Basing notions of national identity on the memory of an indigenous past is a common practice throughout postcolonial societies. In his analysis of the Caribbean experience, where slavery, black history and African diaspora overlap with post-coloniality, Stuart Hall explains that one of the traditional conceptions of cultural identity suggests that people with shared history and ancestry hold in common ‘one true collective self’ hiding inside other artificially imposed ‘selves’. In this view, the oneness underlying ‘all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence’.
1 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222–237 (p. 223). Huasipungo attempts to reveal what such essence might be for the Ecuadorian nation, proposing, as we have seen, that it can be based on the indigenous figure. By doing so, Icaza creates a narrative that produces meaning about the nation, or what Hall calls a ‘national culture’, with which a wide segment of the population could identify. This narrative has a unifying purpose because ‘however different its members may be in terms of class, gender or race, a national culture seeks to unify them into one cultural identity, to represent them all as belonging to the same great national family’.
2 Stuart Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and its Futures, ed. by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: The Open University and Polity Press, 1992), pp. 273–327 (p. 296). Such an operation, nonetheless, is not so much the rediscovery of an essence hidden by time and history, but instead a production grounded in a politically functional retelling of the past. As such,
Huasipungo‘s proposal of national culture is deeply problematic as it is a fiction: it engenders a unified and coherent identity for the Ecuadorian nation when, in fact, Ecuador’s national context in the 1930s was more complex, stratified and divided.
Assuming an ideological stance, Icaza and the other members of the Generación del 30 associated what they believed was the essence and uniqueness of Ecuadorian national culture with a strong sense of territoriality, that is, they linked people’s identity with the territory in which they were born and lived. In the previously referenced speech where Icaza talks about the literary production of his generation being ‘una literatura que refleja las vivencias del ser auténtico, del ser que, en cualquier latitud cultural, tiene sus raíces propias’, he mentions the writers of the 1930s clustered around the different regions of the country to write about their unique peoples, stressing the importance of geography for thinking about identity. In his view, these local portraits helped to convey a comprehensive picture of Ecuador:
Cada grupo de la generación de relatistas del año 30 trató de dar a sus obras el mensaje del elemento humano y del medio geográfico de cada una de las regiones del país en la cual había surgido. Los de la Costa, subrayaron lo fecundo y trágico de su manigua tropical, subrayaron asimismo, junto al duro trabajo del montuvio, su hambre, su dolor, su superstición, su lujuria. Los de la Sierra, es decir los escritores del grupo de Quito, en contrapunto con las escuelas literarias que habían explotado al indio eglógico, visto por los ojos interesados de latifundistas y de académicos de la lengua española, incorporaron a la emoción literaria un indio con toda la tragedia que soportaba y que arrastraba desde siempre. Los del Austro, a más de referirse al indio, se refirieron al cholo y relataron con profundo realismo su medio geográfico y su mundo social.
3 Icaza, ‘Relato, espíritu unificador’, p. 212.In this quote, Icaza attempts to explain one of the practices that notably distinguishes the authors of the
Generación del 30: they focus their writings on particular national spaces, select groups of local and marginalised subjects particular to those geographies and – writing from the perspectives of outsiders – make them epitomes of the whole cultural environment. In that fashion, the writers of Guayaquil focused on the peasant farmers of coast, the
montubios; the writers of Quito focused on the indigenous population of the highlands, as Icaza did; and the writers of the southern provinces of Ecuador focused on
cholo experiences.
4 El grupo de Guayaquil – formed by José de la Cuadra, Enirque Gil Gilbert, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, Demetrio Aguilera Malta and Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco – is probably the best-known group of writers of the Ecuadorian literature of the 1930s. Their seminal collection of short stories, Los que se van (1930), is often recognised as the starting point of the Generación de 30 as a whole. The essentialism behind this separation, however, does not reflect the complexities of Ecuadorian demography, as the Ecuadorian indigenous experience has never been limited to the highlands, and it is certainly not true that there are no
cholos in the coastal region of the country or
latifundista legacies in the south.
