. This paper combines ethnographic and semi-
structured interview data (collected from 2011–2013) with
archival and historical data collection conducted in the
Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, the Benson Bee Latin
American Library at the University of Texas Austin and
the Panamanian National Library in Panama City (collected
from 2011 to 2017) and supplementary travel to Panama
in 2017. These findings are contextualized alongside Afro-
Latin American historiographies, which help reveal the ways
in which colonial spatial relations are historically woven into
the social fabric of Bocas. Captured in ethnographic tes-
timonies and vignettes, Bocas, as a place, is imbued with
multiple racial and gendered ideologies (Mollett field notes,
2011–2013, Mollett, 2017). Through reading ethnographic
data alongside Afro-Latin American historiographies and
archival data, the weaving of past with the present punctuates
the workings of what Stoler calls “recursive logics” (2016).
Through this entanglement, I aim to illustrate how contem-
porary Bocas is shaped by a “sort of history [that] is marked
by the uneven, unsettled, contingent quality of histories that
fold back on themselves” (Stoler, 2016:26 emphasis in the
original), offering an optic of blurred temporalities. Such
blurred temporalities defy seeing history as linear and may
suggest that these racial, gendered and carnal relations, while
structural and persistent, are neither fixed nor settled. As his-
torical geographers maintain, attention to histories of place
effectively capture the “lingering effects of European ex-
pansion on environments and environmental epistemologies”
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S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles 329
as seen through “the continuity of material and discursive
forms of resource control” (Offen, 2004:28, 2012). Further-
more, attention to how the past, as both temporal and spatial,
shapes the present affords “alternative stories of belonging”
(Schein, 2011; see also Saldaña-Portillo, 2016). In this vein,
I wish to highlight the particular case of Afro-Panamanian
women, as domestic service providers, and demonstrate the
co-constitutive ways in which anti-blackness and patriarchy
intimately weave within the eliminatory processes of (settler)
colonialism at work in residential tourism in Bocas, compli-
cating the where, how and for whom settler colonial histories
tell a story.
In Bocas, settler land control, and concomitant land dis-
placement for Indigenous and Black residents are not sim-
ply about land, but rather simultaneously about land, peo-
ple, and their bodies (Mollett, 2021b; Naylor et al., 2018;
Zaragocin, 2019). This land and body entanglement is in-
fused with imaginaries that reflect conventional histories,
which take for granted Black female servitude and Black
peoples’ landlessness. Such imaginaries yoke economically
“poor” Afro-Panamanian women into particular kinds of
work. To illustrate, I entangle feminist political ecological
assertions that struggles over nature are embodied struggles,
with intersectional and relational understandings of land and
body (Doshi, 2017; Sultana, 2011; Mollett, 2021b). To do
so, I draw insights from a fusion of anticolonial, Indige-
nous and Black feminist critiques of coloniality and settler
colonialism (Simpson, 2016; Zaragocin, 2019; King, 2016;
Mollett, 2017, 2021b; Radcliffe, 2015). Through this lens,
I seek to show how a logic of elimination operates within
the legal geographies of tourism development. Next, I high-
light the ways in which Afro-Panamanian women are natu-
ralized as criadas (maids), a process that accompanies land
enclosure and illuminates Afro-Panamanian women’s liveli-
hood struggles through their acquiescence to, and resilience
in the face of Bocas’ anti-black patriarchal coloniality. To
demonstrate how land dispossession involves more than what
happens to the land, I draw upon the concepts of postcolo-
nial intersectionality and cuerpo-territorio to highlight the
co-constitution of land and body within colonial imaginar-
ies and the concomitant role that gender and race play in
the extractive-development enclosures shaping life in Bocas.
Finally, I argue that Afro-Panamanian women’s desires for
inclusion in Bocas’ tourism enclave – a project that seeks
to eliminate Indigenous and Black relations to coastal lands
and foster their (domestic) servitude to foreign nationals – re-
flects enduring Afro-Panamanian relations to the lands of the
Bocas Archipelago and their embodied struggles for rights to
remain on the coast.
2 Feminist fusions: postcolonial intersectionality
I situate this examination of Afro-Panamanian women’s
livelihood struggles at the entanglements of feminist polit-
ical ecology and a fusion of anticolonial, Indigenous and
Black feminist thinking, woven within the concept of post-
colonial intersectionality (PI) (Mollett, 2017, 2021b; Rad-
cliffe, 2015; see also Cho et al., 2013). PI acknowledges the
ways “patriarchy and racialized processes are consistently
bound in a postcolonial genealogy that embeds race and gen-
der ideologies within nation building and international de-
velopment processes” (Mollett and Faria, 2013:120). In do-
ing so, I aim to make visible multiple structures of power,
demonstrating the messy and myriad forms of rule at work in
the colonial spatial formations imbued in contemporary de-
velopment practice (Christian and Namaganda, 2018; Mol-
lett and Faria, 2013; Lugones, 2007; Patil, 2013; Radcliffe,
2015). Across the Americas, Indigenous feminist thought
articulates how Indigenous women’s bodies are a collec-
tive site of settler colonial violence during and after con-
quest and the scale upon which multiple forms of power
sear (Daigle, 2018; Simpson, 2016; Goeman, 2009; Razack,
2016; Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual
Health Network, 2016). Maya–Xinka feminist, Lorena Cab-
nal conceptualizes this entanglement as “cuerpo-territorio”,
an embodied ontology that centres people and territory
as a, single, unique and mutually constituted subjectivity.
Cuerpo-territorio challenges the ways both historical and
contemporary forms of conquest are constitutive with ex-
traction, to enclose and control women’s bodies, like terri-
tory (Cabnal, 2015; Zaragocin, 2019). Similarly, in think-
ing through the terrain of Indigenous women’s life and death
in settler-governed Canada, Simpson articulates how Indige-
nous women’s bodies represent a “threat” to settler power.
She writes,
like the lives of all Indian women in Canada is an
anomaly because since the 1870s they have been
legally mandated to disappear, in various forms ...
