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Wolf Tracks
Popular Art and Re-Africanization in Twentieth-Century Panama
Peter Szok
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eBook - ePub
Wolf Tracks
Popular Art and Re-Africanization in Twentieth-Century Panama
Peter Szok
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Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colón and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers with eye-catching depictions of singers and actors, brassy phrases, and vivid representations of both local and exotic panoramas. The red devils boast powerful stereo systems and dominate the urban environment with their blasting reggae, screeching brakes, horns, sirens, whistles, and roaring mufflers. Wolf Tracks analyzes the origins of these practices, tying them to rebellious, Afro-American festival traditions, and to the rumba craze of the mid-twentieth century. During World War II, thousands of US soldiers were stationed in Panama, and elaborately decorated cabarets opened to cater to their presence. These venues often featured touring Afro-Cuban musicians. Painters such as Luis "The Wolf" Evans exploited such moments of modernization to challenge the elite and its older conception of Panama as a country with little connection to Africa. While the intellectual class fled from modernization and asserted a romantic and mestizo (European-indigenous) vision of the republic, popular artists enthusiastically embraced the new influences to project a powerful sense of blackness. Wolf Tracks includes biographies of dozens of painters, as well as detailed discussions of mestizo nationalism, soccer, reggae, and other markers of Afro-Panamanian identity.
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Arte generale1. FROM WHITENING TO MESTIZAJE
The Panamanian Official Identity, 1821–1941
Panama has suffered from a long-standing reputation of being an invention of North American imperialism rather than a nation with legitimate roots in history. This idea rests largely on Panama’s independence—its controversial separation from Colombia in November 1903, which occurred with decisive U.S. assistance. The Colombian Senate had recently rejected an agreement that would have allowed the United States to build a canal through the isthmus and to connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. With the aim of securing the strategic route, Theodore Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian patriots to rebel and to establish their own republic. U.S. warships supported this separatist movement. They blocked the arrival of Colombian reinforcements, while diplomatic representatives quickly arrived at an agreement for the construction of the interoceanic waterway. Panama became a U.S. protectorate, and the North Americans established themselves in the Canal Zone and remained there until the end of the twentieth century. Over the next years, Panama suffered repeated U.S. interventions, most recently in December 1989, when a large invading force removed General Manuel Noriega from power and revived the image of a bogus country. Panama: Made in the U.S.A. is the title of a 1991 publication that illustrates this persistent and negative perception.1
The criticisms have not been lost on the Panamanians, who long ago formulated an impressive response to what they often refer to as their “black legend.” Many of the republic’s leading historians have produced studies of the nineteenth century to affirm the existence of various identities that predated and encouraged the 1903 uprising.2 These authors have demonstrated that the isthmus had had its own “lettered city.”3 This was a collection of merchant-politicians whose fortunes were tied to Panama’s traditions of commerce and who had been molding a conception of sovereignty since the 1821 end of the Spanish colony and their incorporation into Gran Colombia. Gran Colombia was largely the vision of Simón Bolívar, who had led northern South America’s quest for autonomy and who then pressed for the region’s unity after the demise of Spanish authority. The country, which encompassed most of the area, was launched and dissolved within a decade. The present-day states of Colombia and Panama, however, remained united to form the Republic of New Granada. In 1858, New Granada became the Grandine Confederation; five years later, it was renamed the United States of Colombia under the Río Negro Constitution.
This chapter traces Panama’s development through these transitions. It focuses on its growing nationalist sentiments and their evolution following the 1903 revolt against Bogota. The chapter underlines the influence of nineteenth-century liberalism, with its increasing positivist and social Darwinist qualities and its tendency to link Europeanization with modernization and progress. It also underscores the demographic inferiority of the Panamanian white oligarchy. The oligarchy was based in the capital and was hugely outnumbered by its black-mulatto inhabitants. The arrabal or gente de color had become politically active and by the 1850s had created a vision of “popular republicanism.”4 Increasingly, they were challenging Panama’s hierarchical social structures and presenting their own ideas regarding the isthmus’s future. To compensate, the elites fomented an autonomist project that sought to distance them from Colombia and to place them under the more secure protection of the period’s leading commercial interests. During these years, they became conjugally and economically tied to dynamic European and North American families, and they repeatedly sought political and even military arrangements with Great Britain, France, and the United States. Most importantly, they became impatient with Colombian indifference to the isthmus’s interoceanic mission. The canal, for this group, became a matter of necessity. It was seen as the only way to “civilize” Panama, as it would attract needed outsiders, their wealth, their culture, and their supposed biological assets, which were expected to displace the oligarchy’s black ideological opponents. The 1903 separation and the following U.S. tutelage consequently were not historical anomalies, but rather they represented the culmination of the oligarchy’s aspirations to whiten the isthmus.
