Huasipungo is a realist depiction of the social, political, religious and economic situation of the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian highlands during the first half of the twentieth century. Its title alludes precisely to the power structure it criticises as a mode of oppression:
huasipungo is a Kichwa word to describe a small piece of land usually conceded by a landowner to an indigenous family. Behind this handover there was an exploitative modality of labour named
concertaje, in which indigenous people acquired a large debt in exchange for the piece of land they were given to inhabit and farm. To pay the debt, the indigenous workers offered their unrestricted labour to the landowner. The characteristics of this type of contract acted in a harmful manner against indigenous populations: there were no working schedules, no certainty about when the contract was going to end and even after the death of the debt holder their offspring had to continue paying the debt to the landowner, extending the contract through several generations.
1 Mercedes Prieto, Liberalismo y temor: imaginando los sujetos indígenas en el Ecuador postcolonial, 1895–1950 (Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 2004), p. 48. It is in this social context that the story of Huasipungo takes place. The plot is focused on the indigenous workers of Cuchitambo, a large latifundium in the Ecuadorian highlands, owned by Alfonso Pereira, a member of the white elite of Quito. The story starts when, suffocated by debts and with the productivity of his lands in decay, Don Alfonso ventures into a new economic project: timber production, supported by the external funding of an American investor. To complete the preparations for this enterprise, Don Alfonso and his family move to Chuchitambo, where he forces the indigenous families living on his property (the huasipungeros) to work on the construction of a road for cars and other vehicles needed for the business. This project advances the plot of the novel, for the swampy terrains of the region are nearly impenetrable and the indigenous workers work in inhuman conditions to complete the roadway. The indigenous experience is narrated through the protagonist of the story, Andrés Chiliquinga, who endures and encompasses the suffering of all his people: he is often characterised as a beast of burden, cripples himself on the construction site, sees his wife die from eating rotten meat in order to avoid starvation and, finally, when the risk of losing his small land arises, leads a violent rebellion against the white masters.
One of the most commented on aspects of the novel lies in the descriptions of the indigenous characters and their living conditions at the command of the latifundistas. The narration introduces the indigenous subjects by presenting them as less than humans, occupying a space at the same level of beasts of burden in the eyes of the landowners. The first appearance of an indigenous character takes place when the Pereira family is on their way to Cuchitambo, going through the Andean plain by mule. When the path becomes too steep and too swampy for the animals to continue calmly, Don Alfonso orders three of his indigenous workers to continue the job by carrying him and his family on their backs:
Después de limpiarse en el revés de la manga de la cotona el rostro escarchado por el sudor y por la garúa, después de arrollarse los anchos calzones de liencillo hasta las ingles, después de sacarse el poncho y doblarlo en doblez de pañuelo de apache, los indios nombrados por el amo presentaron humildemente sus espaldas para que los miembros de la familia Pereira pasen de las bestias a ellos.
2 Jorge Icaza, Huasipungo (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1934; repr. Barcelona: Plaza & Janes, 1982), p. 14.The narration stresses the animalisation of the indigenous figure by describing Don Alfonso riding on the back of Andrés Chiliquinga, holding onto him by pulling his hair and ripping his flesh open with the spurs of his cowboy boots. This is but the first episode of abuse in a novel that continuously depicts the suffering of indigenous people, exploited and animalised by their masters. Deborah Foote argues that Icaza animalises the characters of the novel to introduce the reader to various economic, political, and social conditions that plagued the Ecuadorian indigenous populations.
3 Deborah Foote, ‘Survival of the Fittest: Animal Imagery in Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo and the Reader’s Perception of the Indian’, in Beyond Indigenous Voice, ed. by Mary H. Preuss (Lancaster: Labyrinthos, 1996), pp. 139–142. In that sense, the novel directly alludes to the Ecuadorian reality of the early twentieth century when the structure of
concertaje was in place. Miguel Donoso Pareja notes that the reproduction of social reality in
Huasipungo – and in most of the literature produced by the
Generación del 30 – is a tendency marked by the influence of the Russian revolution and the aesthetic proposals of its protagonists.
4 Miguel Donoso Pareja, Nuevo realismo ecuatoriano. Los grandes de la década del 30 (Quito: Eskeletra, 2016), p. 235. Donoso Pareja claims that communism and its long-reaching political influence impacted Ecuadorian literary production through the social field, as this is also the time when Ecuador’s first socialist parties began to appear and writers were militants who thought that literary creation must serve political goals. Exposing the conflicted relationship between white authority and indigenous servitude and stressing the necessity for the latter to be liberated was one of the ways in which literature performed that role.
Building on the premise that the writers of the
Generación del 30 followed the notion that ‘no hay historia de la literatura sino historia en la literatura’, that is, that literature is there to reflect the history of the time and place it is born into, Donoso Pareja argues that the reproduction of social reality in their work also has a special connection with European naturalism, or the idea that literature must be constructed upon ‘la observación más cruda del presente’.
5 Donoso Pareja, p. 237. In the 1930s, observing the present in Ecuador meant observing heavily politicised developments such as ‘las luchas liberales, las primeras organizaciones de trabajadores, la confrontación de clases’.
6 Donoso Pareja, p. 236. In terms of aesthetics, this mode of production resulted in a brutal portrayal of the lowest classes of society and has been categorised as social realism for the attention it placed on the social conditions of the poor and, in Icaza’s specific case,
indigenismo, for its focus on the indigenous experience among them.
