The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Abstract

Carlos de la Torre, a sociologist at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, and Steve Striffler, an anthropologist at the University of New Orleans, have assembled an impressively broad compilation of writings on Ecuador as part of Duke University Press’s Latin American Readers series. Typically editors assemble anthologies from previously published material. In this case, it appears that half of the items were written specifically for this volume, although many of these largely draw on the authors’ previous writings rather than new research. Unfortunately, relatively few of the selections are what historians typically would consider primary sources. While specialists will inevitably quibble with omissions and specific emphases in the volume, altogether it does successfully present an overview of Ecuador’s history, culture, and politics for the general reader or a student who is new to the field.The volume is broken into six sections, roughly organized along chronological and thematic lines. The first section on the colonial period features edited versions of previously published essays by such eminent ethnohistorians as Frank Salomon (on how the Cañaris in southern Ecuador acquired an Inca identity after earlier opposing Tawantinsuyu’s push northwards) and Karen Powers (on how the Duchisela family battled to establish themselves as the legitimate indigenous rulers of the central highland region of Riobamba). Sarah Chambers writes about how Simón Bolívar’s lover Manuela Sáenz shifted from an Ecuadorian identity to an American one and back again. Sáenz has received a growing amount of attention as an early feminist hero both in her native Quito and in Venezuela, and it is a treat for readers that newly translated letters from Sáenz form the bulk of Chambers’s chapter. A somewhat surprising omission is the priest Juan de Velasco, who controversially formulated an Ecuadorian national identity through the fictitious creation of a kingdom of Quito, the subject of an outstanding dissertation by Eileen Willingham.The second section, on the nineteenth century, opens with an edited selection of Andrés Guerrero’s classic essay on the construction of a ventriloquist image of indigenous peoples in liberal discourse. Edited selections from the work of leading scholars A. Kim Clark and Ronn Pineo are complemented by primary source pieces from Friedrich Hassaurek, Abraham Lincoln’s minister to Ecuador, and liberal leader Juan Montalvo. The third section, entitled “The Rise of the Popular,” features a letter and speech from perennial populist president José María Velasco Ibarra, as well as literary pieces from Jorge Icaza and Pablo Palacio, leading novelists from the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, this section excludes items on important developments in labor movements and political organizing, such as the anarchist-led general strike in November 1922 in Guayaquil and resulting police repression that led to the birth of Ecuador’s labor movement though a baptism of fire, and a May 1926 socialist assembly in Quito that created the country’s first leftist political party. In an essay on “The Origins of the Ecuadorian Left” in the subsequent section on “Global Currents,” political scientist Adrián Bonilla briefly mentions these events as background to an analysis of the fragmentation of the left in the 1960s, but given their historical significance both would be worthy of fuller treatment.The editors frame the fifth section, “Domination and Struggle,” as an example of how capitalism and democracy exist in tension with each other in Latin America. This section features a nice range of essays on social movements, including chapters by geographer Sarah A. Radcliffe on women’s movements, historian Pablo Ospina on environmentalism, and anthropologists Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Suzana Sawyer on Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous movements. The section opens with an interview that editor de la Torre conducted with contemporary indigenous leader Nina Pacari that offers interesting insights into issues of alliances with military and populist leaders and the emergence of the indigenous political party Pachakutik. Nevertheless, an overall disappointing shortcoming of the volume is that it does not include more such historic and contemporary subaltern voices. In the introductions to the book and to this section, the editors explain how indigenous peoples in Ecuador provide a model for social movement organizing, but in the various selected essays too much of this discussion is carried out through scholarly treatises rather than through the words of the protagonists themselves.The volume closes with a section on culture, including discussions of the election of Mónica Chalá as the first black Miss Ecuador and a fascinating essay by Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld on how Otavalo’s world-famous tourist market reveals deep underlying class divisions in indigenous society. María Fernanda Espinosa and Iván Oñate contribute several poems, and in an interesting departure for this type of volume Noemí Espinosa supplies several recipes for traditional Ecuadorian foods. As a whole, this volume is an impressively broad and useful contribution to the field of Ecuadorian studies.