PUTNAM: THE PANAMA CANNONBALL’S TRANSNATIONAL TIES The Panama Cannonball’s Transnational Ties: Migrants, Sport, and Belonging in the Interwar Greater Caribbean LARA PUTNAM† Department of History University of Pittsburgh The interwar years saw the creation of a circum-Caribbean migratory sphere, linking British colonial sending societies like Jamaica and Barbados to receiving societies from Panama to Cuba to the Dominican Republic to the United States. The overlapping circulation of migrants and media created transnational social fields within which sport practice and sport fandom helped build face-to-face and imagined communities alike. For the several hundred thousand British Caribbean emigrants and their children who by the late 1920s resided abroad, cricket and boxing were especially central. The study of sport among interwar British Caribbean migrants reveals overlapping transnational ties that created microcultures of sporting excellence. In this mobile and interconnected world, sport became a critical realm for the expression of nested loyalties to parish, to class, to island, to empire, and to the collective they called “Our People,” that is, “the Negro Race,” worldwide. †The author is grateful to Rob Ruck, Theresa Runstedtler, and three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Sport History for very helpful comments on earlier versions. Correspondence to
[email protected]. Fall 2014 401 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY THE PANAMA AMERICAN’S “WEST INDIAN PAGE” in August of 1926 traced a world of sports in motion. There was a challenge from