The chapter continues with a description of modernization and the difficulties it presented for Panamanian leaders after the opening of the much-anticipated waterway. From the perspective of the upper class and a nascent middle sector, the canal and independence did not work out as planned and instead seemed to weaken their position, especially in respect to their plebeian enemies. The building of the sea route and presence of the United States invited the entry of economic competitors, who challenged and dislocated national investors while disrupting the country in a number of important ways. Strikes, indigenous rebellions, and feminist mobilization characterized the first decades of the republic, whose political life became sharply fragmented and beyond the control of the Liberal Party. The domineering U.S. oversight was particularly influential. Its abuses were chronicled in a body of pessimistic literature that questioned the validity of traditional liberalism. The North Americans galvanized a rising group of professionals who had emerged from a new educational system and who were eager to take up responsibilities in the republic but who found a host of U.S. advisers blocking their advancement through the state bureaucracy. Finally, the canal did not whiten or “civilize” the isthmus, but rather it dramatically increased its black population, just as the United States strengthened racist doctrines by imposing segregation in the Canal Zone. The U.S. construction project depended heavily on Afro-Antillean laborers, thousands of whom remained after its completion and who would help revive the traditions of popular republicanism. These and other concerns preoccupied the intellectual class and forced the creation of a mestizo identity.
Mestizaje was a legitimate part of Panamanian history, as the isthmus had long experienced an intense process of racial mixing. However, this phenomenon now took on a political significance. It was chronicled in poetry, songs, paintings, and public monuments, all seemingly designed to control the process of modernization as well as to forge ethnic homogeneity and to maintain the existing social hierarchies. Mestizaje’s advocates did not abandon liberalism; however, they balanced it with a sense of nostalgia. They turned their attention away from the black urban areas and suddenly became fascinated with the interior, especially with the Azuero Peninsula, whose light-skinned inhabitants they now depicted as representative of national culture. In addition, they focused on the colonial era. They created wistful depictions of the Spanish period that highlighted the merging of indigenous and European populations and the creation of a harmonious society that was uniformly Hispanic and patriarchal in nature. Africa received no acknowledgment in this “crucible of races” despite its deep and growing presence and the resurgence of black plebeian republicanism.5 In this sense, Panama’s official identity remained closely linked to the themes of previous decades. Nationalism remained a project to “civilize” the isthmus through the introduction of European elements and through the disregard or elimination of its profound African heritage.
COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS OF A BLACK MAJORITY
A prominent theme of Panamanian colonial historiography is the arrival of proportionally large numbers of Africans and their numerical superiority over the country’s white and indigenous inhabitants. Small numbers of Africans participated in the conquest, and their presence grew rapidly through the sixteenth century, especially after the reduction of the isthmus’s indigenous population, decimated by the abuses of the European invaders, their slave raiding, and their deadly diseases. Alfredo Castillero Calvo estimates that of the 150,000–250,000 people who had populated the isthmus before the entrance of the Spanish, just 7 to 12 percent remained a decade later.6 Captives from Senegambia, Lower Guinea, and Kongo helped to meet the resulting labor needs, and they dominated most sectors by the 1550s, when the Crown largely abolished Panama’s encomiendas and demonstrated the importance of African slavery.7 The Panamanian economy was comparatively modest, and it never developed dynamic export sectors like those in Peru, Brazil, and Mexico that depended on large numbers of free and forced workers. Nevertheless, slaves were present on the isthmus’s ranches as well as in its pearl fisheries, mines, vegetable gardens, and sugar mills. They also played a critical role in its transportation industry. Panama was a key point of the Spanish mercantilist system, designed to protect the bullion of Peru and Mexico and to funnel it safely to the Iberian Peninsula. It served as a land bridge, linking Spain to South America, and it was the designated place of trade for the Viceroyalty of Peru. Slaves moved silver and other goods between the capital and Portobelo, the Atlantic terminus of the commercial network. As a result, they became dominant in this zone of transit, particularly in its urban areas, where they also worked in domestic service and in construction, skilled trades, and small commerce. Slave society in Spanish America was often associated with cities, and in this regard, Panama was an obvious example.8 Castillero notes that by 1575, there were more blacks than Indians in regions under Spanish control and that within the area of the capital’s jurisdiction, slaves outnumbered Europeans by nearly four to one.