For Icaza, placing the focus on indigeneity means not only exploring the ways in which the white masters exploited indigenous workers, but also presenting the brutality of their own lives. The harshness of Huasipungo’s depictions extends to the portrayal of the conditions in which the indigenous characters conduct their lives, even when they are not supervised by their foremen or other outsiders. Violence against their own surfaces naturally in the novel’s indigenous characters. This is especially noticeable when a group of men beat to death a member of the community for defying taita Dios, after he fails to gather enough money to organise a mass in honour of the Virgin Mary and choses to ignore the possible consequences of his ‘stinginess’ during a discussion with the parish priest. Shortly after this episode, a river flood causes great damage to the houses, livestock, and crops of the indigenous people. They blame the man who failed to organise the mass for bringing God’s rage upon them:
Por él … porque es miserable con Mama Virgen … Taita cura dijo […]
Sintiéndose perdido, Gualacoto cayó de rodillas implorando perdón, misericordia. Nadie escuchó las razones y los ruegos de aquel ser maldito; había de por medio una voz interior que enloquecía, que enajenaba hasta el crimen a los runas del coro: «Malditos por él. ¡Miserable con Mama Virgen! El castigo … La creciente … La muerte …» Y fue así como en el tumulto de una crueldad sin nombre los ruegos de la víctima – Gualacoto tendido en el suelo – se transformaron en quejas y las quejas se transformaron a la vez en ronquidos dolorosos, agónicos.
– Tuma, caraju.
– Tuma, miserable.
– Tuma, condenadu.
Y cuando se cansaron de castigar, el indio Taco anunció ante la inmobilidad del caído:
– Ya creu que está jodidu.
– Jodidu?
– Arí, pes.
Fue a la vista de la sangre que manchaba la tierra, el poncho, la cara de la víctima y el garrote con el cual uno de ellos operó sin piedad, que los amigos y verdugos de Gualacoto huyeron desaforadamente.
7 Icaza, p. 121.The violence of the scene is emphasised by the narrator’s voice judging the actions of the indigenous characters. The fact that the narration stresses that it was Gualacoto’s friends who acted ‘without mercy’ as his executioners builds on Icaza’s intention to construct indigenous life as barbaric and lawless. And although it could be argued that brutality is motivated by an agent external to indigeneity – the parish priest, who exploits the indigenous’ fear of God to benefit from them – a cold-blooded murder is still committed against a member of their own community. The absence of self-reflectivity about the crime on the part of the murderers, their non-repentance and impunity add to Jean Franco’s argument that in Icaza’s fiction ‘not only do the Indians live in animal conditions – they behave like animals’.
8 Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (London: Pall Mall Press, 1967), p. 167. Franco’s view is problematic because, more than behaving like animals, the indigenous characters of the novel are always made to operate within the context of an exploitative structure that animalises them. It is in this context where the animal-like indigenous behaviour noted by Franco is synonymous with violence against their own. The wording of the following scene, where the protagonist Andrés Chiliquinga arrives at his hut after a day of work to find that his wife Cunshi is not inside waiting for him, as he had expected, is illustrative:
—¡Mentirosa!
De un salto felino él se apoderó de la longa por los cabellos. Ella soltó la leña que había recogido y se acurrucó bajo unos cabuyos como gallina que espera al gallo […]
Después de sacudirla y estropearla, Andrés Chiliquinga, respirando con fatiga de poseso, arrastró a su víctima hasta el interior de la choza. Y tirados en el suelo de tierra apisonada, ella, suave y temblorosa por los últimos golpes – cuerpo que se queja y que palpita levemente de enternecido resentimiento –, él, embrujado de cólera y de machismo – músculos en potencia, ronquido de criminales ansias –, se unieron, creando en su fugaz placer contornos de voluptuosidad que lindaba con las crispadas formas de la venganza, de la desesperación, de la agonía […]
En nudo de ternura salvaje rodaron hasta cerca del fogón […] se durmieron al abrigo de sus propios cuerpos, del poncho empapado en páramo, de la furia de los piojos.
9 Icaza, p. 24.The animalisation of the indigenous subject lies not only in the violence of the scene itself, but is also palpable in the words used by the narrator to describe the action. Andrés jumps like a ‘felino’ to reach his wife-prey, while Cunshi passively braces for the attack ‘como gallina que espera al gallo’ and endures the beating with the soft tremors of a wounded bird. After the fight, their bodies surrender together ‘en un nudo de ternura salvaje’ to have sex, and finally they fall asleep sheltered by warmth of their bodies, a poncho soaked by the drizzle and ‘la furia de los piojos’. These descriptions could well be about a brawl between two lice-infected animals, but it is important to remember that Andrés – the aggressor in this scene – is also the protagonist and hero of the story, and the narrator is arguably Icaza himself, who lived in a hacienda serviced by indigenous labour during his childhood. Franco claims that by turning his characters into animals, making them not just live in animal conditions but also behave like animals, Icaza dehumanises them. In her view, dehumanisation works against the intentions of the novel, robbing it of its value as an account of exploitation: it prevents the reader from developing any desire to sympathise with the indigenous characters or from seeing the central situation of their exploitation without emotional involvement.
10 Franco, p. 167. She implies that these are the only two routes for the novel to effectively denounce indigenous suffering, either by creating a sympathetic bond between the (presumably non-indigenous) reader and the indigenous protagonists, in order to make the reader care about the exploited people; or by allowing this type of reader to see the situation from a neutral perspective without emotions involved, so they can focus on the problem – which is real – and not on the fictitious characters.
However difficult it might be for a contemporary reader to understand character motivation in scenes like the fight between Cunshi and Andrés, the reception of
Huasipungo has proven that Franco’s interpretation falls short and underestimates the power of the novel to transcend its time. The novel has been – and still is – largely considered an account, with historical resonances, of the exploitation of indigenous people, despite Franco’s thesis that its characters are distanced from any ‘literate reader’.
