1. Panama Canal Commission (PCC) 37 E 25/1940. Note: PCC documents are housed at the National Archives Record Center in Greenbelt MD. Notations reflect the filing system in use from the time of early construction of the Canal until 1960. The date at the end of the reference is not usually part of the official code, but is added here for the reader's convenience. Where there are two dates, the first represents the date of filing, and the second, the date of authorship.
2. Reference to Americans in the Canal Zone implies «white» Americans. By policy, few Americans of colour were hired by the Panama Canal Company. Instead, English-speaking Black West Indians were hired as canal labourers. Spanish-speaking Panamanian citizens were not included in the Canal Zone's employment or housing plans until much later. Their separation from the potential profits of canal work became the basis for a long-term grudge against the Americans.
3. Segregation began to break down as a result of partial integration of the United States military during World War II (as well as increasing political pressure from Panama), a process that was accelerated with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
4. To ensure a range of views I focus on the writings of the Canal Zone Governor, the «Engineer of Maintenance» (the Canal's second in command), and members of the «Engineer,» «Build- ing,» and «Quartermaster» divisions and the Health Department. They represent a spectrum of American canal employees, from executive to ordinary worker. For a more general discussion of the mechanics of planning colonial cities, see A. D. King,Colonial Urban Development (London 1976). For a similar example dealing with the planning of company towns, see P. B. Hales, Topographies of power: the forced spaces of the Manhattan Project, in W. Franklin and M. Steiner (Eds), Mapping American Culture (Ames, IA 1992) 251–90.
5. Thousands of linear feet of archival records provide a rich trove for research, and a number of scholars have probed these records. Most of these are American administrative documents from the National Archives in Washington D.C. and various locations in Panama. In standard works such as D. McCullough, The Path Between the Seas (New York 1977) or W. LaFeber,The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (Oxford 1989), the focus is largely on the waterway's politics. Others concentrate on social and racial issues within the Zone, as in M. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal (Pittsburgh 1985), J. Major, Prize Possession (Cambridge 1993), or L. Diez-Castillo, El Canal de Panama y su Gente (Panama 1990). Some examples of detailed description are J. P. Augelli, The Panama Canal Area in transition (parts I and II), American Universities Field Staff Reports 3 (1981) 1–14, 1–10; J. P. Augelli, The Panama Canal Area: the “made in America” era comes to a close, Focus 36 (1986) 20–29; and H. Knapp and M. Knapp, Red, White, and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama (New York 1984). Theoretically informed articles on the Canal Zone are rare. While an article by D. Matless, A modern stream: water, landscape, modernism, and geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992) 569–88, explores metaphorical representations of the Canal, few studies explicitly link American representations of Panama to the production of the Zone's residential landscape.