Because as with all bodies, these bodies were more
than just ‘flesh’ – these were and are sign sys-
tems and symbols that could effect and affect po-
litical life. So they had to be killed, or, at the very
least subjected because what they were signaling
or symbolizing was a direct threat to settlement
(Simpson, 2016, emphasis added).
Black feminist scholars also entangle bodies and colo-
nial expansion (i.e. land) in research on the transatlantic
slave trade – a key temporal moment marking black dehu-
manization. Indeed, the objectification of the captive black
body legitimated and sustained African slavery (Spillers,
1987; McKittrick, 2006). Moreover, “the black female body
[acts] as a historical signifier” and is a symbolic site for
slavery’s reproduction (Santos de Araújo, 2016:150; Smith,
2016; Morgan, 2004; Hartman, 2016). Such symbolism is ex-
emplified in European male travel writing depicting “black
women as simultaneously unwomanly and marked by a re-
productive value that was both dependent on their sex and
evidence of their lack of femininity”, a presupposition made
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330 S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles
ever more salient as European–American slave owners used
black women’s bodies “to produce both crops and other la-
borers” (Morgan, 2004:14; see also Lugones, 2007). These
presuppositions fuel settler desires, making “[the] discovery
of new lands [ ] inextricable from the language of sexual con-
quest” (Morgan, 2004:17). In the face of such violence, and
in spite of it, the black female body also represents fugitiv-
ity and possibility, which collectively enables a “breach in
the system to which Blacks [are] morally submitted” offer-
ing hope for freedom from an enduring colonial racist patri-
archy (Nascimento, 1985:91 cited in Smith, 2016:84; McKit-
trick, 2006, 2013). Hence, a focus on the entanglement of
land and body helps demonstrate how settler land accumula-
tion structures Afro-Panamanian women’s livelihood strug-
gles and their concomitant resilience in the face of racial,
gendered and carnal colonialities shaping both Black female
subjectivities and access to land for Bocatoreños.
3 Historical racial geographies of land control in
Bocas
Bocas’ history is part of the contemporary fabric of the
archipelago and its allure. The region’s largest resort, the Red
Frog Beach Island Resort and Spa (2018) invites tourists and
prospective foreign residents to visit Bocas just as Christo-
pher Columbus did in 1502. The website reads,
Columbus [“an innovative explorer”] was im-
mediately captivated by the beauty and abun-
dance on Isla Bastimentos . . . Just as Columbus
did . .. discover a New World for yourself in Bocas
del Toro. We consider it fortunate that the heritage,
Caribbean lifestyle, enduring culture, and nature-
given “provisions” are much like the scene sev-
eral hundred years ago (RedFrogrealestate.com,
author’s emphasis, 2018).
This invitation to “discover” Bocas through the spatial
image of “several hundred years ago” is not benign. This
historical-geographic representation remakes Bocas as terra
nullius, imagined to be waiting for settler discovery and inno-
vation, in a place seemingly stuck in time where cultures and
nature “are much like the scene several hundred years ago”.
While this use of colonial history in tourism advertising sug-
gests an availability of land and nature, ever more salient are
the constant and pervasive celebrations of Boca’s twentieth
century past as a United Fruit Company stronghold.
Throughout the archipelago’s main islands, namely Colon
and Bastimentos, many of the interior walls of hotels and
restaurants on the main street of Bocas Town feature photos
depicting the “boom days” of the United Fruit Company’s
(UFC’s) Bocas Division and plantations. These photos for-
ward images of Afro-Caribbean harvesters and their de-
plorable housing often in contrast to the images of the UFC’s
white administrators and the fancy homes and lawns of the
“White zone”, a place off limits to former Afro-Caribbean
workers. As Bourgois writes “the luxury of the white zone
contrasts violently with the squalor of the overcrowded bar-
racks area, likewise the unpaved roads, and walkways are ei-
ther covered with ankle-mud or engulfed by clouds of dust”
(Bourgois, 1989:4). Such images of the past compiled in
photographs, postcards, posters, pamphlets and books cele-
brate the historical role of the UFC and the making of Bocas
(Stephens, 2008). Today, Bocas is a place filled with the em-
bodied histories of Euro-American settlement and imperial
desires; a place layered with histories of land dispossession
and free and unfree labour that often culminates into a cele-
bration of Panama’s key infrastructural projects, The Canal,
The Railroad and in particular, the United Fruit Company
(Lasso, 2019; O’Reggio, 2006).
Yet, the images of the UFC’s “boom days” and their
celebration are more complicated for some Bocatoreños.
US racial segregation under Jim Crow organized the life and
labour of the UFC. From the late 1800s to the early 1930s,
the United Fruit Company, under the auspices of the Chiriqui
Land Company, shaped land, labour and daily life along
the Caribbean coast from Bocas del Toro, Panama to Tala-
manca, Costa Rica (Bourgois, 1989; O’Reggio, 2006; Put-
nam, 2002). While many different ethnic groups worked as
labourers for the UFC, including Guna and Ngäbe Indige-
nous peoples; in the early years, Afro-Caribbean migrants
comprised a disproportionate role as harvesters (Bourgois,
1989; O’Reggio, 2006). By the mid-19th century, impov-
erishment and ongoing anti-black discrimination followed
the decline of the sugar trade and the abolition of slav-
ery across former British and Spanish colonies. As a re-
sult, the well-publicized labour shortages facing the UFC
targeted and attracted primarily Black men from Jamaica
and Barbados, and later Martinique to the Isthmus (New-
ton, 1984). Black men, as harvesters, cleared swampland,
snakes and faced plagues of mosquitos all in the face of de-
bilitating and often fatal disease (Stephens, 1997, 2008). Ac-
cording to Bourgois (1989), the Bocas division was “struc-
tured by a complicated and hierarchal productive process,
subdivided into dozens of job categories involving differ-
ent degrees of technological skill, as well as physical and
mental stress” . . . what he calls “a defacto apartheid occupa-
tional hierarchy” (Bourgois, 1989:331). In fact, while many
Afro-Caribbean migrants were able to establish small family
farms adjacent to the plantation and to sell bananas and cacao
as independent producers, their entrepreneurialism was used
by UFC administrators to justify exploitatively low wages
(Bourgois, 1989).