11 Franco, p. 167. In fact, in the view of the Ecuadorian writer and critic Jorge Enrique Adoum, the dehumanisation of its characters is part of the denunciative strategy of the novel:
La condición de los personajes constituye, en sí misma, parte de la denuncia: el sistema que en cada página de Huasipungo lleva a los protagonistas indígenas a situaciones extremas de la resistencia humana, no es algo abstracto: la hediondez y los piojos, la podredumbre y los excrementos, la pobreza del lenguaje […] son resultado y consecuencia de una opresión u de una explotación que se escapan a toda noción de lo que pueden ser las relaciones humanas.
12 Jorge Enrique Adoum, Narradores ecuatorianos del 30 (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), p. XLVIII.Bestialising the indigenous bodies is one of the ways in which Icaza exposes the oppressive nature of a system that does not treat them nearly as equals to
blancos or
mestizos. Nonetheless, it must be noted that doing so is not a pure reproduction of reality, as its categorisation of ‘realismo social’ might prompt us to believe. It also implies a selection of which aspects of reality are to be narrated, and from what perspective. It is true that
Huasipungo’s story introduces its readers to real aspects of the Ecuadorian social context of the early twentieth century, such as the indigenous slave-like conditions under the terms of
concertaje, but it is also true that it does not transparently reflects the indigenous experience of the time. What the story puts forward is carefully selected to accomplish a political purpose. Miguel Donoso Pareja recounts that such a purpose is explained by José de la Cuadra, another prominent member of the
Generación del 30, when he says that the literature they made is ‘capitalmente veraz’ but its veracity is tendentious, because ‘no se basta con presentar la realidad: la escoge, la traduce y la empuja a servir propósitos, en cuanto busca con eso delatar las injusticias de la organización que rige nuestra vida social’.
13 Miguel Donoso Pareja, ‘De la Cuadra: obras completas, realismo mágico y una discutible reivindicación’, Kipus, 16 (2003), pp. 89–102 (p. 91). As it was the case for most of the narrative of the 1930s in Ecuador, by denouncing the ‘injustices’ of the organisation of social life,
Huasipungo served a purpose: it called for a change in indigenous people’s position in society.
That goal, of course, is closely related to the wider notion of
indigenismo, an ideology with a long tradition in Latin American history, especially prominent in countries with large indigenous populations, including Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean countries.
Indigenismo’s many iterations were focused on tackling and solving the ‘Indian problem’ by transforming indigenous peoples into useful modern citizens. Social sciences have long reflected upon the politics behind this project, pointing out its many problematic implications. According to Rachel Sieder, the main task of
indigenismo was to facilitate the emergence of a modern nation in which indigenous labourers would find their logical place as workers, shoulder to shoulder with non-indigenous workers.
14 Rachel Sieder, Multiculturalism in Latin America. Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 29. That goal was often transformed into governmental programs that pushed for the erasing of ethnic differences: to become standardised workers for the modern nation, indigenous men and women must abandon those qualities that distinguished them as indigenous people before others. In Ecuadorian politics, proof of such projects can be found in one of the declarations issued by the Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana, a coalition of the political parties that formed a government in 1944. Referring to the indigenous populations of the country, as cited by Marc Becker, their propaganda claimed:
Ellos ‘necesitan vivir como hombres, en casas y no en chozas; dormir en camas; comer alimentos de verdad; usar herramientas que pueden proporcionar el adelanto técnico de nuestro siglo; beneficiarse de las ventajas de la medicina y de la higiene; vestirse como hombres de nuestro tiempo y de nuestra cultura’; necesitarían ayuda ‘para extirpar definitivamente lo negativo que en lo fisiológico, espiritual, social, económico y político han sedimentado, en el transcurso de siglos de opresión, en sus personalidades’.
15 Marc Becker, ‘Comunistas, indigenistas e indígenas en la formación de la Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios y el Instituto Indigenista Ecuatoriano’, Íconos, 27 (2007), pp. 135–144 (p. 137).Similar to Icaza’s
Huasipungo, this excerpt also animalises indigenous people, who ‘need to live like men’ as if they were not already human. In this light,
indigenismo is seen as a homogenising project, for at the heart of its proposal lay the idea that the only way indigenous peoples could rise above their impoverished and exploited status was by suppressing their racial and ethnic identities. As such,
indigenismo was not an indigenous movement, but primarily an external movement focused
on indigeneity.
16 The externality of indigenismo to the indigenous people is exemplified by the Instituto Indigenista Ecuatoriano, an institution created in the 1940s to promote the rights of the indigenous populations. Despite its mission, the institute was formed exclusively by white and mestizo men belonging to the middle and upper classes of Ecuadorian society. Many scholars have noted that it carried a paternalistic approach that marginalised the very peoples it purported to aid. José Carlos Mariátegui, Ángel Rama and Antonio Cornejo Polar are among the many Latin American critics who, in the twentieth century, highlighted the outsider condition of
indigenista creation. While Mariátegui famously claimed that
indigenismo was the work of
mestizos, Rama and Cornejo Polar agreed that it was ‘a movement in which certain middle sectors assume the interests of the Indian peasantry’.
17 Antonio Cornejo Polar, ‘Indigenismo and Heterogeneous Literatures: Their Duo Socio-cultural Logic’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 7.1 (1998), pp. 15–27 (p. 25). This is precisely the case in Ecuador, as Becker notes:
Icaza’s work represents the entire
indigenista literary genre in that he was an elite from Quito who showed interest in the plight and suffering of the rural Indigenous masses. He first came in contact with Indigenous peoples when, as a boy, after the fall of a Liberal government in 1912, his family was forced to flee from Quito. They retreated to a family hacienda where he viewed first-hand the misery in which Indians lived […] he took a paternalistic attitude toward the Indians and portrayed them largely as a passive population which was acted upon by outside forces.
