(Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music) Ketty Wong - Whose National Music - Identity, Mestizaje, and Migration in Ecuador-Temple University Press (2012)

Whose National Music?
In the series Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music,

edited by Peter Manuel
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
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Cathy Ragland, Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation

between Nations
Alejandro L. Madrid, Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas
in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
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in New York City
David F. Garcia, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin

Popular Music
Sergio Navarrete Pellicer, Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala
Peter Manuel, East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tân-Singing, Chutney,
and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture
María Teresa Vélez, Drumming for the Gods: The Life and Times
of Felipe García Villamil, santero, palero, and abakuá
K ET T Y WONG

Identity, Mestizaje, and Migration in Ecuador
T E M PL E U N I V E R SI T Y PR ES S
PH I L A DE L PH I A
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2012 by Temple University

All rights reserved
Published 2012
Material in Chapter 3 first published as the article “The Song of the National Soul: Ecuadorian
Pasillo in the Twentieth Century,” by Ketty Wong, in Latin American Music Review, Volume 32,
Issue 1, pp. 59–87. Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wong, Ketty.
Whose national music? : identity, mestizaje, and migration in Ecuador / Ketty Wong.
p. cm.—(Studies in Latin American and Caribbean music)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-0057-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4399-0059-8 (e-book)
1. National music—Ecuador—History and criticism. 2. Music—Social aspects—
Ecuador. 3. Nationalism in music. I. Title.
ML3575.E2W66 2012
780.9866—dc23
2011028563
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1992
Printed in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Multimedia
ethnomusicology
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to expand opportunities for emerging scholars in ethnomusicology by publishing first books
accompanied by supplemental audiovisual materials online. Developed with funding from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, EM is a collaboration of the presses at Indiana, Kent State,
and Temple universities. These presses gratefully acknowledge the help of Indiana University’s
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information and to view EM materials, please visit www.ethnomultimedia.org.
Contents
List of Multimedia Examples vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 | The Nation in Bloom: A Search for “Ecuadorianness” 17
2 | La Música Nacional: An Anthology of Songs 38
3 | The Pasillo: Rise and Decline of the National Song 66
4 | Rocolera Music: New Urban Sounds in the City 95
5 | Chichera Music: The “Tropicalization” of Música Nacional 130
6 | The Tecnocumbia Boom in Ecuador: “A Letter with My Kisses

Sent with Love by Internet” 163
7 | The Translocation of Ecuadorian Popular Music 192
Epilogue: Whose National Music? 211
Appendices 225
Notes 229
Glossary of Ethnic and Musical Terms 235
Bibliography 237
Index 247
Multimedia Examples
A selection of enhanced media examples (still images, audio, or video recordings)

associated with this book can be accessed on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia
website, www.ethnomultimedia.org. Keyed to specific passages, each example
listed below has a unique persistent uniform resource identifier, or PURL. Within
the text of the book, a PURL number in parentheses functions as a citation and
immediately follows the text to which it refers, for example, (PURL 3.1). The
numbers following the word “PURL” indicate the chapter in which the media
example is found and the order in which the PURL first appears in that chapter.
There are two ways for readers of the print edition of this book to access and
play back a specific media example. The first is to type in a web browser the full
address of the PURL associated with a specific media example. Readers will be
taken to a web page displaying that media example as well as a playlist of all of
the media examples related to this book. Once readers have navigated to the
Ethnomusicology Multimedia website, the second way to access media examples
is by typing into the search field the unique six-digit PURL identifier located at
the end of the full PURL address. Readers of the electronic edition of this book
will simply click on the PURL address for each media example; this live link will
take them directly to the media example on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia
website. Readers will be required to electronically sign an end-users license agree-
ment (EULA) the first time they attempt to access a media example.
The list below, organized by chapter, includes the PURL number, the
title of the media segment, and the full PURL with the six-digit unique
identifier.
viii | Multimedia Examples
PURL 2.1 Yaraví, “Puñales” (Daggers). Trío Los Brillantes.

http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Wong/910107 46
PURL 2.2 Yumbo, “Campesino de mi tierra” (Peasant of
my land). Ángel Guaraca.
http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Wong/910108 47, 153
PURL 2.3 Danzante, “Vasija de barro” (Clay pot).
Dúo Benítez-Valencia.
PURL 2.4 Sanjuanito, “Pobre corazón” (Poor heart).
Trío Los Brillantes.
PURL 2.5 Fox incaico, “La canción de los Andes” (Song
of the Andes). Paulina Tamayo.
PURL 2.6 Albazo, “Morena la ingratitud” (Dark-skinned woman,
the ingratitude). Paulina Tamayo.
PURL 2.7 Pasacalle, “El chulla quiteño” (A man from Quito).
Dúo Benítez-Valencia.
PURL 2.8 Pasillo, “Guayaquil de mis amores” (Guayaquil
of my loves). Julio Jaramillo.
PURL 2.9 Pasillo, “Lamparilla” (Little lamp).
Hermanos Miño-Naranjo.
PURL 3.1 Pasillo, “Invernal” (Wintertime).
Hermanos Miño-Naranjo.
PURL 3.2 Pasillo, “El alma en los labios” (Wearing one’s soul
on one’s sleeve). Margarita Cueto and José Mojica.
PURL 3.3 Pasillo, “Despedida” (Farewell). 1910s, vocal.
PURL 3.4 Pasillo, “Palomas Blancas”
(White doves). 1910s, instrumental.
PURL 3.5 Pasillo, “Romance de mi destino” (Romance
of my destiny). Hermanos Miño-Naranjo.
Multimedia Examples | ix
PURL 4.1 Bolero, “Nuestro juramento” (Our oath). Julio Jaramillo.

PURL 4.2 Bolero, “La otra” (The other woman). Cecilio Alva.
PURL 4.3 Bolero, “Asciéndeme a marido” (Make me
your husband). Aladino.
PURL 4.4 Pasillo, “Te quiero, te quiero” (I love you, I love you).
Ana Lucía Proaño.
PURL 4.5 Pasillo, “Diecisiete años” (Seventeen years [of age]).
Segundo Rosero.
PURL 5.1 Sanjuanito, “Por una guambrita” (For a beautiful
indigenous girl). Dúo Saavedra-Rubira.
PURL 5.2 Fox incaico, “Collar de lágrimas” (Necklace of tears).
Segundo Bautista.
PURL 5.3 Fox incaico, “Collar de lágrimas” (Necklace of tears).
Starband.
PURL 5.4 Sanjuanito, “El conejito” (Little rabbit).
Los Conquistadores.
PURL 5.5 Paseíto, “Dos cariños” (Two loves). Bayronn Caicedo.
PURL 6.1 Tecnocumbia, “Me abandonaste” (You left me).
María de los Ángeles.
PURL 6.2 Tecnocumbia, “Por internet” (Over the Internet).
Azucena Aymara.
PURL 6.3 Bomba, “Mil lindo Carpuela” (My beautiful
Carpuela). Segundo Rosero.
Acknowledgments
T
his book would not have been possible without the collaboration of
many Ecuadorian people I have met on the streets, in the buses, and
at numerous concert venues, parks, and music stores in Quito, Guaya-
quil, Madrid, and New York. They have shared with me their love, memories,
nostalgia, thoughts, and criticisms of Ecuador in many different ways. Un
Dios le pague, thank you, to them and to the composers, performers, music
producers, and entrepreneurs I have met during my field research. They were
very kind and patient enough to answer my numerous questions. They are too
many individuals to list here, but I wish to express my gratitude in particu-
lar to Teresita Andrade, Azucena Aymara, Juanita Burbano, Naldo Campos,
Patricio Cóndor, Dúo Mixto Ecuador, Marcos Espinoza, Héctor Jaramillo,
Jayac, Los Búfalos, María de los Ángeles, Noé Morales, Saulo Proaño, Ricardo
Realpe (+), Segundo Rosero, Carlos Rubira Infante, Pablo Santillán, Cristóbal
Vaca, Claudio Vallejo, Franklin Villegas, Lola Zapata, Hugo Zavala, Mauri-
cio Zavala, and Roberto Zumba.
I have a debt of gratitude to the late Gerard Béhague, an outstanding and
inspiring teacher, mentor, and advisor, whose constant support and encour-
agement to ask deeper questions about music and society have driven my
study on Ecuadorian popular music. I owe special thanks to Robin Moore, a
friend, colleague, and dissertation advisor whose encouragement, feedback,
and criticism helped me refine my thoughts on musical nationalism. I also
wish to express my thankfulness to Veit Erlmann, Charles Hale, Aline Helg,
Joel Sherzer, Stephen Slawek, Pauline Strong, Michael Tusa, and the late
Begoña Aretxaga for their academic guidance during my graduate studies at
the University of Texas at Austin. I am very grateful to Peter Manuel for his
thoughtful and detailed comments throughout the manuscript, which have
improved the book immensely. Many thanks also go to the two anonymous
xii | Acknowledgments
readers for their helpful comments on and criticisms of an earlier draft of this
book. I have an intellectual debt with Michelle Wibbelsman, an Ecuadorian-
American friend and anthropologist whose insights have always questioned
and enlightened my views of Ecuador. I deeply appreciate Mona-Lynn Cour-
teau’s, Andre Moskowitz’s, Francesca Sutton’s, and Jerry Fried’s meticulous
readings, observations, and editing of earlier drafts of the manuscript.
A Spanish version of this book won the Casa de las Américas Musicology
Award in 2010. I am thankful to Casa de las Americas for this honor, and to
María Elena Vinueza and the jury for their comments and criticism on the
book manuscript. I am very grateful to Temple University Press’s editorial staff,
particularly Janet Francendese, for their fine work and assistance throughout
the publication process. My appreciation also goes to my colleagues in the
University of Kansas Musicology Division, Paul Laird and Roberta Freund
Schwartz, who granted me the time I needed to complete this book.
I am deeply grateful to the Fulbright Commission of Ecuador, which
awarded me a scholarship and made possible my graduate studies at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. Fieldwork research for this book was supported by
the University of Texas at Austin Cullen’s Continuum Fellowship and the
College of Fine Arts Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. The University of Kansas
provided a New Faculty Graduate Research Fund grant to conduct research
in Spain in the summer of 2008. I am thankful to these institutions for their
generous support at different stages of my research.
Research for this study took me to libraries and music archives where I
spent many hours listening to old 78-rpm records and revising manuscripts
of old music scores in order to trace the history of Ecuadorian popular music.
I thank the personnel of the Archivo Histórico and the Department of Cul-
ture of the Banco Central del Ecuador, the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio
Espinoza Pólit, the Biblioteca Carlos A. Rolando, the Biblioteca Municipal
de Guayaquil, the Radio of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, and the Cor-
poración Musicológica Ecuatoriana for their kindness and assistance in this
research. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Society of Authors
and Composers of Ecuador (SAYCE), Productores Independientes, Produc-
ciones Zapata Internacional, and Nicole Adoum for granting permission to
reproduce copyrighted poetry, music, lyrics, and images in this book and on
the website accompanying it. Some of the material in this book was first pre-
sented as conference papers. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as
an article in the Latin American Music Review no. 32 (2011): 59-87.
I am grateful to the music collectors and enthusiasts who shared with me
their invaluable collections of Ecuadorian music records. I thank the person-
nel of the Consulate of Ecuador and the Associations of Ecuadorian Migrants
in Madrid, especially to the late Juan Carlos Manzanillas, for their hospitality
Acknowledgments | xiii
and assistance during my research conducted in Spain in 2003 and 2008. I