In Central America, the UFC orchestrated an enormous
land grabbing operation throughout the early 20th century.
Importantly, the materiality of such land accumulation was
made possible with an embedded and embodied racial-
ized labour operation. Company officials sought “suitable”
labourers to fill its ranks. In Panama, the imperial desires
among UFC American administrators involved a very de-
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S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles 331
tailed search for the strongest and healthiest Afro-Caribbean
(Black) men (Bourgois, 1989; Stephens, 1997). As New-
ton (1984) writes,
as the men came up they were formed in a line
around the wall .. . all those who looked too old, or
too young, or too weakly, were picked out and sent
away. Then [the doctor], he went over the whole
line again for trachoma, rolling back their eyelids
and looking for inflammation . . . Then he made
them strip, and went over them round after round
for tuberculosis, heart trouble and rupture (Newton
1984:76).
Afro-Caribbean men lived in the small cramped space of
the UFC barracks. But a lack of formal work for women
on the plantation often meant that Afro-Caribbean women
lived in the port towns. It was along the railroad lines that
black social reproduction stretched between plantations and
port towns on both sides of the Panamanian–Costa Rica
border (Putnam, 2002; Bourgois, 1989). The exclusionary
logics of Latin American nationalist thinking under mesti-
zaje and blanqueamiento imbued in Panamanian nationalist
movements reinforced US racial ideologies on the plantation
(Mollett, 2016; Milazzo, 2012). These narratives employed
a variety of anti-black policies that targeted Black people for
deportation and subjugation in the early 20th century and rei-
fied anti-blackness by disavowing Black humanity in Panama
(Stephenson Watson, 2012; Lasso, 2019). These histories of
labour and embodied dispossession are important to under-
standing how overlapping racial projects thread within resi-
dential tourism development in the present.
4 Sustainable tourism and the legal geographies of
indigenous and black land dispossession
In Panama, since the 1990s, successive state “Master
Tourism Plans” continue to promote tourism as a develop-
ment strategy. The content of these plans, particularly the
emphasis on attracting foreign direct investment, is part of
a global trend led by the United Nations, World Tourism
Organization, and the World Bank who together along with
numerous environmental and development NGOs celebrate
“Sustainable Tourism Development” (UNWTO, 2018; World
Bank, 2017). This global tourism strategy argues that sustain-
able tourism is a vehicle for “poverty reduction”, a “critical
sector for women’s economic and social advancement” and
a tool for “inclusive growth” through “efficient and effec-
tive” job creation (UNWTO, 2018; World Bank, 2017:19;
Klytchnikova and Dorosh, 2012). Over the last 20 years,
tourism is one of the main drivers of exceptional growth, fa-
cilitating Panama as a leader among Latin American coun-
tries in generating foreign direct investment (Benson, 2013;
Jackiewicz and Craine, 2010; Spalding, 2011). An attractive
place for visitors, Panama’s economy is dollarized, English
language is widely spoken and political stability helps bol-
ster investment seen most visibly in infrastructure, real es-
tate and both large- and small-scale residential tourism de-
velopment (Velásquez Runk, 2012; Spalding, 2011). It is
estimated that Panama receives approximately 2.3 million
tourists annually, which accounts for 16.2% of the nation’s
GDP. Of that, beach and leisure tourism accounts for 70 %
of tourism receipts (Mach and Vahradian, 2021:132). With a
priority on inclusive growth, the World Bank reports that in
Panama “the tourism sector was found to have higher multi-
pliers than any of the country’s seven other principal sectors.
With a multiplier of 2.87, tourism was more than twice that
of textiles at 1.3 and maize at 1.4” (World Bank, 2017:16).
Thus, tourism development is touted to benefit large numbers
through its multiplying power to produce employment.
Nonetheless, despite the success of tourism’s contribution
to Panama’s economy, tourism benefits are unevenly dis-
tributed (Koehler-Geib et al., 2015; Gómez et al., 2009).
While the state relies on Afro-Panamanian and Indigenous
cultures to “sell” cultural and bio-diversity, Panama’s wealth
from tourism is concentrated in elite enclaves and special
economic zones within urban areas. Even when visitors
travel to the cultural and biodiversity-rich regions largely lo-
cated in the rural parts of the country, tourism benefits of-
ten bypass those “where agriculture is the main sources of
livelihood” and where economic need is already dire, namely
in Indigenous and Afro-Panamanian communities (Klytch-
nikova and Dorosh, 2012:4; Velázquez Runk, 2012; Guerrón-
Montero, 2014).
In Bocas, impending land insecurities and dispossession
facing economically poor Indigenous and Black residents
evinces tourism’s maldevelopment. Indigenous Ngäbe peo-
ples claim the lands of the Bocas del Toro Archipelago as
part of the Ngäbe–Bugle homelands. Still, for more than 500
years, people of African descent have shared this coast with
the Ngäbe (and other Indigenous peoples) (Bourgois, 1989;
Diez Castillo, 1981; Reid, 1987; Wickstrom, 2003). The
state’s comarca system only partially acknowledges these
histories (for Indigenous peoples only) (Herrera, 2012; Jor-
dan, 2008). Moreover, Black land and territorial rights, by
contrast, enjoy no formal collective protections at all. Fur-
thermore, since the early 1990s, Panama has formalized a
business-orientated “sustainable tourism model” that contin-
ues to rely heavily on designing “ecologically balanced” ac-
commodations and tourism amenities through a foreign di-
rect investment (FDI) (Guerrón-Montero, 2005, 2006; Spald-
ing, 2011). For local Bocatoreños, this vision has material-
ized into a number of land grabs. In 1988, the Bastimentos
Island National Marine Park (13 360ha) managed by the Na-
tional Environmental Authority (ANAM) enclosed a sizeable
portion (13 360 ha) (1630 terrestrial and 11 730 is marine) of
island territory and marine resources. A consortium of state
agencies, international and national NGOs and settler resi-
dents (US, European and Canadian retirees and Latin Ameri-
can elites) spurred the Park’s creation all the while excluding
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332 S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles
Afro-Panamanian and the Ngäbe peoples from consultation
(Guerrón-Montero, 2005).