5 Diverse indigenous populations have been historically disseminated throughout Ecuador. The indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region of the country are notably ignored in Icaza’s portrayal of Ecuadorian indigeneity. Similarly, the commercial locus of Ecuador, the coastal city of Guayaquil, has received indigenous internal migration since the twentieth century yet the urban indigenous migrant populations are also disregarded by the author of Huasipungo. Nevertheless, for the author of
Huasipungo, his generation was united in their purpose:
Mas, a pesar de que cada grupo trabajó con amor, con pasión, con descarnada verdad sobre las características que diferenciaban a cada uno de los sectores del país, sus obras, todas -salto sobre mis preferencias y sobre la difusión mundial de alguna de ellas-, hallaron, en su obligado peregrinaje por lejanas latitudes, la sorpresa de la opinión de críticos y de lectores extranjeros, los cuales, al hablar de esos relatos, exclamaron: ‘Esto es ecuatoriano’, con el placer de quien halla la filiación extraviada -entre copias, plagios, imitaciones- de un retazo de tierra hispanoamericana.
6 Icaza, ‘Relato, espíritu unificador’, p. 212.Icaza’s idea that the writings of the
Generación del 30 represented a national essence – something to which foreign readers could say ‘esto es ecuatoriano’ – implies that only literature reflecting territory-bound experiences were authentically reflective of ‘Ecuadorianness’, and everything else was to be considered ‘copias’, ‘plagios’ or ‘imitaciones’. This proposal, of course, has obvious limitations, as it means reducing national identity to social types to be found in specific regions, a labelling strategy that limits diversity, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. The Ecuadorian population challenges any cataloguing attempts. Historically, the country has hosted several population groups broadly categorised under the tags of ‘indígena’, ‘afroecuatoriano’, ‘blanco’, ‘mestizo’ or ‘montubio’.
7 The Ecuadorian population is categorised under broad tags by the state. The last national census, conducted in 2010, included a question regarding cultural self-identification. People were asked if they self-identify with one of seven tags: indígena, afrodescendiente, negro, mulato, montubio, mestizo, blanco. The option ‘other’ was also available, although the results for this category were marginal. According to the results of the census, the majority of the population are self-identified mestizos, montubios and indígenas. See INEC, ‘Resultados del censo 2010’, INEC <http://www.ecuadorencifras.gob.ec/resultados> [accessed 26 June 2018]. Each of these classifications has its own generalisation problems, but the category of ‘indígena’ is especially challenging: there are 14 officially recognised ‘nacionalidades’ and 18 ‘pueblos indígenas’ distributed in the national territory, and more than ten of those – all with different traditions and heritage – are located in the highlands Icaza described.
8 UNICEF, ‘Nacionalidades y pueblos indígenas, y políticas interculturales en Ecuador: Una mirada desde la educación’, UNICEF <https://biblio.flacsoandes.edu.ec/libros/digital/54805.pdf > [accessed 31 January 2022] (p. 10).Information about the internal diversity of the country illustrates the argument that there is not only one indigenous ancestry to appeal to, as indigenous communities in Ecuador are not a homogeneous group, let alone the rest of the non-indigenous population of the country. In fact, the constitution of 1998 defined Ecuador as a state that is ‘pluricultural y multiétnico’.
9 Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, ‘Constitución de la República del Ecuador’, Asamblea Nacional de la República del Ecuador, 1998 <http://www.asambleanacional.gob.ec/documentos/biblioteca/constituciones-del-ecuador/Constitucion-1998/1998-Documento-original.pdf> [accessed 23 April 2018] (p. 1). That is, a national state in which different cultures and ethnicities cohabit in the same territory. Moreover, the last constitutional reform (2008) expands this definition by adding the notion that Ecuador is a ‘plurinacional’ state, meaning that there is more than one officially recognised nationality within its borders.
