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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 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.
Acknowledgements
The research for this work been made possible thanks to the support of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the University of Notre Dame Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA); Fundación Guayasamín (FG); Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión del Municipio del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito (CCBC); and the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Benjamín Carrión (CCE). For their assistance and generous sharing of information and documents, I am indebted to the following: Pablo Guayasamín Monteverde, Pablo Guayasamín Madriñán, and Alfredo Vera (FG); Alejandro Querejeta-Barceló; Luce Deperon Tcherniak q.e.p.d; Raúl Pacheco (CCBC); María Rosa Carrión Eguiguren (Pepé Carrión) and Alejandro Carrión. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their intelligent and generous critiques and commentary: Jens Andermann, Román de la Campa, Juan Carlos Grijalva, Yanna Hadatty Mora, Michael Handelsman, Manuel Gutiérrez, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Andrei Jorza, Lorraine Leu, Juliet Lynd, Luis A. Marentes, Mabel Moraña, Françoise Perus, José Quiroga, Ignacio Sánchez, Emmanuelle Sinardet Seewald, David M. Solodkow, Sebastian Thies, Sergio Villalobos and Valeria Wagner. This article incorporates research partially presented at Washington University in Saint Louis (March 28, 2013; proceedings edited by Moraña and Sánchez 2015), the University of Pittsburgh (April 11, 2013), the Universität Zürich, Switzerland (December 13, 2013), the Fundación Guayasamín, Quito Ecuador (June 4, 2015) and El Colegio de México (May 6, 2015).
Notes
1. Guayasamín traveled with Huacayñán to Venezuela where, under the patronage of Miguel Otero Silva, he sold over fifty paintings before the exposition opened at the Museo Nacional de Caobos in Caracas (Citation1953). Following his success in Venezuela, he held exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas of the Panamerican Union in Washington DC (today the Organization of American States) in 1955 and in the Duveen-Graham Gallery in New York in 1956. He went on to win the Grand Prize in painting at the Tercera Bienal Hispano-Americana de Arte in Barcelona in 1956 and the next year at the Bienal de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (Jáuregui and Fischer Citation2008: 17–38). Despite its original conception as a work of national public art, in 1953 Huacayñán was divided up and sold to several private collectors.
2. Between 1924 and 1927 Ecuador ‘had twenty-seven heads of State, four presidents in one month, six constitutions, and countless […] revolutions’ (De la Torre Citation2008: 35). For Carrión’s generation, Ecuador represented a problem; political instability and profound cultural differences constituted serious threats to the existence of the nation (Handelsman 2007: 21, 22). All translations are ours unless otherwise noted.
3. The rebellion of May 28, 1944 was a popular uprising that toppled President Carlos Arroyo del Río, ended the hegemony of plutocratic liberalism, and briefly brought José María Velasco Ibarra to the presidency. The Revolution allowed for constitutional change and, ultimately, the rise of developmentalist liberalism represented by the presidency of Galo Plaza Lasso.
4. This is a general characterization that does not take into account the richness and notorious diversity of the debates, opinions, and theories that circulated among the liberal elites of the time. As Mercedes Prieto rightly signals, in Ecuador ‘the liberalism of the first half of the twentieth century did not concoct a singular, centralized discourse for indigenous subjects; neither did it promote a singular strategy of integration’ (249). Not even the liberal indigenistas could agree upon basic questions like who are the indigenous? What are the politics of integration that the State ought to promote? To what degree can or should integration coexist with indigenous identities? Etc.
5. Biopolitics, as distinct from disciplinary control, is not wielded over individual bodies (anatomo-politics), but rather over the whole of the population; biopolitics is not concerned with people as individuals, but rather as a species. Although biopolitics does not eliminate disciplinary control, its techniques are located, Foucault says, at another level: biopolitics has a field of action associated with a ‘massification’ of social problems (rates of fertility, mortality, longevity, sickness, productivity, etc.); it is an intervention into ‘general phenomena’ (Citation2003: 239–61).
6. To be clear, the Instituto Indigenista Ecuatoriano did not put into place the policies it proposed (it was never officially a government entity), but it did formulate a disciplinarian and biopolitical discourse for the management of indigenous populations that has had repercussions in the politics of the Ecuadorian state through today.
7. As the exception and not the rule, a few reforms were proposed to address the economic exploitation of the Indian (Prieto 2004: 190).
