Insurgent Beauty: Indigenous Art in Urban Panama

Insurgent Beauty: Indigenous Art in Urban Panama examines artistic and political developments from 1968 to the present, exploring how Native American artists leveraged Panama’s populist military reforms from 1968 to 1989 and the neoliberal transition to assert their presence in urban spaces. This book breaks new ground as it examines Indigenous art in new contexts. It utilizes research conducted over ten years with authorization from the Congreso General de la Cultura Guna and supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and grants from the US Library of Congress, the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries, and the A. M. Pate Professorship. It also taps a wide variety of archival materials as well as oral histories obtained through informed consent.

With emphasis on the urban Indigenous experience, this book uniquely focuses on art’s connection to Indigenous politics and public life. Historically, scholars of Indigenous artistic expression in Latin America have focused on elements they regard as rural crafts, such as weavings, ceramics, oral literature, and carvings. Inspired by scholars Philip Deloria and Gerald Vizenor, this study shifts to urban art forms such as studio art, jazz, modern dance, hip hop, drama, photography, and film. Concentrating on the Guna (formerly Kuna) people who were the earliest Indigenous migrants to Panama City and who are famous, across Latin America, for their bright, geometrically patterned mola fabrics, author Peter Szok argues that the molas are just one aspect of Guna artistic culture, and that the rise of more urban manifestations is part of a process of ethnic resurgence.

Peter Szok is professor of Latin American history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. His previous publications include Wolf Tracks: Popular Art and Re-Africanization in Twentieth-Century Panama, published by University Press of Mississippi.