10 Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, ‘Constitución de la República del Ecuador’, Asamblea Nacional de la República del Ecuador, 2008 <http://www.asambleanacional.gob.ec/sites/default/files/documents/old/constitucion_de_bolsillo.pdf> [accessed 23 April 2018] (p. 23). Hence, limiting ‘Ecuadorianness’ to what Icaza calls the ‘human element’ representing the different geographic regions of the national territory is especially limited for contemporary understandings.
Likewise, such a vision is limited not only because it ignores heterogeneity, but also because it does not take into account what Hall calls the ‘continuous play of “history”, culture and power’, that is to say, it overlooks the fact that cultural identities, like everything which is historical, undergo constant transformations.
11 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, p. 225. Believing that Ecuadorian national identity could be solidified on the basis of a fixed ‘essence’ that lies in the past and is best reflected by social types fixed in geography is, at the same time, believing that there is an Ecuadorian cultural essence untouched by the passing of time and history. Cultural identities do not exist in a vacuum: they are subjected to changes and transformations, and Ecuador’s panorama of the early twentieth century was marked by the transformations brought about by the modernisation that liberalism pursued.
The impossibilities of basing Ecuadorian national identity on a fixed territorially defined essence transpire in Icaza’s work. The modernisation promoted by liberalism implied that Ecuador was engaging more directly in encounters and exchanges with other nations involved in the global market. As such, some of the transformations brought about by modernisation – that can be traced in Huasipungo – were the signs of the cultural impact of an early yet developing transnationalism, that is, of multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions beyond the borders of nation-states. Even if transnational phenomena were not catalogued as such before, applying a transnational lens to history provides us with an analytical framework for seeing and understanding the impact of cultural exchanges that predate the modern state of global interconnectedness that transnationalism is usually associated with. In Icaza’s Ecuador, these exchanges and encounters resulted in transformations that defied the ideal of a national territory containing an exclusively national experience. Consequently, they meant that Icaza’s conception of a national essence fixed on memory and geography was not plausible, even then, when transnationalism had not yet been intensified by the communication technologies of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The transformative influence of transnationalism appears in Huasipungo’s story. If we consider the economic aspects of the concept, that is, if we see transnationalism as an avenue of capital, its most evident incarnation is Mr Chapy. By being a North American investor funding the business project that sets the plot in motion, his presence is indicative of change: his ‘gringo’ ways are expected to bring ‘civilisation’ to the remote highlands where Cuchitambo is located. In this sense, a postcolonial perspective would focus on the ways in which the story presents and denounces the establishment of asymmetrical relations of power between two cultures, one considered superior to the other. The narration stresses that the character of Mr Chapy – and every mention of ‘los gringos’ in general – builds on the perpetuation of traditional images of the colonisers as naturally superior and, consequently, the colonised as naturally inferior:
Por el pueblo corrió de boca en boca la noticia de la llegada de los señores gringos.
– Traen plata, guambritas.
– A repartir.
– Dizque son generosos.
– Ojalá nos saquen de la hambruna que soportamos.
– Dicen que harán mejoras en el pueblo.
– Tenemos que salir al encuentro
– ¿Qué nos darán?
– ¿Qué nos traerán? […]
– Yo le vi a un señor de pelo bermejo.
– Bermejo como de un ángel.
– Yo también le vi.
– Toditos mismo.
– Parecían Taita Dios […]
[Don Alfonso speaking]
– Aquí ustedes están seguros. Nadie se atreverá a molestarles. ¿Quién? ¿Quién puede ser capaz? Ustedes… Ustedes han traído la civilización. ¿Qué más quieren estos indios? – chilló Pereira dando una patada en el pedestal de tierra que le sostenía. Pero como la tapia era vieja se desmoronó sin soportar aquel alarde de fuerza y el terrateniente, entre nubes de polvo, dio con su humanidad en el suelo.
