The Song of the National Soul: Ecuadorian Pasillo in the

Twentieth Century

Ketty Wong

Latin American Music Review, Volume 32, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2011,

pp. 59-87 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lat.2011.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/448417

[ Access provided at 23 May 2022 23:46 GMT from University of Toronto Library ]
 KETTY WON G

The Song of the National Soul:

Ecuadorian Pasillo in the Twentieth Century

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A BSTR AC T: This article examines the social history of the Ecuadorian pasillo and its rise, de-
cline, and pervasiveness as a musical symbol of the Ecuadorian national identity. It also explores
the pasillo in relation to a widespread belief among Ecuadorians that being “sentimental” is a
unique trait of their national character. I argue that the pasillo’s pervasiveness as a national sym-
bol during the twentieth century is due to the multiplicity of meanings that it generates across
age, ethnicity, gender and social classes.

■ ■ ■

keywords: Ecuador, nationalism, identity, popular music.

R E SUM E N: Este artículo examina la historia social del pasillo ecuatoriano y su auge, ocaso, y
permanencia como un símbolo musical de la identidad nacional ecuatoriana. También analiza el
pasillo en relación a una creencia generalizada entre los ecuatorianos que ser “sentimental” es
un rasgo particular de su carácter nacional. Sostengo que la permanencia del pasillo como un
símbolo nacional durante la mayor parte del siglo XX se debe a la multiplicidad de significados
que éste genera en grupos de distintas edades, etnicidades, géneros y clases sociales.

■ ■ ■

palabras clave: Ecuador, nacionalismo, identidad, música popular.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

A foreign tourist who arrives in Ecuador and inquires about the country’s
most representative national music will be puzzled by the different answers
he or she may get. Middle-aged and elderly Ecuadorians will favor the pasillo
for its poetic and romantic lyrics that remind them of their youth, while
younger generations will probably disdain it because of its sad and maudlin
character. Many people, regardless of their socio-economic position, gender
or other status, will claim that listening to pasillos is an invitation to drink
heavily, especially when nursing a broken heart. Our foreign tourist may be
surprised to hear many Ecuadorians proudly saying that the pasillo moves
them to tears and that it is the song of the national soul. But he or she will
find out a few days later that the music that Ecuadorians claim as emblem-
atic of the nation is the least promoted by the government and the mass

Latin American Music Review, Volume 32, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2011

© 2011 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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media. Are they all talking about the same music? How can a maudlin song
associated with drunkenness be considered a national symbol? Why does
the pasillo generate so many different reactions among Ecuadorians?
This article examines the rise and decline of the pasillo as the musical
symbol of the Ecuadorian national identity. In Ecuador, as in many other
Latin American countries, the hegemonic and, thus, elite conception of the
national identity has been molded upon the ideology of mestizaje, a nation-
building discourse which claims racial and cultural mixing of indigenous
and Hispanic people as the essence of the nation. According to Stutzman
(1981), this ideology styles itself as inclusive but is exclusionist in practice
because it obliterates the unmixed Ecuadorian population (Indígenas and
Afro-Ecuadorians) in the national imagination. Unlike in Mexico, where
José Vasconcelo’s praise of mestizaje as a “cosmic race” discursively ele-
vated the indigenous culture to a source of national pride, in Ecuador the
ideology of mestizaje has been conceived as blanqueamiento (whitening).
This is a process in which the indigenous people assimilate to the domi-
nant culture, racially and culturally, in order to climb the social ladder to
reach the privileges denied to indigenous people (Whitten 1981).
Culturally, the ideology of mestizaje is manifested in Ecuadorians’
low esteem for the indigenous heritage of their national music, which is
rooted in a colonial history of power relations in which “Indianness” has
been constructed as synonymous with primitive, submissive, and back-
ward people. The “whitening” of Ecuadorian national music is especially
embodied in the elite pasillo, a musical genre that has been stripped of
the indigenous elements feeding into the concept of the “mestizo.” This
pasillo, whose lyrics sing to feelings of love and nostalgia in an elegant po-
etry, is stylistically different from the working-class pasillo that emerged
in the late 1970s in the aftermath of the massive rural-to-urban migrations
and the processes of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization
in the country. The working-class pasillo portrays the urban life experi-
ences and aesthetic values of the subaltern populations and is scorned by
the elites for its association with cantinas (bars) and working-class ambi-
ences. The co-existence and popularity in the late twentieth century of
both types of pasillo—the elite pasillo and the working-class pasillo—has
given rise to a series of discussions and debates about the standing of
the pasillo as a symbol of Ecuadorian national identity. I argue that the
pervasiveness of the pasillo as an emblematic expression of “Ecuadorian-
ness” throughout the twentieth century is due to the multiplicity of im-
ages, memories, and meanings it generates across age, gender, ethnicity
and social status.
In addition to ethnic and class connotations of the pasillo, I examine
its relation to a widespread belief among Ecuadorians that singing in a
heartfelt manner, as if the singer had experienced the stories of unrequited

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 61

love and despair narrated in the lyrics, is a unique trait of their national
character. Ecuadorians easily respond to emotional performances of the
pasillo and are proud of being able to express their sensitivity in both dis-
cursive and public ways. I argue that the pasillo has been an effective tool
for the articulation of a national sentiment that stresses feelings of loss and
despair as a mechanism of control and maintenance of social hierarchies.
In this study, feelings and emotions are seen as identity markers shaped by
the social and cultural milieu in which they are produced, rather than as
simply personal expressions.
The pasillo has also been popular in Colombia, Venezuela, and Costa
Rica,1 but only in Ecuador has it become a prominent and enduring sym-
bol of national identity. I trace the history of the Ecuadorian pasillo from
archival sources, oral histories, public discourses in the media, recordings,
annotated songbooks, and interviews with music entrepreneurs, national
artists and the general public. The first section of this article describes the
musical characteristics of the pasillo and various hypotheses explaining its
possible origin. Then I explore the stylistic changes this musical genre un-
derwent throughout the twentieth century, from a lower-class expression
early in the century to an elite cultural symbol in the 1920s–1950s to its
re-appropriation by the popular classes in the late 1970s. The next sections
examine the crystallization of an Ecuadorian national sentiment, the am-
biguous image of the female figure in the pasillo, and the decline of the
elite pasillo in the 1980s.

I. The Ecuadorian Pasillo

The pasillo is often defined as a poem set to music. In fact, this defini-
tion actually describes the way in which popular composers wrote their
songs in the 1920s–1950s; they selected poems written by upper- and
middle-class intellectuals in a refined poetry. Although the pasillo may be
performed in various ways,2 the standardized form features duet singing
in parallel thirds accompanied by a guitar and a requinto (a small high-
pitched guitar). The rhythmic accompaniment consists of a basic triple-
meter waltz-derived pattern, made up of two eighth notes followed by an
eighth rest, an eighth note, and a quarter note.

MU SI CAL EX AMPLE 1. Waltz and Pasillo Rhythm Patterns.

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The harmonic accompaniment is based on simple triadic chord pro-

gressions (I-IV-I, I-V-I, and I-IV-V-I), often enriched with brief modula-
tions to the secondary dominant in a major key. In the 1920s and 1930s,
pasillos were written in three or four sections according to the number of
stanzas in the poem, each of which introduced new melodic material. By
the mid-twentieth century, a binary form, with predominance of minor
keys and inclusion of an instrumental refrain between the stanzas, had
become the norm.
In Ecuador, pasillos are distinguished according to their geographical
origin—pasillo costeño (from the coast) and pasillo serrano (from the high-
lands). These pasillos display differences in tempo and musical character,
but do not carry connotations of class. Pasillos serranos tend to be slower,
melancholy, and in the minor mode, while pasillos costeños are faster, hap-
pier, and harmonically more varied.

