arts

Also in this section:
"Jesus Lizard on a Banana Channel" graces the new US Embassy
Gaenor Speed exhibition at the Sheraton

Arte por Tierra at the Anthropology Museum

Anything Goes: a Spanish version of a Cole Porter musical

If you prize your Tupperware...

Another public depiction of the 1964 Martyrs

Gallery & Museum Guide

The Martyrs of 1964

If you look at the lead opinion column in this issue, with its photos from the famous 1937 "Battle of the Bridge" at the Miller Road entrance to the Ford Rouge Complex and then get deeper into US labor lore, it is often claimed that if every UAW activist who claimed to have been at the Battle of the Bridge had actually been there, the structure would have collapsed under their collective weight.

Something similar applies to the January 1964 Day of the Martyrs, the flag riots that spelled the beginning of the end of the old Canal Zone. The politicians of that time were running to catch up with public opinion, and the leaders who gave names to the two main political traditions of contemporary Panama, Arnulfo Arias (arnulfismo) and Omar Torrijos (torrijismo) played roles in those events that they later had to falsify for public appearances. So the political class loves to surround itself with images of the Martyrs of 1964 like this sculpture in the socialist realism genre near the legislative palace --- but virtually all claims of heroics back then by today's politicians are much akin to the claims of the many to have been among the few at the bridge in front of the auto factory on that day in 1937.

What really happened in January of 1964? Zonians, led at first by a Canal Zone police officer, staged a series of American flag demonstrations in the former US enclave, some radical students from the Instituto Nacional (which was out of session for vacation at the time) picked up their gauntlet, there was a minor scuffle next to the Balboa High School flagpole in which a Panamanian flag was torn, several hours later an angry crowd descended on the Canal Zone and the Canal Zone police opened fire. The entire country exploded in protest, some maleantes took advantage of the situation to loot, US troops were called in to replace the Canal Zone cops and when the smoke cleared several days later more than two dozen people, most of them Panamanians, were dead and Panama had cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. There began a long negotiating process that ultimately led to treaties that abolished the Canal Zone going into effect in 1979, starting a transition process that lasted through 1999.

Photo by Eric Jackson

Arte por Tierra at the Anthropology Museum

Anything Goes: a Spanish version of a Cole Porter musical

If you prize your Tupperware...

Another public depiction of the 1964 Martyrs

Gallery & Museum Guide