A girl dress hanging out of a house in Pedro Miguel, mispronounced by the Zonians as “Peter Magill”. By 1918, the Dredging Division’s workforce from the nearby town of Paraiso, was reduced as the danger of landslides abated. Paraiso’s American work force was moved to the nearby town of Pedro Miguel and Paraiso became a segregated “silver” town (The appellative “Silver” comes from the Gold and Silver Roll system implemented by the American administrators of the Canal Zone in 1904 to segregate black people from white people in The Canal Zone). Pedro Miguel dates from the French canal and it was the site of the first of the Pacific locks after Gatun Lake, and lock headquarters were located here.

The Panama Canal Zone, an American colony and military preserve on Panamanian territory, was controlled by the United States for most of the 20th century. This highly strategic place for the USA formed a country within a country, a kind of capitalist commune ruled by the Zonians, as the Zone’s inhabitants were known. The Panama Canal was built between 1904 and 1914, when it was opened, and it will be remarkably enlarged by 2016, with a third set of locks which is intended to double the capacity of the Panama Canal.

A Zonian is a person associated with the Panama Canal Zone, a political entity which existed between 1903 and 1999, when it was finished the absorption of the Canal Zone into the Republic of Panama, started in 1979, by the Carter-Torrijos treaties. Many Zonians are descendants of the civilian American workers who came to the area during the early 1900s to work and maintain the canal. Today Zonians might work at the canal itself. Others may have been American citizens born in the Canal Zone or who spent their childhood there. A significant presence of American canal workers remained in the Canal region until 1999. Many of these people consider themselves to be Panamanian and U.S. citizens, although quite a few say that they are only American or onl