Hybridity as a challenge

The fictions I study here are in conversation with the notion of the hybridisation of cultures that Néstor García Canclini sees as a historically constitutive component of Latin American nations. For Canclini, the region is the result of ‘la sedimentación, yuxtaposición y entrecruzamiento de tradiciones indígenas (sobre todo en las áreas mesoamericana y andina), del hispanismo colonial católico y de las acciones políticas, educativas y comunicacionales modernas’.1 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México: Grijalbo, 1990), p. 71. By placing the focus on the encounters of different elements that make the fabric of Latin America, Canclini argues that countries such as Ecuador need to be thought of as hybrid. Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Kazbek and Humo explore the facets of that hybridity. In that exploration, I argue, these novels invite us to focus on how interactions among ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ symbols and traditions make up the everyday life of Ecuadorian society and that, as such, contemporary analyses of the Ecuadorian nation must reject exclusivist arguments of national uniqueness. Thereby, more than proposing that mixture is something intimately linked to the nuances of contemporary Ecuador – for it is not, as it has been there from the beginning of the country’s colonial and republican history – these novels counter the normative voice of the literary tradition discussed in the first chapter.

The most direct challenge to the Ecuadorian literary tradition in my selection is embodied by Arcos’ novel. Through its main character, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga contests the premises about identity put forward by Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo. The plot revolves around twenty-first century Andrés Chiliquinga reading about the exploits of his ancestor, Huasipungo’s Andrés Chiliquinga, through Icaza’s writing. In the process of reading, Andrés realises that the fiction is, at the same time, true and false. The ‘true’ side of Huasipungo, declares Andrés, is the suffering of his ancestors under the rule of mestizo and white masters. The aspect he finds less truthful and racist is the bestialising portrayal of indigeneity that transpires throughout the novel. That is to say, he rejects the descriptions Icaza makes of indigenous people, for he argues that the author – in the role of the narrator’s voice – portrays indigenous’ behaviours as primitive, barbaric, ignorant, and superstitious. Andrés is able to perceive traces of the ancestral knowledge of his forefathers permeating through the text, even when this remains obscured by the biased mestizo eye. For instance, when Andrés learns that his tocayo hurts his leg with a machete while working in the field and is later treated by a yachag (an indigenous healer) who cures the badly infected wound to save his life, he bitterly notes the derogative comments made by the narrator (whom he understands to be Icaza himself) about the healing process:

One could argue that Arcos is only fleshing out one of the main criticisms Huasipungo has received since its publication: that it is not a story of indigenous people solely, but the story of indigenous people as seen and enunciated by white men. Arcos is aware of the alleged faults of Icaza’s novel and how these have been discussed in academia, a world he is familiar with: not only has he worked in universities, but he has also published several essays on Ecuadorian literature. That is to say, he is part of a lettered tradition that has helped to produce – or to challenge – national discourses based on literary scholarship. In that sense, certainly, Arcos’ fiction embodies Huasipungo’s critiques; but, more importantly, it also expands them. To do so, the novel confronts Andrés Chiliquinga with the global dimension of New York City, where – rather than portraying a ‘pure’ version of Ecuadorian indigeneity – Andrés becomes reflective of mixtures and fluidity. As an Otavalo, he is part of a community that is constantly interacting with other communities beyond the frontiers of their territory. In those interactions, they transform themselves. That is to say, they integrate into their lives symbols and traditions taken from other communities in a process of hybridisation that – importantly – does not mean the disappearance of their own national symbols and traditions. Instead, it means that they strategically preserve their most valued cultural elements while, at the same time, taking elements from other cultures through appropriations and combinations. Andrés projects his hybridity from the beginning of the story, when he arrives at one of New York’s airports to meet his transfer driver: ‘¡Ah! Eras vos. – Sonó a puro despecho al verme runa, indio, con poncho, guango y sombrero. Hasta alpargatas llevé a ese viaje, en lugar de los Reebok, que eran nuevitos. Años que no me ponía alpargatas. Me dijeron que tenía que vestir tradicional, porque íbamos representando a nuestros pueblos.’4 Arcos, p. 12. This excerpt implies that Andrés is used to managing other’s expectations by means of his outfit, ‘dressing up’ or ‘dressing down’ as an Otavalo man depending on the case. In his daily life, he does not regularly wear alpargatas but common Reebok trainers. However, not because of that can it be said that he has forgotten his traditional Otavalo outfit and is usually dressed like a non-Otavalo. It is instead a mixture of both: perhaps he wears Reebok trainers daily but, in the same way, he also wears his ‘guango’ (a specific way to braid his hair that is common among men and women in the Otavalo community). That is to say, every day he uses his hair as a way to express belonging to a particular community. This portrayal shows the coexistence of what is national/traditional with what is global/foreign in one character, who can fluidly cross from one dimension to the other depending on the context; or rather, inhabit both simultaneously.