Statistics from 1607 are equally useful in revealing the large black population and the position of whites as a minority. By this time, the slave population of Panama City had ascended to 3696, while the whites numbered just 1267. There were also 718 free people of color in the capital, along with twenty-seven indigenous residents. Castillero observes that from this point onward, both the white and slave groups gradually stagnated, and they entered into a steady decline several decades later. The suspension of the isthmus’s commercial route in 1739 contributed to this demographic reduction by undermining the economy of the transit area. In the mid-eighteenth century, slaves constituted 9.6 percent of Panama’s total inhabitants, falling to 5.7 percent by 1778. In 1851, shortly before abolition, they represented just .4 percent of the country’s populace.9 Nevertheless, Panama City remained an important slave market through most of the colonial period. It served as the transshipment place for the human cargoes destined for sale in Peru and Central America and other places along the Pacific coast. Omar Jaén Suárez, in another study, emphasizes the impact of the thousands of transients who often spent extended periods in the capital and who constantly reinvigorated its “intense African imprint.”10 More importantly, as in other parts of Spanish America, the deterioration of slavery occurred simultaneously with the remarkable rise of free people of color. In fact, their emergence contributed to slavery’s decline by creating a source of inexpensive labor in a time of economic contraction. The libertos were an ethnically complex sector whose background reflected the intense racial mixing that occurred in many parts of the isthmus and which in Panamanian towns and along the communication route, incorporated the prevailing African elements. This largely pardo or mulatto population exploded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and increasingly challenged the Spanish caste structures, eventually occupying lower positions within the militia and the civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracies. At the end of the colonial period, the ascendant pardos vastly outnumbered the capital’s Europeans.11
In 1790, there were some 7,713 residents in Panama City, 66 percent of whom were free people of color. Slaves made up another 22 percent, while whites and indigenous people represented 11 and 1 percent, respectively.12 Numerous historians have underlined the impact of these demographic structures on the European minority, which lived segregated within the walled barrio of San Felipe and which suffered, according to Castillero, a general fear of blacks. Such anxieties, he insists, were self-perpetuating. Ignorance and hatred induced repressive measures that only intensified the tension between the two sectors.13 Afrophobia inevitably increased with the Haitian Revolution, which destroyed the French colony of Saint Domingue and which expelled or eradicated its entire white population. Elites in Panama and in other parts of the Caribbean felt insecure about their numerical debility, especially as they later fell under the influence of liberalism, with its positivist and Social Darwinist qualities. Representatives of the oligarchy responded by fashioning a form of nationalism based on these anxieties and conceptions of civilization.14 In 1821, they decided to join Colombia, largely as a consequence of Panama’s economic decline. However, they quickly became disillusioned with Bogotá’s leadership and fomented an autonomist project whose key elements were the revival of the transit route and greater dependency on outside powers, who were expected to offset demographic imbalances and to control rising black political elements. Afro-Panamanians, of course, had their own plans for the isthmus.
BLACK LIBERALISM AND THE HANSEATIC REPUBLIC
In his seminal work, Formas ideológicas de la nación panameña, Panamanian historian Ricaurte Soler explains the development of Panamanian nationalism and the decision of the country’s fathers in 1821 to join Gran Colombia rather than strike out on their own. Analyzing the issue from a Marxist perspective, he posits that Panamanians elites determined the isthmus’s destiny and that they were too weak in this period to sponsor the creation of a separate country.15 “They had insufficient military forces, and... were internally divided,” notes another important study of the period.16 The oligarchy was a group of merchants and urban property owners whose fortunes had been tied to the colony’s traditions of commerce and who had suffered a prolonged deterioration since the suspension of the Portobelo fairs. Some of the most prominent families had actually emigrated, while several fires gutted the capital in the mid-eighteenth century. Spanish officials had added to the decline by eliminating the isthmus’s audiencia in 1751. Soler underlines the ideological impact of the elite’s socioeconomic decay. He notes that while universities in other parts of the region were undergoing changes and revising their curriculums, there was an “infirm” attempt on the isthmus to establish an institution of higher learning; however, it was born and collapsed within the “framework of orthodoxy.”17 At this point, the Pana...