Soccer and the (Tri‐) Color of the Ecuadorian Nation: Visual and Ideological (Dis‐) Continuities of Black Otherness from MonoculturalMestizajeto Multiculturalism

Abstract

As evidenced by the series of commentaries that followed the good performance of the Ecuadorian soccer team at the 2006 Mundial, which I discuss in the last section of this essay, the place of blackness within/outside Ecuadorian national identity continues to be ambiguous despite the multicultural turn formally officialized with the adoption of the 1998 Constitution. Through the analysis of visual representations of Afro‐Ecuadorian men, I sketch the long history of black exclusion from the dominant Ecuadorian understanding of the nation during monocultural mestizaje, and the metamorphosis of this exclusion into multiculturalism. This provides a genealogy for today's spontaneous representations of Ecuadorian black athletes found on the internet and on the daily press. As indicated by the essay's title, I conclude that even though notable changes have occurred since the “multicultural turn,” there are also profound ideological continuities. I argue that in fact with multiculturalism, mestizaje—as an ideological technology of the state and as a project of the Ecuadorian elites—has not disappeared from the political landscape but instead continues to do its work both within and around multiculturalism. Thus, for Afro‐Ecuadorians, the passage of the official or national stance from “monocultural mestizaje” to “multiculturalism” has not been accompanied by the transformations that the change of vocabulary might suggest. Instead, it has reinscribed the prevalent racial order in a “new” narration of the nation.