ABSTRACT
Racism toward blacks was surely important in Panamanian society before Theodore Roosevelt captured the Isthmus for US interests in 1903, but the mythology of color built into the cultural apparatus of work and bureaucracy organized to construct the canal surely took it to a higher level. This mosaic of alterities, with its hierarchy of attraction and repulsion, was not only colored by money into gold and silver; it was also sexualized. The figure of the nia or black phallus, as exposed by Cuna ethnography, alerts one to the sexual fear and excitement of the boundary created out of mimesis and alterity under specific colonial histories. Indeed what makes his text valuable is precisely that it gives voice to unbridled fantasy couched as matter of factuality in the development of two amazing events-the Indian revolt against the Panamanian State, and the Smithsonian-backed search for white Indians.
