A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Featuring Nancy Billings

Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. 

REGISTRATION (open to all graduate students)

A/P/A Institute Research Affiliate Nancy Billings (PhD candidate, Yale University) presents, “1906 Escape from the SS Chile: Chinese Exclusion and the Panama Canal” at this session of the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting. Lunch will be served.

The meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A studies.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Nancy Billings, “1906 Escape from the SS Chile: Chinese Exclusion and the Panama Canal”

In May 1906, twenty-six Chinese passengers escaped from the British steamship Chile as it departed La Boca, the Pacific terminus harbor of the Canal Zone, for the southern ports of South America. Despite implementing and enforcing many precautionary measures to prevent the landing of Chinese, these passengers were able to evade the Chinese exclusion laws that were in effect and surreptitiously gain entrance to both the Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama. This presentation examines this escape, and the ensuing investigations into it, to explore the history of Chinese exclusion in the greater Canal Zone. Billings argues that moments like this escape ruptured the bureaucratic fantasies of state control that underwrote these laws and revealed the integral role they played in the region, even as they were erased, surveilled and excluded from US and Panamanian political projects.

Nancy Billings is a fourth-year PhD candidate in American studies at Yale University and a current research affiliate at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Her dissertation turns to the Chinese who resided in and around the Panama Canal to examine both the formation and operation of the greater Canal Zone through their unique position in its social and economic fabric and their role in the expansion of global capitalism that conditions Central American state building and US ascendance.

Photo of “Payday at Miraflores.” Circa 1905-13. taken by presenter at the Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá, 2025.