– ¿Ve? ¿Ve usted cómo no sabemos dónde pisamos?
12 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 168.While it is true that such postcolonial analysis could be made, I prioritise a reading that focuses on the transformative power of the cultural exchanges that come naturally with economic interactions. My interest here lies in the ways in which early twentieth-century Ecuadorian society was influenced by transnationalism and how that influence can be traced in Icaza’s writing. In this light, Mr Chapy embodies the transnational business with the US and European countries that started to flourish in Ecuador with the reforms of liberal modernisation. His presence comes to disrupt everyday experience in Cuchitambo: when he is referred to as a way to bring ‘civilisation’ to the Ecuadorian highlands, that is to be read as a way to bring Western capitalism and all the cultural phenomena it entails. As such, he signals a type of economic and cultural relationship that would end up transforming the everyday living experience of Ecuadorian society, impacting not only the lives of people that today would be considered
mestizos, but also people who self-identify as indigenous.
13 I will elaborate on the transnational cultural exchanges among US, Europe and Ecuador in the third chapter by analysing Carlos Arco’s novel Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), whose plot functions as an indirect continuation to the story of Huasipungo.But if we look more closely, the character of Mr Chapy is not the only way in which transnationalism manifests itself in Huasipungo. The indigenous community Icaza shows us is one that has already been touched and mixed with others through a process of interaction. The presence of once external influences is especially represented in the role that Christian beliefs have for the community members. All the indigenous characters of Huasipungo are devoted Christians, as they attend mass every Sunday, they have interiorised the fear of God and they worship the Virgin, who is the ‘patrona’ of their community. Christianity is, of course, a European influence that, through violence, overtook indigenous religious beliefs since colonisation. However, that does not mean that indigenous beliefs have completely disappeared. Rather, they have fused with Christian traditions, creating hybrids in which both cultures coexist. The story explores this mixture when Cunshi, Andrés Chiliquinga’s wife, dies after eating rotten meat in order to avoid starvation. The funeral arrangements for Cunshi mix indigenous and Christian traditions, without contradicting one another, but playing complementary roles:
Entonces, alguien que se sentía con derecho, por miembro de familia, por compadre o por amiga querida, sustituyó a Andrés Chiliquinga en las lamentaciones, en los gritos y en el llanto a los pies de la difunta. Todos por turno y en competencia de quejas […]
– El chasquibay de la pobre Cunshi – opinaron santiguándose los campesinos que de lejos pudieron oír aquel murmullo doloroso que se esparcía por la madera en mancha viscosa de luto.
– El chasquibay que aplaca.
– El chasquibay que despide.
– El chasquibay […].
14 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 153. The first ritual, named chasquibay, denotes a process in which the family and friends of a deceased person lament the dead publicly, paying their respects before the community attending the service. In Icaza’s fiction, it lasts for three days until the corpse begins to decay. Only then, when the stench emanating from the rotten flesh becomes unbearable, is the body of Cunshi taken to the next stage of the indigenous mortuary tradition, that takes priority and develops before Christian customs:
Entonces se habló del jachimayshay […] Con palos viejos […] los indios más expertos del velorio hicieron una especie de tablado, donde colocaron el cuerpo rígido y maloliente de Cunshi, y rezando viejas oraciones en quichua transportaron al cadáver hasta la orilla de río para el ritual del jachimayshay. Después de lavarse la cara y las manos, un grupo de mujeres desnudó a la difunta y le bañó cuidadosamente – frotándole con estopas de cabuya espumosa, raspándole los callos de los talones con cascajo de ladrillo, sacándole los piojos de la cabeza con un grueso peine de cacho –. Debía ir al viaje eterno limpia como llegó a la vida.
Andrés, en cambio, casi a la misma hora que sus amigos y parientes se ocupaban del jachimayshay, entró en el curato del pueblo a tratar con el párroco sobre los gastos de la misa, de los responsos y de la sepultura cristiana.