18 Marc Becker, ‘Indigenismo and Indian Movements in Twentieth-Century Ecuador’, LASA95 Papers Pilot Project, (1995) <http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/lasa95/becker.html> [accessed 11 December 2017].The outside forces ‘acting upon’ the indigenous populations came from several fields and disciplines. The early twentieth century witnessed not only an array of governmental policies, but also an explosion of literary, critical, and visual work centred on the so-called
indio latinoamericano. Jorge Coronado argues that this broad presence stemmed from the wide applicability and appeal of
indigenismo’s central and self-declared objective of vindicating the indigenous people of the continent, but at the same time it is intimately related to modernity.
19 Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society and Modernity (Pittsburgh PN: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 5. The technical and economic modernisation of Latin American nations in the late nineteenth century, and the subsequent emergence of a cultural modernity, had a great impact in the Andean indigenous world, working as agents of disruption that changed the frameworks under which indigenous populations understood themselves, and were understood by others.
It is through this process of disruption, amidst a world changed by the manifold cultural and economic impacts of modernisation, that
indigenismo connects to literature. Cornejo Polar argues that, for the indigenous world to become the source of a work of fiction, the indigenous world must first experience the irruption of an external element that often expresses ‘ciertas dimensiones de la modernidad, y a partir de ello produce algún tipo de conmoción que dramatiza (y de nuevo, hace novelable) la vida indígena’.
20 Antonio Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire: ensayos sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas (Lima: CELACP, 2003), p. 180. Cornejo Polar’s comment functions in two correlated manners when applied to Icaza’s
Huasipungo. Firstly, it relates to the story itself, for what sets in motion the plot is the proposal Don Alfonso receives from Mr Chapy, an American investor who is keen to start a timber production enterprise in the Andes, where he has also ‘smelled’ the possibility of finding oil. It is to get the funding from Mr Chapy that Don Alfonso starts the construction of the roadway that will consequently lead to most of the suffering of the indigenous characters. And ultimately, it is to fulfil Mr Chapy’s final request that Don Alfonso orders the eviction of the indigenous peoples from their lands, an action that sparks the rebellion with which the novel ends. These plot devices – the presence of an American investor as well as the construction of a roadway – are all related to modernity, the agent of disruption that arrives to make the indigenous world ‘novelable’.
It is important to note, however, that modernity comes to the novel from the real world. The second manner in which Cornejo Polar’s argument relates to
Huasipungo is that, just as in the novel, Icaza’s context was also disrupted by modernisation. It is in an Ecuador shaken by liberal ideas that
indigenismo arose. Following the 1895 Liberal Revolution, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, liberalism sought to modernise the productive structures of the country and its integration into international markets.
21 Juan Paz y Miño describes the Liberal Revolution as a conflict between liberals, who promoted modernisation and capitalism, and conservatives ‘que permanecían arraigados al tradicionalismo, aliados con la Iglesia Católica y protectores de régimen oligárquico-terrateniente’. Paz y Miño argues that even though the liberals successfully modernised several structures in the country – separating the Church from the State, implementing civil rights and building first Ecuador’s railway – they failed to get rid of the ‘sistema oligárquico terrateniente’. Even after the presidency of the most notable liberal leader, Eloy Alfaro, the highlands remained largely dominated by quasi-feudal landowners. See Juan Paz y Miño, ‘La Revolución Liberal ecuatoriana’, El Telégrafo, 2 June 2014 <https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas/15/la-revolucion-liberal-ecuatoriana> [accessed 2 March 2022]. As such, liberalism and modernisation go hand-in-hand in Ecuadorian history.
Huasipungo’s first publication coincides with a hectic period in which the liberals struggled with a traditional sector whose economic power was based on methods inherited from the colonial system, that is, agrarian structures and latifundia ownerships. The Ecuadorian sociologist Agustín Cueva notes that, after the assassination of the liberal leader Eloy Alfaro in 1912 by a conservative sector that tried to regain the diminished privileges of traditional groups from the highlands and the Church, what followed was a time marked by a crisis of hegemony:
Entre 1920 y 1940 desfilan por el Palacio Presidencial de Quito alrededor de veinte mandatarios; el 15 de noviembre de 1922 hay una insurrección popular en Guayaquil que termina con una espantosa masacre de artesanos y obreros; sólo en el año de 1923 se producen y son brutalmente reprimidos los levantamientos campesinos de Leyto, Simincay, Pichibuela y Urcuquí; en 1925 triunfa la revolución pequeñoburguesa ‘juliana’, que intenta modernizar el país; en 1932, la reacción conservadora desencadena la guerra civil ‘de los cuatro días’.
22 Agustín Cueva, ‘En pos de la historicidad perdida. Contribución al debate sobre la literatura indigenista del Ecuador’, in Entre la ira y la esperanza y otros ensayos de crítica latinoamericana, ed. by Alejandro Moreano (Bogotá: CLACSO, 2008), pp. 153–176 (p. 160). The struggle between liberals and conservatives had a prominent focus on the condition of the indigenous populations, as the conservatives intended to maintain the productivity of their lands by working them under the vestiges of a feudal system in which indigenous near-slave labour was implemented for farming large portions of land. That is to say, the conservatives were dependent on employing a cheap workforce they could exploit freely. On the other hand, the liberals’ plans for the indigenous labour force were more in line with the ideals behind
indigenismo. The modernisation of the productive structures of the country intended by liberalism needed the integration of the working capabilities of indigenous people into the state machinery, in order to increase production and facilitate the entry of the country into international markets.