Additionally, Afro-Panamanian residents insist that
tourism development also disrupts their access to all kinds of
natures, beyond just land. For instance, reports of decreased
air flow and compromised air quality as a result of the ad-
vance of hotels built along the coast are ubiquitous (Mollett
field notes, 2011). Bocatoreños lament that the plethora of
hotel construction obstructs “[their] God-given sea winds
that used to enter homes freely” (Mollett field notes, 2011,
2012). Others report that sea air is a mix of “salt water and
the smell of restaurant garbage” (Mollett field notes, 2011,
2012). The irony that locals are compelled to smell refuse
from a restaurant they could never afford to enter is not lost
on Bocatoreños. Betsy, a town artist, reports that “bad air”
and ongoing construction of hotels along the coastline “kills
my soul to not see the shore, its just not right man” (Mollett
field notes, 2011). Fervently, many Bocatoreños lament
how their dwindling access to nature greatly differs from
the rights afforded to settlers. Motorista operator Nelson
insists that “we [Bocatoreños] are constantly blamed for
destroying the coral and stealing the region’s protected red
turtles, while foreign developers are granted construction
permits to build hotels and luxury homes in mangrove areas
on the archipelago” (Mollett interview, Bocas, 2012). For
example, in 2006, the Red Frog Beach Island Resort and Spa
was established adjacent to the Park. This USD 400 million
dollar development boasts not just a hotel and spa, but two
marinas, plans for 900 condominiums and 30 villas, each
with private swimming pools (Mollett field notes, 2017). The
property encloses some of the archipelago’s best beaches and
beachfront land and makes neighbouring Afro-Panamanian
and Ngäbe villagers feel “that they are not welcome to enjoy
the trees and animals, the water and the land on [their] own
island” (Mollett field notes, 2011; Guerrón-Montero, 2005;
Shors, 2007).
Numerous laws exist to promote the state’s vision for at-
tracting FDI in tourism development. Established in 1994,
Law 8, known colloquially as the “tourism law” grants in-
centives for FDI (i.e. tax exemptions; residency). In re-
cent years, Law 80 also entrenches the state’s tourism
plan (Panama, 2009). Under law 80, which was part of a
multi-million dollar World Bank funded land regularization
project, PRONAT (2001–2009), foreign nationals hold the
same rights to own island lands as Panamanians, includ-
ing Indigenous and Afro-Panamanian citizens (Mollett field
notes, 2011). As a result, Law 80, along with many other
legal tools, intensifies domestic land dispossession and ef-
fectively re-orders land access through multiple forms of en-
closure (Spalding, 2017; Thampy, 2013; Mollett, 2016). The
legal geographies of tourism and the shifting property rights
they enable disrupt customary forms of land tenure in Bo-
cas. Throughout the archipelago, Bocatoreños rely upon a
system of derechos posesorios, (ROPs) or rights of posses-
sion. ROPs are a kind of land holding embedded in the coun-
try’s first Civil Code in 1917 “which established a process
through which individuals had the right to possess land as
long as they could demonstrate ‘use’ and were not trying
to claim rights over inalienable government land” (Spald-
ing, 2017:547). Currently many ROPs remain unregistered,
and thus there exists no formal record of the holding nor its
holder either in the local municipality or in the ANATI (The
National Authority of Land Administration) office in Panama
City. While recent land regularization seemingly sought to
make legible land holdings and bolster land markets, many
Afro-Panamanian and Ngäbe residents find their tenure se-
curity eroded (Mollett field notes, 2011–2013, Mollett, 2016,
2017; Panama, 2009). Land formalization renders holders
of customary ROPs vulnerable to land fraud as many set-
tlers make claims, in legal and extra-legal ways (Thampy,
2013; see Mollett, 2016). In fact, recall my opening story
of Angelo and Liala. The Canadians attempted to steal An-
gelo’s plot but the plan failed because Angelo is known in
the community and the cadastral office intervened on his be-
half. Nevertheless, such extra-legal moves, in the words of
Angelo, make it likely for those who “have money to pay tax
on the land to end up owning it” (Angelo interview, Bocas,
2011). Indeed, part of a process to convert ROPs to land ti-
tles (under law 80) requires payment of the taxes on the mar-
ket value of the land. For most local residents, an inability
to afford the tax is what prohibits them from legally owning
(fee simple) their customary-held lands (Mollett field notes,
2011). The Canadians assumed Angelo’s land tax was unpaid
likely because this has been one of the extra-legal ways that
land theft occurs in Panama, and throughout region (Mol-
lett, 2011, 2016). The foreign enclosure of land throughout
the archipelago means access to land and other natures are
dwindling, prompting many Afro-Panamanian residents to
ask “what’s in it for us?” (Mollett field notes, 2013)
5 Embodied political ecologies: in search of
“dignity” and “respect”
It’s not just our land that makes Basti our home.
We are Afro-Caribbean and we are workers . . . this
is our place too” (Maxine Williams, resident of
Old Bank, Bastimentos Island, Mollett interviews,
2011).
A recent report focused on the perceptions of Black iden-
tity and development in Panama cites the need to pro-
tect Black land rights (UNDP, 2013). Indeed, many Afro-
Panamanians and their struggles for land and housing echo
such sentiment (Swaby, 2014; UNDP, 2013). In Bocas, simi-
larly, many Afro-Panamanians make claims to land based on
their historical presence on the coast and familiar links to the
early days of the UFC plantation. But for some, embedded
within discursive claims to land are Afro-Panamanian col-
lective histories of work and identities as “workers” (Mol-
lett field notes, 2011, 2012, 2013). These histories also punc-
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S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles 333
tuate Afro-Panamanian land claims (Impacto Films, 2011;
UNDP, 2013). Many Afro-Panamanians insist they too, and
not just their Indigenous neighbours, have intimate relations
with nature in the archipelago, and such it is as “workers”
on the lands and waters of the archipelago that they seek
commitments from the state in its promise of employment
as a “trade-off” for their increasing displacement from land
and nature (Mollett field notes, 2011, 2012, 2013). But it is
what these trade-offs entail that reveal the multiple power re-
lations embedded in tourism development. Afro-Panamanian
women maintain that despite state promises of employment
and the mutual benefits of tourism (supposedly for develop-
ers and residents alike) the opportunities afforded to them
lack “dignity” (Mollett interviews, 2012). While “grateful”
for income, they seek employment that comes with “re-
spect” (Mollett interviews, 2012). Undignified work condi-
tions are a common target of scorn particularly among Afro-
Panamanian women who work in domestic service (Mollett,
2017). Afro-Bocatoreñas report that in spite of possessing a
secondary level education and even some with 1–2 years of
university, the work opportunities beyond domestic service
are severely limited (Mollett interviews, 2012). A bartender
for a local hotel, Kenya, explains, “I went to Changuinola for
Business school (2-year program). I wanted to work in hotel
reception. But after I graduated, there were no jobs in Bo-
cas so I moved to Panama City . .. I worked as a maid . . . but
it was like Bocas, where I worked there were already two
Indian girls from Salt Creek”(Mollett interview, Old Bank,
2012). Cara, one of the few Afro-Panamanian women work-
ing the front desk in a hotel in the archipelago explained a
similar journey:
After university, I spent 2 years in Panama City
working as a maid. Then, thanks to God I got
a front desk job at [an American owned hotel].