am especially grateful to Marcos Espinoza, the manager of the Quito branch
of Almacenes J. D. Feraud Guzmán and a great connoisseur of the Ecua-
dorian music industry, who shared with me his memories, insights, and love
for Ecuadorian music. Conversations with music researchers Hernán Ibarra,
Mario Godoy, Pablo Guerrero, Juan Carlos Franco, Roberto Fuertes, and
René Torres have been helpful to my analysis of various types of Ecuador-
ian popular music. My appreciation goes to them and to Edgar López, the
founder and choreographer of the Ballet Quitus in Madrid, for showing me
how to dance the pasillo.
Research for this book took me to various places where I had the fortune
to meet friends, relatives, and kind people who assisted me with contacts,
logistics, and friendship. I wish to thank the kindness and hospitality of Way-
gen and Luis Yip, Puig-Yi and Edward Ching, and Nancy and Guillermo
Hagó in New York; Beto, Dalila, and Miriam Tejada in Lima; Morena and
Gustavo Mateus, Sara González, and Elena Wong in Madrid; Katherine and
Ed Spring in Austin; and María Antonieta and Gustavo Dávila, and Lena and
Reinaldo Cañizares in Quito.
Special friends and family members provided emotional and intellectual
support throughout my graduate studies and the research process and writ-
ing of this book. My heartfelt thanks go to Miriam Estrada, Alegría Hibbetts,
Theresa Fechek, Jerry Fried, Cecilia Pareja, Gonzalo Cartagenova, Libushe
Hlavenka, Anita Herzfeld, Gi Neustaetter (+), and Gita for their enduring
friendship and encouragement in the long and solitary process of writing a
book. I am deeply grateful to my siblings Nelson (+), Betty, Johnny, Patricia,
Wellington, Moifa, and Lenfa, and their respective families, who have always
been loving, supportive, and curious about my work. Finally, I owe heartfelt
thanks to my parents, Alejandro (+) and Blanca, for their unconditional love,
inspiration, and support. They taught me to persevere in my endeavors by
their example in their own quiet ways. This book is dedicated to them.
Introduction
P
eople often believe that a musical phenomenon, such as a particular
genre, musical instrument, or song repertoire, captures the essence
of a country’s national character. Think of the Paraguayan harp, the
Trinidadian steelband, the Brazilian samba, the Argentine tango, and the
Dominican merengue as just a few examples of this in Latin America and
the Caribbean. In its adoption of the term música nacional (national music),
Ecuador is unusually frank in its acknowledgment of the link between a musi-
cal symbol and ideas about nationhood. During my sojourn in Ecuador from
November 2001 to October 2004, and also as an Ecuadorian citizen who grew
up in Ecuador singing and listening to pasillos in serenades, at high school,
and on the radio, I came to realize that Ecuadorian people do not normally
use the phrase “Ecuadorian music” to designate music of Ecuadorian origin;
instead, they use the phrase “música nacional.” This term cannot be generi-
cally translated into English as “national music”; rather, it is an expression
that has been used in Ecuador as an umbrella term for a specific repertoire
of urban popular songs composed between the 1920s and 1950s. This rep-
ertoire consists especially of pasillos, a song type the elites have elevated to
national status. Since the 1990s, however, the popular classes have been using
the same phrase—música nacional—to refer to a broader repertoire of songs
the elites pejoratively call chichera music (an urban popular music associated
with indigenous people) and rocolera music (a working-class music related not
to rock music but to the rocola, drunkenness, and unrequited love).1 For the
2 | Introduction
popular classes, these styles, not the pasillos preferred by the elite, embody the
sounds of the nation and what it means for them to be Ecuadorian.
The focal point of this book is to understand what kinds of music Ecuador-
ians from different walks of life call música nacional, why there are dispari-
ties between different social groups in terms of how they use this term, and
what the ramifications of these differences are. The term música nacional
has varying definitions according to the socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, and
generational background of the individuals doing the identifying. I argue that
Ecuadorians’ attitudes toward the music they identify as música nacional are
symptomatic of their outlook on the nation and on conationals. The inclusion
or exclusion within the scope of this term of musical genres and styles associ-
ated with the white, mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Ecuadorian populations
reveals how different social groups envision the ethnic and racial configura-
tion of the nation. No previous study of Ecuadorian popular music (EPM) has
focused on this double usage because using this phrase to pinpoint different
styles of music perceived as embodying the feelings for the nation has become
a common and unnoticed habit that is deeply ingrained in social practice. For
analytical purposes, throughout this book I will use the terms “elite música
nacional” and “working-class música nacional” to distinguish the two usages.
It must be noted that Ecuadorians do not make this distinction and simply use
the term música nacional to refer to both types of musics.
T his book explores the ideas that people have about themselves and their
nations. More specifically, it examines Ecuadorians’ perceptions of their
national identity in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particu-
larly between 1960 and 2004, and how such perceptions are conspicuous in
the production, circulation, and consumption of música nacional. Ecuador,
like other Latin American countries, has a long history of racial and cultural
miscegenation as a result of the encounter of Europeans, Amerindians, and
Africans in the colonial period, which has given rise to the popular saying,
“El que no tiene de inga, tiene de mandinga” (The person who does not have
indigenous blood [inga] has African blood [mandinga]). Although “mixture”
has been the norm in the demographics and cultural scene of Latin Amer-
ica, the trend among upper-middle-class mestizos has been to self-identify as
“white” (of European ancestry) and to deny their indigenous and/or African
heritage. “Whiteness,” in this case, has less to do with race than with social
distinction and socioeconomic status among mestizos, which are features
used as a means to build social boundaries between upper-middle-class mesti-
zos (white-mestizos) and lower-class mestizos (hereafter called mestizos).
The elite construction of Ecuadorian national identity has been molded
by the ideology of mestizaje (mixed ancestry), a nation-building discourse that
Introduction | 3
celebrates the racial and cultural mixing of indigenous and white people, yet
is exclusionist of the nonmixed populations, that is, indigenous and Afro-
Ecuadorian people (Whitten 1981). This vision of mestizaje seeks to integrate
Ecuador’s multiethnic population into a discursive national unity by homog-
enizing their cultural practices through the adoption of urban lifestyles and
the cultural features of the dominant sectors (white-mestizos), such as the
Spanish language, customs, and dress. However, mestizo groups in Ecuador
are anything but homogeneous. As with all hybrid identities, it is important
to analyze the power relations at play between the ethnic groups involved in
the mixture because the perception and level of acceptance of the cultural
mixture will vary if the components are not equally valued (Roitman 2009).
In Ecuador’s case, the indigenous culture has historically been devalued,
while “whiteness” (becoming urban and modern) has been overpriced and
esteemed as the ultimate goal of mestizaje.
Although Ecuadorians’ view of indigenous culture has been changing since
the rise of indigenous social movements in the 1990s and their active participa-
tion in Ecuadorian politics, the evaluation of indigenous people continues to
be undervalued.2 The “archaeological” Indians from the precolonial period
are recognized as valiant people who courageously fought against the Span-
ish conquistadors, but contemporary common Indians are neglected and mar-
ginalized. Social scientists distinguish an indigenous intellectual elite and the
Otavalan merchants who are in a better-off position from the common indig-
enous people to whom I refer as a marginal group. The government recognizes
the legitimacy of indigenous culture as expressed in the 1998 Constitution,
which declares Ecuador a pluricultural and multiethnic nation. Indigenous
children, for example, are able to study in Quichua in elementary school, and
a “multilingual” version of the national anthem has been recorded and is aired
on television state programs.3 However, official recognition does not necessar-
ily equate with acceptance from the general population.
In her study of the upper classes in Ecuador, Roitman notes that mes-
tizaje in Ecuador has been examined mainly as a process of blanqueamiento
(whitening), which looks at how indigenous people strive to become whites
in order to climb the social ladder and gain access to privileges denied to
indigenous people. Because mestizos are generally perceived as a homoge-
neous group, ethnic and racial tensions among mestizos of different socioeco-
nomic levels have been overlooked and left unquestioned. Roitman also states
that studies of mestizaje in Ecuador rarely focus on the hybrid identity of the
upper-middle classes because “‘mestizo’ became colloquially understood as
a label for those who were ‘no longer Indians,’ [and] the Criollo ‘elites’ while
theoretically mestizos, were not placed in the ethnic structure since they were
not directly linked to an Indigenous past” (2009, 2).
4 | Introduction
As a hybrid-identity discourse, mestizaje is “an extensive construct that

permits much variety within it” because any ethnic group, regardless of their
socioeconomic, cultural, and physical disparities, can “in theory” become or
claim to be mestizo (Roitman 2009, 4). This malleable concept of mestizaje
presupposes the possibility of ethnic identity change and is symptomatic of
the social differences, antagonisms, and hierarchical levels that upper-, mid-
dle-, and lower-class mestizos establish among themselves. Ecuadorians and
social scientists use a variety of ethnic labels to refer to this ethnic and cul-
tural mixture, such as white-mestizo (upper- and upper-middle-class mestizo),
mestizo (lower- and lower-middle-class mestizo), mishi (Quichua term for
mestizo, used by indigenous people), and cholo and longo (terms indicating
various degrees of assimilation of indigenous and mestizo people from the
rural areas to urban culture). The terms cholo and longo are pejorative and
often used by the upper-middle classes as insults for urban mestizos who have
notable indigenous features and try to escalate the social ladder.4 According
to Roitman, these ethnic labels have been examined more as indicators of a
change in socioeconomic status than as a change in ethnic identity, or expres-
sions of a subtle racism among and within mestizos (2009, 4–5).
Ethnic and racial tensions are also revealed in the labels upper-middle-
class Ecuadorians use to disparage EPM associated with indigenous people
and lower-class mestizos assimilated to the cities. A central argument of this
book is that upper-middle-class Ecuadorians (white-mestizos) do not acknowl-
edge the indigenous heritage of their mestizo identity, an attitude symbolically
observed in the stereotypes and labels they use to refer to mestizo working-
class musics. I argue that labels such as chichera and rocolera music pinpoint
the existing ethnic and racial tensions among and within mestizo groups and
have pejorative connotations similar to those of longo and cholo. The label
música nacional, which designates the music cultivated by upper-middle-class
Ecuadorians, underscores the social hierarchies between white-mestizos and
lower-class mestizos, that is, the cholos and longos. It is important to note that
the terms chichera and rocolera have been assigned from above as the popular
classes do not normally refer to their music as such.
Identifying what kinds of repertoires Ecuadorians from different walks of
life identify as música nacional is as complex as determining who a mestizo
person is. Mestizoness is a highly relational concept defined conjuncturally
according to who does the identifying and who is being identified. Likewise,
the definition of música nacional is highly situational and will depend on
the types of songs in question and who the people who produce and listen to
them are. I argue that elite música nacional is the musical embodiment of the
ideology of mestizaje as blanqueamiento. Elite música nacional “whitens” the
indigenous features and accentuates the European component in the musical
Introduction | 5
mixture through stylization of the lyrics, musical arrangements, and singing

style, whereas working-class música nacional (that is, chichera and rocolera
music) is the expression of a type of mestizaje where the indigenous elements
are made more obvious. Manuel Espinosa Apolo calls this process “mestizaje
as cholificación” (2003).5 As a result, for the elites the elite música nacional
repertoire is considered the Ecuadorian music par excellence, while chichera
and rocolera music are unclassified and simply regarded as música del pueblo
(people’s music).
I view música nacional as a metaphor for Ecuadorian national identity.
According to Samuels, “Metaphors assert an identity between things that at
a basic referential level are different” and thus “open the possibility for prolif-
eration of meaning” (2004, 9). It is this capacity for music to convey a multi-
plicity of meanings that I analyze in the elite and working-class constructions
of música nacional. We must bear in mind, however, that these constructs
representing different visions of the nation are not mutually exclusive because
the elites need to keep their positions of power and distinguish themselves
from the people they outwardly claim to be “equal” citizens (Wade 2000).
Rather than pointing to a singular and homogenous national identity, I focus
instead on the coexistence of multiple expressions of national identity, which
represent different interests, aesthetics, and social groups vying for national
representation in a multicultural nation such as Ecuador.
The Intimacy of the Nation

In Ecuador, the elites seem to be connected to the nation by a “shameful
identity” (identidad vergonzosa), as evidenced by their tendency to disparage
their popular culture and the products made in Ecuador. These negative
views, which are commonly expressed in criticisms of and disdain for rocolera
and chichera music, are not normally talked about with nonnationals because
they exist within a private sphere, a kind of dirty laundry only to be aired
within the “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997) of the nation.6
This book examines negative self-stereotypes with which Ecuadorians
identify and express their denial of their national identity’s indigenous heri-
tage. Ecuadorians, like nationals of other countries, usually describe them-
selves as nice, cheerful, and hospitable people who are proud of their coun-
try. However, they also point out negative aspects of their national character.
Writer Jorgenrique Adoum, for example, calls attention to Ecuadorians’ “par-
ticular traits” (señas particulares) and pinpoints the existence of a negative
national identity, reflected in an “inferiority complex” and a devalued image
of Ecuadorians: “The Ecuadorian citizen, in general . . . adopts from the out-
set a defeatist attitude, almost servile, of ‘Indian’ or ‘longo’ when abroad, or
6 | Introduction
when confronted by someone whom he or she perceives to be superior based

on his/her nationality, position, income” (2000, 46).
In Ecuador, one can frequently hear discourses in the media about Ecua-
dorians’ “inferiority complex” and low self-esteem, which make them place
higher value on foreign products and cultural expressions than on those of
their own country. Several marketing campaigns, with slogans such as “Elige
siempre lo nuestro” (Always choose our products) and “Dile sí al producto
nacional” (Say yes to national products), were conceived in the early 2000s
with the aim of encouraging consumption of Ecuadorian goods and chang-
ing people’s attitude toward them. Although both campaigns advocated the
consumption of such products as a way to generate employment, stimulate
the economy, and reduce the escalating rates of international migration
(Ortiz 2003, 38), these marketing strategies also played on a perceived sense of
inferiority, putting a positive spin on this reference point for mutual recogni-
tion among Ecuadorians.
Upper-middle-class Ecuadorians often complain about Ecuador’s popu-
lar music not being known on the international stage.7 Social critic Agustín
Cueva puts it bluntly: “Latin American popular music has been successful
in the entire world. Ecuadorian music, however, is the exception” (Donoso
2000, 56). Upper-middle-class Ecuadorians have taken the fact that Ecuador-
ian music is little known outside Ecuador as symptomatic of Ecuador not
having a national identity. Writer Miguel Donoso Pareja, for example, affirms
that Ecuador lacks a popular music that integrates and identifies its people
in the same way that the cumbia, the samba, and the tango do in Colombia,
Brazil, and Argentina, respectively. For him, “the only musical identification
Ecuadorians have is the suffering, lamentations, weeping, drunkenness and
the heartbreak of unrequited love affairs,” which indicates “a negative, self-
commiserating, and castrating identity” (Donoso 2000, 56). Many upper-mid-
dle-class Ecuadorians I spoke to in Quito and Guayaquil formulated similar
value judgments, albeit in a more subtle manner. However, it must be noted
that Ecuador is not the only Latin American country whose popular music
is little known in the international sphere. One could even argue that Brazil
and Cuba are the exceptions, rather than the rule, in terms of having their
popular musics known internationally.
In addition, Donoso states that Ecuador does not have a national drink
that identifies it internationally as the caipirinha in Brazil and the mojito
in Cuba do. He points out that while in Ecuador it is possible to eat Mexi-
can tacos, Argentine parrilladas, and Chilean empanadas, Ecuadorian typi-
cal dishes are unknown even in the border cities of Ipiales in Colombia and
Aguas Verdes in Peru. Finally, Donoso reminds us that even the famous hand-
woven straw hat from Ecuador is internationally known as the “Panama hat”!8
Introduction | 7
For intellectuals such as Donoso, Ecuadorian national identity is defined by

international recognition (the gaze of the “Other”) rather than by Ecuador-
ians’ self-identification because, for him, “to be in the world means to have an
identity, and from this identity, to transcend, that is, to expand, to be mean-
ingful, to be unique first, and then to be recognized as an equal” (2000, 159).
In addition to the inferiority-complex and lack-of-international-presence
discourses, this book addresses the musical identity dilemma of a national
population that tends to prefer music genres of foreign origin and that is
not celebrated for having created distinctive musical styles of international
or even broad national popularity. However, not every country is a musical
powerhouse like Cuba, which has produced music crazes with the rumba,
the habanera, the son, the mambo, and the cha cha cha, to name just a few;
or like Mexico and Brazil, whose popular music forms and artists are interna-
tionally known. It is important to note that there are countries whose popula-
tions may be as musically active as any other, but who devote their energies
almost entirely to “imported” musical styles (for example, rock, salsa, West-
ern classical music). As Peter Manuel points out in examining the impact of
urbanization and rural-to-urban migration on popular music, although “pop-
ular music may sound to the naïve ear as a crude imitation of other forms, [it]
may serve as a metaphor for the creation of a distinctive world of common
meanings and shared cultural ideologies” (1988, 17). Thus, musics that may
look like a simple carbon copy to cultural outsiders may be meaningful to
insiders for reasons that can only be understood by examining the history and
sociocultural setting of that country.
One example is the Orquesta de la Luz, a Japanese salsa band of the
mid-1980s and 1990s, which impressed the world with its impeccable per-
formances of salsa. Hosokawa (2002) argues that the Orquesta de la Luz
should not be seen as Japanese musicians giving in to cultural imperialism,
but rather as representing modernity and westernization in Japan. Accord-
ing to Hosokawa, Japanese people tend to disdain their own musical roots
because they are reminiscent of the harsh policy of isolation under which they
lived for more than two centuries before the Meiji period.9 This historical
background helps us understand why Japanese people show a preference for
Western music and invest their musical energies in reproducing it (2002, 303).
Salsa in Cali, Colombia, exemplifies another “imported” music that has
been adopted and resignified as local, to such a degree that Caleños (people
from Cali) claim their city to be the “world capital of salsa” (Waxer 2002).
Although Caleños recognize salsa’s roots and further development in Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and New York, they view salsa as a cultural form that helps them
“formulate an alternative cosmopolitan identity as they became increasingly
tied to world markets, while being excluded from national and elite spheres
8 | Introduction
of cosmopolitan culture” (2002, 2). Salsa in Cali is, therefore, an expression

