Huacayñán (1952–1953) and the biopolitics of in(ex)clusion

Abstract

The foundation of the modern Ecuadorian State in the 1940s and early 1950s coincides with a series of attempts to synchronize and incorporate certain “problematic” sectors of the population that were supposedly resistant to progress and whose forms of life were incompatible with modernity, a capitalist economy, and a cohesive nation. This biopolitical project for the modernization and governance of the population also had repercussions on—and analogous manifestations within—the discourse of national identity, the design of cultural policies, and the production of State-sponsored national art. This article analyzes Huacayñán / El camino del llanto / The Way of Tears (1952–1953), a collection of FIGURE 3 aintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín that was commissioned by the government of Ecuador in 1951. Huacayñán was conceived within the ideology of mestizaje as an instrument of aesthetic cultural modernization and as a visual artistic showcase of the harmonious integration of ‘Ecuadorians.’ Despite, or even because of its governmental overdetermination, however, this article shows how Huacayñán instead materialized the exclusionary logic of the syncretic and biopolitical policies of the State, displaying dystopic visions of violence and exclusion, and of a fractured nation inhabited by monsters and resistant to mestizo-ization.