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 Colon 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 U.S. 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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