of modernity, transnational markets, and cosmopolitan values, rather than an
expression of life in the barrio, as originally intended by Nuyorican10 musi-
cians in the 1960s and 1970s.
Over time, Ecuadorians have adopted and adapted foreign music forms to
their national repertoire. This book shows how upper-middle- and lower-class
Ecuadorians have responded to the adoption of the Colombian pasillo, which
acquired the status of a national musical symbol in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, and the Peruvian tecnocumbia, which is scorned by elite intel-
lectuals for its lack of originality, despite its association with the Ecuadorian
nation among the lower classes. Both popular musics reveal new sensibilities
and a new sense of modernity emerging in periods of profound social, eco-
nomic, and political transformations. The pasillo developed in the aftermath
of the Liberal Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century, when the new
bourgeoisie was seeking for symbols of the new social and political order. The
tecnocumbia appeared as a result of the international exodus produced by the
economic crisis of the late 1990s in Ecuador. In both types of music, it is the
lyrical content and the emotional performances of Ecuadorian singers that
are seen as embodying the feelings of the nation and that ultimately make
these songs Ecuadorian music. As the examples of Japan, Cali, and Ecuador
illustrate, different reasons motivate different people to devote their artistic
impulses to adopting or reproducing styles of music of foreign origin; how-
ever, for local people, these songs acquire meanings other than those that
inspired them.
A Theoretical Framework
This study is framed by Anderson’s well-known conceptualization of the nation
as an “imagined community” (1991). Several reasons explain this approach.
Identities are first imagined, and only then articulated, performed, narrated,
materialized, negotiated, and/or contested. Due to its private and subjective
character, the work of imagining is the starting point for the formation of ideo-
logical discourses and social practices that enable people from different ethnic,
racial, class, and generational backgrounds to articulate a sense of national
belonging. The notion of “imagined community” also allows us to explore the
coexistence of alternate visions of the nation and analyze simultaneous forma-
tions of local, regional, national, transnational, and postnational communi-
ties interacting with each other. Most importantly, the concept of “imagined
community” allows us to explore the agency of the popular classes because,
although the elites may be able to symbolically impose their cultural canon
on the popular classes, they have no control over the production of meanings.
Introduction | 9
This study integrates “a discourse-centered approach” (Sherzer 1987;

Urban 1991) into the study of popular music and national identity. For Urban,
the analysis of culture begins with an examination of concrete discourses
because “culture is localized in concrete, publicly accessible signs, the most
important of which are actually occurring instances of discourses” (1991, 1).
By discourse I mean not only the way people talk about music, but also the
ways in which musical sounds mediate social reality. Discourse is considered
here to be “the locus of the expression of ideology and especially of the play-
ing out and the working out of conflicts, tensions, and changes inherent in
ideological systems” (Sherzer 1990, 7). Following this line of thought, I view
identities not only as “trapped in public discourse” (Urban 1991), but also
as manifest in musical performances and in the acts of listening, discussing,
thinking, and writing about music (Stokes 1994).
By examining the notion of elite and working-class música nacional, I seek
to understand how upper-middle-class Ecuadorians discursively construct
and maintain class hierarchies with the indigenous and lower-class mestizo
populations, and how the latter express their sense of Ecuadorianness in their
own cultural terms. To this end, I examine a series of upper-middle-class dis-
courses and lower-class practices that express pride and shame for the national
and popular culture. Upper-middle-class discourses include: “Ecuadorians do
not have a national identity because its popular music is little known interna-
tionally”; “Ecuadorians hold their national culture in low esteem and prefer to
listen to foreign music”; “Ecuadorian music is sad and makes people cry and
drink”; and “Ecuadorian singers are ‘karaoke singers’ because they show little
originality and professionalism in their performances.”
Studies on musical nationalism tend to focus on elite constructions of an
“official” national identity, which generally examines the role of the government
and the media in elevating a local or regional music to national status. While
I use this approach to examine the elite música nacional, I also explore how
the popular classes actively express and assert their sense of national belonging
through everyday musical practices that mindlessly recall and materialize the
nation. My study of Ecuadorian national identity is greatly informed by the
works of Robert Foster (2002) and Michael Billig (1995), who look at consumer-
ism, everyday discourses, and banal activities as locus of “daily nationalism.”
For them, an identity is to be found in the embodied habits of social life and
routine activities of everyday life, such as ways of thinking and talking about
nationhood, eating typical food, and listening and dancing to national popu-
lar musics. These forms of daily nationalism are often overlooked because the
continual reminders of nationhood are familiar and slip from attention, unlike
official nationalisms, which exhibit passionate demonstrations of patriotism in a
public setting, such as singing a national anthem at the Olympics (Billig 1995).
10 | Introduction
Music labels are usually thought of as strategies used by the recording

industries to market a new style of music, for example, salsa, música tropi-
cal, or world music; however, labels are also used as “othering” tools. In his
examination of the landing of Columbus in the Americas, Trouillot argues
that “names set up a field of power” that shape our way of looking at things,
and he challenges us to examine what kind of power is at work in our naming
practices (1995, 115). He notes that the way in which an event is described
or remembered to have happened—such as whether Columbus’s arrival in
the Americas was a “discovery,” an “encounter,” or an “invasion”—will greatly
influence our way of looking at it. Similarly, the labels Ecuadorians use to
refer to various styles of mestizo popular music influence the way they view
the people who produce and listen to them. In Ecuador, songs labeled chich-
era by the elites are associated with “Indianness,” cholos, longos, and drunken-
ness, while música nacional is associated with educated, “decent,” and sensi-
tive upper-middle-class people.
In the Field
This book analyzes four styles of EPM that emerged and developed in Guaya-
quil and Quito in different periods of the twentieth century—elite música
nacional, rocolera, chichera, and tecnocumbia. The study of elite música nacio-
nal necessarily involves an examination of the origin and development of a
well-known song repertoire that encompasses an array of Ecuadorian musical
genres. My ethnographic work is centered on Quito, the place where rocolera,
chichera, and tecnocumbia acquired national overtones and where the ethnic,
racial, and class conflicts I discuss in this book are more conspicuous.11 It is
also in Quito where the tecnocumbia boom had its greatest impact and where
large EPM concerts and an alternative music industry developed.
I examine Guayaquil as the arena where the nationalization of the pasillo
(1920s–50s), the emergence of rocolera music (1970s), and the “tropicaliza-
tion” of música nacional (1960s–70s) started, as well as the headquarters of
the two largest record companies that promoted these musical styles at the
national level. The music scene in Guayaquil has been more Caribbean-
oriented and open to international music trends than the scene in Quito,
which is more traditionalist and Andes-focused. The singers and types of rep-
ertoire that are popular in each city are markedly different and also have dif-
ferent connotations. For these reasons, the analysis of mestizaje and EPM in
Guayaquil requires a separate study and awaits further research.
I conducted multisited fieldwork for this book from November 2001
through October 2004, though many observations I present in this study are
the result of my exposure to elite música nacional since childhood, and also
Introduction | 11
during my sojourn in Quito in the early 1990s as a music researcher of several

cultural institutions. In addition to Guayaquil and Quito, I traveled to Madrid
and New York in the spring of 2003 to explore how Ecuadorian migrants re-
create aspects of their national culture abroad and to see how their percep-
tions of música nacional have changed in the diaspora. Finally, I spent two
weeks in Lima to get acquainted with the social venues and the development
of the tecnocumbia in Peru. I was interested in comparing the similarities and
differences between the performance practices and meanings that this music
generates in Ecuador and Peru.
I conducted archival research and examined music scores and songbooks,
and listened to recordings of early twentieth-century pasillos and sanjuani-
tos.12 Likewise, I interviewed numerous Ecuadorian composers, singers, disc
jockeys, record producers, music-store owners, and music entrepreneurs in
Quito, Guayaquil, New York, and Madrid, as well as people of different socio-
economic levels selected at random on the streets and in buses, parks, music
stores, and concerts. I devoted most of my spare time in Quito to listening to
EPM programs on the radio and to watching EPM videos on television. Buses
and the trolley transport system became important sites of fieldwork as they
provided a space for informal conversations with passengers and opportunities
to see their reactions to the different types of musics listened to while using
these means of transportation. I also attended numerous elite and working-
class música nacional concerts at various locations in Quito. As a participant-
observer, I engaged in the dancing and sharing of drinks that normally take
place at these events.
In order to provide a flavor of how Ecuadorians of different walks of life
articulate identity, race, and gender issues, I present numerous YouTube com-
ments posted on the Internet. Some are witty and clever, others are racist, and
some silly and obscene, but they are also informative, expressive, and reveal-
ing in different ways. Although the commentators’ backgrounds are unknown
and their opinions may represent only a section of Ecuadorians who are liter-
ate and have access to computers, their comments help readers understand in
vivid ways the issues of race, ethnicity, and identity that I address in this study.
My exposure to the elite música nacional repertoire as a woman who was
born and raised in Guayaquil allowed me to navigate and recognize the dif-
ferences between the various styles of EPM. It would have been a more dif-
ficult task for me to notice the musical nuances of elite and working-class
música nacional had I not had this background. Although Quito was a famil-
iar site to me because I had lived there between 1991 and 1995, the EPM con-
cert venues and the people who attended the EPM concerts were not. At that
time, I was well acquainted with the repertoires of elite música nacional and
Ecuadorian art music because of my upbringing and previous research work
12 | Introduction
in Quito. I had also heard rocolera music on the radio but was not acquainted
with the music and the social contexts of chichera music and tecnocumbia.
As with all popular musics, a major challenge in this research has been
finding reliable data to reconstruct the origin and development of the differ-
ent styles of music analyzed in this book. Most national record companies
went into bankruptcy in the 1980s or early 1990s due to music piracy and the
onset of the economic crisis; their music catalogs and sales records have been
lost. Nonetheless, I have been able to sketch a rough history and periodization
of elite música nacional, rocolera, and chichera music with the help of records,
music scores, and articles penned by journalists and music enthusiasts that
appeared in newspapers and music magazines. I have also relied on oral his-
tories provided by renowned musicians and singers of the 1970s. While this
source of information provides useful personal insights, it also requires care-
ful treatment because composers are passionate and often highly subjective in
their opinions about their music. Many times the singers I interviewed treated
me as if I were a radio journalist and spoke to me as if they were addressing a
radio audience.
This book fills a lacuna in the study of Latin American popular music.
Aside from an article on the Ecuadorian pasillo by the American musicolo-
gist Johannes Riedel (1986), little has been published in English on Ecua-
dor’s urban popular music. Most investigations by native and foreign schol-
ars focus on indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian musics, rituals, and dances
(Moreno 1996; Whitten 1974; Coba 1985; Botero 1991; Schechter 1992, 1994;
Volinsky 2001; Franco 1999, 2000, 2002; Meisch 2002; Ritter 2003; Wibbels-
man 2009). Students of the Ecuadorian pasillo have been more interested in
seeking the origin and history of this musical genre than in examining its sig-
nificance as a social expression (Riedel 1986; Godoy 1995; Guerrero Gutiér-
rez 1996; Granda 2004; Guerrero and Mullo 2005). Only in the late 1990s
have scholars begun to examine EPM as a social expression reflecting the
concerns and experiences of the urban popular classes (Núñez 1998; Quin-
tana n.d.; Ibarra 1998; Moscoso 1999; Santillán 2001; Santillán and Ramírez
2002; De la Torre 2003). This lack of attention is partly due to the identifica-
tion of EPM with commercialization and mass mediation, which some Ecua-
dorian scholars consider unworthy of study. The association with bohemian
lifestyles and the lack of formal music training of EPM musicians has also
contributed to its value being diminished in academic circles.
A Note on the Terms Used in the Book

A few terms in this study need clarification. I employ the phrase Ecuadorian
popular music (EPM) as an umbrella term referring to a group of Ecuadorian
Introduction | 13
musical genres and styles (rocolera, chichera, and tecnocumbia) associated

with the popular classes. In my view, EPM more effectively describes the
uses, functions, and contexts of this repertoire, as well as the people who
produce and consume it, without the negative connotations embedded in
the terms rocolera (drunkenness), chichera (“Indianness”), and tecnocumbia
(lower-class aesthetics). This term also distinguishes working-class musics,
such as those mentioned above, from the elite música nacional. The word
“popular” in EPM refers to the Latin American notion of música del pueblo
(people’s music), which is disseminated both in rural and urban areas through
grassroots and pirated recordings and promoted by an alternative mass media
targeting lower-class audiences. This notion of “popular” contrasts with that
of British and North American cultural studies, which imply a highly com-
modified and mass-mediated music.
The reader will notice that throughout this book I refer to several musical
genres, particularly the pasillo and the sanjuanito, using a variety of labels.
For example, when I discuss the elite pasillo, I am referring to the musical
symbol of the nation and call it pasillo nacional; when I discuss the pasillo
rocolero, I am referring to the working-class pasillo composed in the 1970s.
Likewise, when I analyze the sanjuanito, I may be referring to an indigenous,
mestizo, urban, folkloric, or national sanjuanito. I apply the term “chichera
music” to refer to the modern sanjuanito played with electric guitars and syn-
thesizers, while the sanjuanito nacional is the stylized rendition of the mes-
tizo sanjuanito, which has musical arrangements similar to those of the elite
música nacional. Following the Ecuadorian naming practice, I use the term
chichera to point to the modernization of the Ecuadorian sanjuanito, instead
of “chicha,” which refers to similar processes of migration and urban growth
that occurred in Peru with the huayno. I also spell tecnocumbia without an
“h” following the Ecuadorian convention, rather than technocumbia, which is
how Peruvian scholars write this term.
In Latin America, the lower classes are not at all homogeneous, as Pacini-
Hernández rightly points out in her study of Dominican bachata (1995, 238).
I use the term “popular classes” as an umbrella term to refer to people with
low-income levels, whether they are employed, underemployed, or earn their
living as informal vendors. This term is a literal translation from the Span-
ish, which I am deliberately employing to capture the Spanish connotation
even though, strictly speaking, it does not carry the same meaning in English.
The term “popular classes” is inclusive of indigenous, lower-class mestizo,
and Afro-Ecuadorian people who live either in rural areas or in the cities. It
also encompasses people with various educational levels whose cultural incli-
nations lean toward the social taste of the lower classes, for example, teachers
and professionals who work in the public sector and earn low salaries. Because
14 | Introduction
of this inclusive usage, I often use the term “popular classes” interchangeably
with “working classes,” “lower classes,” or “mestizos.” Since the early 2000s,
the term “Ecuadorian migrants” has acquired a similar connotation because
most people who emigrated in the 2000s come from the underclasses. There-
fore, when I write “Ecuadorian migrants,” I am referring to lower-middle-
class mestizos who have emigrated and live in a host country. By contrast,
I use the term “upper-middle classes” to refer to people who are better-off,
including not only the wealthy upper classes but also middle-class Ecuador-
ians who identify with the elites’ aesthetics (white-mestizos).
One goal of this book is to present a macro picture of what música nacio-
nal is (or should be) for different social groups. This task reminds me of the
anecdote of a group of blind men who visit an elephant in its cage and com-
pare their impressions of the animal according to the parts of the body they
were able to feel (Seegers 1992, 107). The man that felt the trunk thought the
elephant was long and flexible, the one who felt the tail thought it was small,
while the one standing under the belly felt the animal was huge and heavy.
Each man had a different impression according to his personal experience
and thought that he had an accurate idea of the elephant. In a similar vein,
Ecuadorians from different generations, ethnicities, and social classes have
different personal experiences with the elite and working-class música nacio-
nal, and they will agree or disagree with some of the issues I describe in this
book. To a certain degree, my duty in this book has been to describe as many
parts of the elephant’s body as possible so that the reader will have a better
idea of the animal. Every social group in Ecuador has its own conceptual-
ization of what música nacional is and usually rejects alternative views with
which it is not familiar. This is especially true of upper-middle-class Ecua-
dorians who are not acquainted with the rocolera, chichera, and tecnocumbia
social venues and the meaning these musics convey to their listeners. They
will reject the idea that these styles of music may even be considered música
nacional. Nonetheless, my role as an ethnomusicologist studying the social
meaning of a country’s national music is to present as many angles of its cul-
tural significance to different social groups.
A Glance in the Mirror