II. Origin
Discourses about the origin of a musical genre often provide a forum for
the study of identity politics and people’s identification with particular eth-
nic or social groups. Rather than looking for concrete answers to the ques-
tion of origin, which might be difficult to pin down, I examine this question
as a site where discourses and foundational myths are created, legitimized,
and manipulated according to the interests of dominant groups. In the first
half of the twentieth century, Ecuadorian historians and writers claimed
connections between the pasillo and musical genres of either Ecuadorian
or European origin based on questionable arguments. To explain their par-
ticular stances, they have drawn attention to the etymology of the word,
and to the musical character and lyrical content of the pasillo, but often es-
chewed detailed musicological analysis. As a result, most of these hypoth-
eses are subjective and only reflect the intellectuals’ desires to locate the
origin of the Ecuadorian nationhood in either the Hispanic or indigenous
roots of the mestizo nation. Many people have taken these hypotheses for
granted because of the academic and literary prestige of the authors, and
also because these hypotheses have been repeatedly cited in the press.
From a Eurocentric perspective, historian Gabriel Cevallos García re-
gards the pasillo as a local version of the German lied, while Humberto
Toscano links its nostalgic character to the Portuguese fado (Guerrero
1996). The association of the pasillo with the lied and the fado is tenuous
and lacks concrete historical or musical evidence. The pasillo most resem-
bles the lied in that both genres set refined poetry to music, characteristic
of many musical genres. The linking of the pasillo to the fado comes from
the perception that both genres embody feelings of loss and nostalgia (the
Portuguese notion of saudade), sentiments highly valued in both Ecuador

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 63

and Portugal. This similarity alone, however, does not prove that the pasillo
had its origins in the fado any more than it would for other genres of the
Americas that also have that characteristic, such as the tango or the blues.
Concrete evidence is required, but absent.
References to the pasillo in literary works by José de la Cuadra and Carlos
Aguilar Vásquez suggest origins in the Basque zortzico and the French
passepied, respectively, again without solid support for these claims. A folk-
loric dance in 5/8 meter, the zortzico has no musical resemblance to the
waltz-like pasillo. The common root of the words—pasillo and passepied—
does not provide enough evidence to link one genre with the other. The
hypotheses suggesting a European origin for the pasillo reflect a desire to
“whiten” the pasillo and find its origin in the Hispanic heritage of the mes-
tizo nation.
By contrast, claims that associate the pasillo with native musical prac-
tices reflect a desire to vindicate its local origin. Musicologist Segundo Luis
Moreno, the Ecuadorian Béla Bartók who in the early twentieth century com-
piled and transcribed many indigenous and folk melodies from the north-
ern highlands, argues that there is a close connection between the pasillo
and the extinct toro rabón, a triple-meter dance with a rhythmic pattern simi-
lar to that of the pasillo, which was apparently popular in the late nineteenth
century (Moreno 1996: 71).3 Writers Gerardo Falconí, Arturo Montesinos,
and José María Vargas suggest that the pasillo received influences from the
sanjuanito, the yaraví, and the pase del niño, respectively (Guerrero 1996).
While the pasillo has been influenced by the melodic contours and typi-
cal cadences of the yaraví and the sanjuanito in the early twentieth century
(Wong 1999), these indigenous musical genres have a duple-meter rhythm
that set them apart from the triple-meter pasillo. Finally, the ostensible as-
sociation between the pasillo and the pase del niño (the passing by of the
Christ-Child), an Ecuadorian villancico performed in Christmas processions
in the city of Cuenca, is based on the etymology of the words pasillo and
pase, rather than on musical similarities, of which none can be discerned.
From a diffusionist point of view—one that suggests that musics have
spread geographically from one region to another—most music scholars
agree that the pasillo was a local form of the European waltz, which came
to current Ecuadorian territories from Colombia during the wars of in-
dependence. In fact, pasillo is a diminutive form of paso (step) and de-
scribes the short jump-like waltz steps of the dance. The popularity of
the Austrian waltz in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the
works of Johann Strauss (father and son), coincides with the emergence
of the instrumental pasillo in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, which
in the early 1800s were territories of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada,
and from 1822 to 1830 of the Gran Colombia Confederation. It is logical to
assume that local forms of the Austrian waltz had immense popularity in

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the newly independent republics, though it acquired a regional flavor in

each country—the Colombian pasillo was influenced by the bambuco, the
Venezuelan by the joropo, and the Ecuadorian by the sanjuanito and the
yaraví (Portaccio 1994, V. 2: 136).
The foreign origin of the Ecuadorian pasillo is a topic of frequent concern
of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Historian Jorge Núñez (1980), for exam-
ple, describes the pasillo as “hijo bastardo de la independencia y hermano ge-
melo de la república” (the bastard son of independence and the twin brother
of the republic), pointing to its illegitimate (i.e., non-Ecuadorian) origin and
close kinship with the Colombian pasillo. Many Ecuadorians I talked with
also felt apologetic about the foreign origin of the pasillo, even though they
believe that it truly reflects what it means for them to be Ecuadorian.

III. The Nationalization of the Pasillo

As in most Latin American countries, the independence of Ecuador from
Spain in 1822 was basically an exchange of political power from peninsula-
res (Spaniards born in Spain) to criollos (Spaniards born in America), rather
than an emancipation of the subaltern populations (Quintero and Silva
1991). As a “Creole Nation,” Ecuador maintained colonial forms of govern-
ment and culture during the nineteenth century. In the performing arts,
the elites cultivated European dances such as the mazurca, the cuadrilla, the
schottische, and the waltz. As a local form of waltz, the nineteenth-century
pasillo, was primarily an instrumental music performed by military bands
and estudiantinas (ensembles of guitar-like instruments) in outdoor venues.
The pasillo was also adapted into salon music compositions by middle-
class composers with formal music training, such as Aparicio Córdova
(1840s–1934) and Sixto María Durán (1875–1947).
It is well known that new cultural symbols emerge as national expres-
sions when new groups come to power, and the pasillo is no exception. The
Liberal Revolution of 1895 shifted control of the government from conser-
vative and religious-oriented highland elites, who had concentrated eco-
nomic power in the landowning system, to the coastal elites, a liberal group
that had accumulated wealth and control of the bank system through a
cacao-exporting economy. The Revolution sought the modernization and
integration of Ecuador through the expansion of a market economy, the
construction of a national railway system, and the secularization of educa-
tion and civil society. Most importantly, the revolution brought to promi-
nence new social actors—peasants, artisans, and workers—who were
incorporated in the imagination of a white-mestizo nation.
The Liberal Revolution set the social, economic and political conditions
for the emergence of the pasillo-canción (pasillo-song) in the early twentieth
century. From a purely instrumental form in the nineteenth century, the

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pasillo was transformed into a love song frequently sung in serenades to

the accompaniment of a guitar. The secularization of society facilitated the
appearance in the early 1900s of Modernismo, a Spanish-American literary
movement that expresses a “personal lyricism” and “the longing for a gen-
uine American artistic expression” (Handelsman 1981). Modernist poetry
was cultivated by the aristocracy defeated in the Revolution, who expressed
their sorrows and loss of political power in poems depicting evasive feel-
ings of love that are never reciprocated. It is unlikely that the pasillo could
have emerged as a love song before the 1890s due to the religious fervor
and conservatism of Ecuadorian society, which prevented the development
of artistic expressions centered on worldly matters, such as the pleasures
and bitterness of love. The fact that most music scores from the 1870s and
1880s found in national music archives are essentially salon music and
military band music supports this view.
Many Ecuadorians believe that the pasillo has always been a romantic
love song; however, this genre changed stylistically from a lower-class cul-
tural form in the early twentieth century to a poetic song of the elite classes
in the 1930s. The stylistic changes were not just the product of individual
or random artistic choices but a reflection of a cultural hegemony imposed
and naturalized from above.

