ABSTRACT
Immigrant workers who stayed on were primarily concentrated in terminal construction or erection and dredging operations or were in the employ of the Panama Railroad. The history of protest and organizing activity of West Indians in the Canal Zone illustrates the type of constraints on political organization that immigrant workers often confront. Denial of formal representation eventually forced the West Indians into a series of spontaneous confrontations over labor conditions and gradually led to an organizational coalition of West Indian immigrants. In the case of the Canal Zone, deportation was executed by simply evicting strikers from administration-owned housing and firing workers from their jobs, thus effectively forcing them out of the zone. Individual walkouts appeared to have been autonomously organized at individual work sites, but the West Indian immigrants did have an informal network of organizations, which could be enlisted in the coordination of their grievances and demands.