23 Understanding the indigenous workers simply as ‘obreros’ allowed their labour force to be considered to work in various enterprises, like road development and other types of constructions, vitally needed to modernise the nation. See María A. Zambrano, ‘Monstruos en la hacienda: el concertaje como narración de la nación’, Temas, 65 (2011), pp. 30–37 (p. 31). That is to say, they wanted indigenous workers to become modern wage earners, freed from the latifundia. Mercedes Prieto writes that Eloy Alfaro, who would serve as president twice between 1895 and 1911, is remembered by an indigenous leader as ‘un runa que intentó que todas las personas trabajaran como iguales’.
24 Prieto, p. 42. To achieve such goal, the majority of indigenous people needed to be liberated from their ‘owners’, and as such the contractual modality of
concertaje needed to be eliminated. Prieto argues that the liberation of the
indios conciertos – the way indigenous workers under
concertaje were referred to – was a key point in the debate regarding the modernisation of the nation in the early twentieth century. The word
concertaje was then used by the liberals as a metaphor to describe the miseries and weaknesses of the nation.
25 Prieto, p. 70. Huasipungo is shaped by this context. The denunciative nature of the depiction of indigenous suffering is intended to condemn the injustices of the organisation of social life, and hence attempts to provoke a change in the position of indigenous people in society, a goal in line with liberal proposals. Likewise, the novel also builds on the incompatibility of modernising enterprises with feudal structures, for its ending makes it clear that the American-funded lumber business cannot function under the semi-feudal administrative structure of Cuchitambo, as the indigenous presence in the hacienda prevents the project from moving forward. The final phase of the project includes expelling the indigenous inhabitants of the farm from their huasipungos, a command they resist by rebelling against their masters, killing many of their foremen and finally getting killed themselves in a confrontation with national military forces, put in place to protect Don Alfonso’s land:
Las balas de los fusiles y las balas de las ametralladoras silenciaron en parte los gritos de la indiada rebelde. Patrullas de soldados, arrastrándose al amparo de los recodos, de las zanjas, de los barrancos, dieron caza a los indios, a las indias y a los muchachos, que con desesperación de ratas asustadas se ocultaban y arrastraban por todos los refugios: las cuevas, los totorales de los pantanos, el follaje de los chaparros, las abras de las rocas, la profundidad de las quebradas.
26 Icaza, p. 178. Once again, the narration turns to the animalisation of the indigenous subject: Chiliquinga and his people try to escape like frightened rats and hide in caves and under plants like animals running from a hunter. The soldiers are precisely those hunters, killing their prey ‘con el mismo gesto de asco y repugnancia, con el mismo impudor y precipitación con el cual hubieran aplastado bichos venenosos’.
27 Icaza, p. 179. By employing such comparisons, Icaza insists that the place of indigenous subjectivity must be rethought before modernisation can be achieved. Their near-to-slavery animalised condition under the terms of
concertaje and the oppressive structure of the haciendas – just as the liberals insisted – represents a point of stagnation to be overcome for the sake of the nation, as it is not compatible with modern productive structures fit for international markets. Conflict will arise if modernising enterprises are attempted under residual colonial conditions. Hence, all the vestiges of the colonial system must be eliminated for a modern nation to emerge.
But the ending of the story does more than only claim that
concertaje is not compatible with a national structure that aims to modernise. The scene of the fight reveals that
Huasipungo is not only shaped by its context, but that it also takes an active part in the shaping of such context. By describing the country’s inner reality with the aesthetics of social realism, the novel supplies elements for the articulation of an ‘Ecuadorian essence’, supporting a discourse of uniqueness and identity that contributes to the construction of the modern nation liberalism sought to build. A key element for liberal politics in the early twentieth century, Prieto explains, was building a unified symbol of Ecuadorian nationhood.
28 Prieto, p. 41. In a speech published in
Revista Iberoamericana in 1966, Icaza himself declares that – alongside the writings of his fellow generational writers – his literary production is demonstrative of an ‘authentic’ national character:
Era el carácter de una literatura nacional que se presentaba por primera vez sin complejos por el mundo […] se trata de una literatura que refleja las vivencias del ser auténtico, del ser que, en cualquier latitud cultural, tiene sus raíces propias – étnicas, psicológicas, históricas. Es algo que está en la sangre de la tierra, en los nervios de los personajes, en la esencia general del fondo y de la forma. Es algo que en las obras de los relatistas de la generación del año treinta, unificó a todo y a todos, por encima y por debajo de las divisiones al parecer insalvables, anunciando que había aparecido un espíritu propio en la expresión unificada de la literatura […] Fue la literatura – especialmente el relato en lo que se refiere a novela y a cuento – la que, adelantándose a la sociología, a la filosofía, al ensayo, advirtió con claridad meridiana […] la posibilidad y la existencia de un contorno y de un espíritu definitivos. En esas obras […] el contenido emocional era más trascendente y sincero que cualquier experiencia estética llegada de Occidente. Era más elemental, más nuestro.
29 Jorge Icaza, ‘Relato, espíritu unificador en la generación del año 30’, Revista Iberoamericana, 32.62 (1966), pp. 211–216 (p. 213).When Icaza mentions the apparition of a ‘definitive spirit’, or a type of literary creation that is more ‘national’ and hence more ‘ours’ than anything arrived from Europe, he builds on the history of
criollismo. Raquel Rivas defines
criollismo as a ‘consciousness’ awoken by Latin American politicians and intellectuals from the former colonies that, during and after the fights for independence, defined them by their link with the land where they were born and inhabited, in opposition to the European
peninsulares representatives of external rule.