A. The Early Twentieth-Century Pasillo

A close examination of El aviador ecuatoriano, a songbook from the early
1920s, reveals that the lyrical content and language style of some early
twentieth-century pasillos were associated with the images and speech of
lower-class ambiences. A type of pasillo, known in this period as canción de
maldición (song of damnation), uses vulgar terms to express a man’s an-
ger toward an unfaithful woman who has deceived him. The pasillo “A mi
amor pasado” (To My Past Love) by Julio Flores, for example, portrays the
young woman the song is intended to describe as a “shameless whore” and
“daughter of vice” who sells her body in “orgies”—very direct and explicit
imagery not typical of the upper class.

Bien te conozco impúdica ramera

Comprendo tu existencia miserable
Eres hija del vicio, eres artera
Y es tu ideal el pecado abominable.

Hiciste de tu cuerpo mercancías

Que cambiastes por oro a precios viles
Y bebiste del placer en las orgías
Cuando solo contabas quince abriles.

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I know you well, shameless whore

I understand your miserable existence
You are the daughter of vice, you are cunning
And your ideal is abominable sin.

You made your body a commodity

That you exchanged for gold at high prices
And you drank of pleasure in the orgies
When you were only fifteen years old.

El aviador ecuatoriano also reveals what seems to have been a common

practice in this period, namely, the paraphrasing of popular pasillos. “Te
perdono” (I Forgive You), for instance, paraphrases the verses of one of the
most popular pasillos in the national music anthology, “El alma en los la-
bios” (The Soul on the Lips). A comment in the songbook indicates that
the lyrics should be sung to the music of the famous pasillo composed by
Francisco Paredes Herrera. Rather than a poetic declaration of love, as is the
case in the original lyrics by poet Medardo Ángel Silva, the new text makes
public the complaints of a man whose woman has been unfaithful to him.
The lyrics are dedicated to “H. I. G. F.,” an “espiritual damita” (spiritual
lady), as decent women from well-to-do families were called at that time.

Cuando tú ya te canses de vivirme engañando

y contemples con horror tus mentidas palabras.
Verás qué mal te has hecho con haberme engañado
al hombre que te amaba con todo el corazón.

When you get tired of always deceiving me

And contemplate with horror your lying words
You will see the wrong you’ve done yourself by deceiving me
The man who loved you with all his heart.

Despite the immense popularity of the “songs of damnation,” as their

frequent inclusion in songbooks suggests, these early twentieth-century pa-
sillos did not enter the national music anthology. In general, musical genres
raised to the level of national symbols represent the aesthetic values of the
upper-middle classes and undergo cleansing processes to eliminate textual
and musical features that point to “undesirable” ethnic, class, or regional
differences within a nation. Ochoa (2003), for example, points out the multi-
plicity of forms that the Colombian bambuco had as a regional music before
its nationalization by the Andean elites, and how the musical features point-
ing to its African roots were eliminated to construct sonic images of a homo-
geneous nation. In the next sections, I will examine the cleansing process of
the Ecuadorian pasillo as well as the role of the media in its nationalization.

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B. The Pasillo in the 1920s–1950s

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of political turmoil and social conscious-
ness in the arts with the emergence of workers’ unions, socialist parties,
and progressive cultural movements in Ecuadorian literature and painting
such as Indigenismo and Realismo Social. A group of left-wing writers and
painters from the Costa and the Sierra—Jorge Icaza, Oswaldo Guayasamín,
and the “Group of Guayaquil”—denounced the exploitation of montubios,
cholos, mestizos, negros, and Indians in their novels and paintings, thus pro-
viding a complex picture of an ethnically diverse Ecuadorian population.4
Concurrently to these cultural movements, an aristocratic wing of up-
per- and middle-class intellectuals produced stories of unrequited love and
despair in a cosmopolitan poetry that had little connection to the lives of the
common people. In the 1920s, these poets appropriated and transformed
the “songs of damnation” into “classy” songs that expressed national pride
and an idealization of the female figure using a refined modernist poetry.
Modernist poetry was easy to set to music because of its eloquent lyrics,
consonance, and simple structure. In Ecuador, Modernismo found its best
exponents in the “Generación decapitada” (Beheaded Generation), whose
poets—Medardo Ángel Silva, Arturo Borja, Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño, and
Humberto Fierro—ended their lives tragically in early adulthood. Other up-
per and middle-class poets, such as José María Egas, Pablo Hanníbal Vela,
Abel Romero Castillo, Lauro Dávila, and César Maquilón, gave their poetry
a more optimistic and romantic tone than did the “Generación decapitada.”
César Maquilón, a school teacher and author of some of the most popu-
lar pasillos in the national music anthology, described in his old age how
middle-class poets and musicians cleaned up the “songs of damnation”
and discussed the relationship of these artists to the aristocratic circles
in the 1920s–1930s. In his youth, Maquilón and other middle-lower-class
musicians and writers were often invited to social and literary gatherings
in upper-middle-class homes. In these events, guests entertained them-
selves and each other by reading poems and performing songs composed
by members of the group. Maquilón recalls that he and Nicasio Safadi, a
well known singer/songwriter of pasillo, changed the lyrics and the music
of “Isabel,” a typical example of a “Song of Damnation.” Instead of saying
“Maldita tu trampa, vagabunda” (Damn your tricks, vagabond woman), he
employed more subtle expressions to depict the man’s anger and only indi-
rectly referred to the pains of love. Maquilón stated, “I have never written
out of hate or resentment. I have always sung about tenderness, emotion,
sweetness, and true love.”5
To transform this pasillo into a “classy” song, Safadi added musical
features that were unusual for the “songs of damnation,” such as adding
an introduction and short instrumental interludes between the stanzas
and embellishing the musical arrangement with brief modulations and

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a walking bass line. I include the first strophe Maquilón wrote for this
song, which was recorded in 1930 with the title “La divina canción” (The
Divine Song).

Al pie de tu reja te canto adorada,

la dulce y sentida canción del dolor;
Despierta, te ruego, mi nunca olvidada,
Despierta y escucha, mujer tan amada,
Mi canto de amor.

At the bottom of your balcony I sing to you, my love,

The sweet and heartfelt song of pain;
Wake up, I beg you, my never-forgotten darling,
Wake up and listen, beloved woman,
To my chant of love.

It is often the case that popular musics raised to national symbols by the
elites are more likely than the “songs of damnation” to express affection for
a country’s geography and to praise the beauty and bravery of its people.6
Obviously, the lyrical content by itself does not explain why these songs
gain national status within and outside the country. The key factor leading
to the nationalization of the pasillo in the 1920s–1930s lies in the recording
and promotion of the pasillo as emblematic by the elites, the government,
and the music industry.

