Robert,
You and s. E have traveled widely in each area walking the streets and markets, socializing g and recording the shakes colors and faces.
The bright colored carefully composed and painted boards on windows, and the awaking atmosphere of use of alive colors creates a unique uplifting atmosphere.
This must have evoked recognition long ago!
Do you know if any articles or discussion of the origins and evolution of this powerful, seemingly ethnic and perhaps local defined but unconscious embedded meme in all societies in South America we call, “Hispanic”, whether or not, in actuality it is related to the colonization of that continent by Spain or not?
…and is it present in the same of a different idiom in Portuguese speaking South American areas?