In a hidden garage in Maryland, just across the D.C. border, Moisés Sanjur keeps his most prized possession: a diablo rojo (“red devil” in Spanish)—a large, beautifully painted bus of the kind that once ran through Panama City and transported thousands of citizens every day.
Sanjur—who has lived in the D.C. area for more than 18 years—was born in Panama City, and the diablos rojos trawling across the city marked his childhood. (They’ve now largely fallen out of use in the country, but remain a strong cultural identifier for many Panamanians.) After several years of planning and dreaming, he finally managed this summer to recreate his own here in the United States, a feat he hopes will help him promote his country of origin and create community with other Panamanians living near the nation’s Capital.
“My idea, my dream, has always been to show the beauty and cultural diversity of my country [in the U.S.]. The diablo rojo occurred to me because my brother drove one when I was little and I went with him on his journeys,” Sanjur says in Spanish. For many years, Sanjur has worked as a chauffeur at the Panamanian Embassy in D.C., where he says he tried to ask ambassadors and other authorities of his native country to help him gather the money to make his bus.
“That’s what [I am] looking for: to represent Panamanian identity, and to give a special moment to all those people I’ve appreciated and lived with all these years. My people,” Sanjur says. “Because back in Panama we were always on a diablo rojo, it was our means of transportation to get to and from work.”
The bus itself is a hulking converted school bus painted in bright colors by urban Panamanian artist David García, who specializes in diablos rojos. Sanjur paid to bring García over from Panama specifically to complete his bus. The two worked together to decide on the designs for Sanjur’s diablo rojo, which include depictions of both his country of origin and his adopted home: drawings of Panama La Vieja and Portobello, the ruins of Panama’s first settled Spanish cities, sit near a large depiction of the U.S. Capitol and a bald eagle. There’s also a huge portrait of Sanjur’s daughter Karina in a pollera, a traditional Panamanian dress, along with several Panamanian celebrities, flora and fauna native to Panama, and a portrait of an indigenous Panamanian woman.
According to Sanjur, there isn’t a Panamanian in the D.C. area who isn’t thrilled to see his diablo rojo. The first time he took his completed bus around D.C. this summer, he says a Panamanian woman who hadn’t returned to her country in 15 years burst into tears when she saw it.
“She remembered when she rode to school in one of them,” Sanjur says. That first time, Sanjur drove the bus along 7th and Constitution Ave. on the National Mall, and he says people were flagging him down to take pictures of the bus. “I parked so they had a chance to get close to the bus,” he says. And—like any good Panamanian diablo rojo—it ended up causing a traffic jam.
Since then, Sanjur has taken the bus out two more times, once to meet the winner of Miss Panama 2018 when she visited D.C. and another time to participate in the Fiesta D.C. parade. He says he ended up not making it in time to meet the beauty queen because he kept stopping to let people see and take photos of the bus. At Fiesta D.C., he says his diablo rojo “was seen by at least half a million people.”
On these outings, he says part of what he wants to do is promote tourism to his country, even from those in D.C. who’ve never been there and never thought about visiting. Tourism is “something we need very much,” he says. “The bus accomplishes that perfectly, because it’s part of the Panamanian identity: it’s attractive, it’s exotic and cheerful and it promotes us. I’ve already seen when I have taken it out, people love it and everyone wants to talk about Panama.”
But it’s not just Panama that he hopes to benefit—Sanjur also wants to help create community among his compatriots living in D.C.
“I’ve been here in the United States for many years and I see that, for example, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Mexicans do lots of community activities and support each other. So I started to ask myself, why not Panamanians?” Sanjur says. “We also offer a lot of folklore, good food, we are joyful. That’s what led me to firmly believe that it was up to me to do this, and it was my mission: to help make Panama great with this diablo rojo. And thank God I think I did it.”