Any cultural study of music bears the mark of the ethnographer’s strengths
and biases. Despite the fact that I was a “native” scholar doing research in my
home country, I frequently felt like an outsider during my fieldwork. Born
and raised in Guayaquil, I was a middle-class woman of Chinese descent
conducting research in Quito on various styles of music associated with a
stigmatized indigenous and working-class population. My coastal accent
Introduction | 15
often revealed me as a mona (a “monkey”), a pejorative term used by serranos

(highlanders) to refer to costeño (coastal) people. In addition, many people
I spoke to on buses or at EPM concerts in Quito thought I was a foreigner.
They often asked me if I was from China, Korea, or Japan. I was surprised by
these questions because in Guayaquil, where there is a large Chinese popu-
lation, nobody would have asked such a question. Their inquiries reminded
me that I look Chinese on the outside, something I tend to forget because I
generally perceive myself as Ecuadorian. Having lived in the former Soviet
Union and the United States for many years as a graduate student, I was
constantly reminded of my Ecuadorian nationality when I was treated as an
inastránka studentka (a “foreign student”) in the former country and as an
“international student” in the latter.
Knowing that I had studied musicology at the Chaikovsky Conservatory
in Moscow, many acquaintances from the National Symphony Orchestra in
Quito asked me why I had shifted my research interests from the “great mas-
ters” of Western European music to the music of Julio Jaramillo and Aladino,
rocolera singers associated with drunkenness and the cantina (lower-class bar)
environment. They first thought I was doing research on the cantinas located
on 24 de Mayo Street, a red-zone neighborhood in Quito’s historic center.
While I did visit a few to get acquainted with that environment, I was aware
that the answers to my research questions about the stigma placed on roco-
lera music would not be found there. Some upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
I spoke to had never heard the word rocolera before and thought that I was
studying Ecuadorian rock music. My friends in Quito often warned me about
violence at rocolera concerts and recommended that I sit up in the highest
rows of the arena to avoid being hit by beer bottles. Whether the throwing
of bottles was common in the past, I never encountered it at any of the many
concerts I attended. It is obvious that there is a virulent stigma attached to this
music and to the people who listen to it by the upper-middle classes.
My interest in música nacional and rocolera music stems from a long-
standing curiosity about the discourses and taboos constructed around them.
Just like the upper-middle classes I examine in this book, I grew up listen-
ing to passionate discourses and debates concerning the rise and decline of
the pasillo as a symbol of national identity. When I began conducting this
research, I wanted to know why the pasillo causes such strong reactions among
advocates and detractors, and what issues were at stake in those debates.
Organization
This book examines several themes that have influenced, and continue to
influence, Ecuadorians’ views of themselves and their national identity. These
16 | Introduction
include the impact of rural-to-urban and international migrations, the effect

of globalization on the local music scene, the loss of the elites’ sociocultural
hegemony in the late twentieth century, and the agency of the popular classes
in shaping their own social imaginary of the Ecuadorian nation. The book is
organized chronologically according to the emergence of the different styles
of Ecuadorian music discussed in this study. Chapter 1 provides an overview
of Ecuador’s history and explains the origin of various discourses pertaining
to the lack of an Ecuadorian national identity, Ecuadorians’ low esteem for
their national culture, and their pride in Ecuadorian sentimentality. It also
introduces Manuel Espinosa’s idiosyncratic view of mestizaje, which provides
insights into the national identity question and Ecuadorians’ denial of their
indigenous heritage.
Chapter 2 introduces an array of música nacional genres discussed
throughout the book and familiarizes the reader with the group of authors,
composers, and performers who have shaped the sounds and images of elite
música nacional. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of the Liberal Revolution and
the mass media in the nationalization of the pasillo in the 1920s and 1930s
as well as the role of rural-to-urban migrations and the processes of urbaniza-
tion and modernization in the elite pasillo’s decline in the 1970s. Chapters
4 and 5 examine rocolera and chichera music as expressions of lower-class
mestizos (that is, cholos and longos) in the urban areas in the 1970s. The first
is associated with the emergence of a working-class music reflecting the life
experiences and sentiments of the new urban classes; the latter examines the
modernization of indigenous music.
Chapter 6 explores the tecnocumbia boom in Ecuador in the late 1990s
and the creation of an alternative music industry that became the outlet for
EPM on a national and international level. Chapter 7 examines the cultural
practices of Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid and how they “recall” and “mate-
rialize” Ecuador in Madrid, thus reinforcing their national identity in the
diaspora. In the Epilogue, I examine how the elite música nacional epito-
mizes the ideology of mestizaje as blanqueamiento and how the working-class
música nacional may be seen as a better reflection of the multicultural nation
proclaimed in Ecuador’s 1998 Constitution.
All translations of interviews, song lyrics, and citations of Ecuadorian
scholars and writers are my own; some have been edited to make them clearer
to an English-speaking audience. The images are either my own photographs
or are taken from CD and LP jackets. The listening examples illustrating
the elite and working-class música nacional in this book are part of a musical
canon and can be listened to on the radio, CDs, and YouTube videos.
|1
The Nation in Bloom

A Search for “Ecuadorianness”
Preguntan de donde soy They ask where I come from

y no sé qué responder: And I don’t know how to respond:
de tanto no tener nada Having had nothing for so long
no tengo de dónde ser. I have no place to be from.
—Jorgenrique Adoum
M
y arrival in Ecuador in October 2001 coincided with two impor-
tant events that reminded Ecuadorians of their nationality and civic
duties: the presidential elections on October 17 and the Fifth Popu-
lation and Housing Census released on November 7. The election of a nation’s
leader and an inquiry into a country’s population are certainly two important
frames of reference within which citizens of any country can measure their
sense of belonging to their nation. My three-year-long stay in Ecuador also
coincided with several international events in which Ecuador figured promi-
nently. In 2002, Ecuador’s national soccer team qualified for the first time for
the World Cup, and in 2003, Ecuador hosted the Miss Universe beauty pag-
eant. That same year, Jefferson Pérez won a gold medal at the Athletic World
Championship in Paris and set a world record in the racewalking (marcha)
competition. He had already won a gold medal at the 1996 Olympic Games
and was considered a strong candidate to repeat this feat at the 2004 Olym-
pics in Athens.1 Also in 2004, filmmaker Sebastián Cordero’s movie Cróni-
cas screened alongside other celebrated Latin American productions at the
Cannes Film Festival. Ecuadorian people were injected with a strong dose
of optimism and pride for their culture and accomplishments through the
international recognition of these athletes and artists.
These images of cosmopolitanism starkly contrasted with the sad farewell
scenes reenacted everyday at the Guayaquil and Quito international airports
where people of diverse social classes were leaving their families in the hopes
of finding better opportunities in the United States and Europe following
18 | Chapter 1
the economic crisis of the late 1990s. Some were campesinos who had never
left their hometowns and who spoke no language other than Spanish and/or
Quichua. Others were middle-class Ecuadorians who had lost their jobs and
life savings during the banking crisis of 1999. People who were denied legal
access took the path of illegal immigration to the United States, paying large
amounts of money to coyotes to smuggle them across the U.S. border. Due
to the lack of a visa requirement to enter the European Community, many
Ecuadorians emigrated as tourists and stayed on as illegal workers in Spain
and Italy. Both Ecuadorian migrants and those who stayed in Ecuador saw
their country as a place where their basic needs could not be met.
T his chapter examines how Ecuadorians of different social classes and

ethnicities feel, perceive, and imagine their nation and their national
identity. The nation has commonly been conceived as a group of people who
share a common history, language, culture, and religion, all of which help to
create a collective sense of national belonging. National belonging, however,
does not necessarily entail the idea of “togetherness” because different social
groups may share loyalty to their nation to the point of making sacrifices and
even dying for it, yet they have different visions of it. Most scholars now agree
that nations are socially constructed. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Gell-
ner (1983) pinpoint the elements of invention and social engineering in the
making of a nation. Anderson describes it as an “imagined political commu-
nity” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds
of each lives the image of their communion” (1991, 6). Following this line of
thought, Appadurai suggests that the imagination in its collective forms cre-
ates a “community of sentiment,” which he defines as “a group that begins
to imagine and feel things together” (1996, 8). Taking Ecuador as a case
study, this book examines how nationals of different social classes, ethnici-
ties, ages, and educational backgrounds become a “community of sentiment”
who share particular feelings for their nation. In Ecuador’s case, this is most
notably observed in the preference for emotional performances of both elite
and working-class música nacional, a collective feeling Ecuadorians claim to
be an important feature of their national identity. They refer to this feeling as
“cantar con sentimiento” (to sing with sentiment).
Anderson’s vision of the nation is pertinent to the study of Ecuadorian
national identity because it addresses the subjective, collective, and imagina-
tive character of social construction. For him, “communities are to be distin-
guished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined” (1991, 6). According to Anderson, the imagining of the nation was
possible due to the emergence of the printing press and capitalism, which
The Nation in Bloom | 19
connected people in a simultaneity he refers to as “homogeneous empty

time” (1991, 24). In Latin America, however, where illiteracy is an endemic
problem, more often cultural industries and the mass media have cemented
collective images of nationhood (Rowe and Schelling 1991). In Mexico, the
film industry consolidated images of the new social order that arose following
the Mexican Revolution (Radcliffe and Westwood 1999, 29). In Brazil, televi-
sion and soccer became the most important means for constructing a sense of
Brazilian nationhood (Rowe and Schelling 1991). Due to its power to trigger
emotions and memories of place, music has shaped and disseminated sonic
representations of a nation. The Ecuadorian pasillo, the Brazilian samba,
the Argentine tango, and the Mexican ranchera are just a few examples of
national musics that identify and distinguish Latin American countries.
Authors such as Mallon (1995) and Foster (2002) remind us that nations
can be imagined in multiple ways depending on who does the imagining.
Appadurai underscores this view and argues that the imagination “has become
a collective, social fact [that can signal] a plurality of imagined worlds” (1996,
5). If different social groups can imagine their nation in multiple and differ-
ent ways, it becomes clear that there is not just one, but several national iden-
tities competing for the hegemony of national representation. Thus the idea
of a nation made up of homogeneous people who share common attributes
and an ancestry is an inaccurate social construct that neglects ethnic, class,
gender, cultural, and generational differences.
Nationalisms point to particular styles of imagining the nation. If nations
are social constructs, then “nationalisms are invented, performed, and con-
sumed in ways that do not follow a universal blueprint” (McClintock 1995,
360). Latin American countries display a variety of contradictory national-
ist images and rhetorics that help us understand the constructed nature of
national identities. In Argentina, for example, the image of the gaucho, the
“cowboy” of the Pampas who embodies the courage, individualism, and inde-
pendence of the Argentine people, identifies a nation made up of nationals
and European immigrants (Schwartz-Kates 1997). In Cuba, “blackness” has
been nationalized through images of a previously scorned Afro-Cuban cul-
ture (Moore 1998). In the first half of the twentieth century, “Mexicanness”
was identified with an “Indianness” that glorifies indigenous people as a “cos-
mic race” in spite of the marginalization of contemporary indigenous people
(Béhague 1979). The constructed images and stylized music of the gaucho,
Afro-Cubans, and indigenous people as national symbols speak to the arbi-
trary and distinctive ways in which national identities are invented; from out-
casts of society they become national models in discursive constructions of
nationhood. As in Mexico, the Ecuadorian elites adopted images of “Indian-
ness” as a component of Ecuador’s mestizo culture, but instead of regarding
20 | Chapter 1
it as a “cosmic race,” it is looked down upon as a cause of cultural shame and,

