arts

Also in this section:
Impressions of 2006
Arts center opening in San Carlos
Crowds to be limited at Portobelo's Diablo and Congo Festival
Gallery & Museum Guide
 

Portobelo Diablos & Congos Festival to be held on March 3

After a year's absence, the Fundacion Portobelo, the Grupo Realce Historico de Portobelo and the Asociacion Cultural AlterArte are teaming up to produce the Fifth Portobelo Diablos and Congos Festival this coming March 3. The event is sure to attract not only large throngs of locals, but also tourists from abroad.

The popularity of the last event was such that it made the festival both a great success and a problem. The crowds were so big that there was a monstrous traffic jam getting into and out of town and many people had a hard time fitting into the small space in the ruins of Fort San Jeronimo where all the congo dancing and diablito displays took place. The problem will be dealt with in several ways:

The culture celebrated on this day will be that of the "colonial" blacks, who were brought to Panama as slaves of the Spaniards and thus have distinct roots and traditions from the West Indian blacks who came in the 19th and 20th centuries to build the Panama Railroad and Panama Canal and establish the country's banana plantations. Fort San Geronimo and the buildings of other colonial sites like Fort San Lorenzo and Panama Viejo were built by black slaves and for the most part designed by Italian architects.

Part of the Afro-Colonial history and tradition is the Cimarrones, slaves who ran away into the jungle and set up West African-style villages. The Colon-style diablito costumes are strikingly similar to some of the masks and other regalia from West African cultures.

Eventually, however, the colonial, then Colombian, then national governments and cultural milieaux, and in particular the Catholic Church, reabsorbed the Cimarrones into something close to the mainstream of Panamanian life, and that entailed an overlay of Catholic symbolism and allegories on the slave and Cimarron traditions that survive as congo dancing and the diablitos.

On the other hand, Portobelo, like the rest of Colon, retains its cultural distinctions from the rest of Panama. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was like the Colon Free Zone is today, the place where the riches of the Spanish Pacific empire (particularly Peruvian gold and Bolivian silver) were loaded onto ships headed for Spain and Old World luxury goods were imported for people in the capital and beyond. Then as now, black people on the Atlantic side did most of the heavy lifting and white people in Panama City skimmed most of the profits. After Spain rescinded the charter that gave special commercial rights to the annual Portobelo trade fairs the town became an economic backwater, but the local people never forgot their roots and traditions.

Portobelo's tourist economy has been around for many years, first with the Festival of the Black Christ that takes place every October 21, with tens of thousands of Panamanian pilgrims and ever increasing crowds of foreign tourists, particularly African Americans. The area's offshore coral reefs are also a hit with divers and now protected as part of an underwater national park.

Although festival organizers and the municipal government are making better preparations for this year's event than were made for the last one, the bottleneck created by the two-lane road from Sabanitas on the Trans-Isthmian Highway to Portobelo will remain. Start out early in the day, keep plenty of something cool to drink in the car and don't let the traffic jam upset you.