They trained me to work in their smaller ho-
tel in Bocas . . . it was just opened. I work in
reception . . . but I am so lucky . . . God helped
me in my journey . . . most women like me are
maids . . . sometimes it’s the only way we can stay
home in Bocas (Mollett interviews, 2012).
Like Cara, many women are content to have employment
however precarious and undignified because work roots them
to a place on the coast (Mollett field notes, 2012). Still, over-
whelmingly, all participants (n=30) argue that the work
expectations for housekeepers are excessive (Mollett inter-
views, Bocas, 2012). I illustrate with ethnographic testimony
from Simona.
Simona explains how her limpiadora job “consumes her”.
At Palmas Property and Realty, a vacation home and prop-
erty management company, a typical workday officially ex-
tends from 07:00 to 15:00, five days a week (Mollett inter-
views, 2012). However, because her boss requires that the all-
women domestic staff perform “special” errands for guests,
she sometimes works everyday. Simona recounts that after
about 3 months into their stay, long-term guests asked her to
help with preparations for the couple’s family arriving from
the United States. Her female employer (Daisy) needed her
to cook the welcoming dinner. Simona explains, “because
[Daisy] wanted fresh, really fresh fish, the next day I woke up
at 3 a.m. to go with my father. He is a fisherman, and I needed
to catch a ride on his boat to the fish market in Almirante .. . I
waited for two hours for the market to open and then another
two hours before my father could come pick me up . .. I had
to work in Bocas Town .. . They were happy with what I pro-
vided for the dinner: lobsters, crabs, beautiful fish and conch.
So a few days later, [Daisy] asked me to help with a farewell
dinner . . . so I once again woke up at 3 a.m. to catch a ride
from my father”. According to Simona, since then, there was
always extra work. Simona has shuffled Daisy’s guests from
the airport and to beaches on the other end of the Colon Is-
land. She cared for Daisy’s family member, cleaned Daisy’s
friend’s home because the housekeeper quit, and even bathed
Daisy’s 80-year-old father visiting from overseas. According
to Simona, she regularly made trips in the middle of the night
to buy fish in Almirante. While Simona was remunerated for
all of these chores, including her “regular job” she was never
paid for the extra travel time to obtain fish nor for her dad’s
labour and connections. Simona maintains that Daisy treats
her “like a machine some days and the rest like an animal”.
When she finally found the courage to ask the property man-
ager if he could assign her to a different house, he refused
and told her “extra work is expected and you come with the
house” (Simona interview, 2011, 2012).
6 Servicing desire in plantation landscapes
Afro-Panamanian women insist there is an “attitude” among
tourists and settlers (often also perpetuated by national elites)
that underpins the material relations of service between lo-
cals and foreigners (Mollett field notes, 2012). The opining
of an American restaurateur witnessed at an opening cere-
mony of a new hotel and restaurant on Colon Island serves
as an example. He notes,
What we are doing is good for the people of Bocas.
Bocatoreños have jobs because we [foreigners] are
here building homes, hotels, doing business, eat-
ing in restaurants, starting schools .. . we fund con-
servation; we raise money for poor Indian kids,
and drive the sustainable tourism economy. With-
out us, without us, Bocas would be a dead zone,
we don’t just bring the jobs . .. we bring [cultural]
sophistication and a global awareness of modern
life (American Restauranteur, Colon Island, Public
Event, Bocas Town, Mollett field notes, 2017).
Such presuppositions and entitlements not only fuel land
enclosure but, it seems that settler land control comes with
affordances that extend, not just over the land, but over lo-
cal people and their bodies. For Afro-Panamanian women
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334 S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles
being a criada is “dirty” work. It is not just because they
spend all day cleaning up after strangers. Rather every sin-
gle participant (n=30) reported experiencing some form of
sexual abuse or harassment while working as a housekeeper
(Mollett interviews, 2012, 2013, see also Mollett, 2017). Ac-
cording to many participants, it is common “if your boss is
a man, he will try to have sex with you” (Mollett interviews,
2012). But “especially the gringos and rubio blancos (white
Panamanian elite) they believe that you are supposed to have
sex with them” (Mollett interviews, Dixa, 2012)! While some
women explain that the assaults and harassment began on
their first day and usually (not always) meant that they quit,
many express that sex with their male employers or male co-
workers was a natural extension of the impossible expecta-
tions of their male AND female employers (Mollett inter-
views, 2012, 2013; see also Mollett, 2017). I illustrate with
the ethnographic testimony from Dixa.
