ABSTRACT
The Oriente, Ecuador’s vast Amazonian frontier lying to the east of the Andes (see Figure 10.1), received minimal attention from the state for nearly a century after Ecuador’s independence in 1830. Despite this neglect, by the end of the nineteenth century the Oriente occupied an important place in Ecuadorian politics and national discourse. A component of this was the “elaboration of a national imaginary about the Oriente,” a key part of the “symbolic incorporation [of the Oriente] to the national State” (Esvertit 2008, 264). The continuation of this process in the twentieth century resulted in the construction of Ecuador’s Amazonian frontier as a national object of desire. As such, the region was both an ideological tool for Ecuadorian state-makers who argued for greater attention to be paid to the region, and a patriotic yardstick to measure Ecuador’s international prestige. These discourses prepared the region in the minds of citizens for its use as a stage on which Ecuadorian history would unfold. This creation of “stage space,” as described by historian Raymond Craib, extends the reach of the state and nation; it allows for certain actions and kinds of agency and permits the operation of “science, statecraft, and political economy” (Craib 2004, 5–6). As the anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor has written, the Oriente’s contribution to the national economy was sporadic until the middle of the twentieth century. However, waves of immigration to the region beginning in early the twentieth century eventually led to the “definitive and irreversible” incorporation of the region and the indigenous people who lived there (Taylor 1994, 60). The elaboration of “stage space” was a prerequisite for this development, in this author’s view. Jean-Paul Deler has described how Ecuador came to control its territory by elaborating the “rules of the game” between different regions and socioeconomic groups (Deler 2007, 13). For Deler, the Oriente remained marginal for much of the republican period due to the region’s lack of an “effective economic interest” (Deler 2007, 175). However, as this chapter argues, Ecuador’s Amazon was anything but marginal in cultural and nationalist terms. A significant portion of the Oriente’s history, then, took place not inside the Amazonian region itself, but in the press and other publications that were available to citizens in Ecuador’s capital of Quito and other principal cities. These publications modified the “national imaginary” about the Oriente to more fully include the Ecuadorian citizens who extended the nation to the Amazon. Also important was the intensified popularization of the Oriente as a component of civic pride and patriotism, thanks to its increasing prominence in national publications and in public celebration. The Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano (Day of the Ecuadorian Oriente) in 1939 and subsequent years offered a condensed view of the Amazon’s symbolic incorporation into the national imaginary and furthered its construction as a national object of desire. Cultural identities are in a constant state of production and are never an “accomplished fact,” as Stuart Hall has stated (Hall 1990, 222). Ecuadorian national identity therefore had to be produced over the course of the nation’s existence; the incorporation of the Amazonian frontier into this cultural identity has a history of its own. As was true for other South American republics, such as Colombia, the frontier occupied an important position in political discourse that shaped frontier policy (Rausch 1993; Rausch 1999). This chapter calls attention to the important role that frontiers play in a nation’s history not just because of the social and political developments in the frontier space, but also because of the cultural importance of the frontier as an object of desire that exists throughout the nation.