8. ‘In July 1943 diverse political parties—including the partidos Conservador, Liberal Radical Independiente, Socialista, Vanguardia Socialista Ecuatoriana, Comunista, Frente Democrático Nacional and Unión Democrática Universitaria del Ecuador, all united to form the Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana (ADE). With the slogan ‘For the Democratic Restoration of National Unity,’ the ADE defined itself as an anti-fascist group and proposed a ‘true democracy’ based on free elections and the constitutional right to assembly and free association. They also expressed the desire to ‘incorporate the Indian and the peasant into national life’ (Becker Citation2007: 136).
9. I transcribe here the English translation of the 1946 Constitution, published in 1961 by the Pan American Union, General Secretariat of the Organization of American States. Note the awkward translation of ‘el indígena’ and ‘el montubio,’ sectors of the population (un)defined by an odd mix of race, class, and geography.
10. The literacy campaign of the UNP-LAE (1944–1961) was advanced ‘under the coordination of two non-governmental institutions: the National Union of Journalists (UNP) in the Andean region and the Literacy League for Teaching in the coast (LAE). According to official Figures 169,191 people were taught to read’ (UNESCO Citation2009: 28).
11. In an early defense of Vasconcelos, Carrión writes: ‘[I]n the tropical lands of the Columbian continent—where the Solar forge will meld the White, the Indian, the Yellow, and the Black […]—there will arise […] the definitive, integral fulfillment of the human species, the synthesized, universal, ‘cosmic’ race’ (Carrión Citation1928: 49). See also the essay ‘El mestizaje y lo mestizo’ (Carrión Citation2007b: 395–326). In the early 1930s, Carrión distances himself from Vasconcelos, who by then was assuming reactionary and antipopular positions following the failure of his presidential campaign and the widespread indifference toward the electoral fraud that snatched the presidency from his grasp (Marentes Citation2000: 13–15).
12. See the essays from the 1940s ‘Sobre nuestra obligación suprema: volver a tener patria’ in Cartas al Ecuador (Carrión Citation2007a: 56–59) and ‘Teoría y plan de la pequeña nación’ (Carrión Citation2005: 273–76). On Carrión’s thought, his relationship to Arielism and the thought of José Vasconcelos, his theory of the ‘tiny great nation,’ and his educational practice as Ecuadorian ‘Czar of Culture,’ see the indispensable work of Michael Handelsman (Citation1989: 22–24, 34–37, 62–65, 93–108; Citation2007: 16–20; and Citation2014a: 31–57).
13. The CCE was created by executive decree on August 9, 1944 (Carrión Citation2005: 264).
14. According to the contract of patronage (auspicio) for Huacayñán between Guayasamín and the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (1951), the exposition should have been ready within sixteen months from April 27, 1951; that is, the end of August 1952. At that point, Guayasamín held a preliminary partial show of Huacayñán in the Salón Nacional de Pintura V and finally, on November 21, he inaugurated the exposition in the Colonial Art Museum of the CCE.
15. In the ‘Presentación’ (introduction) to the catalogue for Huacayñán, Carrión repeatedly mentions the Mexican muralists. Since the mid 1930s he had been thinking about an Ecuadorian national art equivalent to Mexican muralism. In 1934, upon his return from Mexico, Carrión saw Eduardo Kingman (1913–1997) as this national artist and he commissioned him four enormous murals for his hacienda in the Valle de los Chillos (Querejeta-Barceló in Carrión Citation2007b: 26); however, in the following decade Guayasamín would displace Kingman as the ‘national painter.’
16. ‘I dedicate this work to BENJAMÍN CARRIÓN, great promoter of culture, a man of vision and faith in the creative abilities of my country’ (capitals in the original, n.p.). In a letter dated April 29, Citation1957, Guayasamín calls Carrión his ‘spiritual father.’ With time, the role of Carrión and the CCE in the completion of Huacayñán would diminish for Guayasamín. Decades later Guayasamín would even join forces with a new generation of artists and intellectuals to oust the long-time leader of Ecuadorian cultural politics. But the truth is the CCE financed at least 83 paintings and the mural, and the project was conceived under the syncretist influence of Carrión (Jáuregui Citation2014: 87–97).
17. According to Giorgio Agamben ‘It has often been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were thus able to write, “Sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing.” […] The particular “force” of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. We shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion’ (Citation1998: 18). Loosely following Agamben, with the term in(ex)clusion I am referring to various forms of inherently paradoxical economic, juridical and symbolic ‘inclusions’ that except and exclude those who are brought under State sovereignty and subjected to government intervention.
18. The Constitution of 1946 embraced a restricted notion of citizenship: ‘Every Ecuadorian, man or woman, over eighteen years of age, who knows how to read and write, is a citizen, and, in consequence […] may vote and be elected or appointed to public office’ (art. 17; Citation1961:3). Four years later, according to the Census of 1950, only 56.3% of the population was literate.