C. The Mass Media

In search of new music markets, Victor and Columbia Records recorded
the popular music of several countries in the early twentieth century. At
first, pasillos were recorded by studio orchestras in Italy, Spain, and Ger-
many and were performed according to the performance practice of each
country. Pasillos recorded in Spain, for example, were accompanied by cas-
tanets and performed in a faster tempo than those recorded in Italy (Wong
1999). In the mid-1920s, vocal pasillos were recorded in Havana and New
York by Latin American bel canto singers such as Margarita Cueto, José
Mojica, and Carlos Mejía from Mexico (Pro 1997, 48).
What began as a business strategy to capture the local music market
was perceived by Ecuadorians as international praise for the pasillo. The
choice of the pasillo as the Ecuadorian music to be recorded raises ques-
tions about the influence of international record companies in the articula-
tion of a country’s musical identity. Did these companies select the pasillo
because of its local popularity, or was their choice based on parameters
that had little relation to local preferences as, for example, the international

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 69

promotion of sentimental songs such as the tango and the blues in the
early twentieth century?
In 1911, Antenor Encalada, an Ecuadorian music entrepreneur and
representative of the German company Favorite Records in Ecuador,
made the first local recordings of Ecuadorian music by military bands
and popular musicians from Guayaquil and Quito (Pro 1997, 74). While
the recordings were made in Ecuador, the records were manufactured
in Linden. From a total of 272 pieces recorded, there were 67 pasillos,
47 valses, 43 canciones, 17 marchas, 13 polkas, 12 pasodobles, 10 habaneras,
and fewer numbers of other genres such as chilenas, boleros, and bambu-
cos (Pro 1997, 83). About 25 percent of the pieces were pasillos, and of
these, soloists and duos with single-guitar accompaniment comprised the
majority. It is worth noting that, with the exception of two yaravíes, no
other indigenous or mestizo musical genre from Ecuador was recorded
in this first local production, which suggests that Encalada may have as-
sumed that these types of music would not sell well among their intended
upper-middle-class clients.
The year 1930 is significant in the history of Ecuadorian popular music
because it was the first time that Ecuadorian artists recorded Ecuadorian
music abroad. Until then, Ecuadorian music had been recorded by local
singers in Ecuador or by foreign artists abroad. The “heroic feat,” as the
newspapers called this accomplishment, was the idea of José Domingo
Feraud Guzmán, a visionary entrepreneur who financed the trip of Dúo
Ecuador to New York. Dúo Ecuador was made up of Nicasio Safadi and
Enrique Ibáñez Mora, two renowned pasillo interpreters and composers
from Guayaquil.7 They recorded 38 songs for Columbia Records, most of
which were especially composed for this trip. The promotion of these rec-
ords was centered on the release of the pasillo “Guayaquil de mis amores”
(Guayaquil of My Love), written by Lauro Dávila (lyrics) and Nicasio Safadi
(music). This song, which has become a popular anthem of Guayaquil, was
the first pasillo devoted to a city rather than to feelings of love and nostalgia
and had an enormous impact on Ecuadorians’ perception of themselves
and their idea of nationhood. (See Figure 1)

Tú eres perla que surgiste del más grande e ignoto mar

y que al son de tu arrullar en jardín te convertiste,
soberano en tus empeños nuestro Dios formó un pensil
con tus bellas, Guayaquil, Guayaquil de mis ensueños.

Si a tus rubias y morenas que enloquecen de pasión,

Les palpita un corazón que mitiga negras penas,
con sus ojos verdes mares o de negro anochecer
siempre imponen su querer, Guayaquil de mis cantares . . .

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 70 ■ KETTY WO NG

You are the pearl that emerged from the greatest and most unknown sea
And in the sound of your lullaby you became a garden,
Steadfast in your efforts our God made a painting
With your beautiful women, Guayaquil, Guayaquil of my dreams.

If your blondes and brunettes that make you mad of passion

A heart beats in them that alleviates deep sorrows
With her green eyes resembling the sea, or the dark evening
They always impose their will, Guayaquil of my songs . . .

F IGUR E 1. “Guayaquil de mis amores,” Álbum musical ecuatoriano (n.d.).

source: SADRAM.

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Ecuadorians regarded Feraud Guzmán’s initiative to record Ecuador-

ian music in New York as the display of Ecuadorian music to the world.
The Ecuadorian Consulate sponsored several concerts of Duo Ecuador on
the WNYC radio station to commemorate two important civic holidays in
Ecuador—the “First Shout For Independence” (August 10, 1809) and the
Independence Day of Guayaquil (October 9, 1820). The latter concert was
simultaneously transmitted in Guayaquil through a short-wave radio trans-
mission. On their way back to Ecuador, the Ecuadorian Embassies in Ha-
vana and Panama City sponsored several performances of Duo Ecuador.8
In Guayaquil, the recordings of Dúo Ecuador sold out as soon as they
reached the music store. One advertisement in Diario El Universo an-
nounced that 30,000 people, about 30 percent of Guayaquil’s population in
1930, had gathered in the Plaza del Centenario (main square in downtown
Guayaquil) to listen to the new releases. A newspaper cartoon from this
period suggests the importance of these recordings for Ecuadorian people
in increasing their country’s profile on the international stage. Safadi and
Ibáñez are drawn on a map of the Americas, depicted with the skyscraper
city of New York at their backs and throwing records toward South America
and the entire world (Figure 2).
“Guayaquil de mis amores” accompanied a silent movie of the same
name, which was filmed for the triumphant return home of Dúo Ecua-
dor. The film, also sponsored by Feraud Guzmán, was basically a love story

F IGUR E 2 . Cartoon of Dúo Ecuador in New York. El Universo (1930). Source: Feraud
Guzmán, J. D. Historia de una hazaña y sus protagonistas.

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 72 ■ KETTY WO NG

F IGUR E 3 .Newspaper advertisement promoting the film Guayaquil de mis amores

(1930). Source: Feraud Guzmán, J. D. Historia de una hazaña y sus protagonistas.

showing the landscapes, people, and architecture of Guayaquil. It also

showed typical urban scenes of this port city, such as bullfights, soccer
games, and scenes of elite people leaving elegant theaters in the downtown
area (Figure 3). The film was so popular that 70,000 people, nearly 70 per-
cent of Guayaquil’s population, had seen it in just a few weeks (Granda
2004, 132).9
The pasillo “Guayaquil de mis amores” not only put the name of Ec-
uador on the international music map but promoted the pasillo as an es-
sential element of Ecuadorian identity. Subsequent pasillos devoted to the
city reinforced this association: “Guayaquil, pórtico de oro” (Guayaquil,
Golden Portal) by Carlos Rubira Infante, and “La niña guayaquileña” (The
Girl from Guayaquil) by Nicasio Safadi. Pasillos dedicated to other cities
and provinces also became symbols of regional and national pride, such as
“Alma Lojana” (Soul of Loja) and “Manabí.”
Before the arrival of recording technology, pasillos were disseminated
by military bands and estudiantinas and through pianolas and sheet music.

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Records and radio, however, proved to be more effective and immediate

outlets for large-scale dissemination. Live performances of pasillos had
been limited to small audiences, but now radio was capable of reaching
much larger audiences, and the low cost of receivers made the listening
of pasillos much more accessible and indiscriminate. Radio stations, such
as Radio Quito in the capital city, had their own orchestras accompanying
daily transmissions and organized live music programs with professional
and amateur singers. Well known national artists, such as Dúo Benítez-
Valencia and Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, started their artistic careers in
Radio Quito.
It is worth noting that the elite pasillos from the 1920s–1950s are usu-
ally referred to as música nacional. Música nacional is a term widely used
in Ecuador as surrogate appellation of the “official” Ecuadorian music.10 In
Ecuador, to talk about música nacional and the pasillo is to talk about a
pantheon of venerated poets, composers, and performers from the Costa
and the Sierra, whose names are frequently mentioned in annotated song-
books compiled by Ecuadorian-music enthusiasts. These songbooks re-
count the stories of how the lyrics and the music of the most popular
pasillos were written and include music scores, pictures and brief biog-
raphies of well known poets, composers, and performers. The first an-
thology of this kind was Florilegio del pasillo ecuatoriano by Alberto Morlás
Gutiérrez (1961), followed by many others published between the 1980s
and the early 2000s.11

