Pimp our ride

Rural buses in Colombia are known by the name of chivas. Since the first decades of the twentieth century, wooden bodyworks were installed on truck chassis for people, equipment, and farm animal transportation. Nowadays, their bodyworks are recognized as a prominent popular art form, thanks to a long tradition of painstaking painting: landscapes, geometric shapes, religious imagery, and a profusion of ornamentation developed by artisans over generations. This volume presents a study about chivas in historie, cultural, and socioeconomic perspectives taking an ethnographic approach in four Colombian cities: Medellín, Popayán, Santa Marta and Bogotá. Additionally, this book provides a theoretical trame about how utilitarian vehicles' decoration is useful for a better understanding of the role of this form of artistic expression in popular culture and popular economy. This study identifies chivas as a transitional cultural object of the Colombian twentieth century: from an agrarian economy to an industrial and services economy. Chivas· owners -- communities, families or individuals - have all redefined uses and meanings in arder to adapt them to prevailing and changing socioeconomic situations. Despite structural socioeconomic changes over the decades, the chivas endurance in Colombia represents an imaginative cultural transformation. The knowledge, traditions, practices, and especially popular music have been adapted to keep chivas as an essential part of culture identity and a vital economic alternative for hundreds of families and communities.