15 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 154. In the jachimayshay, the corpse is washed in the river – while being prayed for in Kichwa – before its journey to the afterlife. Only after these rituals are completed is the body due to receive ‘cristiana sepultura’, that is, it is ready to follow the Christian ways of burial. For the indigenous characters of Huasipungo, mixing both traditions does not mean the clashing of two opposing religions, but a natural mixture of local and foreign systems of beliefs made their own. In the mentions Icaza makes of indigenous traditions, however, some critics have seen a mechanism to expose indigenous ignorance by associating this type of ritual – and those belonging to indigenous medicinal practices – with superstition. For me, on the other hand, these descriptions are evidence of different facets of culture and identity being selected and elaborated from more than one heritage. They evidence the existence of a process of cultural blending in which an indigenous community takes the Christian ‘Dios’ to transform him into their own ‘Taita Dios’.
The interplays and blending of two or more cultural traditions have taken many names in Latin American studies. One of the terms usually used to conceptualise these processes is syncretism, a concept that can be expanded to other fields, but is most often related to and understood in connection to the transmission of religious beliefs. The traditional definition of syncretism departs from the idea that religion, culture and ethnicity are ‘pure entities’ which may become mixed in encounter: from this standpoint, the mixture of different religious origins may lead to the parentage of new hybrid forms, instead of the stable reproduction of pure religious or cultural traditions.
16 Ana Maria Leopold, ‘General Introduction’, in Syncretism in Religion: A Reader, ed. by Ana Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 2. In countries with colonial history such as Ecuador, syncretism as a concept has been used to analyse the cultural consequences of dominant cultures forcing their religions on the peoples they have colonised. In those cases, ‘syncretism may be seen as a result of a resistance to power and a means to preserve indigenous gods in the clothes of the gods of the dominant culture’.
17 Leopold, p. 4. In some instances, this same process has also been called creolisation, so much so that for many anthropologists it remains unclear if the term creolisation denotes anything different from syncretism.
18 Charles Stewart, Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory (California: Left Coast Press, 2007), p. 3. Both terms, creolisation and syncretism, share a historical component that might limit their usefulness for describing contemporary forms of mixture. That is the reason why, in his analysis of Latin American modernity at the end of the twentieth century, Canclini prefers the notion of hybridisation: ‘porque permite incluir las formas modernas de hibridación mejor que sincretismo, fórmula referida casi siempre a fusiones religiosas o de movimientos simbólicos tradicionales’.
19 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México: Grijalbo, 1990), p. 15.From a Latin American perspective, other types of criticism have emerged to analyse relations between cultures. In the 1940s, the Cuban essayist Fernando Ortiz coined the term ‘transculturation’ to describe the process in which one culture ‘transitions’ to another as the result of a cultural encounter, a process that according to Ortiz ‘implica también necesariamente la pérdida o desarraigo de una cultura precedente […] y además, significa la consiguiente creación de nuevos fenéomenos culturales’.
20 Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Havana: Jesús Montero, 1940; repr. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987), p. 96. In Ortiz’s view, the notion of transculturation is vital to understand the history not only of Cuba, but the history of all American countries, products of many overlapped transculturation processes. Building on that idea, more than 40 years later, the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama expanded the theory of transculturation to point out that its importance resides in stressing that a culture that receives an external impact is modified, but not merely in a passive manner, as it also has a creative role in the selection and adoption of external traits to appropriate, and – perhaps more critically – in the selection of internal traditions to preserve. The Latin American community, Rama argues, is not simply a collage of inherited norms, behaviours, beliefs and cultural objects; rather, ‘se trata de una fuerza que actúa con desenvoltura tanto sobre su herencia particular, según las situaciones propias de su desarrollo, como sobre las aportaciones provenientes de fuera’.
21 Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1984; repr. Buenos Aires: El Andariego, 2008), p. 41. Consequently, one of the main contributions of the notion of transculturation is that it recognises the active role colonised cultures have in defining the cultural outcome of an encounter with a dominant culture, a role that is often neglected by other types of analysis.
