HOME GO GRINGO
Mural / Intervention; 20.2 meters X 1.88 meters (2008)
Polyurethane and latex paints

 
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Home Go Gringo was created within the context of the 8th Panama Art Biennial

I like to think of this piece as an exercise in conceptual muralism, and I believe it has three main elements: its location, its content and its phantasmagoric character. By situating it on the very border that formerly separated the city of Panama from what was once the Canal Zone – only a few meters away from the place where the violent clashes between Panamanian high school students and U.S. military police took place on January 9th, 1964 – my intention was to point out the fact that a limit had once existed there, the physical boundary between two territories, the traces of which have begun to disappear as the reverted areas gradually become incorporated into the rest of the city.

The mural’s content, an inversion of the classic Latin American anti-imperialist slogan Gringo go home, alludes to globalization, and its homogenizing processes. More specifically, it refers to the hundreds of United States citizens that are currently settling in Panama as “residential tourists”, thereby contributing to the continuous gringofication process Panama has experienced throughout its history.

I conceived the piece to evolve with the passage of time. Through the use of paints with varying degrees of resistance to the elements and to exhaust fumes, I left the emergence of the mural’s text slightly up to chance, a phantasmagoric touch consonant with the idea of the Zone as a place that now only exists within the memory of the Zonians that at one time lived there, and within the collective imagination of Panamanians, whom until recently lived on the other side of its border.