IV. The National Sentiment

Alejandro Pro (2004), a music collector of pasillo and tango records, ar-
gues that “Anybody can sing baladas, anybody can sing boleros; however,
pasillos are not sung, they are interpreted” [my emphasis]. To support his
view, Pro quotes the words of Hernán Restrepo Duque, a Colombian music
researcher and record collector, who once told him: “What do you [Ecuador-
ians] have to envy [referring to the tango], if the pasillo—in sentiment—is
superior?” (Pro 2004, 68). Ecuadorian singers also express similar views
regarding the importance of singing and playing the guitar with sentiment.
Juanita Burbano, for example, recalls the words of a Peruvian friend who
once told her: “I have paid lessons to learn how to play pasillos . . . with the
same sentiment expressed by Ecuadorian musicians, but I cannot play like
them.”12 Teresita Andrade, another pasillo singer, proudly stated in an inter-
view: “Ecuadorians are fantastic at interpreting songs with sentiment!” Her
husband added: “Colombians also have pasillos, but they are different. . . .
In singing their tropical music Colombians express another type of senti-
ment, one of happiness.” Then, with even more emotion than his wife, he
exclaimed: “Lo nuestro hace llorar!” (Our music makes people cry!).13

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Rather than questioning the truth of these statements, I am more inter-

ested in analyzing Ecuadorians’ ideas about the uniqueness of the pasillo to
raise such a strong emotional response. When I asked people from differ-
ent social classes why they thought the pasillo is an emblematic expression
of the Ecuadorian national identity, they often stressed “suffering” and be-
ing “sentimental,” instead of a more optimistic feeling, as salient attributes
of their nationality. By “sentimental” I mean being overtly sensitive and
emotional to pasillo performances, to the point of finding gratification in
the idea of suffering and “crying” over the loss of someone or something
important in one’s life. But this notion of “sentimental” is not synonymous
with “romantic,” a more optimistic feeling that conveys the illusion of be-
ing in love without the melancholy, sufferings, and sense of loss that typify
the pasillo. Why are Ecuadorians proud of a music that moves them to tears
(hace llorar)? Why is a song that most Ecuadorians perceive today as sad and
maudlin such a strong metaphor for the nation?
In his analysis of Guayaquilean identity, Benavides (2006) points to the
importance of feelings and emotions in the production and maintenance
of social hierarchies, which are shaped by ethnic, racial, class, gender, and
generational aspects. The elites’ articulation of a national sentiment seeks
to discipline people’s ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; once internal-
ized it becomes a sort of doxa that remains uncontested and is reproduced
unconsciously (Bourdieu 1977). In other words, it becomes an internalized
form of domination that guarantees the reproduction of a hierarchical so-
cial order from above, but disguised in what people think is a “way of be-
ing” of Ecuadorians.
According to Benavides, Medardo Ángel Silva (1898–1919) crystallized
with his modernist poetry “structures of feelings” that were just beginning
to emerge during his lifetime and slowly became a dominant social for-
mation. For Benavides, Silva’s poetry “captures centuries of defeat and re-
jection by a colonial past and a postcolonial rereading of the past” (2006,
38). Following Raymond Williams’s “structures of feelings,” he analyzes
the social experiences that shaped Silva’s life and poetry as a “cultural hy-
pothesis” that needs to be reassessed once the “structures of feeling” have
been formalized and institutionalized. To these ends, Benavides examines
Silva’s poem “El alma en los labios,” as well as his lower-class origins and
the aristocratic circles in which he moved as a poet.
“El alma en los labios” is a well known poem that has been imbued with
tragic meanings due to the fact that Silva wrote it a few days before commit-
ting suicide at age twenty. Journalists and literary critics have interpreted
this poem as a forewarning of his death because one of its verses alludes
to his thought to end his life the day his beloved woman leaves him. Ac-
cording to annotated songbooks, Paredes Herrera, who was in Cuenca at
the moment of Silva’s death and had met with him a few years earlier in

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 75

Guayaquil, read the poem in the newspaper and, impressed by the content
and lyricism of its verses, set it to music a few days later. Once released, the
song became a national hit and has maintained a life of its own. Current
associations of the pasillo with images of sadness, suffering, and suicide
greatly derive from this poem and the mysterious circumstances of Silva’s
death. Most Ecuadorians know this story well not only because “El alma en
los labios” is one of the best-known pasillos in the música nacional anthol-
ogy and the story of Silva’s death has been frequently recounted in news-
papers and songbooks, but also because the study of Silva’s poetry, as the
most representative expression of Modernismo in Ecuador, is required in
high school literature programs.

Cuando de nuestro amor, la llama apasionada

Dentro tu pecho amante contemples ya extinguida
Ya que solo por ti la vida me es amada
El día en que me faltes me arrancaré la vida.

When the passionate flame of our love

You see has already been extinguished within your loving chest
Since it is only because of you that I cherish life
The day you leave is the day I will end my life.

“El alma en los labios” has been central to the cultural production of a
feeling of loss, of not attaining, of not being able to hold on to the object
of one’s desire (Benavides 2006). Although the lyrics refer to the loss of
a woman’s love, the loss can also refer to a loss of a mother, a homeland,
a dream, or any significant loss that leaves one with feeling hopeless and
abandoned. For Benavides, the man’s identity in the pasillo is based on
self-rejection, which arises from “the anguish and pain that come from not
fitting in,” both ethnically and socially (2006, 93). He argues that Ecuador-
ians’ self-rejection developed through years of colonial rejection of the na-
tive population and that the expressions of unrequited love and despair are
intimately related to a postcolonial reality of repressed desire, which makes
suffering an essential element to the constitution of the self (idem).
Following this line of thought, I suggest that the pervasive feelings of
loss and non-fulfilled love depicted in the pasillo reflect to a great extent
Ecuadorians’ denial of the indigenous heritage in their mestizo national
consciousness as a result of the colonial experience of oppression and
stigmatization of indigenous people. Espinosa Apolo (2000) argues that
Ecuadorian mestizos have developed a “negative ethnic identity” since the
colonial period as a result of trying to differentiate themselves from indig-
enous people in order to reach opportunities denied to the latter group.
This attitude produces a rupture between their external and inner selves

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because while in public mestizos seek to “whiten” their look and style of
living, thus giving the impression of assimilating to the dominant culture,
in the private sphere they keep alive their cultural values and traditions.
For Espinosa Apolo, mestizos live a life of constant simulacrum, which
produces a rejection of, or low esteem for their culture. In my view, these
feelings of self-rejection are expressed in the pervasive images of loss and
despair in the pasillo.
While feelings of loss and nostalgia were embodied in the lyrics of “El
alma en los labios,” they were not yet present in its musical performance in
the 1920s–1930s. A recording of this pasillo by Margarita Cueto illustrates
the absence of these feelings. Despite its sad lyrics, she sings this song
in an up-beat tempo suitable for dancing. Other pasillos recorded in this
period, such as those by Dúo Ecuador in 1930, also maintain a lively and
danceable tempo. These performances greatly differ from the pasillos re-
corded in the late 1940s and 1950s by Duo Benítez-Valencia and Hermanas
Mendoza-Suasti, as well as from current performances, which tend to be in
a slower tempo and in a weeping tone.
I suggest that the pervasive discourse that Ecuadorians are sentimental
people arose and became a dominant social formation in the mid-twentieth
century. The elite pasillo could not have been considered a nostalgic and
sentimental song in the 1920s and 1930s, as many Ecuadorians think today.
First, it was the center of public attention and a source of national pride as
a result of the “heroic feat” achieved by Dúo Ecuador in New York. Second,
the pasillo was a means of socialization in retretas, a courting song in ser-
enades, and a music Ecuadorians happily danced to in social gatherings.
Third, the national music anthology was not yet established because many
of the songs that were to appear in it had yet to be composed. Finally, most
poets and composers who were born at the turn of the twentieth century
were in their youth or early adulthood looking to the future for opportuni-
ties, rather than experiencing nostalgia for yesteryear.
I propose that Ecuadorians’ current perception of the pasillo as sad and
sentimental music was “constructed” in the aftermath of Ecuador’s loss of
half of its national territory in the Rio de Janeiro Protocol. This was a treaty
signed in 1942 to resolve a longstanding and bitter border dispute between
Peru and Ecuador (Quintero and Silva 1991), which marked a breaking point
in the crystallization of the “structure of feelings” that was in early forma-
tion in Silva’s poem. This loss was a painful experience for the Ecuadorian
people, who saw themselves defeated and mutilated in their sovereignty.14
To overcome this psychological trauma, Benjamín Carrión, writer and
founder of Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (1944), put forth his thesis of
the “gran nación pequeña” (great small nation), which held that if Ecuador
could not be a great nation through its military forces, politics, and econ-
omy, it would be one through its culture and arts (Carrión 2002, 21–22).

