Marixa Lasso teaches history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Prior to that she was a tenured Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University. She received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center to support her research on this book. She has also held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. In 2016 Lasso was the Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
Commandeering rafts, steamboats, or railroads, countless isthmian black settlers for centuries had brought the Caribbean and the South Sea together. In the 1910s, the Canal Zone turned these modern black urbanites into unwelcome refugees. Their towns disappeared under water or tropical vegetation. The Canal also wiped out the memory of vibrant black republican institutions, the foundational vanguard of global political modernity. This book expertly dissects the myth of Western Civilization, namely, how a unified capitalist world became two imaginary ones: an entrepreneurial, law-abiding, technically advanced white Canal Zone, on the one hand, and a violent, pardo, primitive tropical banana republic, on the other. Eye-opening.--Jorge Ca izares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin Erased shows how the construction of the Panama Canal hid forced depopulation behind the artificial transformation of the landscape, building segregated urban centers on the myth of a pristine tropical landscape. The book challenges narratives of industrialization and urban change that have for too long neglected the history and the places of the people who built the basic infrastructure of modernity.--Pablo Piccato, Columbia University Erased is the most splendid of ghost stories. Tracing the hidden history of the depopulated 'lost towns' of the Canal Zone, Marixa Lasso reveals a traumatic transformation of the landscape as important in its impact as the construction of the Panama Canal. The result is a powerful and dramatic tale of lost histories that illuminates our understanding of Panama and its relationship to the United States.--Julie Greene, University of Maryland