19. The Constitution of 1945 recognized ‘Quechua and other aboriginal languages as elements of national culture’ even as it established that ‘Spanish is the official language of the Republic’ (art. 5); it also determined that ‘The State and the Municipalities will take care of eliminating illiteracy […]. In the schools established in predominately Indian zones, Quechua or the respective aboriginal language will be used in addition to Spanish’ (art. 143). The Constitution of 1946, on the other hand, abandoned this Indigenismo in favor of declaring the unity ‘of the Ecuadorians associated under the dominion [imperio] of the same laws and customs’ (art. 1) and whose ‘official language […] is Spanish’ (art. 7) (1969: 1, 2).
20. I am indebted to my colleague Sebastian Thies for our productive discussion on the issue of the significance of muralismo in national imaginaries.
21. The ‘Presentación’ (1953) corresponds to the introduction to the catalogue (eight pages, unnumbered). Given the catalogue’s rarity we quote also the version of the introduction published in the volume San Miguel de Unamuno (1954).
22. Interview with Guayasamín about Huacayñán for Folha da Manha, January 1951 (in Ordoñez-Charpentier Citation2000: 70).
23. Beginning in the mid 1940s, the indigenous communities of Ecuador articulated proposals for social justice and projects for an alternative nation in opposition to the indigenists, hygienists, literacy campaigners, landowners and bosses, and the government itself. Among the most salient are the activism and initiatives of leaders such as Dolores Cacuango (1881–1971) and Tránsito Amaguaña (1909–2009). I am thankful to my colleague Lorraine Leu for her enlightening suggestion to distinguish between cuerpos agónicos and cuerpos antagónicos in Guayasamín’s work from this era.
24. Re-interpreting his own work years later, Guayasamín states: ‘Fruit of betrayal or of violence, the Mestizo has a very strange psychology. Men with a complex about their non-Indian, non-Spanish, non-Black blood. […]. Heirs and owners of usurped land, owners of the banks, of industries that manufacture junk, [they show] a tremendously marked cruelty toward the Indian. These are the men who are below the surface, hidden in the depths of the terrible dictatorships, civil as well as military, that have existed and that exist in our Latin America’ (Citation1988: 40).
25. ‘The three great human lineages of Ecuador […] the Mestizo, the Indian, the Black Man, have been interpreted in this great visual poem [poema plástico]; musical thoughts and words come to mind: symphony, orchestration, counterpoint, rhythm’ (Carrión, Citation1953: 6 s.n. / 1954: 167).
26. Slavoj Žižek observes that the ‘truth’ of ideological fantasy is revealed and recognizable in its material exteriority. Materiality declares what cannot be made discursively explicit (Citation2008a: 1–4).
27. The Capilla del Hombre (Chapel of Man), the monumental cultural center envisioned by Guayasamín himself in the mid-seventies, today hosts an enormous collection of his murals, paintings and sculptures.
28. The piece is not supposed to be fixed to a wall permanently. Its oxymoronic title makes this point explicit: ‘Ecuador “Mural de movimiento”’ (`Ecuador “Moving Mural”’).
29. For more on these political movements, see Andolina (Citation2003) and Jameson (Citation2010).
30. I am referring to ‘Art in Motion: Ecuador Unframed,’ an interactive exhibit of the mural Ecuador based on the research outlined in this article. Touring several US locations through 2014–2015, the exhibit was the result of a collaborative endeavor between the Fundación Guayasamín and several colleagues from different disciplines: Gilberto Cárdenas (Sociology), Andrei Jorza (Mathematics), Gergely Varga (Computer Programming), Santiago Quintero, Laura Fernández, Paola Uparela (Cultual Studies), Tatiana Botero, Rachel Parroquín, Elena Mangione-Lora, and Andrea Topash-Ríos (Spanish). The interactive exhibit uses touch-screen technology to allow viewers to manipulate a virtual image of the mural, unleashing its antagonistic potential (Agamben Citation1999: 1–7, 34).
31. The awkward English title, The Way of Tears, manages to avoid the possible translation of camino as ‘Path’ or ‘Trail of Tears,’ although I am unaware of any deliberate attempt to do so.
32. In addition to the title Huacayñán, the catalogue contains one other word in Quechua: churana (aljaba or carcaj; a quiver of arrows). Churana is the title of the second painting in series 8 of the Indian Theme, and it should be noted that the word has been listed in the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language since 1927, thus indicating its regional use in Spanish.