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 77

Greece and Israel, he asserted, were excellent illustrations of his thesis be-
cause of the enormous influence their cultural legacies have had on modern
times. It is worth noting that the Ecuadorian culture advocated by Carrión
was a “highbrow” culture, rather than the culture of the common people.
By the mid-twentieth century the pasillo was performed in a slower
tempo and had lost its danceable character. New pasillos with strong over-
tones of loss and nostalgia for an idealized past were composed in the
1940s, such as “Romance de mi destino” (Romance of My Destiny), a poem
of Abel Romeo Castillo set to music by Gonzalo Vera Santos. Castillo, a
journalist and writer from a well-to-do family from Guayaquil who owned
Diario El Telégrafo, wrote this poem out of nostalgia for his homeland
when he was studying in Chile in the 1930s. According to the annotated
songbooks, Vera Santos wrote the music in the early 1940s and, due to the
border conflict with Peru, this pasillo immediately became a popular song
among soldiers.15 The poem describes one’s inability to keep the object of
desire, a leitmotif in Ecuadorian popular music and a theme that aptly ex-
presses the sad feelings Ecuadorians were experiencing in this period.

Todo lo que quise yo tuve que dejarlo lejos

Siempre tengo que escaparme y abandonar lo que quiero
Yo soy el buque fantasma que no puede anclar en puertos
Ando buscando refugios en retratos y en espejos.
En cartas apolilladas y en perfumados recuerdos.

Por más que estiro las manos nunca te alcanzo lucero

Jugo de amargos adioses es mi vaso predilecto;
Yo me bebo a tragos largos mi pócima de recuerdos
Y me embriago en lejanías para acaricias mis sueños.

Everything that I loved, I had to leave far away

I always have to depart and abandon what I love
I am the ghost vessel that cannot anchor in ports
I seek refuge in portraits and in mirrors.
In moth-eaten letters and in perfumed memories.

However I stretch my hands, I never reach my star

Juice of bitter farewells is my favorite glass
I drink slowly my potion of memories
And I get drunk in the distance to pet my dreams.

It was also in the 1940s when the pasacalle, a duple-meter and up-beat
dance-song derived from the Spanish pasodoble and the polka, emerged
on the national music scene forging a sense of pride for the place of

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birth. Pasacalles were composed to reaffirm a local identity and also to

elevate the morale of people who saw their country geographically dimin-
ished. These songs became popular anthems for the towns, cities, and
provinces they were devoted to, markedly different from the sentimental
and nostalgic lyrics of the pasillo. “Guayaquileño madera de guerrero”
(Guayaquilean Spirit of Warrior), “Ambato, tierra de flores” (Ambato,
Land of Flowers), and “Chola cuencana” (Beautiful Girl from Cuenca)
are examples of the many pasacalles composed in this period of national
healing and identity reconstruction.
Ecuadorian scholars often state that the dominant classes were unable
to articulate a national culture that would support their leadership posi-
tion and impose their class ideology (Silva 2004). A closer examination to
the social history of the pasillo, however, reveals the opposite. While pro-
gressive artists and writers were denouncing the exploitation of the subal-
tern populations through expressionist paintings and literary works that
brought their histories of oppression to the public attention, the elites were
simultaneously spreading their class ideology and aesthetic values through
the feelings of loss and despair expressed in the pasillo. Ecuadorians have
internalized these feelings to such a degree that being sentimental has be-
come an uncontested and highly valued cultural marker of “Ecuadorian-
ness.” It is worth noting that the message in the paintings and literary
works stood no chance of contradicting or counterbalancing the message in
the pasillos because relatively few people were exposed to these art forms,
whereas the vast majority of Ecuadorians sang and listened to pasillos on
the radio and in the streets.

V. The Golden Period of the Pasillo

The 1950s and 1960s were a period of political stability, economic pros-
perity and modernization of the country due to the banana export boom.
It was also a period of splendor for the pasillo due to the advancement
of sound technology, the emergence of television programs, and the ap-
pearance of a new generation of performers who innovated the pasillo
singing style. Hermanos Miño-Naranjo, Dúo Aguayo-Villamar, and Los
Montalvinos maintained the duet singing tradition in the early 1960s with
an upbeat tempo and new vocal arrangements. The most dramatic change
for the pasillo, however, was the emergence of the trio format in the late
1950s with the influence of Trío Los Panchos. The addition of the re-
quinto and a three-voice harmonic arrangement produced what Mullo and
Guerrero have called the “bolerization” of the pasillo (Mullo & Guerrero
2006). Trío Los Brillantes, made up of Argentine singer Olguita Gutiérrez,
requinto player Homero Hidrovo, and guitar player Héctor Jaramillo, gave
the pasillo a romantic overtone and more international appeal with their

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 79

polished singing style, which was markedly different from the sentimental
style of previous performers such as Dúo Benítez-Valencia and Hermanas
Mendoza-Suasti. Concurrently with the trio performance appeared a new
generation of soloist singers, such as Julio Jaramillo, who broke the tradi-
tional duet-singing practice.
To a great extent, the golden period of the pasillo was made possible by
the development of the Ecuadorian recording industry, led by two promi-
nent businessmen from Guayaquil—Luis Pino Yerovi and José Domingo
Feraud Guzmán, who founded IFESA (1946), and FEDISCOS (1964), re-
spectively. These two family-owned companies controlled production and
distribution networks, including recording studios, radio stations, maga-
zines, outlet stores, and printing houses, which gave them total sway over
the popular music industry. With the goal of promoting its records, IFESA
published Revista estrellas, a bi-monthly magazine that regularly devoted
articles to Ecuadorian singers, composers, and poets. In this period, Ecua-
dorian music competed with international music for the top rankings in
the Ecuadorian billboards, and Ecuadorians were proud of their national
music and artists.

VI. The Decline of the National Pasillo

If the 1960s was a period of splendor for the elite pasillo, the late 1970s was
a period of decline. The pasillo lost commercial visibility with the influx of
new international musics such as the cumbia, salsa, nueva canción, balada
romántica, rock, and disco music. Middle-class Ecuadorians, who were the
main consumers of música nacional, were awash in new musical options
that pointed to modernity, happiness, romantic love, and social protest. In
search of larger audiences, radio and television stations devoted more time
to international music in their daily programs. Even Revista estrellas, which
had supported Ecuadorian artists since its launch in 1964, began to feature
more interviews with international singers.
Government tax policies also contributed to the decline of the pasillo.
In 1971, President Velasco Ibarra imposed a substantial tax increase on
public performances, from 20 percent to 27 percent. The increase of
seven percent over the previous tax greatly affected música nacional en-
trepreneurs because they were required to pay 27 percent of the box of-
fice, regardless of the number of tickets actually sold. Unable to recoup
their investments, they stopped organizing concerts, leaving Ecuadorian
singers without performance and revenue opportunities. Ironically, the
tax increase worked against the government’s interests because it did not
produce the expected incomes.
By the 1980s, the music industry centered on the pasillo had almost
disappeared due these policies and the lack of support by entrepreneurs

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 80 ■ KETTY WO NG

and the media. Music piracy also drove music stores and small record com-
panies that had previously promoted national music into bankruptcy. As
a means of surviving in the music market under these conditions, IFESA
and FEDISCOS, recycled old 33-rpm and 45-rpm recordings of pasillos into
cassette format and, as of the 1990s, onto CDs—which required less capi-
tal outlay than the sponsoring of new productions. As a result, the youth
of the 1990s were hearing the same pasillos in the performance of the
same singers that had been popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Artists such as
Hermanos Miño-Naranjo and Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, whose artistic
careers have now spanned more than a half century, continue singing today
and attract a vast audience of elder and middle-aged Ecuadorians.
Because there has been little innovation in the repertoire and singing
style of the elite pasillo, the younger generations regard it as “old national
music” and thus not representative of their generation. It is worth noting
that young people eventually turn to more conservative musics like pasillo
as they reach middle age or when they leave their home country and feel
nostalgic. The change of attitude toward the pasillo helps us understand
how the pasillo continually gains new enthusiasts and is not in danger of
dying out completely.