as I will show later in this chapter, a point of departure for “whiteness” (the
adoption of urban culture).
Official nationalisms follow the interests of the state and tend to be
analyzed from a top-down perspective that favors the elites’ imagining. Yet
nationalisms are also generated from below as an alternative, oppositional,
and/or counterhegemonic expression (Mallon 1995), which may not necessar-
ily entail resistance or empowerment of the subaltern populations. I see both
“official” and “popular” nationalisms as two sides of the same national iden-
tity coin. They are not mutually exclusive because national identities are con-
structed on the basis of unequal power relations that justify the leading posi-
tion of the elites and maintain the existent social hierarchies (Wade 2000).
In his study of modernity and identity in Latin America, Jorge Larraín
states that national identities exist in public discourses articulated by the dom-
inant sectors and in private discourses that express a variety of subjectivities
on personal levels (1996, 208). He argues that studies of national identity tend
to privilege public rather than private discourses, and that ordinary people are
generally neglected in these representations. Public discourses tend to hide
the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity behind a discursive construction of
homogeneity articulated by the elites and the mass media. These discourses
tend to disregard the social, political, and economic changes that societies
normally undergo, thus portraying a fixed and static national identity. How-
ever, it should be noted that the elites have no control over the production of
meanings that ordinary people generate at the private and subjective levels.
Nations are not only imagined, but also “recalled” and “materialized” in
myriad ways. According to Foster, the nation materializes in multiple con-
structs that circulate in discursive and nondiscursive forms, such as state cere-
monies, flags, anthems, school textbooks, airlines, advertisements, and popu-
lar music. He notes that “these constructs are promulgated through a variety
of channels and by a variety of agents, not all equipped with equal resources
to make their version of the nation stick” (Foster 2002, 5). Elite nationalisms
are disseminated in public discourses sanctioned by the state and the media,
while popular nationalisms are less visible in the public sphere due to the
popular classes’ lack of access to the centers of power and the mainstream
media. Billig looks beyond the agencies of the state for routine ways in which
ordinary people “remind” (that is, recall) and express their national belong-
ing. For him, everyday activities, such as listening to music or eating typical
food, define public spaces for the reminding as much as holidays and major
sports competitions do (Billig 1995).
Borrowing Foster’s definition of the multiethnic and multilingual New
Papua Guinea nation as “a collection of people united by the commodities
they jointly possess and consume in common” (2002, 78), I suggest that a
nation can also be defined as a collection of people united (or fragmented) by
the music they jointly listen to or debate about. Unlike Foster’s focus on com-
modities for imagining the nation, I see a country’s heterogeneous population
connected through music consumption and discussions about the value of
local styles of popular music. These discourses create a frame of reference
upon which people of different social and ethnic backgrounds position them-
selves within a national unit. Anderson refers to this frame of reference as
“unisonance” (1991, 145), an experience of simultaneity occurring, for exam-
ple, when people sing or listen together to a national anthem. In this study,
I examine both the “unisonance” and “dissonance” in Ecuadorians’ views of
música nacional.
National identities are dynamic social constructs in constant process of
change, rather than fixed and static identity units. In his analysis of hege-
mony, Raymond Williams (1977) argues that, in order to maintain their
ruling position, the elites need to actively and continuously renew their
forms of domination; otherwise, there is “room for maneuver” (Chambers
1991) for nondominant groups to contend with, or alter the official images,
sounds, and rhetorical discourses of power. Chambers regards this maneu-
vering as a “disturbance” in the system, which has “a particular potential
to change states of affairs, by changing people’s ‘mentalities’ (their ideas,
attitudes, values, and feelings)” (1991, 1). This possibility of change in the
ideas, attitudes, and values of their national identity, that is, the collective
vision of themselves, is more likely to occur in times of political and eco-
nomic instability.
One example of such a “disturbance” in Latin American national music
is the Colombian cumbia, the upbeat music from the Atlantic Coast that
displaced the bambuco from the Andean region as the emblematic music of
Colombia and challenged the ideas of Colombians toward the Afro-Colom-
bian roots of their music. Originally a rural music played with traditional
instruments, the urban and commercial renditions of cumbia had national
and international overtones to the point that it came to epitomize the notion
of “Colombianness” in the mid-twentieth century (Wade 2000). Ecuador has
been experiencing a similar “disturbance” in the musical representation of
the national identity since the 1970s, when indigenous peasants and mestizos
in the haciendas migrated to the large cities in search for work. The privileged
position of the pasillo as an elite musical symbol has been challenged by the
ubiquity of chichera and rocolera music, which indexes indigenous and lower-
class mestizo cultures in the urban centers. Unlike the Colombian cumbia,
in Ecuador no other Ecuadorian popular music has reached international
stature or has come to be accepted by most social sectors.
22 | Chapter 1
The study of national identities in the late twentieth century needs to

be examined vis-à-vis the global forces that have influenced their forma-
tion. Questioning the general assumption that globalization brings about the
homogenization of national cultures, Wilks notes that globalization “actually
promotes difference, but difference expressed in a standardized vocabulary”
(cited in Foster 2002, 14). He regards beauty pageants, sports competitions,
and international music festivals as examples of uniform difference, in which
nations express their uniqueness in terms of content rather than form. For
Wilks, these activities represent a “local appropriation” or “domestication of
the foreign” (cited in Foster 2002, 14). In a different vein, Robertson poses that
globalization always entails a simultaneous manifestation of the global and
the local because the idea of global culture is “constituted by the increasing
interconnectedness of many local cultures,” a process he calls “glocalization”
(Robertson 1995, 31). From this perspective, national identities can also be
viewed as expressions of particularisms reflecting global trends.
The emergence of transnational musics blending disparate elements from
different musical cultures into one song shows how globalization promotes a
hybrid aesthetics that brings awareness of national cultures, rather than their
homogenization or the erasure of their distinctiveness. However, it must be
noted that it is the fusion of disparate elements that is celebrated in the new
hybrid product, not the individual popular musics and the people they repre-
sent per se.
The Cultural Setting

Ecuador is a small country, about 100,000 square miles in the northwestern
coast of South America with a wide variety of climates and landscapes—
beaches, rainforests, volcanoes, and highlands. It is divided into four geo-
graphical regions with distinctive characteristics—the coast (Costa), the
Andes Mountains (Sierra), the Amazonian region (Oriente), and the Galapa-
gos Islands in the Pacific Ocean (about six hundred miles west of the main-
land). Despite its small size, Ecuador harbors approximately 70 percent of the
total biodiversity of the planet and is one of the world’s seventeen megadiverse
countries.2 The country’s name derives from the equator (latitude 0), which
crosses the country just a few miles north of Quito.
The country’s economic development is centered on the Costa and Sierra,
especially in Guayaquil, the largest and main port city, and Quito, the capital
and center of the national government. Ecuador’s main incomes come from
export of petroleum, banana, cacao, shrimp, and other nontraditional prod-
ucts such as flowers, tropical fruits, and canned fish. Since the turn of the
twenty-first century, the remittances that Ecuadorian migrants send to their
families represent the second major source of income after the petroleum
export. Despite its major export revenues, Ecuador has accumulated a con-
siderable external debt and has a high percentage of poverty. The minimum
living wage (salario mínimo vital) is US$218 per month (as of December 2009;
INEC).
Ecuador’s population is as diverse as its geography, flora, and fauna, with a
population of more than twelve million people (INEC 2002). Tourist images
of Ecuador underscore its indigenous culture, such as Otavalan textiles, hand-
icrafts, and music, but there are other ethnic groups with distinctive cultural
expressions, such as various indigenous nations from the Amazonian and
highland regions (the Shuar, Ashuar, Secoya, Saraguro, Cañarejo, Tsáchilas,
and so forth), the montubio (peasants from the coastal provinces), and Afro-
Ecuadorians from the coastal province of Esmeraldas and the Chota Valley in
the highland region. In the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants of
Italian, German, French, Lebanese, and Chinese descent arrived in Ecuador
and have assimilated to the local culture.
According to the 2001 population census, the largest ethnic group is the
mestizo (65 percent), followed by indigenous people (25 percent), whites
(7 percent), and Afro-Ecuadorian (3 percent) (U.S. Department of State
2011).3 These statistics greatly differ from those recorded in previous cen-
suses, which show percentages of 40 percent mestizos, 40 percent indig-
enous, 15 percent whites, and 5 percent Afro-Ecuadorians. The different
ratios between indigenous and mestizo groups are symptomatic of changes
in ethnic self-identification, rather than actual changes in the ethnic com-
ponent of the population.
Ecuador’s National Identity

Why devote a book to the study of Ecuadorian national identity in the twenty-
first century when the world is shrinking and becoming what McLuhan
(1964) called a “global village”? Questions of national identity matter in a
pluriethnic and multicultural country with a tri-ethnic colonial heritage
(Amerindian, European, and African), but which has neglected its indigenous
and African roots. They are particularly important in a country with two eco-
nomic centers of power—the Costa and the Sierra—in which regional identi-
ties are stronger than national identities. Questions of national identity are
also relevant in a country with a large diasporic population that imagines
the nation from outside of the national territory and lives in what Pratt calls
“contact zones,” the social space where the cultures of the homeland and the
host countries come into contact (cited in Miller 2004, 17). Although the
focus of this book is centered on Ecuador, these identity questions are central
24 | Chapter 1
elsewhere since many countries experience similar problems with migration,

racism, ethnicity, and regionalism.
The extensive body of scholarship by social scientists and Ecuadorian writ-
ers reflects the centrality of the national identity question. In these studies,
Ecuador is regarded as a “nation in bloom” (Quintero and Silva 2001) and as
a country without a national project integrating its people and regions (Tra-
verso 1998). Ecuador is perceived as a “schizophrenic” country mentally and
emotionally split (Donoso 2000, 11), and as an “invertebrate” unit with “two
nations sharing the same territory” (Silva 2004, 41). These statements reveal
the regional tensions between the Costa and the Sierra, and more specifically,
between the elites of Guayaquil and Quito.
In general, Ecuadorians believe that regionalism stems from geographical
and climatic differences, which have shaped the character of the people from
each region. Accordingly, Ecuadorians from the Costa are perceived as being
cheery and extroverted people, while Ecuadorians from the Sierra are seen as
reserved and introverted. Regional differences are also expressed in political
ideology and religious practices. People of the Costa promote laicism and are
more liberal than the conservative and religious people of the Sierra. Eco-
nomic and ethnic profiles also set these regions apart. The Costa is oriented
toward an export model (cacao and bananas), while the highlands have an
agricultural economy based on a land-owning system. The indigenous people
of the Costa assimilated into the dominant culture at an early stage of colo-
nization, while in the Sierra there persists a predominant indigenous popula-
tion that preserves its language, traditions, and culture.
Ecuadorians often engage in discussions about national identity, espe-
cially in relation to their national character. According to social psychol-
ogist Martha Traverso, who studied elite politicians’ vision of Ecuador-
ian national identity, most upper-middle-class Ecuadorians believe that
Ecuadorians do not have a national identity, or had one that either is in
need of rescuing or has been lost. The belief that Ecuador lacks a national
identity stems from a collective perception that Ecuador, its people, and
its cultural expressions are little known outside the country. She argues
that many Ecuadorians equate Ecuador’s national identity with its inter-
national image, rather than viewing it as a ref lection of who they think
they are, or who they want to be.
From a social and psychological perspective, anthropologist José Almeida
argues that “if we pay too much attention to the economic development (and
standards of living) in Europe and the United States as an identity reference
(and a model to follow), it is unavoidable that the comparison will generate a
deflated sense of confidence and an extreme feeling of inferiority among Latin
Americans” (2003, 84). Since social conditions in developing and developed
countries are different, a low self-esteem is bound to be present among those

in the former who cannot attain the living standards of the latter.
Mestizaje in Ecuador
Mestizaje is a complex term that carries strong colonial and racial conno-
tations and has undergone various conceptual transformations.4 During
the colonial period, mestizaje referred to the racial intermingling between
Spaniards and indigenous people. In the early twentieth century, this term
was used as part of an ideology of scientific racism to demonstrate the back-
wardness of the “Indian.” In more recent discourses, authors have used this
term to refer to a cultural process whereby indigenous people are accultur-
ated and adapt to Western lifestyles upon migrating to the city. According
to Mallon, two opposing views have dominated studies of mestizaje in Latin
America. The first emerged in the early twentieth century as “an official
discourse of national formation” praising the creation of a new mestizo cul-
ture in public discourses, as opposed to in social practice. The second view
regards mestizaje as “a liberating force that breaks open colonial and neo-
colonial categories of ethnicity and race” (Mallon 1996, 171). This notion
implies a “constructive miscegenation” that praises the benefits of racial
and cultural mixing, as is the case of Vasconcelos’ view of mestizaje as a
“cosmic race” (1976).
Following the view of mestizaje as a “liberating force” during the past
two decades, progressive scholars have regarded mestizaje as an alternative
and empowering force that does not reject indigenous culture. Marisol de la
Cadena, for example, proposes the term “de-Indianization” for current views
of indigenous culture as a postcolonial phenomenon, and “Indianness” as a
colonized and inferior social condition. In her view, the new term “allows
grassroots intellectuals to reinvent indigenous culture stripped of the stigma-
tized ‘Indianness’ assigned to this ethnic group since colonial times” (2000,
7). In his study of music making in the Mantaro Valley in Peru, ethnomusi-
cologist Raúl Romero views mestizaje as “a gradual appropriation of moder-
nity by the Andean Indian peasant” and “a process by which Indian sectors
living in closed communities interact fully with regional and national mar-
kets” (2001, 89). In his ethnography, Romero describes proud mestizos who
move easily from tradition to modernity, and vice versa, rather than portray-
ing them as exploited and displaced. Despite these epistemological changes,
current notions of mestizaje in the Andes continue to be constructed in oppo-
sition to images of “Indianness.” Mendoza-Walker, for example, states that
mestizaje is frequently associated with social mobility, advantageous position
in labor relations, and identification with national/urban culture (2000, 15).
26 | Chapter 1
According to Ayala Mora (2008), Ecuador’s republican history is divided

