Adalberto Ortiz

Pablo Adalberto Ortiz Quiñones (1914–2002) was one of the most gifted writers in Ecuador and all of Latin America. Yet outside of Ecuador and amongst Afro-Hispanic literature scholars in the United States, little critical attention has been given to this pioneer whose multi-genre contributions spanned decades. In his writings, Ortiz explores some of the defining social issues in the Americas since the African and European encounters with the New World, including the notion of “race.” He articulates a complex process of affirming the ethnic while not denying the national. Consequently, miscegenation—a biological process—as well as acculturation are motifs in his writings, which explore the essence of what it means to be Ecuadorian. Ortiz does not dwell upon the so-called “race” question, the issue that causes such anxiety and hostility, overtly and covertly, in the United States. Rather, he explores, in depth, ethnicity, class, and caste in his earlier writings and evolves into an international writer while maintaining a strong black awareness. Adalberto Ortiz’s transcendence of victimization to a broader view of the world is indicative of the title of Marvin A. Lewis’ analysis —from margin to center—and reflective of the approach taken by many Afro-Hispanic writers. The dialectical nature of Ortiz’s writings makes his work particularly interesting and rewarding, as revealed in Adalberto Ortiz: From Margin to Center. In this book, Lewis examines the form and content relationships between works published during different literary periods and movements. Emphasis is placed on Ortiz’s transition from the local to the international in each genre, and the theoretical approach is “eclectic,” depending upon the exigencies of the texts. Ecocriticism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, and other methodologies addressing the environment, place/displacement, identity, and historiographic metafiction are fundamental to the Lewis’ readings of Ortiz’s prose and poetry.

In Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, Richard L. Jackson explores literary Americanism through writings of black Hispanic authors such as Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Quince Duncan, and Nelson Estupiñán Bass that in many ways provide a microcosm for the larger literature. Jackson traces the roots of Afro-Hispanic literature from the early twentieth-century Afrocriollo movement--the Harlem Renaissance of Latin America--to the fiction and criticism of black Latin Americans today. Black humanism arose from Afro-Hispanics' self-discovery of their own humanity and the realization that over the years they had become not only defenders of threatened cultures but also symbolic guardians of humanity. This humanist tradition had enabled writers such as Manuel Zapata Olivella to write of a Latin America "from below" the slave-ship deck and "from inside" the mind of Africa. Though many writers have adopted black literary models in their quest for a "poetry of sources, of fundamental human values," Jackson demonstrates that literature about blacks by blacks themselves is clearly separate from, yet instrumental to, these other works. Relating the vision of Latin American blacks not only to other Latin American writers but also to North American literary critics such as Eugene Goodheart and John Gardner, Jackson stresses the universal power of resisting oppression and injustice through the language of humanism.

Between 1890 and 1930, the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, experienced a liberal revolution and a worker's movement—key elements in shaping the Ecuadorian national identity. In this book, O. Hugo Benavides examines these and other pivotal features in shaping Guayaquilean identity and immigrant identity formation in general in transnational communities such as those found in New York City. Turn-of-the-century Ecuador witnessed an intriguing combination of transformations: the formation of a national citizenship; extension of the popular vote to members of a traditional underclass of Indians and those of African descent; provisions for union organizing while entering into world market capitalist relations; and a separation of church and state that led to the legalization of secular divorces. Assessing how these phenomena created a unique cultural history for Guayaquileans, Benavides reveals not only a specific cultural history but also a process of developing ethnic attachment in general. He also incorporates a study of works by Medardo Angel Silva, the Afro-Ecuadorian poet whose singular literature embodies the effects of Modernism's arrival in a locale steeped in contradictions of race, class, and sexuality. Also comprising one of the first case studies of Raymond Williams's hypothesis on the relationship between structures of feeling and hegemony, this is an illuminating illustration of the powerful relationships between historically informed memories and contemporary national life.

According to some chronicles of the Spanish Conquest, the violent arrival of the Conquerors to the Andes in the sixteenth century led to sex-dissident people who lived outside the dominant European cisheteropatriarchal model being burned at the stake. This act burned more than the flesh; it also charred practices, ways of life, and textualities, leaving an emptiness and a trauma that would mark the future literatures of the Andean region. This book cannot repair those pre-sodomite texts and bodies. It seeks instead to reconsider the value of the ash, a metaphor that allows for a critical and contradictory reading of sexual dissidences in the Andean region in the twentieth century, beyond both multiculturalism and the wake of a globalized LGBTI movement. Through a comparative analysis, and drawing on theoretical perspectives such as anticoloniality, feminisms, and cuir (rather than queer) theories, the book aims to understand the value of a series of complex texts in which dissident subjectivities, practices, and desires help to broaden the understanding of the Andean. Winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize, the book was praised by the jury for the paradoxical and provocative way that it struggles against the abyss of past destruction and reflects on the contribution of the Global South to the often uniformist thinking around the body and its intersections.

"Winner of the first prize for novels at the Ecuadorian Concurso Nacional in 1942, Juyungo tells of the tough daily survival of the Afro-Hispanic inhabitants of Ecuador's Esmeralda coast. Ascensión Lastre - known as Juyungo - is a hunter, a woodsman, and a friend of the oppressed Indians of the forest. This tale of his journey from racism to class awareness has won acclaim as both a social statement and a literary achievement."--Goodreads

Describes the country of Ecuador, including its history, geography, economy, and the cultures of its people.