Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
ORCID
N/A
Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
History
Degree Type
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Year Degree Awarded
2018
Month Degree Awarded
May
Abstract
U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a shorthand for vagrant, vagabond, and hobo. This thesis examines the so-called “tramp crisis” of the late nineteenth century to show how questions of labor invariably shaped problems of empire. As a category, the tramp moved outside of the United States where various U.S. foreign policymakers, writers, and business officials created the idea of the “tropical tramp” in U.S. imperial spaces. This label, tropical tramp, offers scholars a different starting point to analyze larger issues of whiteness, masculinity, sexuality, class, and the U.S. empire. By following discursive formations of the tramp and tropical tramp into Central and South America, this thesis argues that the figure of the tramp represented someone unbefitting the U.S. empire’s desired sociopolitical order.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/12107585
First Advisor
Christian Appy
Second Advisor
Laura Briggs
Third Advisor
Julio Capó, Jr.
Recommended Citation
Werner, Jack, "Wanderers of Empire: The Tropical Tramp in Latin America, 1870-1930" (2018). Masters Theses. 675.
https://doi.org/10.7275/12107585
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/675
Included in
Cultural History Commons, Diplomatic History Commons, History of Gender Commons, Labor History Commons, Latin American History Commons, United States History Commons