Joan Flores-Villalobos is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

"Joan Flores-Villalobos moves deftly across a rich set of archival sources to uncover the complexities of West Indian women’s social reproduction in the Panama Canal Zone. The Silver Women exposes how Black women negotiated suspicion, hostility, and even criminalization, in the process of migrating to make a life for themselves and their kin. A necessary perspective on West Indian women’s efforts to sustain their communities while also resisting American imperialist control over their labor and personal lives." --- "The Silver Women is utterly original in its research and analysis. With enormous skill and sensitivity, Joan Flores-Villalobos invites us to understand the West Indian women who travelled to Panama as part of a much broader story: to place their intimate lives, choices, losses, grief, anger, and ambition at the center of the story of a region-wide economic and geopolitical transformation that kicked off ‘the American Century.’ Here we meet a diverse array of women and come to understand that history was made by them." --- "In this beautifully written book, Joan Flores-Villalobos places West Indian women at the very heart of the Panama Canal’s construction. They navigated tremendous contradictions, seen as essential to the project yet facing racist exclusion and marginalization by government officials. Their determination to secure moral and economic independence, Flores-Villalobos shows, profoundly shaped Panama, the Caribbean, and more broadly the history of the Americas. Along the way, The Silver Women illuminates in rich detail the critical role Caribbean women played in creating and sustaining the practices of diaspora." --- "The Silver Women reconstructs entire worlds of life and labor in a way that sheds immense light on the power of ideas of race and gender in the governance of the Canal Zone...[M]andatory reading for anyone interested in empire and migration—not to mention histories of women and gender in the Caribbean. The writing style is accessible and the attention Flores-Villalobos pays to the lived experiences of women makes this a very human account." --- "Against the mythos that upholds the canal as an achievement of white masculine ingenuity, The Silver Women offers an account of canal construction from the perspective of the West Indian women who 'made do' where US hegemony faltered. Its great achievement is its systematic reconstruction of the creative, pragmatic, and at turns resilient and responsive strategies employed by West Indian women as they encountered US empire. For these reasons, it makes significant contributions to Black women’s history, labor history, histories of the US and the world, and Latin American and Caribbean history. Although this book does not claim to be a work of environmental history, it invites questions more closely aligned with the field that others can and should explore." --- "[B]y drawing on US government documents, criminal investigations, divorce and rape cases, memoirs authored by white women, administrative correspondence, and other sources from the United States, United Kingdom, Barbados, and Panama, Flores-Villalobos makes compelling cases for the significance of West Indian women to canal construction and for canal construction as an epochal event for West Indian women." --- "In The Silver Women, Joan Flores-Villalobos makes the most of unacknowledged people passing through a transitional space of empire to provide counternarratives to triumphalist histories and archival erasure. With many chapters that could be assigned independently, lucid prose, and engaging everyday actors, the book is ripe for teaching histories of the United States in the world, migration, empire, and historical methods. Flores-Villalobos gives women back their names, their individuality, and their stories, while also reminding us that while the particulars might differ, Black women’s stories serve as counternarratives to empire, productivity, and profit wherever we find them." --- "Flores-Villalobos shakes up the traditionally told history of the construction of the Panama Canal in this explorative historical analysis. The author contends that the creation of the Panama Canal would not have been possible without the labor of West Indian Black migrant women....Flores-Villalobos beautifully tells the story of these women and brings this important history to life using a vast array of archival sources." --- "The Silver Women unsettles the triumphalist story of the Panama Canal as a white, male feat, instead showing the essential role of Black migrant women in the success of the project. Like Flores-Villalobos’s analysis, the women she studies similarly disrupted the world they lived in...Even as The Silver Women offers a thorough exploration of race and gender in Panama, the book is not about Panama alone. Instead, it crafts an essential revisionist account of the overlooked but indispensable role that West Indian women played in forging their diaspora across the Americas." --- "The Silver Women is critical for understanding West Indian women’s roles in the development of a Caribbean migratory tradition. By centering their labor of social reproduction, Flores-Villalobos provides an important model for centering Black women in the history of US empire, Latin America, and the African Diaspora."