30 Raquel Rivas, ‘Del criollismo al regionalismo: enunciación y representación en el siglo XIX venezolano’, Latin American Research Review, 37.3 (2002), pp. 101–128 (p. 102). Rivas argues that discourses of
criollismo invested themselves with a ‘carácter nativo’ through an appropriation of indigenous elements to legitimise them as truly national, although these elements were mostly taken out of their popular and cultural contexts. The logics behind
criollismo can be found in many of the works of Latin American writers of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, who built on discourses of national authenticity and political futures to create identitarian narratives for the young and yet politically unstable new nations.
31 One well-known example is Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara (1929), but similar novels can be found throughout the continent. Although there is more to it, as I will argue later on, an exaltation of national authenticity that feeds from the history of
criollismo is aesthetically and politically manifested in
Huasipungo.Aesthetically, it can be found in the mapping of an orality that attempts to be representative of the indigenous spoken world. The fact that indigenous characters of the novel say ‘tuma’ instead of ‘toma’ or ‘caraju’ for ‘carajo’ means that Icaza is intentionally trying to voice indigenous speech
. Huasipungo uses this linguistically imperfect orality aiming to project authenticity for his characters. It is an operation similar to that described by Julio Ramos in Argentina’s national ‘novel’, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s
Facundo (1845). Ramos argues that, for Sarmiento, ‘escribir es transcribir la palabra (oral) del otro, cuya exclusión del saber (escrito) había generado la discontinuidad y la contingencia del presente’.
32 Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2003), p. 43. The author of
Facundo thought that to achieve modernisation it was necessary to ‘revelar las costumbres nacionales’.
33 Ramos, p. 43. Similarly, although almost an entire century after the publication of Sarmiento’s text, Icaza understood that to move Ecuador into a modernised future, it was necessary to represent a uniqueness that would root Ecuadorians in Ecuador. To do so, he sought to portray indigenous orality as a nationally authentic form of using a foreign language inherited from the colony.
34 The attempt to capture the orality of indigenous populations in written form has a long and manifold tradition in Latin America, one that goes back to colonial times and has been manifested both in literary and anthropological discourse. See Amy Nauss Millay, Voices from the Fuente Viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative (Lewisburg PN: Bucknell University Press, 2005), p. 11. In doing so, Alejando Moreano argues, Icaza contributed to the creation of a national-popular language for Ecuadorian literature, casting a message of national identity opposed to European forms of expression.
35 Alejandro Moreano, ‘El escritor, la sociedad, el poder’, in La literatura ecuatoriana en los últimos 30 años 1950–1980, ed. by Hernán Rodríguez Castelo and others (Quito: El Conejo, 1983), p. 105. Moreano’s argument is that before the 1930s, literary production in Ecuador was not the result of local social creativity, but a mere expression of a type of colonial domination that tried to restrain written discourse to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. Icaza and his generation, however, challenged the frameworks in which European Spanish is inscribed in Ecuador and, by doing so, they attempted to create a national sphere for expression.
Politically, the ‘definitive national spirit’ Icaza aspired to create in Huasipungo can be found through a rejection of the structural colonial vestiges thought to be causing the stagnation of the nation. But also, it is manifest in a profound love for the land, that is, for the national soil or ‘la sangre de la tierra’ to use Icaza’s own illustrative words. Love for the land and rejection of residual colonial structures come together in the indigenous characters of Huasipungo: after stoically enduring years of abuse, what triggers their rebellion is the risk of losing their huasipungos. By defending their land against representatives of residual colonial rules, they become paradoxical entities in the story: they are degraded by being subjected to structures that dehumanise them, but at the same time they are represented as an idealised picture of national authenticity for standing up against injustice and defending territorial boundaries. Icaza’s portrayal of indigenous people has a double nature, for on the one hand he presents them as the animalised victims of social exploitation, as we have already discussed, but on the other he also uses them to depict the foundations of an allegedly true national subject.
Huasipungo operates through a selective characterisation of the indigenous subject, one that like most of the
indigenista creation is politically constructed from the outside and expected to function as a myth of national-collective identification to lay the basis for Ecuadorian national identity. It is a myth, I argue, in the sense of Roland Barthes’ definition of the myth as type of speech that, while politically constructed, is presented as a natural set of values. Under these terms, myths are defined by their intentions of presenting discourses with ‘a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact’.
36 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957; repr. New York: The Noonday Press, 1991), p. 143. Icaza’s discourse in
Huasipungo – his portrayal of indigeneity as the foundation of a truly national subject – is aligned with liberal politics and, as such, it intends to present a politically biased understanding of Ecuadorian national identity as an unquestionable reality.
37 Even though Icaza may have endorsed the mestizo as the national figure that embodies the nation in his later work, most notably in El chulla Romero y Flores (1958), Huasipungo is the novel that has remained fixed in Ecuador’s national canon and has come to embody ‘authentic’ Ecuadorian writing through its non-indigenous portrayal of indigeneity. I therefore disagree with the view that Ecuadorian
indigenistas did not ‘recognise indigenous cultures as valuable and worthy of protection’, as argued by Becker in his review of
indigenismo in Ecuador.
38 Marc Becker, ‘The Limits of Indigenismo in Ecuador’, Latin American Perspectives, 39.5 (2012), pp. 45–62 (p. 46). Such an assertion is based on a widespread critique that considered that
indigenista writers only represented indigenous people as primitive and ignorant, unable to improve their socioeconomic position without the outside assistance of a dominant culture that, supposedly, knew better than them. This position holds that
indigenista literature was functional in arguing that the solution to the poverty and the marginalised situation of the indigenous populations was assimilation into the dominant culture. Nevertheless, this standpoint remains an understatement. Recent scholarly work has revisited
indigenismo to argue that, while previous criticism was based on true aspects of its cultural production, it is also short-sighted. These new approaches seek to demonstrate that
indigenismo was more influential in – and more influenced by – the shaping of a properly indigenous political discourse than has been previously acknowledged, and that the
indigenista concept of national identity as profoundly indigenous was more far-reaching than has generally been recognised.