VII. A Pasillo Rocolero

The decline of the elite pasillo in the 1970s did not necessarily entail the
decline of the pasillo as a musical genre per se. Middle-lower-class compos-
ers wrote new pasillos with a working-class aesthetic that reflects the ur-
ban experience of the subaltern populations. These pasillos maintained the
rhythmic pattern, the guitar-and-requinto arrangements, and the themes
of unrequited love characteristic of the elite pasillo, albeit expressed in col-
loquial language. One example is “Diecisiete años” (Seventeen Years), a
song written by Fausto Galarza and popularized by rocolera singer Segundo
Rosero in the early 1980s, whose lyrics praise the beauty of a teenage girl
who is coming of age. Unlike the elite pasillo, which is played exclusively
on a guitar-and-requinto ensemble, the working-class pasillo includes the
electronic sounds of a synthesizer, especially the organ timbre. Slower tem-
pos and a nasal, sobbing, high-pitched vocal production are reminiscent of
the indigenous preference for high-pitched timbres, which is characteris-
tic of Andean cultures. In general, the elites scorn this type of pasillo and
refuse to recognize it as such because of the extra-musical characteristics
associated with rocolera ambiences.
Rocolera music is a term widely used in Ecuador to describe a style
of music associated with drunkenness, shantytown environments, and a
stigmatized working-class population. The term “rocolera” has no connec-
tion with rock music but with the rocola, the old jukebox usually found

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 81

in the cantina (bars in lower class neighborhoods). Rocolera music has

become an umbrella term for boleros, valses, and pasillos from the 1970s
and 1980s. The boleros and valses rocoleros are reminiscent of the “songs
of damnation” from the early twentieth century in that the lyrics usually
deal with themes of love triangles, treacherous women, and revenge.16
Although the lyrics of working-class pasillos are devoid of these images,
Ecuadorians nevertheless associate it with rocolera ambiences because re-
nowned rocolera singers, such as Segundo Rosero, sing them in the rocol-
era concerts. Turino argues that it is through co-occurrence, or repeated
experiential associations, that particular singers and musical styles be-
come indexical signs (something that stands for something else and cre-
ates an effect in the observer) for different types of identity. The association
of working-class pasillos with rocolera ambiences is also reinforced by the
fact that Ecuadorian liquor companies sponsor and sell their products dur-
ing the concerts, which sometimes end in episodes of violence. Needless
to say, national artists, known for their performances of elite pasillos, do
not sing pasillos rocoleros, as rocolera artists do not sing elite pasillos in
their concerts.
In the early 1990s, academic composers decried the commercialization
of the national pasillo and recommended that it be renovated and mod-
ernized. Some proposed “dressing the pasillo in a tuxedo,” i.e., having bel
canto singers performing pasillos with arrangements for the symphony or-
chestra. Other intellectuals called for harmonic innovations, such as the
introduction of jazz and rock harmonies, so that the music would be more
appealing to younger audiences. Some musicians have incorporated these
suggestions into their works; however, none of these experimental forms
is conspicuous in the music market and they remain unknown to a vast
majority of Ecuadorians.

VIII. Female Figure in the Pasillo

Pasillos are invariably written from the man’s point of view and display a
series of ambivalent images and feelings toward the woman. She is the sub-
ject of idealization or revenge, the object of love or hate. She is the “Other”
against whom the man positions himself, usually as a victim. In many
pasillos from the highland region, the man is abandoned by a female fig-
ure, be this a lover who has left or a mother who has died. An illustration
of the latter is “Encargo que no se cumple” (Duty That Cannot Be Fulfilled)
by Marco Tulio Hidrobo. In this song, a man cries at his mother’s tomb be-
cause he has not been able to carry out the last promise he made to her in
life, which was precisely not to cry when he visits her tomb.
In the national pasillos from the 1920s–1950s, the elites transformed the
female figure into a sublime human being who is idealized to such a degree

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that she is always unattainable, intangible, or unreal. As a mother or as a

beloved woman, she is a pristine figure and a spiritual being who embod-
ies the ideal of the motherland and becomes a suitable metaphor for the
nation. Literary critic Natasha Salguero points out that pasillo lyrics avoid
expressions alluding to a woman’s body or sexuality (Salguero 1995). For
example, the woman portrayed in the pasillo is loved not for her body but
for the tender feelings she inspires, as the verse of the well known pasillo
“Como si fuera un niño” (As If I Were a Child, 1930s) by Paredes Herrera
indicates: “Yo no amo en tí la carne, amo en tí el sentimiento” (What I love
about you is not your flesh, but your feelings).
Unlike the “songs of damnation,” where the man expresses misogynis-
tic feelings and blames the woman for his misery and sufferings, in the
elite pasillo that replaced them, the man presents himself as the cause of
the breakup for his inability to make her happy. She is not an object of re-
venge or the cause of despair, but a sublime human being. She abandons
him not because she is unfaithful but because he does not deserve her love.
The woman, hated in the “songs of damnation” but idealized in the elite
pasillo, is the object of love and desire that is never fulfilled.
In my view, the ambivalent figure of the woman and the evasive feelings
of the man toward his object of desire symbolically represent Ecuadorians’
ambiguous feelings toward the indigenous roots of the national identity,
here represented in an Oedipus-complex relationship. If the idealized and
spiritual woman depicted in the pasillo represents the indigenous heritage,
the man represented in the pasillo might be thought of as a mestizo who
rejects his ethnic self through evasive feelings for what he most loves and
desires.

Conclusion
A brief examination of the social history of the pasillo allows us to under-
stand the contradictory views that may have puzzled our foreign tourist in
the introduction of this article. When Ecuadorians talk about the pasillo,
they may be referring to any of several different styles of pasillo, which rep-
resent different ideologies, historical periods, and musical aesthetics. Al-
though there are clear stylistic differences between pasillos favored by the
elite and the lower classes, Ecuadorians generally talk about the pasillo as
if there were just one kind. It is often the case that new styles of music are
labeled with new terms to highlight their novelty17; in Ecuador, however, all
types of pasillo are simply called “pasillo,” without a hyphen or an adjective
qualifying the stylistic innovation.18
As with most national musics, the pasillo is a polysemous genre that
generates multiple and different meanings for its listeners according to