Thirty-two-year-old Dixa is from Old Bank, Bastimentos
Island. When she was younger, she used to work at a popu-
lar bar in Carenero (an island in the archipelago). She notes
the money was great and she and her boyfriend were able to
build a two-room house on his family’s property. After a few
years, the couple had a baby. When her son was about four
months old, she approached her former boss about how soon
she could go back to work. To Dixa’s surprise, he claimed
that the only position available for her was as a criada in his
hostel business in town. According to Dixa, “He said I was
too fat to be behind the bar, that I’m not sexy. .. not youthful
anymore”. Dixa, insulted by the prospect that he only saw
her fit to be a criada, insisted “I am a great bartender, I speak
English [Spanish and Creole] and tourists love me . . . they
really do, when I go by them on the street they say, Dixa,
Dixa are you working tonight? I deserve a better job. I am
more than a maid”! (Mollett interview, 2012). Determined,
Dixa found employment as a personal assistant working for
an American woman’s clothing store in Bocas Town. Dixa
recounts,
[A]t the beginning I unpacked the new merchan-
dise, helped customers and kept the inventory orga-
nized. After about three weeks, Miss Kathy started
to ask me if I could pass by her house in Bocas del
Drago (approximately 30 min bike ride) and let out
her dogs into their yard. She would say, ‘and while
you are there can you make lunch for Timmy (her
husband)’ . . . so I started riding my bike there ev-
eryday to let the dogs out and make lunch for her
husband and sometimes for her (Mollett interview,
2012).
Dixa describes how her job description continued to grow.
One day while at the store where she earned no more than
USD 3 per hour, Miss Kathy offered her USD50 extra to
spend the afternoon cleaning her home and doing laundry
because their regular “girl” was sick. Dixa insists that she
was always paid for the extra chores but that eventually she
was doing “everything,everything”. Dixa explains, “one day
she asked me to clean the mierda from the dog’s ass, it was
humiliating. I did it but I told her. I am not here to clean the
dog, Miss Kathy” (Mollett, 2021a). According to Dixa, Miss
Kathy replies, “I am sorry, dear, but sometimes I need your
help with other parts of my life and not just the store”. Af-
ter about a year, business was slowing in Bocas for the low
season and Kathy told Dixa that she could not offer her full-
time work but, if she wanted to clean her house and help Mr.
Tim; she could be their “maid”. Dixa agreed to the work, she
reports, because Mr. Tim is nice to her. Dixa would clean
the house, feed the dogs and clean their pen, do laundry and
make lunch. After lunch, she would deliver packages by bike
to Mr. Tim’s clients in Bocas Town. Dixa adds, “I also cook
lunch for the couple and sometimes give Mr. Tim massages.
When Miss Kathy goes to David or Panama City to buy mer-
chandise for the store, I go with her to help carry things and
speak Spanish to the wholesalers who do not speak good
English . . . When Miss Kathy visits the US, she pays me
extra to stay at the house to help Mr. Tim. [What do you
do? Where do you sleep when Mrs. Kathy is away?]. After
a pause, Dixa replies, “sometimes, I sleep with Mr. Tim.”
Dixa explains that Mr Tim is “always kind” “respectful” and
that sharing his bed, “its just part of [her] job” (Mollett in-
terviews, 2012). Such expectations are normalized in Bocas.
Many women like Dixa report a prevailing settler expecta-
tion that domestic labourers – often referred to as “girls” –
are available for sex (Mollett interviews 2012). Settlers how-
ever often dismiss these critiques – as well as Bocatoreño
complaints of land theft and fraud – through the same ex-
pression, “This is Bocas”. The ubiquitous frequency of this
phrase and similar ones (i.e. this is Panama) suggests that the
limits to employment, land and bodily appropriations by for-
eign nationals, are “just how it is” on the archipelago (Mollett
field notes, 2011, 2012).
7 Histories in the making of place in the present
The taken for grantedness of foreign land control and Black
women’s servitude in Bocas has a history. The stories of
Liala, Simona and Dixa illustrate how colonial logics of race,
gender and sexuality structure space in Bocas. Black femi-
nist scholar, Saidiya Hartman (1997, 6) in theorizing black
women in the “afterlife” of the transatlantic slave trade, ex-
plains that “the fungibility of the commodity makes the cap-
tive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the pro-
jection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires and values” (Hart-
man, 1997:21). Similarly, King, in contextualizing Black
women in settler landscapes, argues that “blackness” . . . “as
expansion and spatial possibility, becomes a constituting
feature of the spatial imagination of the conquistador/set-
tler rather than just another human labourer exploited as a
mere technology to produce space” (King, 2016:1023). To
be clear, I am not equating contemporary livelihood strug-
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S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles 335
gles to slave life. However, Bocas’ history on the Caribbean
re-emerges in the contemporary as partial and incomplete
legacies, re-writings and discontinuities from the past (Stoler,
2016). Thus it is important to highlight that while Liala, Si-
mona and Dixa were paid for their assigned tasks, none were
remunerated for their time that it took to do many of the other
tasks; weeding gardens, travelling by boat to buy fish, us-
ing family labour, biking to deliver parcels, giving massages,
companionship etc., such embodied labour and familial con-
nections were taken for granted. Furthermore, the paucity of
employment opportunities outside domestic service reflects
an enduring imperial–colonial stereotype or “imperial de-
bris” (Stoler, 2013) that in the context of Euro-American land
accumulation continually imagines Black women’s subjec-
tivity as bound to hard labour, sexually available, “less-than-
human” and “disposable” even as free Black women (Mor-
gan, 2004:12; Hartman, 1997; Razack, 2016). The repetitive
and fungible way Black women serve as “criadas” (maids)
in the homes and businesses of foreign settlers and elites
embodies a collective geographic imaginary that not only
assumes that specific kinds of labour are meant for par-
ticular people, but that some of their labour must go un-
paid. In Bocas, “the plantation evidences an uneven colonial–
racial economy that, while differently articulated across time
and place, legalize[s] black servitude while simultaneously
sanctioning black placelessness and constraint” (McKittrick,
2011:948). Perhaps counter intuitive for some, for Afro-
Panamanian women, such unequal power informs their col-
lective imaginaries, as they see (and hope) that their work
makes legible their place on the coast even when their em-
bodied histories of survival and resilience seem not to reverse
impending land dispossessions.
