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This article explores the local histories and ecological knowledge embedded within a Spanish print of enslaved, Afro-descendant boatmen charting a wooden vessel up the Chagres River across the Isthmus of Panamá. Produced for a 1748 travelogue by the Spanish scientists Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, the image reflects a preoccupation with tropical ecologies, where enslaved persons are incidental. Drawing from recent scholarship by Marixa Lasso, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, and Kevin Dawson, I argue that the image makes visible how enslaved and free Afro-descendants developed a distinct cosmopolitan culture connected to intimate ecological knowledge of the river. By focusing critical attention away from the print’s Spanish manufacture to the racial ecologies of the Chagres, I aim to restore art historical visibility to eighteenth-century Panamá and Central America, a region routinely excised from studies of colonial Latin American art.
A boat ascends a coursing river (Figure 1). Fourteen oarsmen paddle against the force of the river’s downward stream towards a range of mountains. Despite the river’s coursing speed, flocks of birds have settled at the water’s edge. Swans and herons wade in cool waters as an iguana scuttles across the surface. Two-headed snakes slither along the ground, as a chachalaca (Ortalis ruficada, labeled here as Pava montesa) and other birds survey the scene. Above the river, small black monkeys form a chain as they swing from one bough of the canopy to the other, demonstrating a playful ease to navigating the forest that escapes the humans below. However, the bogueros, or boatmen, are hardly unprepared. They row with years of experience under their belts, having navigated up and down the Chagres River and across the Isthmus of Panamá innumerable times. Often enslaved and Afro-descendant, bogueros played a crucial role in the flow of silver, gold, and other precious goods and materials from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Latin America to the rest of the world. As they rowed along the river, they also dispersed other enslaved people throughout Latin America (O’Toole 2020).
A Spanish printmaker by the name of Juan Moreno created this image of Panamá in Madrid, as an illustrated chapter heading in the 1748 tome Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional (Ulloa and Juan 1748, p. 144). Penned by the Spanish scientists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, the book narrated their journey from Cádiz to Quito and their efforts to measure the circumference of the Earth. Images were central to the book’s didactic function, expanding scientific accounts into engaging narratives by visualizing colonial cities, cultural customs, and landscapes of eighteenth-century Latin America. Upon their return to Spain, Ulloa and Juan supervised the careful creation of some forty-eight illustrations by Spanish artists including Juan Bernabé Palomino, Vicente de la Fuente, Juan Moreno, Carlos Casanova, Juan Pablo Minguet, Juan Fernández de la Peña, and Juan Palomino (Contreras and Iniesta 2015).
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Art historian Daniela Bleichmar has established the visual culture of science in the Hispanic Enlightenment as an important site to investigate imperial formations of power relations (Bleichmar 2014; Bleichmar 2017). The illustrations in Juan and Ulloa’s books belong to this well-established genre of European expeditionary images, providing crucial insight into the eighteenth-century Spanish imaginary of colonial Latin America (especially the Andes) (Vega González 2010). Scholars have argued that Moreno’s image of Panamá is “the most well-known of all” of the book’s illustrations, enticing in its visualization of a “dangerous navigation system” (Contreras and Iniesta 2015). Moreno’s print is also distinctive for another reason: it renders enslaved black bogueros visible in a scholarly practice that usually insisted on blackness “remain[ing] in the interstices” (Safier 2008, p. 63). Seated under the thatched roof of the boat, the white European scientists Ulloa and Juan evade our gaze. This latent but invisible whiteness raises questions about the role of race within the image.
In Panamá, the print has taken on a different meaning, where, divorced from the original text, it appears as a routine illustration in history books about the isthmus (Castillero Calvo 2019, p. 620). The popular reproduction of this print marshals the image as foretelling visual testimony of Panamá’s transformation into a central hub of global commerce after the completion of the eponymous canal in 1915. Over the centuries, the 1748 image of the Chagres River has become synonymous with the canal’s historicity, supporting narratives of Panamá’s “predestined geography” to be a locus of intercontinental trade (Carse 2014, pp. 71–82). Yet, as Marixa Lasso has made clear, the creation of the Panamá Canal was dependent on the displacement and erasure of the country’s black citizenry (Lasso 2019). As humanities scholarship recenters Panamanians within accounts of Panamá (and away from twentieth-century U.S. actors), the historical significance of the Chagres River as a cultural space in the late colonial period—and the centrality of blackness therein—has emerged as an important avenue of inquiry.