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 83

their age, gender, ethnicity and social status. The pasillo is associated with
the birth of Ecuador as a republic, with the military and aristocratic cir-
cles in the nineteenth century, and with the popular and upper-middle
classes in the twentieth century. It was a courting music, an upbeat popu-
lar dance, a salon music, and a song of pride and despair.
Some Ecuadorian scholars have examined the pasillo outside of its his-
torical context, making assertions that have obscured our understanding
of the processes that made the pasillo be considered the musical symbol of
Ecuador. In the late 1970s, for example, Jorge Núñez (1980) coined the term
canción del desarraigo (song of uprootedness) to refer to the working-class
pasillo (pasillo rocolero) that was emerging in this period, when rural-to-
urban migration was at its peak. Other Ecuadorian scholars began using
the same term, “Canción del desarraigo,” for all styles of pasillos indiscrim-
inately, although elite pasillos, such as “Guayaquil de mis amores,” have no
association with the uprootedness theme or with the social processes that
led to the appearance of that theme in pasillo.
Several newspaper articles pointing to the decline of the pasillo as a na-
tional symbol appeared in the mid 1980s and 1990s. Headlines in newspa-
per stories, such as “Don’t Die, Pasillo,”19 “The Pasillo is Still Alive on the
Lips of the Ecuadorian People,”20 and “The Pasillo Has Been Abused,”21 re-
flect the concern of upper-middle class intellectuals in maintaining the elite
pasillo as a dominant national music. These assertions, however, overlook
the existence of the working-class pasillo from the 1980s, such as “Dieci-
siete años.” Another prominent view portrays the pasillo as cortavenas (lit-
erally, music by which to slash one’s veins) because people often turn to it
when they are drowning their love frustrations in alcohol.
Changes in musical style have generally reflected changes in society
(Blacking 1973). As I have shown in this article, stylistic changes in the
pasillo reflect the profound social, economic and political transformations
Ecuador has undergone in the twentieth century. The elite pasillo from the
1920s–1950s stresses the Hispanic heritage of the mestizo nation and has
been “whitened” with its poetic lyrics, guitar accompaniment, and upper-
middle-class performance settings. In contrast, the working-class pasillo
from the 1980s is not seen as a national identity expression, or even as a
pasillo, because it is imbued with musical and extra-musical elements that
point to the indigenous heritage.
The most important change in the pasillo, however, has been the con-
struction of public discourses and performance practices that underscore
the sentimental nature of Ecuadorians as a distinguishing feature of the Ec-
uadorian national identity. In the early twenty-first century, the pasillo has
had a sort of renaissance due to the large numbers of Ecuadorians from all
walks of life who had left the country in search for better opportunities as a

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 84 ■ KETTY WO NG

result of the economic crisis of the late 1990s. Once abroad, Ecuadorian mi-
grants revalorize their national music for the soundscapes and memories
of place it recreates in the diaspora. Despite the many debates questioning
the standing of the elite pasillo as a national symbol in the late twentieth
century, Ecuadorians within and outside the country keep singing the song
of the national soul with the emotions and heartfelt sentiments they have
learned to praise and value.

Notes
Research for this article was supported by a Graduate School Continuing Fellowship
and a College of Fine Arts Dean’s Fellowship from the University of Texas-Austin.
I am grateful to the Fulbright Commission in Ecuador for providing financial sup-
port to pursue graduate studies in the United States. I would also like to thank my
mentor, the late Gerard Béhague, as well as Robin Moore and the anonymous re-
viewers for their feedback and criticism on earlier versions of this paper.
1. In Colombia, the pasillo was an important national music from the Andean
region in the first half of the twentieth century, second only to the bambuco (Wade
2000). In Costa Rica, marimba renditions of pasillos are popular in Guanacaste, the
border region with Nicaragua (Acevedo n.d.). In Venezuela, the pasillo was popular
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
2. Pasillos were performed by military bands, estudiantinas, orchestras, piano,
organ, ensembles of harps and guitars, guitars and accordion, or any other combi-
nation of instruments.
3. In La Música en el Ecuador (1930), Moreno transcribed a toro rabón he heard
on one of his trips to the countryside early in the twentieth century. It is not clear
whether this piece is an example of toro rabón as a musical genre or whether the
former genre was simply referred to in the title of the song he heard, because no
other references to toro rabón have been found other than this one.
4. Jorge Icaza and Oswaldo Guayasamín represented the Indigenismo trend in
Ecuadorian literature and painting, respectively. Writers José de la Cuadra, Enrique
Gil Gilbert, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and Alfredo Pareja
Diezcanseco were known as the Group of Guayaquil and represented the Realismo
Social trend.
5. Estrellas, 5, no. 65, 14–17.
6. Examples include the Peruvian vals criollo and the Brazilian samba. “Flor de
la canela” (Cinnamon Flower), a vals criollo by Chabuca Granda, sings to the beauty
of the city of Lima. “Aquarela do Brasil” (Brazilian Water Colors) is an example of
music exaltation to the beauty of Brazilians landscapes.
7. Safadi was born in Lebanon but arrived in Ecuador at age two. He received
the Ecuadorian citizenship days before his trip to New York in order to represent the
country.
8. Estrellas, 14, no. 124, 3–7.
9. Unlike Mexico and Argentina, which developed a strong film industry for the
dissemination of canción ranchera and tango at national and international levels, re-
spectively, in Ecuador sound movies never became a vehicle for the popularization

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 The Song of the National Soul ■ 85

of the pasillo because Ecuador lacked the infrastructure and economic resources to
develop such industry.
10. Every country has a national (typical) music that identifies the country and
its people at national and international levels; however, nationals normally refer to
their music with the name of the country—“música cubana,” “música mexicana,”
“música peruana”—rather than with the term “música nacional.”
11. Other anthologies include Antología del pasillo Ecuatoriano (Anthology of the
Ecuadorian Pasillo) by Isabel Carrión (n.d), Florilegio de la música ecuatoriana (The
Flowering of Ecuadorian Music) by Mario Godoy (1988), Pasillos clásicos (Classical
Pasillos) by Pablo Díaz Marmolejo (1996), Pasillos y pasilleros del Ecuador (Pasillos
and People Who Cultivate the Pasillo from Ecuador) by Guerrero Blum (2000), Lo
mejor del siglo XX (The Best of the twentieth Century) by Oswaldo Carrión (2002),
and Antología de la música ecuatoriana (Anthology of Ecuadorian Music) by Ermel
Aguirre González (n.d).
12. Interview with Juanita Burbano, May 2003.
13. Interview with Teresita Andrade, May 2003.
14. There is a long history of rivalry between Ecuador and Peru, which stems
from the time of the conquest of the Shyris (in what is now Ecuadorian territory)
by the Incas (whose centre of power was in Cuzco, Peru). It continued in the colo-
nial period with the Royal Audience of Quito, which was a part of the Viceroyalty of
Lima. In the early 1820s, both countries obtained their independence; however, the
failure to establish clear territorial boundaries at the time remained an issue, even-
tually leading to the Rio de Janeiro Protocol.
15. Estrellas 5, no. 52.
16. Similar types of songs are known in other Latin American countries as ba-
chata (Dominican Republic), carrilera (Colombia), brega (Brazil), and cebollera (Peru).
17. Examples include the samba complex (samba-canção, samba de morro, pagode,
bossa nova, etc.) and the huayno (chicha, cumbia andina, tecnocumbia). In Ecuador,
some researchers have used categories such as pasillo canción and pasillo de reto to
refer to early forms of pasillo. However, the public and the mass media rarely use
these terms.
18. I use the terms “elite pasillo,” “national pasillo,” “working-class pasillo,” and
“pasillo rocolero” as analytical categories to distinguish the different styles of pasil-
los in the twentieth century. Ecuadorians do not normally use these terms.
19. El Comercio, B-9. August 16, 1992. Quito.
20. Semana, 2. May 29, 1988. Guayaquil.
21. El Comercio, B-3. July 3, 1994. Quito.

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Other Research Materials

Songbooks: El aviador ecuatoriano, 1920s.
El cancionero del Guayas, 1910s.
Magazines: Revista estrellas (1964–1986).
Revista Cine Radial (1950s–1970s).
Newspapers: El comercio.
El universo.

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