Festival of the Black Christ, October 21 in Portobelo

Before you consider the next major tourist event of Panama’s centennial year, the Festival of the Black Christ in Portobelo, allow me to set the context with three controversial academic tangents.

First, as far as I am concerned deconstructionism is mostly an intricate excuse for intellectual laziness, but what happens every October 21 in Portobelo can be used to buttress an argument that it’s not.

Second, even though the denials that Panama has racism that one sometimes hears are outrageous, you will not understand this country’s race relations very well if you view them through a lens that’s made in the USA.

Third, the odds are much greater that the historical Jesus Christ and his mother had complexions like the icon at the center of Portobelo’s celebration than like the white-skinned representation that you find in the little park in San Felix.

Say what?

For starters, the central idea of deconstructionism is that a literary or cultural phenomenon must be considered in terms of the way that it is taken by the beholder, which is more important that the author’s or creator’s intent.

This festival dates back to the 17th century. In Portobelo they talk about El Nazareno when referring to their local icon. It is a dark-skinned Jesus with delicate facial features more like those found among the Amharas of Ethiopia than the broad-nosed, thick-lipped faces seen among the Bantu peoples and their descendents. The emphasis on this Christ’s blackness is of a much later date, and is largely a product of white Americans’ amazement that their light-skinned savior could be portrayed in this manner.

Wherever the European Catholics colonized, they had racism and slavery just like the Protestants. However, the Protestants who settled in South Africa and North America denied the very humanity of black people and considered it a terrible perversion for whites to intermarry with them. The Catholics considered Africans to be uncivilized heathens who needed to be brought into Christendom at the bottom of the social scale, but not as beasts unfit to marry. The Protestant taboo against interracial marriage and the lack thereof in Catholicism is why most Latin Americans are of mixed race and most North Americans aren’t. It explains why black nationalism is a powerful force among blacks in the United States and much of the Caribbean but not Panama. It explains why to most Portobelo residents, the statue is The Nazarene, who happens to be black, while to most visitors from the States it’s The Black Christ.

But of course, Colon is a mostly black province, Portobelo is a black majority town and if you look at Mireya’s nearly all-white cabinet or the Miss Panama finalists and take into account some of the pronouncements that certain government ministers and business leaders have made about Colon, it’s easy to see that Panama is a racially stratified society currently ruled by a white minority regime. The Festival of the Black Christ has come to represent a counterpoint to that reality, among both Panamanians and foreign visitors. It’s an implicit negation of the white minority's misappropriation of God.

If you get into Biblical archaeology and the history of the Jews, while the possibility of a fair-haired, white-skinned Jesus is not ruled out, the odds are much greater that the founding martyr of the Christian faith looked like the statue that will be paraded around Portobelo on the evening of the 21st. Yes, there are Jewish racists who deny that the Ethiopian Falashas are Jews, and Christian racists who assert that Jesus was of Aryan stock. But Rastafari’s claim that the Ethiopian royal lineage traces back to a union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba --- hence his title “Lion of Judah” --- is plausible given what we know of the ancient world. The light-skinned Ashkenazi Jews are largely descended from Caucasian Khazar converts from well after Christ's time and from Slavic and Germanic peoples with whom they intermarried at even later times. While the Holy Land had long been a crossroads among Europe, Africa and Asia by the start of the Common Era and at that time had Jews of just about all human colors, Jesus was probably darker-skinned than Western Christendom usually portrays him.

Anyway, Portobelo is in Catholic-majority and mostly mixed-race Panama, rather than in the racially obsessed United States. According to local legend, back in the 1600s an epidemic was laying waste to the local population until a crate bearing the very wooden statue around which the October 21 commotion takes place was found by local fishermen, and when The Nazarene was brought ashore the plague vanished. It was taken as a very Catholic reminder that Jesus Christ is not just a figurative savior, and that’s what brings in the multicolored mass of purple-robed pilgrims every year.

You need not dress in purple, adhere to any particular religious denomination or pass for black to partake of the festivities. This is a party for all, one of the high points in Panamanian popular culture.

If you are not going to drive to Portobelo well in advance of the festivities or walk from where the road to Portobelo departs from the Trans-Isthmian Highway in Sabanitas (or make the journey on your knees, as a few people will), your most viable transportation option will be the bus. Driving is possible, but the traffic jams are nightmarish and parking is even more frightful. The formal celebration begins at dusk but the party begins way before that (there will be plenty of bars and refreshment stands along the way to serve those taking the long walk from Maria Chiquita or thereabout) and there will be no hopping into a car in Panama City an hour or two before dark and getting there on time.

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Festival of the Black Christ