In this essay, I contend that this 1748 print functions beyond its Spanish manufacture to reveal colonial Panamá, and the Chagres River in particular, as a historical space that has nourished black life and culture. In doing so, it follows models of black geographical thought developed by Katherine McKittrick, who urges us to pay attention to the “livingness” within a colonial archive of enslavement and dispossession (King 2019, pp. 30–31, 77–78). Closer consideration of the river’s enslaved bogueros establishes the racial valences of the isthmus’s aqueous ecologies, evoking Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of the black shoal as a liminal space that slows and disrupts white settlement. I therefore advocate for a shift in our positionality away from the print’s European Enlightenment manufacture in order to understand how the image embeds the ecological knowledge and cultures of colonial Panamanian actors.
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The print’s focus on the slow ascent up the Chagres invites viewers to linger in the river’s liminality. In doing so, we can better see the complexity of our surroundings and reconsider the space of Panamá in eighteenth-century art histories. For art historians, the busy ports of Panamá City and Portobelo are important insofar that they are nodes in, say, the mobile networks of the Manila Galleons. Otherwise, the isthmus appears most often in lists that describe the geographical extent of the Viceroyalty of Peru (1543–1717) and later New Granada (1717/1739–1821), rather than as a site of cultural production. These Andean affiliations made colonial Panamá a clear beneficiary of and an occasional contributor to the famed Quito School. Seventeenth-century painter Hernando de la Cruz, for instance, traced his roots to Panamá, though his artistic activity was firmly in Quito and contributed little towards artistic production on the isthmus proper (Vallarino 1950; RamÃrez 2013). Some of the earliest and most impressive churches on the isthmus, notably in Natá (or Natá de los Caballeros), feature the paintings and polychrome sculptures of Quito School artists.
An enduring emphasis on transit treats the isthmus as a site between cultures, rather than a site of distinct cultures, especially before independence from Colombia in 1903. This lacuna is especially conspicuous in the eighteenth century because of the closing of the Portobelo fairs (ferias) after 1739 (Ward 1993). The fairs had been the main Caribbean and Atlantic trading post for the Viceroyalty of Peru, where merchants exchanged Andean silver, New Granadan gold, textiles, cacao, tortoiseshell, and quinine for other global wares. The fairs were also the main impetus for the maintenance of transisthmian travel routes that utilized the Chagres River. After repeated attacks and sieges at Portobelo made the port an untenable location, the Spanish crown closed the ferias permanently in 1739.
Mercantilist histories exacerbate this absence of art historical investigation, suggesting that the closing of the Portobelo ferias ushered over a century of “decline” for Panamá, until the construction of the world’s first transcontinental railway across the isthmus in 1855 (Delgado et al. 2016, pp. 115–35). However, there are many reasons to consider the eighteenth century anew from a Panamanian perspective. When Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan arrived to Portobelo in 1733, they witnessed one of the last fairs to
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The print’s focus on the slow ascent up the Chagres invites viewers to linger in the river’s liminality. In doing so, we can better see the complexity of our surroundings and reconsider the space of Panamá in eighteenth-century art histories. For art historians, the busy ports of Panamá City and Portobelo are important insofar that they are nodes in, say, the mobile networks of the Manila Galleons. Otherwise, the isthmus appears most often in lists that describe the geographical extent of the Viceroyalty of Peru (1543–1717) and later New Granada (1717/1739–1821), rather than as a site of cultural production. These Andean affiliations made colonial Panamá a clear beneficiary of and an occasional contributor to the famed Quito School. Seventeenth-century painter Hernando de la Cruz, for instance, traced his roots to Panamá, though his artistic activity was firmly in Quito and contributed little towards artistic production on the isthmus proper (Vallarino 1950; RamÃrez 2013). Some of the earliest and most impressive churches on the isthmus, notably in Natá (or Natá de los Caballeros), feature the paintings and polychrome sculptures of Quito School artists.
An enduring emphasis on transit treats the isthmus as a site between cultures, rather than a site of distinct cultures, especially before independence from Colombia in 1903. This lacuna is especially conspicuous in the eighteenth century because of the closing of the Portobelo fairs (ferias) after 1739 (Ward 1993). The fairs had been the main Caribbean and Atlantic trading post for the Viceroyalty of Peru, where merchants exchanged Andean silver, New Granadan gold, textiles, cacao, tortoiseshell, and quinine for other global wares. The fairs were also the main impetus for the maintenance of transisthmian travel routes that utilized the Chagres River. After repeated attacks and sieges at Portobelo made the port an untenable location, the Spanish crown closed the ferias permanently in 1739.
Mercantilist histories exacerbate this absence of art historical investigation, suggesting that the closing of the Portobelo ferias ushered over a century of “decline” for Panamá, until the construction of the world’s first transcontinental railway across the isthmus in 1855 (Delgado et al. 2016, pp. 115–35). However, there are many reasons to consider the eighteenth century anew from a Panamanian perspective. When Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan arrived to Portobelo in 1733, they witnessed one of the last fairs to
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