While all concepts mentioned above have their merits, and they can certainly be used in a critical reading of Icaza’s Huasipungo, I privilege here the approach that transnationalism has to offer. I do so because a transnational lens allows to engage my reading with the economic and modernising transformations happening in Icaza’s context. It is in a context where commercial relations with the world – and capitalism – were starting to have a significant impact on the cultural life of Ecuadorian society that the nationalistic proposal of Huasipungo emerges. Similarly, it is in this same disrupted context that its contradictions become more evident: the essentialism of basing a national discourse on a uniqueness to be found in the national land and indigeneity is especially inadequate when we see that, even indigenous cultures, are already touched by encounters with others. The fluidity shown by the mixing of indigenous and foreign traditions in the passage of Cunshi’s wake is an indication of transnational encounters permeating through the novel, as for this cultural interpenetration to exist and to be written about in national literature, the development of dialogues and exchanges among cultures that lies at the heart of transnationalism is needed first. In this case, transnationalism functions as a mode of cultural reproduction, in which two cultures mix to create hybrid identities.
Hybridisation is also recognisable in some of the words of the novel. I have already discussed the inclusion of orality in the story as a way to reveal a national uniqueness in literature. Nonetheless, the ways in which Icaza uses language is also telling of transnational exchanges despite the fact that, as noted by Kari Soriano, some critics have argued that
Huasipungo ‘construye una alteridad lingüística’ in order to separate the indigenous world from other non-indigenous forms of expression.
22 Kari Soriano, ‘El precio de la palabra: la voz indígena en Huasipungo de Jorge Icaza’, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 45 (2016), pp. 325–341 (p. 329). The logic behind Soriano’s proposal is that, through the use of dialogues, Icaza makes his indigenous characters speak with too many Kichwa words, projecting the impression of them speaking poorly the language of prestige, that is, Spanish. White and
mestizo characters, including the narrator, on the contrary, make a more comprehensive use of Spanish. Hence, the novel marks a distinction between those who can communicate effectively – and be understood easily by the reader – and those who cannot. While I can see the reasoning behind such an argument, it is not true that only indigenous characters make use of Kichwa in the novel. Although less frequently – and seldom obscuring meaning – white and
mestizo characters, and even the narrator himself, also make use of words that belong to the indigenous world. Consequently, instead of language being a tool for alterity, I believe it is quite the opposite: it reveals a Spanish that has drawn from and mixed with indigenous roots, extending its lexical framework in order to understand and describe a local reality that could not be precisely enunciated otherwise.
In her analysis of its English translations and the linguistic strategies used to preserve meaning in a novel full of regionalisms and Kichwa, Cecilia Mafla points out that
Huasipungo makes use of many Kichwa words that are already part of the Ecuadorian Spanish vocabulary and, as such, they are used by all the characters.
23 Mafla, p. 69. This is the case for words like
guagua and
guambra, both used to designate youngsters, babies the former and teens the latter, which are commonly used in everyday Ecuadorian society. In the novel, this type of word is used by a wide range of characters. The following conversation between Don Alfonso, the parish priest and the local ‘teniente político’ – the
mestizo political authority for the geographic area where Cuchitambo is located – give us an insight into the extent to which Kichwa shows its influence in Ecuadorian Spanish:
El párroco llegó una media hora más tarde. Su aparición puso una nota familiar y bullanguera en la conversación – diálogo desigual entre el patrón latifundista y el cholo teniente político.
– ¿Qué de bueno dejó por nuestro Quito, don Alfonso?
– Nada.
– ¿Qué hay de bullas? ¿Ya cayó el gobierno?
– No. ¡Qué va!
– ¿Y de guambritas? – insistió el sotanudo cínicamente.
