UCLA

My dissertation explores novels about the port city that reflect attitudes about liberalism in Ecuador between 1855 and 1944. Traditionally, the Ecuadorian novel has been primarily studied focusing on indigenismo, the literary representation of the indigenous peoples of the nation in novels set in the Andes. My study offers a new and complementary dimension of the Ecuadorian novel by privileging maritime spaces, paying special attention to the port city, and giving pride of place to the connections of what I call "the amphibious space" (a space that connects water with earth) to modernization, the nation, the global market, and especially liberalism, as it is understood in Latin American intellectual and political history.

The selected works take stances regarding liberalism, and in turn expose continental and regional struggles. Thus, while one of my case studies establishes a socially conscious vision defending liberalism, another case study critiques liberalism from a conservative standpoint, and lastly, a third case study condemns liberalism from a progressive perspective, inspired by Marxism. Each chapter in this dissertation underscores links between specific historical, topographical, and economic contexts, and significant aspects of Ecuadorian literature and cultural studies.

In the first chapter, I set up the theoretical, historical, and literary frameworks of the dissertation. First, it explains in detail the maritime and urban concepts relevant to a terraqueous approach in which the port city is the axis of an amphibious territory that includes rivers, estuaries, ocean, and pertinent urban spaces. Second, it provides a historical framework of the port city's development, and third, it includes a brief history of the novel in Ecuador. In the second chapter, I argue that Manuel Bilbao Barquín's realist romantic novel, El pirata del Guayas, exposes continental tensions between liberals and conservatives while advocating for a political program that is clearly on the side of the liberals. In the third chapter, I argue that Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno's proto-modernist novel, Titania, is a reactionary response to end-of-the-century liberalism. Finally, in the fourth and fifth chapters, I argue that Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco's social realist novels, El muelle and Las tres ratas, are premised on a Marxist critique of liberalism and end up proposing a socialist new beginning. All of the political tensions are dependent on novels that address, in one way or another, what I call "amphibious spaces," and my literary analysis explores these spaces.