“Raíces Americanas”: Indigenist Art, América, and Arguments for Ecuadorian Nationalism

Abstract

Drawing on Douglas Powell's assertion that “region making [is] a practice of cultural politics” (8), this essay traces the nationalist force of mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorian appeals to America as a strategic ethno-historic region. It suggests that such arguments bound national, regional, and transnational concerns together, using indigenous roots and cultural landscape as their anchors. Ecuadorian intellectuals who made nationalist arguments by building a larger, American moral geography drew on a racialized sense of history and landscape to re-imagine their relationship with their Spanish ex-colonizer and to distinguish an autochthonous American Ecuador from its diluted American neighbors. These arguments from America gave their small country greater cultural weight through regional identification. Tracing those tactical claims to America as they played out within Ecuador and across its regional commitments contributes to a broader understanding of the rhetorical force of place. The Ecuadorian example of regional appeals that amplify national stature demonstrates how place-based claims to identity can simultaneously ground and circulate arguments; it shows as well how the cultural politics of a particular landscape invoke and move within larger complexes of meaning and force.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Lauren Kroiz and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay and Jenny Rice for both her feedback on this essay and her leadership in putting the larger volume together. In Ecuador, the Biblioteca Aurelio Espinoza Polit, the Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión, the Fundación Posada de Kingman, and the Fondo Cultural at the Banco Central/Ministerio de Cultura all graciously provided access to their collections in order to make this scholarship possible. That research was financially supported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a P.E.O Scholar Award.

Notes

¹All translations of Spanish-language texts in this essay are my own.

²The copy of this article that I reference comes from a collection of clippings in the Galo Galecio file at the museum library of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito, Ecuador. The clipping includes only the article title and year. Contextual reading suggests that it was published in Mexico, probably Mexico City.

³The simple diacritical mark in América indicates an important cultural and political distinction between the Anglo [United States of] America and mestizo América Latina (or, in this case, hispanoamérica). Holding to the ethno-historic boundaries deployed by mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorians, “América” and “Américan” here refer to the areas of North, Central, and South America that were once part of the Spanish empire and that had a significant indigenous population. América crosses nation-state boundaries. Because of the subject matter of this essay, I will write mostly about Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru. Even so, portions of what is today the United States of America (e.g., portions of Texas, Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico) properly belong to both America and América.

⁴These narratives of racialized identity, if they mentioned the history of colonialism, did so only obliquely. In general, the vastly differing experiences of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Spaniards during (and after) the colonial period predictably fade from view in order to advance a story told for and by members of Spanish America's lighter-skinned middle and upper classes.

⁵“Telluric,” an uncommon English word meaning “of or from the earth,” shows up somewhat often (in its Spanish version, telúrico) in Ecuadorian writing from the mid-twentieth century. I use the term throughout this essay because its simultaneously grounded and spiritual invocation of the land closely matches the purposes pursued by Ecuadorian rhetors summoning América.

⁶Abya-Yala is the Kichwa term for the Americas and invokes the shared indigeneity of First Nations peoples across both continents in order to tie them more closely together. It is thus a broader term than América since its territory reaches all the way to the Arctic circle.