The devaluation of Black women’s labour, via poor pay
and undignified working conditions in the kinds of jobs they
are expected to perform, materially and symbolically reflect
space and time in the longue durée of the Atlantic coasts’
ontological becoming. As Stoler explains, “the social terrain
on which colonial processes of ruination leave their mate-
rial and mental marks are patterned . . . by the racial ontolo-
gies they called into being, and by the cumulative histori-
cal deficiencies certain populations are seen to embody . . . ”
(Stoler, 2013:23). In Bocas, racial, carnal and gendered on-
tologies link settler land accumulation to embodied subjec-
tivities that naturalize Black women as domestic workers.
As previously mentioned, such imaginaries and the era from
which they are plucked – the boom days of the UFC land
expansion and banana production – are continuously cele-
brated. Afro-Caribbean women migrants arrived to the At-
lantic coast of Central America in pursuit of economic op-
portunities and tended to live in Puerto Limon (southern
Costa Rica) and the junction towns along the railroad. It
was there that many women performed the daily tasks of so-
cial reproduction on behalf of UFC plantation workers. For
Afro-Caribbean women migrants domestic labour often in-
corporated more than cooking and cleaning. Domestic ser-
vice, namely “[h]ot meals, [laundry service] sliced fruit, a
close dance and sex were just some of the goods and ser-
vices that female migrants might profitably offer for sale in
Limon” (Putnam, 2002:92). Furthermore, many women in
the zona bananera were “clandestine prostitutes”, namely
a woman who “in addition to being occupied in the vari-
ous duties appropriate to her sex, also traffics in her body”
(Stern, 1995:320 in Putnam, 2002:92). Women who worked
in paid occupations such as dressmaking, cigar making and
food preparation dabbled in commercial sex “sequentially or
simultaneously as need and opportunities arose” (Putnam,
2002:92). And while these particular moments of the past
and present (early 20th and 21st centuries) align, history re-
veals that this conflation of Blackness and servitude limited
to domestic labour in the context of Euro-American land ex-
pansion is not a given. In fact, the past also complicates the
common refrain of “This is Bocas” with settler assumptions
seemingly drawn and reinforced from this temporal moment,
which assumes “what we are doing here is good for the peo-
ple of Bocas” (see above).
Archival data collection and Latin American historiogra-
phies suggest that while the coast was at times a place of
Black and Indigenous unfreedoms, this was not always the
case. In sixteenth century Spain, Spanish settlers sought per-
mission from the Crown to travel to the Americas and in
particular to Tierra Firme (Panama). Because the Crown
“officially” prohibited non-Christians from travelling to the
Americas, many enslaved Africans in Seville and Castile
underwent baptisms in order for would-be settlers to ob-
tain licences (licencias) to travel with enslaved people (Ire-
ton, 2017; Pike, 1967). Negros ymulatos travelled officially
as criados. The term criado, included a variety of contrac-
tual labour arrangements for men and women (Ireton, 2017).
For the enslaved, assisting settlers travelling across the At-
lantic often meant freedom in Spanish colonies and for free
Africans, a criado contract meant escaping discrimination
and concomitant impoverishment in Spain (Pike, 1967).
People of African descent and their services made them
pertinent to European travel to, and settlement in, Tierra
Firme (Wheat, 2016). However, it would seem that criados
were rightfully more than labour, but represented spatial pos-
sibilities not just on behalf of settlers, but for themselves (see
King 2019). For instance, in 1627, Diego del Poyo, the owner
of a fleet of sailing vessels (patache) called Nuestra Señora
de los Reyes applied for a licencia for his pilot, Juan Gomez.
In this application, Diego del Poyo asked for permission to
take his slave Maria, due to his ill condition:
I say that I am very ill and I have been healing for
many days in Sevilla and because I have a mulata
slave, named Maria and so that in the said trip I
may have some comfort to heal and go to the rest
of my service. At your mercy, I beg and beg you to
give me permission to take her in my service . . .
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336 S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles
I ask for justice” (Archivo General de Indias de
Sevilla, 2016b).
As a condition of this licencia, Poyo could not abandon
Maria in the Americas. Abandoning her there would mean a
debt to the Crown, namely to pay a fee plus “the value of the
said slave” (Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla, 2016b).
While Maria was undoubtedly under his control, it is im-
portant to note that he also needed her. Despite the strict
racial religious coding structuring freedom and captivity in
the colonial period, women of African descent as negro and
mulato criados experienced myriad degrees of freedom in
ways that complicate the continuities of the colonial spa-
tial imaginaries that link blackness and “servitude” so taken
for granted in Bocas and throughout Latin America (Wade,
2013). Afro-Latin American historians explain that because
Spain struggled to control its territories in the early centuries
after conquest, enslaved men and woman enjoyed a consid-
erable degree of mobility and freedom (Wheat, 2016; Pike,
1967). Indeed, as described in a letter from an official of
the Audiencia de Panamá, a negra slave, named Dominga
Jolofa, while working as a criada in Panama City in 1620,
was out looking for firewood (lena) in the monte (rural area)
and came upon a bar of silver. When she returned to the city,
an Iberian settler took the bar and accused Dominga of theft.
While the details of her interrogation are unclear, what is
clear is that Dominga moved freely from city to monte un-
accompanied, even if monitored, by other vecinos (Archivo
General de Indias de Sevilla, 2016c).
These brief archival examples of captivity, freedom and
emancipation in the histories and geographies of slavery,
combined with the critical historical work on Afro-Spanish
America in early 15th and 16th centuries, disclose how
women of African descent occupied a variety of jobs, ran
businesses, owned property and were bequeathed vecina sta-
tus (Ireton, 2017; Wheat, 2016). The label vecina/vecino
once thought to exclude people of African descent from the
benefits of vecindad, was in part determined by conversion to
Christianity, and the adoption of Catholicism, a combination
that assumes “clean” blood (Ireton, 2017; Wheat, 2016). Fur-
thermore, despite racial/religious hierarchies, Black women
did become vecinas and travelled on their own across the
Atlantic (Ireton, 2017; Wheat, 2016). For instance, in 1614,
Leanor de Espinola and her daughter Catalina de Espinola,
both “mulatas” applied for a licencia to Tierra Firme. Leanor
sought to travel to live with her husband an Iberian el
Maestre, Miguel Benitez, who was in Peru. It would seem
that Leanor and her daughter (ages 46 and 24) were pre-
viously enslaved as the archival scripts note them to have
“con una señal de herida al lado del ojo derecho” (a brand-
ing wound on the side of the right eye) (Archivo General
de Indias de Sevilla, 2016a). In many ways, colonial spatial
imaginaries linking blackness and domestic servitude and its
endurance through the present is complicated by the various
forms and different temporal moments of emancipatory free-
dom (beyond manual labour) and the porosity of unfreedoms
among negro and mulato criados in early Spanish America.