As I have expressed before, Arcos does not speak for Ecuadorian indigeneity in Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga. Nevertheless, his work’s determination on remarking that indigenous people can and do cross borders is a critical enterprise in a country where dominant sectors of the white mestizo society continue to reject indigenous presence in some urban spaces while arguing that they should remain limited to certain areas of the country. The previously mentioned rebellion of October 2019 provides a compelling example: reacting to the possibility of indigenous demonstrators entering Guayaquil, the former mayor of Ecuador’s economic capital – a conservative politician that for many years headed the Partido Social Cristiano – warned them in a TV interview: ‘[a esos indígenas] recomiéndeles que se queden en el paramo’.5 Daniel Romero, ‘Jaime Nebot dice que mensaje sobre páramo “fue sacado de contexto”’, El Comercio, 21 October 2019 <https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/politica/nebot-indigenas-paramo-contexto-disculpas.html> [accessed 11 February 2022]. Jaime Nebot Saadi later apologised for his racist statement. Yet, his declaration, publicly and widely broadcast in national TV, makes visible the problematic persistence of the idea that indigenous people in Ecuador ‘belong’ to a particular territory distant from white mestizo-dominated environments. Arcos’ novel, a mestizo work of fiction about an indigenous character for a presumably non-indigenous readership, rejects that belief by stressing mixture in his protagonist.

Andrés’ tendency towards mixture is emphasised in the language he uses to tell his memoirs. In this case, language plays a role because – as the Argentine writer Andrés Neuman points out – ‘en toda problemática de identidad o de cultura, la lengua desempeña un papel escencial’.6 Joëlle Lints, ‘Andrés Neuman: entre géneros y países, cómo viajar sin ver’, in Transnacionalismo e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico, ed. by Reindert Dhondt and Dagmar Vandebosch (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 239–255 (p. 245). Andrés moves freely from Kichwa to Spanish to English, resisting the link between his written words and one specific nation. He mixes the three languages to show a hybrid subject in which English, the lingua franca of globalisation, Spanish, the language of the conquest and colonisation of Hispanic America and the majority language of Ecuador, and Kichwa, a marginalised and silenced language that embodies a past prior to the creation of Latin American nation-states, coexist in the present.7 The poetry of the Chilean author Cecilia Vicuña uses a similar process in which she ‘weaves’ together English, Spanish and Quechua. See Silvia Goldman, ‘Beyond Borders: Language and Postnational Identity in Cecilia Vicuña’s i tu’, in Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature, ed. by Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), pp. 89–108 (p. 93). While his narration is written in Spanish, in New York, Andrés eats hot dogs, visits the desk and shops in the grocery. He describes these actions naturally, the same way he talks about his taita (father) or remembers the guaguas (children) and runas (indigenous people) of his community, where there are young punk and metal musicians who are criticised for not playing traditional Andean music.

The interchangeability of language in Andrés’ memoirs responds to one function of multilingualism in literature: to contribute to unite heterogeneous elements.8 An Van Hecke, ‘Los retos de la frontera: los ensayos híbridos y multilingües de Guillermo Gómez-Peña’, in Transnacionalismo e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico, ed. by Reindert Dhondt and Dagmar Vandebosch (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 186–200 (p. 189). In this case, the heterogeneous elements united by language are several. It is not simply Andrés’ indigeneity mixed with the European origin of Spanish. To this already mixed reality where Kichwa interacts with Spanish – and Kichwa words such as ñano (brother) are used every day in the mishu Ecuadorian society – Arcos adds another layer, that of English, being spoken by an indigenous character. Andrés uses the three languages, thereby uniting multiple heterogeneities in one character, who reveals that his mixture comes from his national tradition as much as from his interactions with the world beyond the nation.

Andrés crosses borders that divide languages according to nationalities but, perhaps more significantly, he also traverses frontiers assigned to indigeneity. In Ecuador, by 2010, less than 2% of the country’s population spoke English, prompting those who did to be considered part of an ‘elite’.9 British Council, ‘English in Ecuador. An Examination of Policy, Perception and Influencing Factors’, British Council, 2015 <https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/English%20in%20Ecuador.pdf> [accessed 19 February 2019]. However, the sentiment of belonging to ‘elites’, be these economic or cultural, is predominantly reserved for whites and mestizos like María Clara, Andrés’ classmate in Columbia. After all, Ecuadorian indigenous communities are mostly poorer than any other ethnic group in the country: a report by the World Bank estimates that, considering two similar households, ‘the probability of being poor increases by 13 per cent and the probability of being extremely poor by 15.5 per cent if the household head belongs to an indigenous group’.10 World Bank, ‘Indigenous Latin America in the Twenty-First Century’, The World Bank, 2015 <http://documentos.bancomundial.org/curated/es/145891467991974540/pdf/98544-REVISED-WP-P148348-Box394854B-PUBLIC-Indigenous-Latin-America.pdf> [accessed 19 February 2019]. Similarly, only a minimal percentage of the Ecuadorian indigenous population has a university degree or a higher education level qualification, and even fewer have gone on to postgraduate studies.11 José Castellano, Efstathios Stefos and Lisa Williams, ‘The Educational and Social Profile of the Indigenous People of Ecuador: A Multidimensional Analysis’, Review of European Studies, 9.1 (2017), pp. 137–147 (p. 146). By incorporating English into his speech, Andrés steps into the so-called ‘elite’ of Ecuadorian English speakers. Moreover, he surpasses most by being trilingual. Thereby, he challenges the negative statistics and forces us to see him as an indigenous character who cannot be contained within the barriers that are supposed to surround indigenous people.

In Andrés’ transgressions, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga rejects the construction of indigeneity as a perfectly homogeneous subjectivity, which is presented as a construct derived from the expectations of non-indigenous people. These external pressures are noted and critiqued in the ways in which Andrés is expected to ‘represent’ his people during his visit to New York. To do so, it is implied, he must dress as one of them, that is to say, to be perfectly distinguishable from other students at Columbia. However, precisely for that reason, he is ridiculed by another Otavalo living in New York:

Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga proposes an alternative way to see the interactions that occur in globalised contexts, crucially factoring in the notion of exchange as a way of hybridisation. In so far as there is exchange – as Andrés embodies in his body and in his language – local and national traditions will not cease to exist in globalisation, even if transformed, as Canclini notes when he argues that ‘tenemos que preocuparnos menos por lo que se extingue que por lo que se transforma’.15 García Canclini, p. 17. Transformations and how these are expressed through language is what Andrei, one of the main characters of Humo, finds in his voyage through the Chaco region, where he encounters a number of Guaraní speakers. Excluded from their conversations, Andrei is intrigued by the sound of Guaraní words and asks one of his companions for an explanation:

But the way in which Humo emphasises that persistence through time of the Guaraní language goes beyond the official status or the number of speakers in contemporary Paraguay. Alemán’s novel illustrates that the major manner in which the Guaraní language survives lies precisely in the place it holds within the Spanish language. What I mean here is directly related to Andrew Stewart’s analysis and what he names the ‘Spanish-Guaraní Language continuum’. Stewart claims that the officially recognised Paraguayan bilingual status stratifies the linguistic performance of speakers, who are idealised as able to dominate both languages equally. In this context, he argues, language planning efforts – that take place to guarantee the education of the Guaraní language across the country – tend to champion a ‘purist’ ideal for both of Paraguay’s official languages. They advocate for keeping the two languages structurally separated, that is, ‘pure’. However, the advocacy for linguistic purity stands in stark contrast with reality; ‘that is, that the vast majority of bilingual Paraguayans use language that inhabits the space in-between their two languages’.18 Andrew Stewart, ‘Jopara and the Spanish-Guarani Language Continuum in Paraguay: Considerations in Linguistics, Education, and Literature’, in Guarani Linguistics in the 21st Century, ed. by Bruno Estigarribia and Justin Pinta (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 379–417 (p. 379). Mutatis mutandis, the tongue of men has come to gain space within the tongue of lords by force of mixture.

Humo reflects the mixed linguistic reality that Stewart points to. Gabriela’s dialogues with the people from Asunción depict a Spanish that, even when it preserves enough ‘neutrality’ to be understood by non-Paraguayan readers, is deeply marked by its Guaraní influence. In Alemán’s novel, the ‘tongue of men’ infiltrates the ‘tongue of lords’ spoken in Paraguay’s capital not only through specific words – like the use of tembo as an adjective to insult somebody – but also by accommodating itself into the forms of the latter, as reflected in a dialogue Gabriela has with an old acquaintance in Asunción:

But the challenge to Icaza’s generation in Humo exceeds its reflections on language. The hybridity the novel showcases is entrenched in its capacity to openly interact with multiple and different traditions. That is, Humo follows on the steps of well-established Latin American literary traditions while it makes them interact with supposedly non-Latin American counterparts. Alternating its action between past and present, Alemán’s novel is a gothic fiction as much as a novela del dictador that refers back to other motifs that have historically populated Latin American fictions. As such, it stands out as a text in which there is no single privileged affiliation; rather, there is a chorus of divergent voices in dialogue to tell of the many borrowings and dialogues present in the context where contemporary Latin American literature emerges and develops.

Dictatorship novels – that is, novels that account for the human and cultural meanings of dictatorships – are a nomenclature on their own in the history of Latin American literature, as Raymond Williams notes after revising the long history of novels in the region dealing with military regimes.22 Raymond L. Williams, The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 166. Within the novela del dictador category, Williams counts fictions centred on the figure of a particular dictator – including Gabriel García Marquez’s El otoño del Patriarca (1975) and Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo, el supremo (1974) – but also narratives about societies under the grip of authoritarian figures such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral (1969). Humo could well be included in this cluster as it portrays a Paraguay shaped by the totalitarian power of Alfredo Stroessner and its legacies:

The dialogue Humo sets up is marked by an interaction between what is traditionally considered Latin American and what is not, as the gothic remains a literary tradition mostly absent from Latin America literary studies.25 For a discussion of how World Literature can be connected with gothic themes in Gabriela Alemán’s stories, particularly in relation to La muerte silba un blues (2014), her homage to the Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco, see Luis A. Medina Cordova, ‘The War of the Worlds May Well Start in Latin America’, Journal of World Literature, 6.3 (2021), pp. 414–429. In their analysis of the gothic in Latin American literature, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz argue that, too often, gothic literature is simplistically associated only with the shadows of European and North American rationalism. Because of these associations, that critically stress issues of belonging and membership to non-Latin American categories of writing, Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz argue that in Latin America, discussions about identity and nationhood have excluded readings of Latin American works in gothic register. There is a concern that identifying texts as gothic could be a sign of cultural colonialism. For that reason, they advocate, there is a predilection among critics for the ‘realist and/or historical novel, which becomes a nationalist representation of Latin American reality free of outside (colonising) influences’.26 Inés Ordiz and Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, ‘Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Persistence of the Gothic’, in Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, ed. by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1–13 (p. 4). In this light, it has been widely understood that historical novels are good examples of Latin American writing while gothic novels are not. The latter might belong to a genre born in and owned by European or North American traditions, championed by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe.

Alemán’s work demonstrates that there is no need for an opposition, that a novel can refer to the gothic while narrating local Latin American history. Gothic elements surface prominently in Gabriela’s story. According to Fred Botting’s extensive study on the genre, in gothic narrative gloomy atmospheres signal ‘the disturbing return of pasts upon presents’ and evoke emotions of terror.27 Fred Botting, Gothic (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. Upon Gabriela’s arrival, Asunción is surrounded by an atmosphere of this kind, deserted, covered in fog and enduring unusually cold weather. But more than this urban image, it is the critical component of a terrifying past returning to haunt the present and its inhabitants that signals the gothic in Humo. Such a harrowing past is described ‘como una melaza que se desparrama indiferente sobre todo’.28 Alemán, p. 43. Of course, it is a past marked by the dictatorship: ‘en ese entonces la realidad era un enorme letrero de luces estroboscópicas que gritaba Stroessner y era imposible no cruzarse con ella’.29 Alemán, p. 43. In the Paraguay Alemán describes, time stopped with the 35-year rule of the so-called Stronato. This is made evident by a key scene when Gabriela finds a man who, after witnessing his father’s abduction, wanders in the streets reciting dates of presidential terms in Paraguay, from Independence to 1954, the year in which Stroessner rose to power. Puzzled because the man’s recollection stops in the mid-twentieth century, Gabriela asks what presidential terms followed 1954. Her question is met with a fatalistic answer: ‘da igual, hasta ahora sigue siendo Stroessner’.30 Alemán, p. 172.

In Gabriela’s present, the spectre of the past manifests itself through multiple forms, commencing with the house where she arrives at the beginning of the plot. Her arrival at Andrei’s old home – where she was summoned to collect the notebook he left for her – signals the entering of what Botting refers to as the major locus of Gothic plots: the old house. As both building and representation of family line, the decaying old house, with its dark interiors, harrowing sounds and closed doors, becomes the site where fears and anxieties return in the present.31 Botting, p. 3. For Gabriela, Andrei’s house is exactly that place: a nightmarish two-storey building with creaky wooden floors and damp ceilings that is always covered by cold and darkness. From the moment of her arrival, she feels mysterious presences in the house that her host – Andrei’s youngest son, Pablo – does not want to talk about. When Pablo explains the house rules, he remarks that Gabriela does not need to ask for permission to do anything, but he clarifies: ‘solo te pido que no andes por aquí abajo’.32 Alemán, p. 15. Gabriela stays on the first floor, secluded from whatever happens downstairs, where she recurrently hears disturbing crawling noises: ‘mientras desciende por el corredor escucha unas patas que se deslizan con rapidez por el suelo de abajo; es un sonido perturbador, pero no trata de buscar su procedencia’.33 Alemán, p. 17.

The anxiety of not knowing what happens downstairs builds on the dread Gabriela faces on her return to Asunción, a place that scarred her for life. The novel reveals that Gabriela left Paraguay after an assault she suffered on the capital city’s streets during Stroessner’s time:

Gabriela is not possessed by hatred or desire for revenge. However, she is also one of the recurrent figures of gothic fiction. Gabriela is herself a ghost of the past: in the final lines of the novel, the narrator reveals that she was, in fact, killed by the men who attacked her nearly two decades ago before the start of the plot. After learning the truth behind Andrei’s death – that is, that he committed suicide when he was no longer able to cope with acknowledging his role in aiding Stroessner – Gabriela takes a deep look at Asunción’s night sky from her window in Andrei’s house and remembers that she does not belong to the world of the living anymore:

Alemán’s awareness of writing from a specific place of enunciation, Latin America, does not mean that she is simplistically showcasing the uniqueness of the region or adhering in her work unproblematically to the lettered tradition of the region. On the contrary – just as she refers to Rulfo’s novel but places a female protagonist as an alternative to the canonically male world of Pedro Páramo – Humo both engages with and questions the Latin American literary tradition. Her use of gothic elements in a novel that builds on the history of the region and its literary motifs contributes to this purpose. We are to see Humo not only as a gothic tale or a novela del dictador, but rather as a mixture that is both at once. Valencia’s Kazbek has a fitting expression to describe this duality: tensioning the cord. That is, stretching the meaning of belonging, expanding it to shed light on how writers blur boundaries without burning bridges.

Valencia’s novel introduces the idea of ‘tensioning the cord’ when Kazbek realises that he is, at once, Ecuadorian and foreign to Ecuador. He does so when he starts writing about Mr Peer’s illustrations as if he were writing about himself: ‘Él mismo es una larva que debe apresurarse a salir para no estar inmóvil […] Se asusta: habla de sí mismo como si fuera uno más de los bichos’.40 Valencia, Kazbek, p. 94. Mr Peer’s bichos are essential for understanding Kazbek’s relationship with Ecuador as one characterised by an ambivalence between leaving and not leaving entirely. In the texts Kazbek writes to describe them, his own experience as a traveller comes to the surface:

As a novel, Kazbek frames itself in the state of interconnectedness that characterises twenty-first century Ecuador and, as such, engages with the cultural shifts that followed the Feriado Bancario. Its story resonates with the context born out of the unprecedented migration phenomenon precipitated by the crisis. Today, most of the Ecuadorians who fled the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s have long settled in – and often become citizens of – other nations. However, these Ecuadorian migrants with Spanish, Italian or American residences or passports have often done what Diego Falconí calls ‘irse a volver’. Falconí uses this Ecuadorian idiom to describe a paradox in which ‘la acción de marcharse es a la vez la acción de regresar, como si el irse no fuese posible del todo, pues la persona que se ha marchado a partido a medias’.43 Falconí, p. 8. He argues that Ecuadorian migrants, even after settling abroad, remain vitally linked to their home country and many of them still dream of going back after they retire. Although this desire to return resonates with the experience of exiled writers who, after escaping from the dictatorships that plagued the region in the twentieth century longed for homecoming, it is far from similar: political persecution might end when a regime changes, but economic failure transcends who is in power. The ambivalence in which a person who has left home dreams of coming back without knowing if it will ever be possible and therefore is ultimately unable to leave entirely is echoed by Kazbek, whose main character is also ‘here and there’. Valencia does not try to reflect on the migrant experience, yet his writing tensions the notion of belonging in a country critically marked by migration. Considered in context, Kazbek enables us to think of Ecuador as a nation that is also here and there.

The combinations of multiple categories into single novels, and of seemingly exclusive traits into single characters, signal the involvement of Valencia, Arcos and Alemán in the complex hybrid realities where they create their fictions. Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Humo and Kazbek expose the mixture of languages, traits and traditions that takes place every day in Ecuadorian society. In doing so, that is, in showing us scenarios where labels and categorisations are regularly exceeded, they form a body of work that invites us to revaluate the ways in which literature reimagines the Ecuadorian nation. Far from the ideals of uniqueness and territory, the work of the authors studied here articulates an Ecuador where the tags of local and national as well as foreign and global are in permanent dialogue with each other. In this context, with exchange signifying hybridity, the Ecuadorian nation is reimagined to be connected to what Jesús Martín Barbero calls ‘las mutaciones perceptivas y expresivas del presente’.44 Barbero, p. 374. That is, connected to the migrations, mobility, networks and flows that make up the fabric of contemporary Ecuador, Latin America and the broader world in which contemporary Ecuadorian literature develops and helps us to understand.