ABSTRACT
The Venezuelan migration to Ecuador, primarily during 2018, establishes a political-cultural configuration that breaks with the discourse of the State, the media, and other narratives that took place in the country during the last ten years. In this sense, this chapter develops three aspects of the analysis of such a configuration. First, the analysis concerns with the discourse on the “Venezuelan migratory crisis” and how it contributed to the creation of an imaginary of “economic crisis” that would justify a neoliberal reform strengthened by the new Ecuadorian government (in office since 2017). With explicit references to “the crisis in Venezuela” and “the economic crisis in Ecuador,” the government of President Lenin Moreno created the conditions for a confluence between anti-immigrant hostility, xenophobia, and the rejection of “progressive populism” (“populismo progresista”). Then, the analysis focuses on how the anti-migrant and anti-progressive sentiment find diverse expressions in different sectors of the Ecuadorian society that reactivate colonial patterns embedded with particular configurations of class, race, and gender dynamics in the main cities of Ecuador. Thus, differentiation is established with the case of other recent migrations to Ecuador (among which Cuban and Spanish migration stand out). In the third part, this chapter focuses on the specific variants of the discourse on culture in Ecuador (i.e., multiculturalism, identity essentialism), not only to warn about its connections with the anti-migrant sentiment but also to offer historical references for intercultural societies.
