Talk:Watermelon Riot

Uh... what the flip? What's up with the whole 'Negro' thing? Does this sound a bit racist?

RACE RIOT????
Excuseme but first, It wasn`t a race riot, simplily because the problem wasn`t about race, It was social conflict due to tensions between americans (of any race) and panamenians (of any race too). The point here is that the problem was about an abuse and not about racial discrimination.

Innacurate
As a Panamanian I find this article inaccurate, non-neutral and completely based on one side of the conflict. In school we've been taught that the Americans started the incident, and the American pulled a gun when the vendor asked for the 10 cents, and the vendor never did pulled out a knife. I'd suggest a complete rewrite of this article with cited sources from both sides of the conflict, or deletion. -- ...RuineЯ|Chat... 19:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Just to confirm. The vendor actually put out a Machete. However, this was not on Panama City, Panama, as panama was just part of La Gran Colombia. Therefore it wasnt the panamanian goverment, but the Colombian one. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.166.255.42 (talk) 16:57, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Correction
Almost correct. Panama was a "department" of Nueva Granada (now Colombia). Gran Colombia was the union of Venezuela, Ecuador and Nueva Granada (Colombia), which included the Isthmus of Panama. This union was promoted by Simon Bolivar.

Some studies tell that the watermelon vendor, Mr. José Manuel Luna, was from Peru; according to these, he took out a knife indeed, not a machete. - - mcerrud (talk) 19:01, 2 October 2008 (UTC)mcerrud

Nueva Granada/Colombia are still not mentioned anywhere in this article, but they should be. A casual reader might assume that Panama was independent at the time. I'd make the change, but this is the first I've heard of this event so I don't consider myself qualified to wade through it. Rwestera (talk) 06:03, 1 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree, the article is written as if the incident occurred in an independent Panama, and not in a department of the Republic of New Granada. Maybe, all references to "panamian citizens" should be changed to "colombian citizens". And the article should be written as a conflict between New Granada and the USA, in which Panama was just the location for it.Alwhorl (talk) 00:42, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

WAR?
In what sense, except humorous, is this properly denominated as a "war"? Scholarly sources and the article itself pretty clearly refer to it as a "riot" which is precisely what it seems to be: some drunks get in a fight over a slice of watermelon and it got way out of hand before the big guns rolled up and ran everybody off. Sometimes I just don't get the people who edit Wikipedia but it's beyond my skill set to fix this problem. Perhaps some good soul will pick up the cause. Economy1 (talk) 14:25, 7 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I agree the article title should be changed to Watermelon Riot. The majority of reliable, English sources refer to the incident as the Watermelon Riot. Even the references cited in this article call it a riot. Not sure where the term "war" came from.  Glendoremus (talk) 19:59, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Possible sources for verification
In addition to the one source listed in the article (Daley 1990), I'll include a few sources that should be helpful in improving the article: Peloneousc 18:28, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Colby, Jason M. (2011). The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801478994.
 * Humphrey, David C. (2015). "The Myth of the Hangman: Ran Runnels, the Isthmus Guard, and the Suppression of Crime in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Panama." The Latin Americanist 59 (4): 3–24..
 * McGuinness, Aims (2008). Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801475382.


 * Adding additional possible sources–
 * Appelbaum, Nancy P. (2016). Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9781469628936.
 * Bassi, Ernesto (2017). An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822362203.
 * Gutiérrez Ardilla, Daniel (2016). "Los Estados Unidos como aliado natural y como aliado peligroso de la Nueva Granada (1810-1865)." Co-herencia 13 (25): 231–260..
 * Soper, Will (2017). "Revisiting nineteenth-century U.S. interventionism in Central America: capitalism, intrigue, and the obliteration of Greytown." American Nineteenth Century History 18 (1): 19–44..
 * Peloneoust c 23:19, 23 October 2017 (UTC)