into three periods defined by distinct nationalist ideologies: the criollo
nation (1830–95), led by Ecuadorians of Spanish descent; the mestizo
nation (1895–1960s), which legitimated Indians, mestizos, cholos and Afro-
Ecuadorians as members of the nation; and the multiethnic nation (since
the 1960s), which recognizes ethnic and cultural diversity as one of Ecua-
dor’s assets. For most of the twentieth century, elite Ecuadorians have artic-
ulated their sense of nationhood around the ideology of mestizaje, a myth of
national unit that claims a mixture of European and indigenous cultures as
the national essence.
Social scientists now agree that a feature of this ideology has been “a rhet-
oric of inclusion that [has] operated concurrently with a practice of exclu-
sion” (Miller 2004, 4) because the indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian popu-
lation has been marginalized on the basis that they are “nonmixed.” This
discourse of national unit also presents a contradiction with the way the
country’s social workings unfold because while mestizaje is praised as a sym-
bol of the Ecuadorian nation, lower-class mestizos are disparaged for their
mixed ancestry, especially when the indigenous heritage is physically more
noticeable. Although upper-middle-class Ecuadorians are also mestizo people
(white-mestizos), they tend to deny their indigenous heritage and self-identify
as whites. In other words, while mestizaje is invoked as the bedrock of Ecua-
dorian national identity, it is rejected at the individual level.
In Ecuador, mestizaje has been conceived as a process of blanqueamiento
(whitening), which requires ethnic groups to adopt the urban and modern
lifestyle of the elites to be accepted as members of the nation-state (Stutzman
1981). Whitten underscores the unequal power dynamics at play and argues
that in the process of mestizaje, “it is not the white who indigenizes, but the
Indian who whitens” (1981). General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, the presi-
dent during the military dictatorship of 1972–76, officialized the notion of
mestizaje as blanqueamiento when he claimed, “There is no more Indian
problem,” because “we all become white when we accept the goals of national
culture” (Stutzman 1981, 45). In using the phrase “Indian problem,” Rodrí-
guez Lara was referring to the lack of integration of indigenous people into
the modern nation-state and market economy. Cultural differences in reli-
gious beliefs, language, hygiene, and customs were seen as obstacles to Ecua-
dor’s modernization. Thus, the ideology of mestizaje in Ecuador legitimated
the elites’ leadership and justified the subordination of the indigenous people.
The claim of mestizaje as the essence of Ecuadorian nationality is problem-
atic because the definition of who a mestizo person is will vary depending on
the social position of the individuals who identify and are identified, as well
as the analytical parameters selected, such as language, socioeconomic status,
and dress. Sociologist Manuel Espinosa Apolo notes that the term “mestizo”
began to be used in the 1950s to designate nonindigenous people who held a
comfortable economic situation (2000). Ecuadorians with varied mixed ances-
tries did not call themselves mestizos, but longos, cholos, and mishus.
For Roitman, the notion of mestizaje needs to be revisited because the
relations of power between whites and indigenous people have changed
and “the indigenous is no longer easily oppressed” (2009, 104). Further, she
argues that studies of mestizaje in Ecuador have focused on the “whitening”
process and have not questioned the ethnic identity of the upper- and middle-
class mestizos. Scholars identify them as “white-mestizos” (or simply whites),
while “mestizo” is normally a label applied to lower-middle-class mestizos,
and longo and cholo to the poorest mestizo groups. For Roitman, longo and
cholo have been analyzed as ethnic terms pointing to changes in socioeco-
nomic status, rather than as ethnic labels revealing racist feelings among and
within mestizo groups (2009, 4).
Because the terms cholo and longo are important to our understanding of
working-class música nacional, I will provide a brief history of the origin and
etymology of these words. It must be noted that cholo is a term widely used in
other Latin American countries with similar negative connotations (Espinosa
Apolo 2000; Weismantel 2001; Pribilsky 2007).
According to Espinosa Apolo, the term cholo was used in the beginning of
the colonial period as synonymous with “dog,” a pejorative term that pointed
to children who were born from a Spanish father and an indigenous woman
(2003, 32). Later in this period, cholo was used to define a specific type of
mestizaje, that of a mestizo person with an Indian. Travelers from the first
half of the twentieth century used cholo as synonymous with mestizo, though
for people from Quito this term denoted a mestizo with overtly indigenous
features (2003, 32). In addition to the racial connotation, cholo became associ-
ated with poor mestizos who had acquired a solvent economic condition, or
people who had acquired wealth in a rapid way (2003, 32). Cholo is often used
to point to indigenous people who have migrated to the city and enter a pro-
cess of “de-indianization” in which they lose their ethnic status of Indians, a
process called “cholificación” in Perú and “acholamiento” in Ecuador (2003,
33–37). In the southern provinces of Azuay and Cañar, the term cholos (or
cholas) describes a group of people defined by dress and lifestyle rather than
by race (Pribilsky 2007, 39). The chola cuencana (woman from Cuenca), for
example, is praised in songs and her image has become an allegory for the city
of Cuenca in the pasacalle “Chola cuencana” by Ricardo Darquea Granda
(lyrics) and Rafael Carpio Abad (music).
According to historian Fermín Cevallos, the term longo appears in nine-
teenth-century Quichua dictionaries meaning “youth” or good-looking guy
28 | Chapter 1
under eighteen years of age (cited in Espinosa Apolo 2003, 39). Hassaurek,
a nineteenth-century traveler, notes that the term was given to indigenous
children who were educated to be servants in the amo’s (master’s) house and
play with the amo’s children (2003, 39). The term was used later to point to
indigenous people who live in the cities permanently and lose their costumes
(2003, 40–41). Longo became a negative synonym for “Indian” that, in Weis-
mantel’s view, can be translated into English as “nigger” (2001, xxxiv). While
the term longo is only applied to indigenous people in the highlands, the term
cholo has varied connotations. It can point to lower-class mestizos from the
coast, to an acculturated indigenous person from the highlands, or a local
identity in the province of Azuay (Roitman 2009).
Stark provides an example of the ethnic categories that mestizos from the
Cotacachi area of the province of Imbabura employ to identify people with
whom they interact. She compares how a member of an indigenous commu-
nity, a tractorista (tractor operator), a hacienda administrator, and a hacienda
owner label one another. She notes that from the perspective of the indig-
enous community member, the tractorista is a cholo, the administrator is a
mishu, and the owner is the amo (owner), while he defines himself as a runa
(Indian). For the tractorista, the indigenous person is a longo, while he, the
administrator, and the owner are blancos (whites). For the administrator, the
indigenous person is a natural, the tractorista is a cholo, and he and the owner
are blancos. For the hacienda owner, the indigenous member is an indígena,
the tractorista is a cholo, and the administrator is a mestizo, while he regards
himself as blanco (Stark cited in Espinosa Apolo 2000, 205). Through stra-
tegic employment of these ethnic labels, these four individuals are trying to
secure as high a place in the hierarchy as possible. It is worth noting that the
terms used by the hacienda owner are similar to those social scientists employ
in their analysis of ethnic groups in Ecuador.
In 2001, the term mestizo was first used in Ecuador as an ethnic category
in a population census. Ecuadorians were asked to select their ethnicity from
among six categories: indigenous, white, mestizo, mulatto, Afro-Ecuadorian,
and other. Local newspapers reported that many upper-middle-class Ecuador-
ians, especially those from the Costa, were confused and did not know how
to answer the census question because mestizo was a term Ecuadorians from
the coast rarely used. Most people understood the term mestizo as a broad
category implying any ethnic and racial mixture. For example, descendants of
Lebanese and Chinese immigrants who arrived in Ecuador in the early twen-
tieth century identified themselves as mestizos, such as Jaime Nebot Saadi,
the mayor of Guayaquil, who was born in Ecuador to Lebanese parents.5 Like-
wise, members of my family identified as mestizos because they view them-
selves as ethnic Chinese born in Ecuador. In other cases, the census collector
would answer the “ethnicity” question for the participating in the census,
especially if the census collector doubted about the self-identification of the
latter. I remember a middle-class professor in a private university of Quito
who told me that he had identified himself and his family as “Indian,” but
the census collector, who was a high-school student, insisted that he was
wrong (at least in her view), and proceeded to mark him and his family as
mestizo.
Espinosa Apolo’s provocative view of mestizaje is relevant to my analysis of
Ecuadorian national identity and needs to be explained in detail. He claims
that a distorted concept of mestizaje has prevailed in Ecuadorian social studies
due to the influence of foreign scholars who replicate segregationist practices
they experience in their own societies and formulate rigid divisions between
mestizos and indigenous people as they do between whites and African Ameri-
cans (Espinosa Apolo 2000). Unlike them, Espinosa Apolo does not draw a
line between white and mestizo, or between mestizo and indigenous people.
He also rejects the notion of mestizaje as racial mixture, cultural syncretism,
or acculturation and uses the term “Indians” rather than “indígenas” to refer to
the Amerindian population. For him, “self-identified mestizos are Indians with
a stronger level of ‘Hispanization’ than self-identified Indians” (2000, 27). In
other words, mestizos are simply “ex-Indians” who adopt white/urban cultural
practices in order to hide an indigenous cultural consciousness (2000, 27).
Since colonial times Ecuadorian mestizos have sought to distinguish
themselves from Indians in order to gain civil rights afforded to mestizos but
denied to Indians. Mestizos who spoke Spanish and adopted urban dressing,
for example, were able to get jobs denied to Indians or evade tax payments
that were mandatory for Indians only.6 As a result, mestizos have maintained
a double standard of living—in the private sphere they feel free to express
their indigenous cultural heritage, but in public they behave as non-Indians.
They live a life of continual simulacrum that gives rise to a negative self-
view of themselves and their culture. For Espinosa Apolo, there is no process
of acculturation because mestizos have not lost their original cultural forms;
they have adopted “acculturation . . . as a strategy for survival rather than
social ascendance.” In this view, the adoption of urban cultural forms does
not imply the disappearance of indigenous culture, but merely an adaptation
to current social realities (Espinosa Apolo 2000, 24–26).
This reading of “acculturation” as a strategy for survival is also found in the
discourses of indigenous intellectuals. Luis Macas, a prominent indigenous
leader from the southern highland area of Saraguro and presidential candidate
in the 2006 elections, stated in an interview with anthropologists Jim and Linda
Belote that indigenous people have “employed a variety of strategies to survive
colonialism. . . . People knew how to preserve their own culture, their own ways
30 | Chapter 1
of doing things, their own institutions” (Macas, Belote, and Belote 2004, 220).
He recalls his father’s wise words: “When the laichus [a Saraguro term for non-
indigenous people] want to win, you have to just be quiet. It does not matter
whether or not you are right; if you are going to lose, just be quiet. Why keep
talking? I will not win in a fight with them, I will let them hit me if they want to.”
For Macas’ father, compliance was a form of resistance and a means of commu-
nity survival because “if we did not comply with them, they would have killed
us, and we would not have survived” (Macas, Belote, and Belote 2004, 220).
Ecuadorian mestizos experience “ethnic shame” for their indigenous heri-
tage, which makes them simulate the “Other” in everyday life. This is done
by “wearing masks,” such as cutting off their long braids or speaking Span-
ish instead of Quichua in an urban setting, to feign a particular social status
or cultural orientation. According to Espinosa Apolo, the simulacrum takes
place at different levels: mestizos pretend to be white, rural mestizos feign
being urban mestizos, middle-class mestizos act as if they are upper-class peo-
ple, and upper-class mestizos imitate Europeans. The social masks they wear,
however, cannot hide their indigenous consciousness because they create a
public identity that is at variance with the private one. For Espinosa Apolo,
while indigenous peasants may alter their external appearances, it is unlikely
that they will change their cultural aesthetic or the music with which they
have identified since childhood.
Espinosa’s view of Ecuadorian mestizos hiding an indigenous cultural
consciousness is to a certain degree essentialist because it is possible that the
next generations of mestizos who are born and grow up in the cities may gen-
uinely identify with an urban mestizo culture, instead of a rural indigenous
culture. This view neglects the capacity of lower-class mestizos to negotiate
new social identities when they migrate to the cities and encounter new social
and cultural conditions. However, my study of música nacional and chichera
music discourses reveals that the denial of an indigenous heritage or tradi-
tion is not uncommon among upper-middle-class Ecuadorians. They express
these feelings in discourses, musical practices, and pejorative labels, as I will
show in the following chapters.
In the literary realm, writer Jorge Icaza describes the simulacrum and the
psychological problems that affect the urban mestizo in his novel El Chulla
Romero y Flores (1958). Chulla is a Quichua word that means “one of a pair.”
When applied to a person, the word chulla usually refers to a lower-middle-class
mestizo from Quito who is a social climber and lives beyond his means. The
lyrics of the famous pasacalle “Chulla quiteño” depicts the typical character
of a chulla: “I am the chulla from Quito / I spend my life enchanted / for me
everything is a dream, below this, my lovely heaven.” Romero y Flores is the
personification of the ambivalent worlds in which mestizos live. His father is
a white man from a high-status family who has lost his fortune, his mother an
indigenous woman who was the maid in his father’s house. As a mestizo, he is
obsessed with maintaining the appearance of good social status, wearing social
masks that hide the internal conflicts he undergoes by being the product of
two races and two worlds (Miller 2004). He abhors his indigenous ancestry and
disguises it through an exaggeration of nonindigenous behaviors.
Readings of Ecuadorian History

The denial and lack of valorization of the indigenous heritage of the mes-
tizo nation has been passed on to successive generations through narratives,
myths, and discourses that have been internalized and taken for granted as a
result of nationalist pedagogies. It is well known that official histories are nor-
mally written by the dominant classes to legitimize their position of power,
and Ecuador is no exception. In order to trace the origin of Ecuadorians’ neg-
ative view of their national identity, I present in this section a brief account of
Ecuador’s history as it has been taught in school textbooks during most of the
twentieth century.7 I focus on three aspects that are essential to my analysis
of Ecuadorian national identity: perceptions of indigenous people, origins of
regionalism, and the imagination of the national territory.
Perceptions of Indigenous People

