The Ecuador Reader ― History, Culture, Politics

The voices and creations of Ecuadorian politicians, writers, artists, scholars, activists, and journalists fill theReader, from Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, the nation’s ultimate populist and five-time president, to Pancho Jaime, a political satirist; from Julio Jaramillo, a popular twentieth-century singer, to anonymous indigenous women artists who produced ceramics in the 1500s; and from the poems of Afro-Ecuadorians, to the fiction of the vanguardist Pablo Palacio, to a recipe for traditional Quiteno-style shrimp. TheReader includes an interview with Nina Pacari, the first indigenous woman elected to Ecuador’s national assembly, and a reflection on how to balance tourism with the protection of the Galapagos Islands’ magnificent ecosystem. Complementing selections by Ecuadorians, many never published in English, are samples of some of the best writing on Ecuador by outsiders, including an account of how an indigenous group with non-Inca origins came to see themselves as definitively Incan, an exploration of the fascination with the Andes from the 1700s to the present, chronicles of the less-than-exemplary behavior of U.S. corporations in Ecuador, an examination of Ecuadorians’ overseas migration, and a look at the controversy surrounding the selection of the first black Miss Ecuador.

Carlos de la Torre is Director of the doctoral program in and Chair of Political Studies at FLACSO (La Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Quito, Ecuador. He is the author ofPopulist Seduction in Latin America: The Ecuadorian Experience and several books in Spanish, includingAfroquitenos: Ciudadania y Racismo.

Steve Striffler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. He is the author ofIn the Shadows of State and Capital: the United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995 and a coeditor ofBanana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, both also published by Duke University Press.