– Lo mismo – dijo Pereira, y con voz de chacrama llamó a la mujer del teniente político para pedirle otro cuarto de botella de aguardiente, la cual objetó:
– Ahora ha de ser entera, pes, con taita curita.
24 Icaza, Huasipungo, p. 63.There are no indigenous characters in this excerpt, yet the words
guambrita,
chacrama and
taita are spoken by the priest, the narrator and the wife of the ‘teniente político’ respectively, showing than Ecuadorian Spanish has a noticeable Kichwa influence in
Huasipungo. If we consider that language is not a transparent vehicle for thought, but ‘a material and historical force’ which acts as the means by which individuals construct their identities, that influence is telling not just of travelling words, but also of travelling ideologies that move from the indigenous world to be taken by the rest of the nation.
25 Language Acts and Worldmaking, ‘What we do’, Language Acts and Worldmaking <https://languageacts.org/what-we-do/ [accessed 26 February 2022]. In this light, the word
taita is especially revealing since its history uncovers more than just the common translation of ‘padre’. Although often included in Kichwa dictionaries, the term
taita is originally derived from the Latin
tata.
26 A Kichwa dictionary published by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education includes the word taita in a section of terms that belong to ancient Castilian but have been included in previous Kichwa dictionaries ‘sin previa crítica y conocimiento de su forma original, su significado y su posible reconstrucción’. See Kichwa yachakukkunapa shimiyuk kamu, ed. by Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador (Quito: Ministerio de Educación de Ecuador, 2009), p. 221. Nonetheless, it is mostly used by indigenous communities and, through time, it has become part of the indigenous world. In their appropriation of the word, indigenous communities also use it to refer to grandfathers, non-familiar elders and deities, both Christian (Taita Dios) and indigenous (Taita Chimborazo).
27 Chimborazo is a currently inactive volcano. It is the highest mountain in Ecuador and it is the farthest point on the Earth’s surface from its centre. It is also a recurrent element of indigenous mythology, in which the mountain is endowed with the characteristics of a warrior fighting for the love of another mountain, Mama Tungurahua. See Barry Lyons, ‘Taita Chimborazo and Mama Tungurahua: A Quichua Song, a Fieldwork Story’, Anthropology and Humanism, 24.1 (1999), pp. 32–46. The word has moved from Latin to the indigenous language and to the Ecuadorian Spanish lexicon. In the process, it gains and brings a wider meaning to Ecuadorian Spanish, that is, not only as the literal translation of father, but also as a signifier of mentorship and spirituality. By such a process, concepts belonging to the cosmovision of indigenous culture gain a place in
mestizo society, showing yet another aspect of the reciprocal dependencies that transnationalism entails.
28 Some might argue that transnationalism entails reciprocal dependencies among different nations and, while different, blancos, mestizos and indigenous referred to in Huasipungo still belong to the same nation, that is, Ecuador. However, even when indigenous have been included in the headcount of Ecuadorian population, they have been set apart – both legislatively and symbolically – from the mestizo political project of the nation, despite that aspects of their culture are present in the everyday life of that same mestizo society. During the colony, such division was more evident, as the region was torn between two racially and culturally divided units of political organisation: the republic of the Indians and the republic of the Spaniards. See Karen Vieira Powers, ‘The Battle for Bodies and Souls in the Colonial North Andes: Intraecclesiastical Struggles and the Politics of Migration’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 75.1 (1995), pp. 31–56 (p.33).Transnational exchanges had already influenced Ecuadorian society during Icaza’s time. In addition to the internal diversity of the country, the presence of transnationalism, that as we have seen is perceivable in Huasipungo, makes any proposal to equate territory and culture no more than a fiction. Icaza’s intention to base national Ecuadorian identity on a unique essence to be found in territory and indigenous ancestry is not reflective of the nation’s reality, but it is rather reflective of his own selective and politically biased views of what the nation was and needed to be. His discourse attempts to stitch up differences into one identity that ignores many aspects that, in his view, are unrepresentative of a national experience.