Tellingly, all history before the Spanish conquest is described as “prehistory,”
while the starting point of Ecuador’s “history” is said to begin with the arrival
of the conquistadors in the early 1530s (Silva 2004). The “prehistory” is based
on the legend of the Historia del Reino de Quito (History of the kingdom of
Quito), written in 1789 by Padre Juan de Velasco (1727–92), a creole Jesuit
priest born in South America. Velasco claims the existence of a kingdom
founded by the Cara people, who arrived on the coastal shores of Ecuador
and settled in the northern highlands.8 Through wars and alliances with the
Quitus, Cañaris, and Puruhaes, the Caras built a confederation of indige-
nous nations analogous to that of the Inca Empire. The supreme leader of the
Kingdom of Quito was known as the Shyri, a name later used to refer to the
kingdom’s entire population.
Velasco’s narrative continues with the Inca Huayna Capac’s invasion of the
kingdom and the death of the Shyri Cacha. The Shyris’ postwar insurrection
ended only with the marriage of Huayna Capac to Cacha’s daughter, Paccha,
who gave birth to Atahualpa. Before his death, Huayna Capac divided the
Tahuantinsuyo Inca Empire into two halves, leaving the northern territories
to Atahualpa and the southern region to Huáscar, his first son from a Cuzco
32 | Chapter 1
princess. Huáscar started a civil war against Atahualpa, but was defeated and
killed in the attempt. The civil war and political instability within the Inca
Empire enabled the Spanish conquest. Atahualpa was captured and killed by
the Spaniards in 1533, and after his death, Indian warriors hid Atahualpa’s
treasures and fought bravely against the Spaniards to the death.
According to Erika Silva, these narratives show that before the Spanish
conquest, Ecuadorian history is in essence a history of an Indian aristocracy
that expanded the Kingdom of Quito through wars and royal marriages. Silva
points out a divorce, or lack of historical continuity, between the past and the
present in the “praise of an archaeological Indian” (brave, royal) and “the
devaluation of the real/present Indian” (primitive, childish, dirty) (Silva 2004,
22). Velasco’s legend also provides an early account of “Peruvian expansion-
ism,” an idea that has frequently been invoked to explain a long-standing bor-
der dispute with Peru. Although Velasco’s history lacks historical evidence,
the upper-middle classes adopted it in the early twentieth century as the mas-
ter narrative of Ecuador’s nationality in order to explain an indigenous origin
distinct from that of the Incas in Peru (Silva 2004, 21).
Ecuador’s “history” thus starts with the Spanish conquest and the mes-
tizaje of people and cultures. This hegemonic narrative highlights the lives of
conquerors, presidents, bishops, and creole Spaniards, while neglecting and
devaluing the lives of indigenous people who make up the majority of the
population. Narratives about the latter are reduced to chronicles of their con-
version to Catholicism and their labor (meaning exploitation) within the haci-
enda system. Adjectives like “rude,” “savage,” and “lazy” are used abundantly
in colonial documents to justify their social status as servants.
According to Silva, two foundational myths have given continuity to these
negative images of indigenous people (1992). The first myth, the mito de
la raza vencida (the myth of the vanquished race), portrays Ecuadorians as
“losers” who have been “defeated” in a triple conquest: the conquest by the
Andean geography, which is said to have turned indigenous people into an
introverted and melancholy people because they were unable to overcome the
challenges of a difficult terrain; the Inca conquest in the late fifteenth cen-
tury, which devastated the national conscience; and the Spanish conquest in
the early 1530s, which brought about “civilization” and the emergence of mes-
tizaje (Silva 1992). Discourses about the “submissive” and “servile” Ecuador-
ian character derive from colonial perceptions of “Indianness” and are found
in numerous writings of historians and other writers of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Indigenous social movements have contested
these discourses through political action during the past two decades, such as
the uprisings of the 1990s and the indigenous involvement in ousting Presi-
dents Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000.9
The second myth, the mito del Señorío sobre el suelo (myth of sovereignty over
the land) held Ecuadorians of Hispanic descent as owners of the national territory
because Spaniards were able to control the savage Andean geography, while the
native indigenous population could not. This myth, however, was invalidated by
the loss of Ecuadorian territories to Peru’s invasion in 1941, which showed the
elites unable to defend the national territory (Ayala Mora 2008). The peace treaty
in 1998 declared the conflict zone an international conservation park and has
ended a long-standing border conflict between the two countries.
The myths of the vanquished race and of sovereignty over the land under-
value the indigenous people and regard the Spanish conquest and mestizaje
as the foundation of a progressive and civilizing nation. These myths also
legitimize the leadership of the white upper-middle classes in pursuing a
national project that excludes the subaltern and multiethnic population well
into the twentieth century.
Regionalism
From 1563 until the country’s independence in 1822, Ecuador was known
under the Spanish system as the Real Audiencia de Quito. The Real Audien-
cia de Quito had three departments—Guayaquil, Quito, and Cuenca—each
of which had different economic systems and political interests. Guayaquil
was a port city linked to foreign commerce; Quito maintained a hacienda
system; and Cuenca had a system that combined large hacienda estates and
small farms/properties (Quintero and Silva 2001). With the Bourbon Reforms
in the 1700s, the three departments were separated: Quito joined the Viceroy-
alty of Nueva Granada, while Guayaquil and Cuenca went to the Viceroyalty
of Peru.10 These three regions maintained few connections with each other,
and, in fact, each declared its independence separately: Guayaquil on October
9, 1820; Cuenca on November 3, 1820; and Quito on May 24, 1822. Between
1822 and 1830, these newly independent regions united to become part of
Simón Bolívar’s Gran Colombia Confederation under the name Distrito del
Sur (Southern district). Only in 1861 did Ecuador change its jurisdictions to
the provincial political division it has today in the Costa and Sierra—plus the
Oriente and Galapagos Islands (Ayala Mora 2004, 69).
With the dissolution of the Gran Colombia in 1830, the Distrito del Sur
became the Republic of Ecuador. Although the name “Quito” was historically
linked to previous political formations (the Reino de Quito and the Real Audien-
cia de Quito), the elites from Guayaquil and Cuenca opposed the selection of this
name for the country. Adopting it would have implied a subordination of Guaya-
quil and Cuenca to Quito. Instead they adopted the name “Ecuador,” which was
the scientific name used in 1736 by the French Geodesic Mission to refer to the
34 | Chapter 1
territories in which the equator was measured (Ayala Mora 2008b, 75). The selec-
tion of the name Ecuador reflects the political antagonism that existed, and still
exists, among the country’s various regions. The elites of Guayaquil and Cuenca
preferred to be known as “Ecuadorians” rather than “Quiteños.”
The National Territory

Ecuador’s upper-middle classes have constantly used the territorial conflict
between Ecuador and Peru as a justification to present Peruvians as the
expansionist aggressors from the south who pursue their goals through mili-
tary might, just as Huáscar did with Atahualpa before the Spanish conquest.
In 1829, the Peruvian army invaded Ecuador but was defeated at the Battle
of Tarqui by Mariscal Antonio José de Sucre, one of Ecuador’s independence
heroes (Ayala Mora 1983).11 Although a peace treaty was signed, the boundar-
ies between the two countries were not clearly delineated and new territorial
conflicts arose a century later. In 1941, the Peruvian army entered the south-
ern province of El Oro in a surprise attack, and Ecuador was forced to sign
the Río de Janeiro Protocol in 1942, a treaty that conceded approximately
half of Ecuador’s territories (278,000 sq. km.) to Peru (Ayala Mora 2004).12
The Protocol had a strong impact on the Ecuadorian collective psyche. Silva
states that elite Ecuadorians perceived themselves as “losers” and “defeated,”
just as they considered the indigenous population had been in the face of
European colonialism (Silva 1992). Benjamín Carrión, one of the most influ-
ential Ecuadorian writers and founder of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana
(House of Ecuadorian Culture) in 1944, described the national conscience
as follows: “The country felt bludgeoned; it felt mutilated in its being, hope-
less. Ecuadorians had been taught that one Ecuadorian could beat ten Peru-
vians, but this did not happen in 1941. There was widespread low morale: we
had turned out to be beatable, easily defeatable. We had been betrayed by an
internal oligarchy” (cited in Quintero and Silva 2001, 1:455).
In response to the psychological trauma of having been geographically
diminished, Carrión developed the thesis of the nación pequeña (small
nation), which held that if Ecuador could not be a great nation through its
army and its economy, it would be one through its culture and arts. He sup-
ported his thesis by pointing to the examples of Israel and Greece, two small
but prominent nations that have each had a strong influence on Western cul-
ture. Despite the nación pequeña thesis, Ecuador maintained an open psy-
chological wound that was only partially closed in 1998 when the territory
under dispute was declared an international park. Interestingly enough, the
conflict with Peru became a rallying point for national cohesion for more
than half a century, and it united Ecuadorians from all walks of life in their
Figure 1.1 Map of Ecuador with the dotted line. Source: Atlas geográfico del Ecuador. n.d.
desire to defend their nation. Anderson’s view on patriotism is pertinent here

to explain the people’s willingness to die for the nation at a critical juncture.
The idea of an “imagined community” in a nation-state normally pre-
sumes the existence of an “imagined territory.” For Silva, Ecuadorians have
had ambiguous ideas about their territory since the signing of the Protocol in
1942. In the 1960s, President José María Velasco Ibarra declared the Protocol
void, suggesting that the boundary demarcation could not be implemented
due to the geographic complexity of the area. Thus, while international maps
showed Ecuador without the territories lost in the Protocol, Ecuadorian maps
and textbooks continued to show the country’s boundaries as they had been
before 1942, with a dotted line indicating the incomplete territorial division
as defined under the Protocol. This state-mandated illusion persisted until
1998 when Ecuadorian maps finally were made to conform to the reality and
include only those territories Ecuador actually controlled. Several generations
of Ecuadorians, including my own, grew up with ambiguous images of Ecua-
dor’s size and shape. I remember my astonishment when I first saw Ecuador’s
reduced size in an international atlas published abroad. I thought that some-
thing was missing on the map and that geographers who had drawn it had
made a mistake. Acquaintances from different generations had similar reac-
tions to maps of Ecuador printed abroad.
In the early 1990s, Silva conducted an interesting poll at a state university
in Quito to find out how college students conceived of Ecuador’s national
36 | Chapter 1
boundaries. She asked 130 undergraduate students to draw the shape of Ecua-
dor on a map of South America. The results were astonishing: fifty-five stu-
dents drew the territory as it was before the Protocol (a triangle shape); eigh-
teen drew it the same way, but included the Protocol line; only nine showed
the territory as it is drawn on international maps, without the territories lost in
the Protocol; four included the Galápagos Islands; and fourteen drew a terri-
tory undefined in shape (Silva 2004, 83–84). Like the young college students
who were polled, many Ecuadorians in their adulthood have had ambiguous
ideas of the country’s shape, especially because the map with the Protocol
line became the official map of Ecuador.
Unifying Elements of the Ecuadorian Nation

A series of disparate elements have forged the idea of a unified Ecuadorian
nation since the country’s inception as a republic—the Catholic religion,
the national currency (the sucre), the territorial conflict with Peru, música
nacional, and soccer. With the exception of soccer, none of these symbols
has endured as a cohesive element of Ecuadorianness. The Catholic Church
lost its hold over the population with the advent of the Liberal Revolution in
1895 and the secularization of education. Religious freedom and the presence
of evangelist missionaries contributed to the weakening of the monopoly on
power that the Catholic Church exerted in the 1860s, when President Gar-
cía Moreno signed a concordato with the Vatican and dedicated Ecuador to
the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. García Moreno, a tyrant and absolute ruler,
viewed religion as the only means of integrating a country split by political and
economic interests.
The sucre, a currency only used in Ecuador and a frame of reference with
which all Ecuadorians identified, disappeared with the adoption of the dollar as
the national currency in 2000. The “open wound” caused by the Rio de Janeiro
Protocol, which united Ecuadorians from the Costa and Sierra in times of war,
was closed with the peace treaty signed in 1998. Ecuadorian national music (elite
música nacional), now perceived as an old-fashioned music, does not have the
commercial visibility it had in its golden period from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Apparently, soccer remains the only unifying element that brings people from dif-
ferent social classes, ethnicities, and regions together because everyone supports
the national team when it represents the country at international competitions.
Conclusion
Ecuadorian mestizos tend to deny the indigenous roots of the mestizo nation
and look to “whitening” as a means of moving up the social ladder. The
ideology of mestizaje, which ostensibly supports the blending of Spanish and

indigenous cultures, has been understood more as an aspiration to “white-
ness,” functioning as a symbol of civilization and modernity, than as an ethnic
or cultural integration. As a social construct, the Ecuadorian mestizo nation
has existed more in discourses and rhetoric imposed by the dominant sectors
than in actual practice. However, the Reformed Constitution of 1998 declared
Ecuador a multicultural and pluriethnic country, and mestizaje is no longer a
nationalist goal. Despite the amended constitution, however, there is still lin-
gering racism manifest in pejorative discourses and opinions about indigenous
people and the popular music they produce and consume in the urban areas.
A nation cannot be imagined as a social unit when regional identities are
stronger than national identities. Many Ecuadorians have come to believe that
regionalism is the response of people having different worldviews shaped by
distinct geographical and climatic conditions. While this is true, regionalism
in Ecuador has also stemmed from a struggle for political and economic power
between the elites of the Costa and the Sierra.
National identities are not only fragmented by regionalism, they are also
contested by international migrations. With the exodus of hundreds of thou-
sands of Ecuadorians during the economic crisis in the late 1990s and early
2000s, Ecuador has become a de-territorialized country with a diasporic pop-
ulation that keeps close ties to the homeland and helps sustain the national
economy with their remittances. This type of migration can best be described
as “transnational” because Ecuadorians have become “transmigrants [who]
develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organi-
zational, religious, and political—that span borders” (Basch, Glick Schiller,
and Blanc 1992, 1). Most Ecuadorian migrants move back and forth between
their home and host countries to attend family celebrations, open small busi-
nesses, buy land to build the home of their dreams, or finance community
projects in their hometown. When Ecuadorian migrants living in Spain
request the Ecuadorian government to help them legalize their residence
status in the host country, or when they send greetings to Ecuadorian com-
patriots living elsewhere in the world, they are imagining a borderless nation
spread across the world.
Ecuadorians emigrate not only with their families and hopes for a better
future, but also with their music, cuisine, and other cultural traditions, which
help them recreate Ecuadorian culture abroad and, thus, cope with their nos-
talgia for the homeland. This is especially notable in the consumption and
categorization of various types of working-class popular musics now called
música nacional.
|2
La Música Nacional
An Anthology of Songs
I
attended countless concerts of Ecuadorian popular music (EPM) during
my stay in Quito between November 2001 and September 2004. Some
were organized in the Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo (CJCH), a sports arena
located near a food market and a bus transit center at the entrance to Quito’s
historic center; others were organized in the Teatro Nacional of the Casa de
la Cultura Ecuatoriana, a concert hall situated in the Mariscal District across
from the Parque El Ejido and the embassies of the United States and France.
The patrons who attended EPM concerts at the Teatro Nacional were unlikely
to go to those in the CJCH, and vice versa, due to generational and social
class differences distinguishing the audiences and performers at these ven-
ues. The patrons of the Teatro Nacional were mostly older and middle-aged
people who enjoyed singing the pasillos, pasacalles, and albazos of yesteryear
(1920s–1950s), while the audience of the CJCH was a younger generation
eager to dance to happy sanjuanitos and tecnocumbias. The audience at the
Teatro Nacional was made up of upper- and middle-class people who enjoyed
the performances of renowned national artists who sang to the accompani-
ment of acoustic guitars, while the audience at the CJCH was formed by
indigenous people and lower-class mestizos eager to listen to new singers to
the accompaniment of bands and recorded tracks. When I asked both groups
if the music played at the concert they attended was “Ecuadorian music,” they
usually responded, “Yes, it is música nacional!” When I asked more specifi-
cally if the pasillo, the sanjuanito, or the pasacalle was Ecuadorian music, the
most common answer was again, “Yes, it is música nacional.” I soon became
La Música Nacional | 39
aware of the prominence of the term música nacional in the construction of