39 Estelle Tarica, ‘Indigenismo’, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Latin American History, 3 March 2016 <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.68> [accessed 28 January 2022]. I situate myself within this context to add that
indigenista writing in Ecuador did not simply and entirely disregard all value in indigenous cultures.
Huasipungo shows that a more complex process took place. Despite resonating with the homogenising project of
indigenismo, the novel does place value on indigenous subjects. When writing about them from a mestizo standpoint, the recognition of this value extends beyond the denunciation of indigenous suffering among non-indigenous readers.
The value Icaza attributes to his indigenous characters, as I have already mentioned, is tied to their profound love for the land. This feature is described early in the novel, when the landowners recognise that ‘los indios se aferran con amor ciego y morboso a ese pedazo de tierra que se les presta por el trabajo que dan a la hacienda’.
40 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 9. By using the word ‘morboso’, this dialogue between two
blancos suggests that the love for the land is a negative and unacceptable behaviour. However, coming from characters primarily presented as oppressors – and in fact villains responsible for creating the conditions for the ‘morboso’ indigenous love for the land – this suggestion comes to signify precisely the opposite. It is the love for their land that drives the indigenous people in the novel to rebel against their masters. The order of eviction triggers an indigenous rebellion under a war cry that is an eloquent claim for the land: ‘¡ñucanchic huasipungo!’.
41 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 182. Translated from Kichwa to Spanish, this expression means ‘el huasipungo es nuestro’. The love for the land is therefore presented as desirable, since it is this sentiment that finally drives indigenous people towards a fight for revindication. In the context of the liberal project, the love for the land is a type of love for what is national that fuels the rejection of colonial vestiges in the nation, bringing together the liberal intentions of modernisation and national identity into one discourse. This is a discourse that, at the same time, is notably championed by two Kichwa words in what is, once again, an attempt to use the vernacular to project a sentiment of national authenticity.
The symbolism behind the indigenous rebellion is connected to the discourse of defending the land from external forms of rule. Cornejo Polar sees in the indigenous revolt an announcement of the future to come, ‘una alegoría premonitoria de la justicia que se avecina’ for the indigenous peoples, as
Huasipungo compares their dead bodies on the ground with a fertilised soil representing ‘la fuerza germinal que nace de la derrota y muerte de los indios’.
42 Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire, p. 179. This is certainly true, but I would add that the rebellion is also referencing the past: the image of natives rising up in arms against white exploiters appeals to a previous combative and rebel spirit inherited from a glorious Ecuadorian and Latin American past, that is, the memory of the independence wars. National sentiments in Ecuador, as in the rest of region, have a strong connection with independence and the end of colonial exploitation. The belligerent indigenous farmers portrayed in the last pages of story – ready to die fighting for their land – recall the battles for independence from colonial powers that resulted in the foundation of the Ecuadorian nation itself, a recollection that is also present in official national narratives. The same operation of bringing together past and future in the image of a battle is accomplished by the national anthem. The lyrics of the Ecuadorian anthem, written by Juan León Mera and published in 1866, set a scene similar to the ending of
Huasipungo:
Los primeros los hijos del suelo
que, soberbio, el Pichincha decora
te aclamaron por siempre señora
y vertieron su sangre por ti.
Dios miró y aceptó el holocausto,
y esa sangre fue germen fecundo
de otros héroes que atónito el mundo
vio en tu torno a millares surgir.
43 Juan León Mera, ‘Himno Nacional del Ecuador’, Cancillería del Ecuador <https://www.cancilleria.gob.ec/himno-nacional-del-ecuador> [accessed 21 June 2018].The Ecuadorian
próceres who died during the independence wars are referenced in Merá’s lyrics both as symbols of past and future: it is their sacrifice – the blood of those who ‘vertieron su sangre por ti’ – that is going to be the ‘germen fecundo’ of the new generations to come for the nation. The indigenous rebels of
Huasipungo occupy the same liminal space by portraying, at the same time, the
independentista past and the germinal future. In that sense, they too reflect national values. Hence,
Huasipungo combines the claim for a national rebellious spirit willing to fight against colonial rule with a notion of territorial authenticity represented by the indigenous people themselves, as they are ‘hijos del suelo’. Icaza makes a discursive use of the indigenous figure as a symbol of national identity for Ecuadorians, a strategy supported by a pre-existent narrative of origins. Prieto argues that the historic conscience of the Ecuadorian nation finds its roots in the figure of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa. When
Huasipungo was first published, the memory of Atahualpa was publicly praised and ‘devino en un ícono nacional del glorioso pasado del espíritu indio, un espíritu públicamente celebrado en Quito a inicios de la década de 1930’.
44 Prieto, p. 167. By showing indigenous people fighting for their land, Icaza appeals to the imagery of indigenous ancestry. It is no coincidence that, to start the rebellion, Andrés Chiliquinga calls his fellow
huasipungeros by blowing a war horn inherited from his father:
En espera de algo providencial, la indiada, con los labios secos, con los ojos escaldados, escudriñaba en la distancia. De alguna parte debía venir. ¿De dónde? ¿De dónde, carajo? De … De muy lejos al parecer. Del corazón mismo de las pencas de cabuya, del chaparro, de las breñas de lo alto. De un misterioso cuerno que alguien soplaba para congregar y exaltar la rebeldía ancestral. Sí. Llegó. Era Andrés Chiliquinga que, subido a la cerca de su huasipungo – por consejo e impulso de un claro coraje en su desesperación – llamaba a los suyos con la ronca voz del cuerno de guerra que heredó de su padre.
