Panameñas No Alineadas: Panamanian Women Artists and Women Cultural Producers during the Dictatorial Regime of Omar Torrijos

The research on Omar Torrijos' military regime has gravitated toward two main topics: the establishment of the dictatorial regime, and the populist measures implemented during the dictatorship and Torrijos's leadership while negotiating treaties between Panama and the United States in 1977. Scholars from the US and Panama have widely analyzed the economic, social, and political reforms imposed during this regime (Summ and Kelly, 1988; Harding, 2001; Long, 2015; Conniff, 2012). Still, more research has to be developed around the cultural production of artists, and the political agency of women artists during this convoluted period. In this essay, I examine the responses and the strategies created by Panamanian women artists and women cultural producers to navigate the military dictatorship. I concentrate on the repercussions of the cultural policies enforced during the dictatorial regime of Omar Torrijos in the art production of women artists and cultural producers in Panama from 1971-1985. These fourteen years were a complex period marked by strict surveillance of citizens and the promotion of artistic expressions highlighting Panamanian nationalist discourses. In this essay, I argue that race, class, and gender determined women artists and women cultural producers' receptivity to the bureaucracy and the media dominated by the militarized regime in Panama from 1971 to 1985. With this project, I expand the analysis of the visual art production of women Panamanian artists such as Gisela Quintero and Alicia Viteri and the cultural agency of Reina Torres de Araúz and Melba Lowe de Goodin. I argue that women artists during Omar Torrijos's regime resorted to art as a cathartic measure to re-imagine the concept of sovereignty, and construct their definitions of womanhood. I finally demonstrate that the cultural policies supported by Torrijos´s regime contributed to positioning women artists and cultural producers in the national context and the international art circuit.