official and popular representations of Ecuadorian national identity.
This chapter examines Ecuadorians’ idiosyncratic use of the phrase
música nacional as a surrogate appellation for elite Ecuadorian music and
introduces an array of songs and musical genres considered música nacio-
nal today. Knowing the origin, musical features, and typical performance
contexts of these genres will help the reader understand the discourses and
debates surrounding the chichera and rocolera music I discuss in Chapters 4
and 5. In addition, I acquaint the reader with a group of prominent authors,
composers, and performers of música nacional whose lives and musical works
are part of nationalist discourses that support a corpus of pasillos, albazos, and
pasacalles as the “official” Ecuadorian music.
L atin American people usually identify their national music by the country’s
name, regardless of the geographic or ethnic origin of the music. For exam-
ple, Mexicans apply the term música mexicana, not música nacional, to their
corridos, mariachi, and norteño music. Peruvians refer to música peruana, not
música nacional, when designating their creole music (vals criollo) and Andean
music (huayno). Ecuadorians, however, use instead the term música nacional
as a surrogate name for Ecuadorian music. Here I wish to make a distinction
between “national music” as a generic, descriptive concept referring to any type
of music that may be seen as embodying the national sentiment of a people,
and the prescriptive concept of música nacional in Ecuador, which designates
selected renditions and repertoires as representing the national sentiment.
The phrase música nacional refers to a corpus of songs composed in the
period between the 1920s and 1950s, which have been canonized as the
quintessential body of Ecuadorian music. This song repertoire, known in
Ecuador as the “antología de la música nacional” (anthology of música nacio-
nal), consists of elite renditions of indigenous and mestizo musical genres.
The first group includes the yaraví, the danzante, the yumbo, and the sanjua-
nito. The second group includes the fox incaico, the albazo, the pasacalle, and
the pasillo. Because the pasillo stands out as the musical symbol of Ecuador,
upper-middle-class Ecuadorians frequently use the terms música nacional
and pasillo interchangeably as if these were synonymous.
A striking feature of música nacional genres is that they resist regional or
ethnic classification and become emblematic of both the coastal and high-
land regions (Espinosa Apolo 2000, 184). The pasillo, the albazo, and the
pasacalle can hardly be classified as coastal or highland music because they
are typical in both regions. A well-known medley of pasacalles and albazos
praising the cities and provinces across Ecuador, which is usually performed
in concerts and civic parades to represent the unity of Ecuadorian people,
40 | Chapter 2
speaks to the national character of the pasacalle and the albazo.1 In other
Latin American countries, however, musical genres are generally associated
with distinct regions or ethnic groups. Colombia’s geographical regions are
represented by distinct musical genres: along the Atlantic Coast, música
costeña (cumbias, porros, vallenatos); in the Andean region, música andina
(bambucos and pasillos); in the plains, música llanera (joropo); in the Pacific
Coast, marimba music (currulao); and in the Amazon region, indigenous
music. In Cuba, música guajira and Afro-Cuban music represent distinctive
ethnic groups and musical genres.
In Ecuador, however, there are not many Ecuadorian musical genres that
distinguish the Costa from the Sierra despite the strong regionalism and cul-
tural distinctions between costeños and serranos. Even the few urbanized ren-
ditions of sanjuanitos, danzantes, and yaravíes that have entered the música
nacional anthology—stylized and “stripped” of overtly indigenous musical
features—are perceived as elite música nacional rather than as ethnic or folk
music.2 This does not mean that upper-middle-class Ecuadorians do not rec-
ognize the indigenous roots of the music; they certainly do. What happens
is that the elite versions have been stylized and resignified with an upper-
middle-class aesthetic that has dramatically changed the lyrical content and
musical arrangements (see the section below on the danzante “Vasija de
barro”). As a result, neither the indigenous people identify with the elite ren-
ditions of sanjuanitos, nor the upper-middle classes regard the urban versions
of sanjuanitos as indigenous music.
It is worth bearing in mind that ethnic musics from the Costa, Sierra, and
Oriente are not considered part of the música nacional repertoire. Some have
survived in folkloric renditions such as música montubia (peasant music from
the coast); others are reproduced in regional contexts and exclusively asso-
ciated with the Afro-Ecuadorian population, such as marimba music in the
province of Esmeraldas and the bomba in the Chota Valley. Traditional music
from the highland and Amazon regions (Shuars, Tsáchilas, Secoyas, and so
forth) are normally confined to the corresponding indigenous communities.
The Origin of Música Nacional

The origin of the phrase música nacional as synonymous with elite Ecuador-
ian music is uncertain. No written evidence documenting the use of this term
in the nineteenth century has been found. While in some contexts música
nacional may just mean local or distinctively Ecuadorian music, this phrase
has come to epitomize the primary and most representative national music,
as is the case of the tango in Argentina and the samba in Brazil. According to
sociologist Hernán Ibarra (1998), the emergence of this term is associated with
Figure 2.1 Música nacional stand in Almacenes Feraud, Guayaquil. Photograph by the
author.
the rise of the middle classes and the officialization of national symbols such
as the flag, the shield, and the national currency (the sucre) at the turn of the
twentieth century.3 It is possible that this term had become popular with the
first recordings of Ecuadorian music released by Columbia and Victor Records
in the early twentieth century, which local people may have called “nacional”
to distinguish it from the international musics in vogue. Many upper-middle-
and lower-class people I spoke to during my stay in Ecuador believe that only
songs based on Ecuadorian rhythms can be considered nacional, while others
think that any type of music may be regarded as such so long as it is sung by
and for Ecuadorian people. Music producers, composers, singers, and radio
announcers who work closely with various repertoires of EPM subtly distin-
guish, as I do, that only certain songs performed by middle-class singers in
upper-middle-class contexts are considered música nacional by the elites.
Most genres considered música nacional today did not exist in the nine-
teenth century. As in other Latin American countries, the Ecuadorian elites
danced to European ballroom dances, such as mazurcas, waltzes, polkas,
and pasodobles, as well as to creole dances that have since been lost,4 such as
rondeñas, zapateados, quiteñas,5 and the alza que te han visto. Why did these
creole musical genres not enter the música nacional repertoire while other
folk musics such as the sanjuanto, the yaraví, and the pasillo did? To answer
42 | Chapter 2
this question, it is necessary to examine prevalent nineteenth-century notions

of nationhood and nationalism in Latin America.
The idea of nations possessing distinctive national styles of music that rep-
resent the “spirit of the people” derives from nineteenth-century European
conceptions of nationalism. According to Dalhaus (1980), notions of national-
ism and universalism were not as mutually exclusive as they are today because
in this period the idea of being “nationalist” was roughly equivalent to the
idea of being “cosmopolitan,” that is, “being in the world.” It was only with
the development of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century
when nationalism became more “introverted” and “xenophobic,” and the
elites raised the folk music of their countries to national status (Dalhaus 1980).
Turino’s analysis of the emergence of nationalism in Latin America is perti-
nent to understanding this process. For him, the modern concept of the nation
as “a culturally and linguistically unified group” within a bounded territory
did not yet exist in nineteenth-century Latin America (2003, 170–74). The
elites conceived the nation as a loose collective of landowners with economic
and political power who were culturally similar to Spaniards and other Latin
American creole elites. In this period, they were more interested in establish-
ing cultural differences between themselves and the indigenous, mestizo, and
Afro-Ecuadorian populations, rather than with citizens from other nations.
Musically, this argument is reflected in the fact that there were no major sty-
listic differences between nineteenth-century South American creole music
forms, most of which were zapateado-like (foot-tapping) dances with sesquiál-
tera (alternation of duple and triple meters) rhythms. The Ecuadorian rondeña
and quiteña, for example, were rhythmically similar to the Peruvian zama-
cueca, also known in Chile and Peru as cueca, marinera, and chilena.
According to Turino, the concept of the nation made up of a unified
population emerged only in the early twentieth century when the subaltern
populations became the labor force and consumers of an expanding capitalist
production. It is also in this period when indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian
people began to be depicted in Ecuadorian literature and arts. Costumbrismo
artists had already portrayed on canvas the everyday manners and customs of
indigenous people in the nineteenth century, albeit in a romanticized way.
Composer and painter Juan Agustín Guerrero (1818–86), for example, depicts
indigenous people dancing and playing musical instruments in his watercol-
ors, without any social commentary on the subhuman conditions in which
they lived and worked on the hacienda.
An example of Costumbrismo in nineteenth-century Ecuadorian literature
is “Cumandá,” a foundational novel written by Juan León Mera, who wrote
the lyrics to Ecuador’s national anthem. This novel portrays the tragic love
story of Cumandá, a white woman who was lost in the jungle when she was
an infant and was raised as an Indian, and Carlos, a white man who arrives
in the jungle and falls in love with her unaware that she is his younger sister.
This Western love story in a jungle setting presents a romanticized view of
the racial and cultural encounter between Spaniards and indigenous people.
Marked by an incestuous relationship, this encounter ends with the death of
Cumandá, thus portraying the racial view of the period in the impossibility
of their love.
Unlike Guerrero’s and Mera’s nineteenth-century romanticized visions
of indigenous people, early twentieth-century left-wing intellectuals and
artists provided more realistic ethnic representations of the nation in their
writings and art works. Luis A. Martínez, the precursor of social realism in
Ecuadorian literature, describes in his novel A la Costa (1904) the regional
conflicts between people from the Costa and the Sierra, thus providing a
complex picture of the ethnic, social, and political conflicts in Ecuador dur-
ing the Liberal Revolution period. In the 1930s, the Generación de los Treinta
(Generation of the 1930s), a group of young socialist writers from Guayaquil,
formed by José de la Cuadra, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Joaquín Gallegos
Lara, Enrique Gil Gilbert, and Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco, denounced the
exploitation of montubios and Afro-Ecuadorians in their short narratives and
novels, a literary movement known as Realismo Social (social realism). With
the portrayal of the exploitation of indigenous people in the hacienda system,
Jorge Icaza’s novel Huasipungo (1934) set the basis for the emergence of Indi-
genismo in Ecuadorian literature. In the fine arts, the paintings of Eduardo
Kingman and Oswaldo Guayasamín provided analogous representations of
the indigenous people’s anguish and misery through depictions of deformed
indigenous faces and hands.
Academic composers also incorporated indigenous and mestizo folk musics
into their works, though this nationalist compositional approach emerged only
with the encouragement of Domingo Brescia, an Italian composer who taught
at Quito’s National Conservatory of Music in the early 1900s. The first and
second generations of nationalist composers—Sixto María Durán (1875–1947),
Segundo Luis Moreno (1882–1972), Francisco Salgado (1880–1970), Luis
Humberto Salgado (1903–77), and Corsino Durán (1911–75)—wrote stylized
pieces of folk dances for piano, most of which depicted Costumbrismo scenes.
These pieces, which were arranged in a cyclic composition known as Suite
Ecuatoriana, followed the baroque suite’s scheme of contrasting tempos and
dances.6 Their first self-conscious nationalist works for a large orchestra por-
trayed important episodes in the life of ancient Indians, such as the dusk of the
Tahuantinsuyo (Inca Empire) and the consecration of the Sun’s Virgins. By
choosing these plots, academic composers were perpetuating sonic representa-
tions of the aristocratic and brave Indian of the past, that is, the “archaeological”
44 | Chapter 2
Indian so much praised by the elites, but far removed from social reality. It
is worth noting that the musical nationalism advocated by Ecuadorian aca-
demic composers was divorced from the progressive social movements that
permeated the other Ecuadorian arts. Rather than denouncing the misery and
oppression of indigenous people, the leitmotif in the works of socialist writ-
ers and artists in this period, Ecuadorian nationalist composers were creating
sonic representations of an idyllic indigenous life, which were reminiscent of
the Costumbrismo scenes in Juan Agustín Guerrero’s watercolors.
Standard musicological scholarship on nineteenth-century European
music has understood musical nationalism as the incorporation of folk ele-
ments into art music, prompting scholars to view national styles of music that
display the folklore of the people as nationalist expressions. Following this nar-
row and conservative view, Ecuadorian academic composers regard the use of
folk elements in Ecuadorian art music as nacionalismo académico (academic
nationalism), and they draw a line between nacionalismo académico and
música nacional. The former is considered the cultural product of professional
composers whose aesthetic values and methods of composition are the out-
come of intellectual consciousness and a profound knowledge of Ecuadorian
folklore; the latter is considered an expression of popular musicians who incor-
porate into their songs the national sentiment of the people but lack a national-
ist consciousness (Mullo 1995, 147). However, the “intellectual consciousness”
here refers more to writing and arranging music following the European musi-
cal canon (formal instruction in the conservatory) than to taking a political or
ideological stand the way artists and intellectuals of Indigenismo and social
realism did. Ecuadorian academic composers advocate a musical nationalism
that neglects other musical styles, discourses, and practices underscoring what
Dalhaus (1980) calls the “aesthetic factor”—the composer’s intention and the
audience’s perception of a piece as truly embodying a nationalist character.
Ironically, while Ecuadorian folk music has been considered the bedrock
of Ecuadorian musical nationalism, it has also been excluded from the cur-
riculum of the conservatory and has been considered unworthy of study due
to its popular character. The urban popular renditions were also undervalued
for their commercial success and lack of sophisticated arrangements, and for
being a music disseminated by oral tradition as most popular composers were
unable to read or write scores of their music. The academic renditions were
thus given more value than the original versions that inspired them.
Música Nacional Genres

This section describes the musical genres that have entered the música nacio-
nal anthology—the yaraví, the danzante, the yumbo, the sanjuanito, the fox
incaico, the albazo, the pasacalle, and the pasillo. Overall this repertoire rep-
resents urban renditions of indigenous and folk dances usually sung to the
accompaniment of an acoustic guitar and requinto (a small, high-pitched five-
string guitar). Most songs have pentatonic inflections in the melodies and
sesquiáltera rhythms (alternation of duple and triple rhythms), elements that
underscore the fusion of indigenous and European musical elements.
Yaraví
Also known as harawi and tono triste in Peru and Argentina, respectively, the
yaraví is a musical genre characterized by a melancholy spirit and slow tempo
in a minor mode. The indigenous yaraví is associated with the timbre of the
rondador, a single-unit panpipe from Ecuador with tubes arranged in a zig-
zag shape. The mestizo yaraví is notated in a compound binary meter (6/8),
structured in a binary form, and played to the accompaniment of a guitar. It
usually starts in a slow tempo and ends with a fast section called an albazo,
which is basically an up-tempo yaraví (Guevara 1990). The lyrics usually deal
with themes of love, suffering, and nostalgia.
In the 1870s, Juan Agustín Guerrero compiled and transcribed a collection
of indigenous melodies for the Spanish historian Marcos Jiménez de la Espada,
which were published in 1883 with the title Yaravíes quiteños in the Acts of the
Second Congress of Americanists held in Spain. Not all melodies in this collec-
tion were yaravíes, but this term was generically used to designate “indigenous
music” in Europe. Guerrero underscores the sad character of the yaraví as an
idiosyncratic element of Ecuadorian music: “For a person from Quito, there is
no better heart-felt music than the yaraví; he weeps and amuses himself with it.”
In the 1910s, Favorite Records recorded two yaravíes in the old 78-rpm
records. Military bands used to play yaravíes in outdoor concerts, and evidence
shows they were quite popular in this period. However, only one—“Puñales”
(Daggers) by Ulpiano Benítez (1871–1968)—has survived in the música nacio-
nal anthology. Its lyrics express oddly ambivalent emotions that represent the
dualism of the Andean cosmovision. