Navigating borders

Navigation is essential to Arcos’ fiction. Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga tells the story of a journey that takes a young indigenous Ecuadorian musician to a foreign land, where he discovers unsuspected aspects about his own past.2 For an analysis focused on this novel and its border-crossing strategies, see Luis A. Medina Cordova, ‘From Cuchitambo to Otavalo to New York City: Border-crossing in Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga‘, Journal of Romance Studies, 22.2 (2022), pp. 257–276. The novel is organised as the memoirs of one of the many travels of Andrés Chiliquinga, a local leader from Otavalo, an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian highlands. This journey, however, is different from others Andrés regularly makes through Europe and other destinations as a travelling musician and merchant of handcrafts. This time, he visits New York City to participate in a doctoral course about Andean Literatures in Columbia University, where the Fulbright Program invites him to ‘compartir un tiempo con estudiantes norteamericanos y conocer algo de la cultura de Estados Unidos’.3 Carlos Arcos, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (Quito: Alfaguara, 2013), p. 32. Despite the goal of his visit being to learn about North American culture, Andrés is asked to do a presentation on Ecuadorian literature, a subject on which he declares himself utterly ignorant. The lecturer in charge of the course assigns him the reading of Huasipungo, a novel about ‘runas’ (indigenous people) written by a ‘mishu’ (a mestizo man) which he has never read. With the help of his classmate María Clara Pereira – an Ecuadorian PhD candidate studying abroad – Andrés analyses Jorge Icaza’s novel to discover that the protagonist is named like himself, Andrés Chiliquinga, and the antagonist, Alfonso Pereira, bears the surname of his new friend, María Clara.

Through the experiences of his homonymous fictional character, the contemporary Andrés Chiliquinga reads about the deplorable conditions the indigenous population of Ecuador endured during the early twentieth century, exploited by white and mestizo landowners. Despite not having experienced the abuse described in the novel himself, Andrés soon feels appalled. By reading Huasipungo, he recalls the stories told in his community about the exploitation of their ancestors and becomes unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. He reads the text as an historical document more than a fictional tale, often wondering if he is the descendant of a previous Andrés Chiliquinga that Icaza knew and whose story is documented in the book. María Clara tries to keep the contemporary Andrés anchored to the reality of their doctoral course, but the borders between what is real and what is not soon begin to blur: Huasipungo‘s Andrés Chiliquinga visits Andrés in several dreamlike apparitions to reveal to him that they are indeed related and that the story Icaza tells in his novel is partially true.

As the plot suggests, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga offers a contemporary take on Ecuadorian indigenista writing, an operation often labelled as neoindigenista. The tag implies that, similar to Icaza’s Huasipungo but almost a century later, it is a novel about indigenous people written by a non-indigenous author. As such, it is in no way representative of the indigenous experience in Ecuador. Nor does it pretend to be. Rather, Arcos’ writing is a transgression of the indigenista literary tradition championed by Icaza, one that dislocates people from places and, in doing so, reflects on the permeability of borders in contemporary Ecuador. While this is a literary exercise that resonates with the transnational framework of this book, one must also note that it has some problematic implications for the real indigenous people of Ecuador. Ecuadorian indigenous communities are constantly fighting to defend their ancestral territories from the extractive thrust of transnational enterprises. In this regard, nationwide demonstrations have been periodically organised by the Movimiento Indígena, especially since the 1990s. The rebellion of October 2019, in which indigenous protestors successfully overturned a presidential decree aimed at eliminating fuel subsidies and rising gasoline prices, show that the struggle remains very much alive.4 For analyses of the October 2019 demonstrations see Leonizas Iza, Andrés Tapia and Andrés Madrid, Estallido. La rebelión de octubre en Ecuador (Quito: Red Kapari, 2020); and Ecuador. La insurrección de octubre, ed. by Camila Parodi and Nicolás Sticotti (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020). Although I recognise transnationalism’s tense relationship with indigeneity, my focus here lies elsewhere. My reading aims at shedding light on how Arcos takes Andrés Chiliquinga, a canonical literary figure that signifies a profound connection with the land, and turns it into one that embodies movement. The meanings of acknowledging such transnationality for the literary imagining of Ecuador are at the centre of my project.

To associate Andrés with movement, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga presents him as a seasoned traveller. He is used to crossing frontiers and interacting with others beyond national boundaries. ‘Harto he viajado, como otros de Otavalo, y ya casi no hay páginas en el pasaporte donde poner los sellos’, declares Andrés when he introduces himself to his classmates on his first day at Columbia University.5 Arcos, p. 10. But he is a representation of navigation not only because he is permanently traversing frontiers in his travels but also because he embodies a back-and-forth interaction between what is supposed to be national and what lies beyond the borders of Ecuador. To refer to the national domain, he is named after the indigenous hero of Huasipungo, a novel that uses the indigenous subject as a symbol of something exclusively national. The contemporary Andrés refers back to this tradition of national ‘uniqueness’ in his name and his personal history: at the end of the novel, it is revealed that Andrés descends from Huasipungo’s Andrés Chiliquinga. In a chat the contemporary Andrés has with the ghost of his tocayo (namesake), the latter reveals the truth of the former’s origin. After the battle that ends Icaza’s narration – where soldiers sent to protect the landowner’s hacienda kill a group of indigenous rebels – something else happens, according to the recollection of the spirit:

Arcos’ Andrés Chiliquinga comes from a context where, in the form of migrant connections and the US dollar circulating as Ecuador’s official currency, transnational exchanges are an unavoidable part of everyday living. Andrés’ experience is particularly connected to migrant work: he is part of a community of travellers whose main motivation to go abroad is often to find ways to make money. Moving from one country to another to seek better standards of living was common to Ecuador well before the Feriado Bancario, but it became significantly more widespread after it, as I have explained previously. Nonetheless, exploring economically motivated migrations is not the only way in which contemporary Ecuadorian literature questions national boundaries. Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek also emerges from the context that opened up the space for Arcos’ reimagining of Andrés Chiliquinga, but – in moving away from indigeneity – it adopts a different approach to reflect on the borders of twenty-first century Ecuador and their permeability. In this novel, rather than relating the main character with economically motivated migrant work, Valencia makes him a nomad, that is, someone who is voluntarily and constantly moving from one place to another, and perhaps goes back to the starting point if desired. In Valencia’s view, ‘nómada es aquel que por sí solo desea moverse por el mundo y a lo mejor volver a pasar por el sitio de donde partió. Todos somos nómadas. Lo sedentario es una idea, en todos los sitios estamos temporalmente’.11 Jorge Martillo, ‘El escritor nómada’, La Revista, 8 January 2012 <http://www.larevista.ec/cultura/arte/el-escritor-nomada> [accessed 26 February 2022].

Valencia’s conceptualisation of nomadism stresses the agency of nomads, that is, their capacity to move away from their homelands or places of residence because they want to. In doing so, not only does he dissociate himself from the exiles of the past, who left their homelands because they had to, but also connects his work with the classical literary motif of the journey. But in contrast to traditional travel narratives, in Kazbek, movements across borders are not voyages of discovery. For the main character of the novel, travelling and constantly moving from one point to another by the act of crossing borders is related to his subjectivity as an individual. Valencia’s account resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s vastly recognised work on the notion of nomadism. Braidotti argues against hegemonic forms of representing the subject in contemporary philosophy and political theory. To do so, she proposes the recognition of a ‘nomadic consciousness’ as a form of political resistance to fixed, unitary and exclusionary views of subjectivity.12 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 58. The Italian scholar builds her argument around a perspective that advocates for considering feminism as a type of nomadism because, in challenging gender structures, it is a subjectivity that resists assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representation. My analysis does not privilege a gender perspective. However, Braidotti’s theory remains vital to guide my reading because, in her proposal, nomads are subjects who relinquish all ideas, desires or nostalgias for fixity and express ‘the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes without an essential unity’.13 Braidotti, p. 57. By illuminating Kazbek under the light shed by Braidotti’s theory, it is possible to see why nomadism is essential for understanding the novel. That is to say, if we consider Kazbek’s characters as nomads in Braidotti’s terms, we are able to see that the novel relies on their refusal to stay put to resist the view that subjects ‘belong’ to fixed and territorially limited nations. Instead, the novel and its characters reflect an acute awareness of the non-fixity of boundaries and an intense willingness to transgress them.

To explore nomadic experiences, Kazbek features a travelling protagonist and a story about a journey. Written in the third person, the plot follows Kazbek, a young Ecuadorian author living in Spain who travels to Guayaquil to see Mr Peer, a German painter living in Ecuador. Once there, Mr Peer asks Kazbek to write 16 short texts for an illustrated small book he wants to publish. These short texts are to be combined with a series of drawings of insects that Mr Peer created, inspired by the eruption of the Pichincha volcano in 1999:

One of the most important aspects of the novel is that Kazbek’s life is marked by movement. In barely 117 pages, he wanders around different cities of Ecuador, Peru, Portugal, Tunisia, Spain and Switzerland. Moreover, he does not feel comfortable in his hometown. In one of his visits to Guayaquil, where his parents live, he finds himself reflecting: ‘que él ya no pertenece a ese sitio, que los suyos ya no son los suyos y que los ha abandonado’.15 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 42. Not even his name links him directly to Ecuador: Kazbek is the name of a mountain in the Caucasus, a dormant volcano whose summit is associated with a story resembling that of the Greek hero Prometheus. Caucasian mythology refers to Mount Kazbek as the place where the local version of Prometheus – Pkharmat for the Vainakh peoples, and Amirani for the Georgians – is chained in punishment for stealing fire from the gods. As it occurs in the Greek myth, Pkharmat/Amirani is physically restrained to a place where, every day, an eagle comes to devour his guts, which heal up at night only to be consumed once again the following morning.

In the same way Prometheus manages to escape his imprisonment, Kazbek also leaves a volcano of his own. In the novel, Ecuador is referred to as ‘el país atravesado por volcanes’, following the description of the nineteenth-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt who, in one of his travels in 1802, named what is now the Ecuadorian territory as ‘la avenida de los volcanes’.16 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 44. In a country that gained independence from Spain only two decades after Humboldt’s voyage (1822) and became a republic in 1830, the descriptions of the German explorer served republican elites to artificially promote the imagining of the newly created nation in relation to its unique geography. Regardless of how unlikely it is that most Ecuadorians have seen the 16 volcanoes in the Ecuadorian territory that make up Humboldt’s avenue, or even know their names, it is a powerful image to represent a nation. Its strength lies precisely in its capacity to evoke a country made up of fiery mountains, a country that might resemble those mountains. Although the image of the volcanic country remains alive today in the official tourist promotion of Ecuador abroad, Ecuadorians largely ignore that such an image was first conjured up internationally by a foreign explorer. By referring to Humboldt’s description, Kazbek highlights the artificiality of the relationship between a nation’s imagining and its territory. The metaphor of the volcanic land, the so-called ‘avenida de los volcanes’, is a way of representing Ecuador through its territory, and it is precisely from that representation that Kazbek escapes.

Kazbek rejects staying in one place of origin and turns his attention to a nomadic life because, as a writer, navigating borders is his condition of existence. Valencia’s work embodies Molloy’s argument that ‘la escritura surge precisamente del desplazamiento’ through Kazbek, for whom writing comes precisely from constant movement. To craft his first book, while he is still living in Guayaquil, he moves to a house in the mountains ‘en una primera muestra de la relación entre su escritura y el desarraigo’.17 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 28. From that moment on, and after realising that to write he needs to be journeying, Kazbek understands literature as his home. Kazbek builds the books he writes ‘como si fueran casas’ and, when the story begins, he is attempting to build his definitive home in his ‘Gran Novela’.18 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 26. Before setting out to complete Mr Peer’s assignment, Kazbek is unsuccessfully working on his ‘masterpiece’, an epic narrative that is supposed to follow in the footsteps of what he considers to be the pillars of his personal temple of fiction:

What saves Kazbek from the siren song inviting him to pursue an unwritable masterpiece is coming to terms with his nomadic condition. Braidotti argues that, as an intellectual style, nomadism consists not so much in being homeless as in being capable of recreating home everywhere.21 Braidotti, p. 45. In this light, as a writer, Kazbek not so much fails to write a grand novel as he needs to abandon it in favour of Mr Peer’s request: ‘un Libro de Pequeño Formato’. Contrary to his ‘Gran Novela’, a ‘Small-Format Book’ gives Kazbek the possibility to intertwine his writing with his traveling. The idea of writing ‘un libro corto que parece no agotarse nunca’ is about abandoning the pursuit of a grand narrative and, instead, going for ‘un libro que no tiene pretensión de dar el Gran Golpe Definitivo’.22 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 20. For Kazbek, this is a far better project. A pocketbook that can be carried around embodies that, for him, there is a necessary relationship between writing and displacement. If Kazbek reproduces his home in the books he writes, with a book thought to be portable, his home can be a mobile one. By carrying out Mr Peer’s assignment, he liberates himself from the idea of being a subject that ‘belongs’ to his homeland or to any fixed territory and, at the same time, he is able to fulfil his destiny as a writer.

Through Kazbek’s capacity to equate placement with displacement, the novel resonates with and helps us to understand contemporary Ecuador. Even if Valencia himself questions the idea of literature constructing ‘lo nacional’, his writing dialogues with the context of a nation where to belong means not necessarily to stay put.23 Valencia has expressed his scepticism about literature being created with nation-building purposes in mind, arguing that doing so compromises artistic value. In a 2017 interview, he says: ‘parecería que, cuando alguien dice que la novela no tiene que someterse a un sentido de construcción nacional, uno fuera como una especie de desinteresado de su rol de ciudadano en un determinado contexto social, pero siempre digo que es preferible que vayas a hacer una minga a que destruyas la capacidad artística de un texto’. Minga is a Kiwcha word used in Ecuador to describe an unpaid labour activity destined for social benefit. See Fausto Rivera, ‘Leonardo Valencia, el crítico practicante’, CartónPiedra, 28 July 2017 <https://www.cartonpiedra.com.ec/leonardo-valencia-el-critico-practicante> [accessed 9 August 2019]. Ecuadorian migrant communities, for instance, prove that it is possible to be part of the Ecuadorian society without having a physical presence in Ecuador. Hence, when Braidotti says that the nomadic consciousness ‘is an epistemological and political imperative for critical thought at the start of this millennium’, for the Ecuadorian case and Valencia’s writing, this could not be any truer.24 Braidotti, p. 22. In the early 2000s, the Feriado Bancario triggers the context Valencia’s fiction engages with and in which it is understood. As such, when Kazbek frustrates the relationship between territory and belonging, the connection of the novel with contemporary Ecuador stands out by reflecting the need to disassociate territory and belonging in a comprehensive view of the nation in the twenty-first century.

Following a similar line in which literature grounds the questioning of a stable and land-centred understanding of national experiences, the work of Gabriela Alemán adds to the imagining of an Ecuador where territory is not constitutive of what the nation is today. It presents us with borders that are there to be questioned and transgressed by literature, both from within fiction and from outside the margins of the text. That is to say, with Humo, Alemán navigates borders herself, as a writer, as well as through her characters. In doing so, the novel challenges territorial limitations and invites us to understand contemporary Ecuador in the broader context of Latin America, a region that also exists in a state of interconnectedness with itself and with the world beyond.

Humo tells the stories of two characters – Gabriela and Andrei – who meet in Asunción during the final years of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954–1989). The plot, however, begins in the early 2000s, with Gabriela returning to Paraguay after 17 years of absence. Gabriela is a name that deliberately connects the character with the writer, whose personal experience of living in Asunción underpins the novel. Gabriela, the character, returns to Asunción motivated by the passing of Andrei, who leaves behind an old notebook for her. In the notebook, written as some sort of travel log, she finds Andrei’s life story, starting from his migration from the former Yugoslavia to Argentina in the 1930s. From the moment Gabriela starts reading, the novel splits into two timelines that come together at the end. The first one follows Andrei’s peregrination from Europe to Latin America, and from Buenos Aires to the Paraguayan Chaco region, where he witnesses the Chaco War (1932–1935) and saves the life of a young lieutenant Stroessner. The second timeline takes place in contemporary Asunción, where Gabriela arrives at Andrei’s old house, receives the notebook, and learns that her friend saved Stroessner and, as such, unwillingly enabled the violence that provoked her absence from the country. By intertwining both stories, alternating between past and present in every other chapter, Alemán dissects Paraguay’s history, offering a critical look at historical figures and events as well as their interactions with fictional characters.

The borders Alemán navigates with Humo start outside the text. The fact that Alemán is an Ecuadorian writer who writes about Paraguay’s history cannot be overlooked. However, for her, there is a logical link between Ecuador and Paraguay. In her view, both countries share a similar not-so-well-known position in the literary field: ‘me di cuenta de Paraguay, al igual que Ecuador, posee una riqueza literaria que es muy poco conocida’.25 Damián de la Torre, ‘Gabriela Alemán presenta su reciente novela Humo’, La Hora, 12 March 2017 <https://lahora.com.ec/noticia/1102037956/gabriela-alemc3a1n-presenta-su-reciente-novela-e28098humoe28099> [accessed 9 August 2019]. Alemán’s claim, based on the larger visibility other countries enjoy in the nomenclature of Latin American literature, both in scholarly interest and circulation, places Ecuador and Paraguay in the position of minor literary producers. The interaction between the two in Humo calls attention to an understudied phenomenon in literary studies: the connections among cultures that inhabit minor spaces in the scholarship.26 The minoritarian position that Ecuador occupies when its literature is considered against the backdrop of a larger structure, that is, that of Latin American literature, is a key issue explored in the next chapter, where the place of contemporary Ecuadorian literature in the framework of World Literature is reviewed. Alemán’s acute awareness of the positionality from which she writes, from where contemporary Ecuadorian authors write, anticipates an exploration of globality from the angle of a minor literature that, in the scope of this project, is to be carefully considered from a historical perspective that analyses Ecuador’s absence from the most successful phenomenon of Latin American letters, that is, the Latin American Boom of the 1960s.

The contacts between nations that are considered ‘minor’ in the cultural field are less studied than those involving a major nation. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih argue that the gap left unattended here is motivated by a ‘politics of recognition’ that feeds the study of binary models of culture where the main goal is to explore the nuances of the relationship between North and South, or dominant and resistant nations, in that order.27 Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, ‘Thinking Through the Minor, Transnationally’, in Minor Transnationalism, ed. by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–23 (p. 7). The terminology they criticise proposes to see ‘dominant’ and ‘resistant’ as opposites: while the former is a powerful and universalising force that either erases or eventually absorbs cultural particularities, the latter refers precisely to that which resists erasure or absorption. Lionnet and Shih accurately point out that an approach such as this is heavily embedded in a politics of recognition that, even when attempting to focus on the minor, never loses track of the major. Alternatively, they call for the study of minor-to-minor networks that circumvent the major altogether. Humo embodies a connection of this type. Alemán links Ecuador and Paraguay together by being an Ecuadorian writer who takes Paraguayan history to make it the source material to create a fictional world of her own. In that choice, there is a questioning of internal borders in Latin America and an example of how these can be transgressed through writing. But, more importantly, there is also a call to see how Latin America is connected internally by countries that develop relationships that need to be explored to make sense of the interconnected present of the region and the world at large.

Humo shows us that Latin America exists in a state of interconnectedness that makes it limited to talk only about minor to minor or major to minor connections, as these are always multi-layered. That is, Latin American countries experience connections with multiple others at the same time, and to get a broader picture, one must see them as a complex network of reciprocal influence. In this sense, Alemán, an Ecuadorian writer, produces a fiction about the history of Paraguay in which a European migrant is the main character. Andrei’s storyline, which begins in Eastern Europe during the interwar period, has a vast impact on the Paraguay Gabriela experiences in her present. The impactful life of Andrei, marked by the navigation of Europe and Latin America’s borders, suggests that Latin American history is not made only by Latin Americans but is also shaped by the world beyond. At the same time, Humo escapes from the recurrent idea of Europe creating Latin America in a major to minor hierarchy by proposing that Latin America also plays a role in shaping the world.

The complex navigational strategies of Humo are put forward, first and foremost, in Andrei’s story. In the early 1930s, Andrei escapes the political and social pressures that resulted in World War II by migrating to Buenos Aires, where he befriends another two displaced Europeans: Ladislao Biró and Peter Palamazczuk. At this point, the story intersects with history as both Biró, an inventor, and Palamazczuk, a doctor, are real people who lived and worked in Buenos Aires in the 1930s. Andrei’s journey to the Chaco region starts with the latter leaving for the Argentine municipality of Isla del Cerrito, in the northern side of the country, to take charge of a boarding hospital that treats – and isolates – leprosy patients. Upon realising that the hospital needs a source of revenue to continue providing care, Andrei comes up with a plan: he will travel to the Paraguayan Chaco to gather a flock of ñandues, a type of bird endemic to Latin America commonly used for its feathers, skin and meat. Andrei’s goal is to bring the ñandues back to the hospital grounds, so Palamazczuk can start a small bird farm to sustain the patients’ living expenses and buy the medicines they need.

Andrei’s journey to Paraguay is marked by the impenetrability of the terrain and the multiple signs of the Chaco War. The conflict is portrayed not only as a war of two armies against each other but also as a battle of men against nature:

By saving him, Andrei becomes an accidental enabler of Stroessner’s regime, responsible for countless human rights violations in a time span of more than three decades.30 Stroessner’s regime conducted thousands of state-sanctioned extrajudicial executions, tortures, and politically motivated kidnappings. These human rights violations are well documented in the so-called Archivo del Terror, a 700,000-pages-long archive that offers a detailed account of the day-to-day proceedings of the security forces during Stroessner dictatorship. The documentation, which includes activity logs and espionage reports conducted by the police, gives harrowing details on the depths of the state terrorism in Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. It also accounts the country’s membership of Operación Cóndor, a collaborative network set up by the military regimes ruling Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. After it came to light in 1992, it provided compelling evidence to fuel legal proceedings against Stroessner and his allies, notably including the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Although both Stroessner and Pinochet died before being convicted for their crimes, the Archivo del Terror gave a sense of how much Paraguay – and Latin America – is scarred by their dictatorships. See R. Andrew Nickson, ‘Paraguay’s Archivo del Terror’, Latin American Research Review, 30.1 (1995), pp. 125–129 (p. 129). Unknowingly, he plays a vital role in the making of modern Paraguay and modern Latin America. Andrei is critical for understanding Alemán’s fiction as one that is concerned with the connections and reciprocal influences between Latin America and the world. In his analysis of two earlier novels by Gabriela Alemán – Body Time and Poso Wells – John Riofrio comments that, put together, these fictions reflect that our vision of Latin America is not complete if we consider it as limited inside its territorial frontiers. Riofrio’s view is that Alemán’s early novels tackle the nature of national borders to demonstrate how, ‘as an idea, Latin America is manifest in the lives of Latin Americans in Latin America, but the idea is incomplete without consideration of the Latin American lives developing beyond the geographical confines of the region’.31 Riofrio, p. 14. In my view, Humo proves that Alemán’s writing stands for more: just as Latin America would be lacking if the lives of Latin Americans abroad were unaccounted for, it would be incomplete as well should we take into consideration only Latin American lives. Through the role of Andrei, Humo lays bare that influences foreign to the region, be these in the form of people or traditions, must be factored in for the imagining of contemporary Latin America.

The contemporary Latin America that Humo presents is critically marked by encounters and dialogues. In the novel, these encounters are embodied by migration, fleshed out by Andrei’s story, but also by economic ties between Latin America and the world. The Chaco War, a conflict portrayed as a catalyst to Stroessner’s rise to power, is motivated by economic interests foreign to both countries involved in the conflict, Paraguay and Bolivia. The disputed zone, that is, the northern part of the Gran Chaco region, is firstly described as deserted wilderness where there is nothing to fight for:

Recognising minor countries in the making of world history allows a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions and connections that make the modern world where Latin America, Paraguay and Ecuador exist. It is a type of understanding that demands attention to the ways in which borders are navigated by things, people, ideas and institutions, and takes into consideration the impacts these multiple crossings have on the life of national communities and the history of nations. Navigation, in this case, means exchange from the inside to the outside as well as from the outside to the inside. Not only Humo, but also Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga and Kazbek, shed light on how contemporary Ecuadorian literature calls for the understanding of Ecuador within such frameworks. They are all novels that dislocate the nation from its geography.

In their questioning of the capacity of borders to confine the nation, the studied novels challenge the ways in which Ecuador has been – and is to this day – imagined. That is the case because, in the experience of most Ecuadorians who grew up in the country going through the national education system, geography lessons and the history of the country’s borders go hand-in-hand with the teachings of what Ecuador is. Until 1979, the subject Historia de los límites was a mandatory course in the national curriculum, from elementary schools to universities. From then on, its content has been integrated into compulsory civic lessons that aim to explain the nuances of Ecuadorian history and the meanings of ‘Ecuadoriannes’ in relation to the territory the country has occupied since Independence.35 Chiara Pagnotta, ‘La identidad nacional ecuatoriana entre límites externos y internos’, Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM, 16 (2008) <https://doi.org/10.4000/alhim.3061>. Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Humo and Kazbek defy this framework as they allow us to reflect on the incapacity of the territory to encapsulate what Ecuador becomes after the Feriado Bancario. By showing us that the navigation of boundaries marks contemporary Ecuador, the writing of Arcos, Valencia and Alemán invite us to reimagine Ecuador as a space where limits continue to exist but, nevertheless, they cannot continue to be considered inflexible containers of the nation.