45 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 173. Icaza references historical indigenous insurgency – ‘rebeldía ancestral’ – to build on a discourse of identity. Aligned with Anthony Smith’s theory on national identity, this discourse establishes a national symbolism that connects ideology with the ‘mass sentiments’ of wider segments of the population, spanning both cognitive and expressive dimensions, and linking itself up with aspirations and feelings among the population.
46 Anthony Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), p. 73. In Smith’s proposal, notions of autonomy and authenticity and symbols of self-reliance and of natural community (for example, re-enactments of resistance events) exemplify the fusion of cognitive and expressive aspects and the links with wider sentiments and aspirations. It is in these terms that, in
Huasipungo, the indigenous spirit – a spirit that goes back in time to Atahualpa – acts as a symbol of self-reliance. Thus, it is connected with the memories of the fight for independence to embody a collective myth of national identification. This myth projects the indigenous figure as a symbol that represents a shared imaginary, on which a national subject is placed within a national history. Therefore,
Huasipungo proposes an Ecuadorian national identity that could be based on the indigenous figure. That is to say, on a selective
mestizo appropriation of the indigenous figure that references indigenous culture only to serve the political will of
mestizos but, at the same time, that silences a violent history that stretches back to the colonial era. The values of indigenous people, as well as their history, are reduced to the celebration of a combative indigenous spirit linked to the last native emperor, that is, Atahualpa, and the possibility of national power he nostalgically represents.
Such a proposal of national identity was instrumental in the context of the liberal enterprise. Liberalism made use of the social intentions of Icaza’s
indigenismo, that is, the denunciative nature of the novel, to argue in favour of transforming indigenous people into ‘useful citizens’ and modern wage earners. But it also benefited from the symbolic dimension of his writings by building on the myth of a national Ecuadorian identity. Hence,
Huasipungo both emerges from liberal ideals and helps to shape them in the national consciousness, connecting a discourse of national identity to a political project.
47 Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano have discussed a parallel experience in Argentina. They analyse the widespread intellectual debate about identity that took place in the early twentieth century in Argentina, after the arrival of European immigration changed the social dynamics of cities such as Buenos Aires. They argue that intellectual production – including literary creation – served to reinforce the idea of an Argentinean national identity that needed to be defined and preserved in the wake of the challenging impacts of the migration wave. Their analysis relates to the Ecuadorian case I revise here because both experiences are the product of a modernising political project. It is in a context marked by modernisation and cultural disruption that an intellectual interest on ‘la cuestión nacional’ emerges and thrives. See Carlos Altamirano and Betriz Sarlo, ‘La Argentina del Centenario: campo intelectual, vida literaria y temas ideológicos’, in Ensayos argentinos: de Sarmiento a la vanguardia, ed. by Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997), pp. 161–201. The correlation between the novel and a political project supports the argument that the writings of Icaza and other writers of the
Generación del 30 were not faithful reproductions of reality, but representations crafted to accomplish social and political purposes.
The crafting of indigeneity carried out by writers such as Icaza involves a double incarnation for the indigenous self, both rejectable and desirable at the same time. What I mean here is that
Huasipungo is unable to produce a strictly realistic version of the indigenous subject. Instead, it follows a logic explained by Mariátegui, who notoriously argued that
indigenista literature, being a
mestizo creation, necessarily has to ‘idealise’ and ‘stylise’ the indigenous populations it focuses on.
48 José Carlos Mariátegui, 7 Ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima: Minerva, 1928; repr. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007), p. 283. By this token, Icaza is able to convey an indigenous figure that can be stylised as archaic and, at the same time, idealised as the seed for the modern national self. This operation, which might appear contradictory at first, begins with the aesthetic stylisation of the indigenous characters in
Huasipungo. The novel builds on the image of the indigenous population – exploited, starved and subjected to exploitative structures that animalise them – as a metaphor of the weaknesses of the nation and, as such, something that needs to be transformed and replaced with something new – that is, modern – and ideal for the intentions of liberal politics. On the other hand, the narration also offers indigenous people as a representation of an idealised Inca past, the fights for the national land and a desirable ancestral insurgency, all values on which an Ecuadorian national identity could be based. Hence,
Huasipungo calls for the transformation of animalised indigenous people – who need to be changed into modern citizens through a homogenising process – but it also appeals for the conservation of the ancestral imagery attached to them, in order to produce a national discourse of identity.
The double standard in
Huasipungo’s representation of indigeneity is nothing strange in the Andean context. Cecilia Méndez remarks that a similar process took place in Peru in the nineteenth century, also against the background of modernising and nationalistic enterprises. Méndez presents this dichotomy in the title of her essay: ‘Incas Sí, Indios No’, where she argues that during a period of political instability, a white-creole sector proposed that the idea of Peruvian nationality implied a fundamental rejection of the indigenous element. Yet, this same white-creole sector glorified the Inca past as means of legitimisation.
49 Cecilia Mendez, ‘Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary Crisis’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 28.1 (1996), pp. 197–225 (p. 214). In doing so, Méndez argues, the ‘Indians’ were denied their real character and an imagined one was ascribed to them.
50 Mendez, p. 223. The similarities with Icaza’s portrayal of Ecuadorian indigeneity become evident: his work presents an argument to discard the indigenous self in favour of a modern persona, while at the same time it praises indigenous ancestral imagery as something originally Ecuadorian. In the liberal enterprise, this double use of the indigenous figure proposes to overcome its shortcomings through a modernising transformation; but, meanwhile, it also proposes to preserve elements of the indigenous imagery to build a national sentiment.
Huasipungo thus envisions a nation formed by modern citizens whose identity finds its roots in the ideal of indigenous insurgency and the Inca past, strategically referring to history to construct the future.