These complexities problematize the way that the symbols
of plantation slavery, imbued in the “boom days of the UFC”
only slightly removed from the end of slavery in Colombia
in 1851 (Panama was a province of Colombia until 1903) ad-
vance representations of structural fixity and unwavering cul-
tural practices in such a way that fuels contemporary imag-
inaries and devalues and yokes Black women’s labour to
servitude (see Bennett, 2007). These spatial imaginaries and
relations are embedded in the refrain “This is Bocas”, which
emerges from a “particular reading of the past that enshrines
foreign white control over land and people, as a “natural”
and the “only” way of being” obscuring prior freedoms of
another temporal moment (the 15th and 16th centuries) and
its possibilities (Mollett, 2021a:393).
8 Final thoughts
In this paper, I configure complexity into geographic schol-
arship on settler colonial landscapes and demonstrate how
land dispossession is not only about land itself, but rather
about the entanglements of land and people. Building upon
the insights from critical feminist thought and in particu-
lar, the concepts of postcolonial intersectionality and cuerpo-
territorio, land dispossession as it unfolds on the Bocas
Archipelago is a material and embodied process. I cen-
tre Afro-Panamanian women in the context of residential
tourism development in Bocas as a way to disrupt native-
settler binaries common among geographic research on colo-
niality, settler or otherwise (Day, 2015; Mollett, 2021b:
Pulido, 2018). In addition, a focus on the blurred tempo-
ralities of the plantation via both past and present with an
eye to the future (Afro-Panamanian desires to remain on
the coast) holds at once the “violence of the plantation and
it’s afterlife while simultaneously acknowledging the ongo-
ing capacity for making and remaking of Black life in the
midst of plantation violence” (King, 2016:1033). I illustrate
these racial regimes of land control through ethnographic
testimonies blended with Afro-Latin American historiogra-
phies and archival data to disclose the naturalization and de-
valuation of Black women as criadas, in a context where
simultaneously Indigenous and Black lands and territories,
along with women’s bodies, seem apt for settler exploitation.
Of course, this is not where the story ends, similar to the
conditions of Black women criadas in the 16th century, as
racial and patriarchal authority shape the contours of Afro-
Panamanian women’s livelihood struggles in the present, the
coast serves as a place of “freedom” and “possibility”. Such
cracks in the co-constitutive colonialities of settler colonial-
ism and the plantation-cum-residential tourism appear in the
way some Afro-Panamanian women use their agency to pur-
sue dignified livelihoods and social mobility beyond domes-
tic service, to orient their lives towards a future that they hope
Geogr. Helv., 77, 327–340, 2022 https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-77-327-2022

S. Mollett: Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles 337
secures their right to remain on the coast (Mollett field notes,
2011, 2012, 2013; Mollett, 2017).
At the time of writing, the Panamanian State has an-
nounced a new Master Tourism Plan (2020–2025) organized
around the notion of a “community centric and [an] envi-
ronmentally minded industry” that invites conscious minded
visitors to “Live for More” and where they insist that “in-
stead of doing branding around the visitor only, we put the
tourist . . . and the Panamanian at the centre of the brand”
(Girma, 2021). While more promising than a model that
seeks FDI through the dispossession of economically poor
domestic populations and offers of undignified work as a
trade-off, how the future of tourism makes better or worse
the lives of Bocatoreños, and particular Afro-Panamanian
women, remains unclear. For now, it seems that the way
“colonial relations are disparately and partially absorbed into
social relations and ecological disparities” (Stoler, 2016:25–
26) remains constitutive of residential tourism development
in Bocas.
Finally, returning to the women of Bocas, Simona no
longer works for Palmas Property. She now sells fish for
her father and other fishers to small hotels and restaurants
throughout the archipelago; life seems better. To cope with
less income she eats once a day, grows more food in her gar-
den and drinks coffee to suppress her appetite when there is
no food. Like Simona, Dixa has also changed jobs. She left
“the store” and works as a part-time teacher in a small private
school run by a settler. Liala and her family raised the rent on
the marina slips, charge double for the BBQ, and it would
seem, disallow foreigners to “borrow” family lands (Mol-
lett field notes, 2013, 2017). Disclosing the ways in which
a logic of elimination unfolds in Bocas through Indigenous
and Black land enclosure and Black women’s servitude-as-
subjugation, not only questions “tourism” as a development
strategy, but challenges geographers and political ecologists
to complicate understandings of the where, how and for
whom settler colonial histories tell a story. Lastly, attending
to how blurred temporalities inform tourism development,
how a particular moment of the past continues to inform the
present in the name of the future, at once troubles the as-
sumptions embedded in “sustainable tourism” and punctu-
ates for geographers how histories of place are always in-
complete.
Data availability. No data sets were used in this article.
Competing interests. The author has declared that there are no
competing interests.
Disclaimer. Publisher’s note: Copernicus Publications remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to the residents of the Bo-
cas del Toro Archipelago for assisting with my research project
in Panama. Huge thanks to the multiple research assistants who
helped with the historical research, in particular Nicole Marie Cot-
ton (Panama), Esther Gonzalez (Spain) and Kyla Egan (Toronto).
I want to thank Carolin Schurr and the Feminist Collective in the
Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, Switzerland, for
inviting me to give this address at the Swiss Geosciences Meeting
in Fribourg in 2019. Special thanks to Maaret Jokela-Pansini and
Muriel Cote for serving as discussants. Lastly, I am grateful to the
two anonymous reviewers and editor, Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch
for their feedback and support. All personal names and many com-
pany and place names are pseudonyms.
Financial support. Research for this paper was partially funded
by the Insight Development Grant awarded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Review statement. This paper was edited by Myriam Houssay-
Holzschuch and reviewed by two anonymous referees.
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