In Their Own Words: Women Authors in Ecuadorian Literature
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Authors
O'Connor, Megan
Issue Date
1999
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
For an outsider, perhaps the South American country of Ecuador is best
experienced on an old bus laden with luggage and pineapples careening on rock roads
around volcanoes, whizzing through backyards of steamy jungle pueblos, and dodging
traffic in the polluted and sunny streets of Quito. Such drastic diversity cramped in such
a small space has created some necessarily diverse cultures and methods of surviving.
The nature, politics, and peoples of the Andes are a fascinating but volatile combination
jostling around in a small space. There are bound to be occasional explosions. This can
be seen in the country's art, which displays the results of the crash and bang of struggling
components. Perhaps the volcano Pichincha, which looms over the city of Quito,
possibly erupting at any time, has added a sense of urgency that surges through the
outwardly placid lifestyle of the Quiteiios; one of the places this urgency breaks through
is in the country's art.
The core of artists in Ecuador today is small and for the most part unknown by
the society at large, yet they are a force in the naming and shaping of Ecuador; they are
the note-takers, the watchers, the revealers of past and present ugliness, the memories of
part and present beauty, and the predictors of the future. They are the visionaries. It is
this power of artists to be a voice and to create an identity that makes them such a vital
and appealing means for furthering the cause of oppressed peoples. Since the Spanish
Conquest of the 1500s, tension has existed between the Spanish and the indigenous
cultures. People of Spanish descent have written much of the literature of the three
hundred years following The Conquest, yet the formality of European forms of
expression conflicted with the voice of the majority of the country's inhabitants. The
indigenous people could not shed the languages, songs, myths and cultures which had
been given to them by their ancestors. Eventually, the strength of the indigenous culture
won. Beginning in the late 19th century, writers of mixed Spanish and indigenous
ancestry, like Jorge lcaza, began returning to the myths and oral story-telling techniques
of the indigenous cultures and incorporating them into modem literature. In lcaza's
Huasipungi, he rebels against the tradition of Spanish literature in Ecuador and uses
colloquial speech and lower class characters to display the abuse of the indigenous in
Spanish haciendas.
Description
61 p.
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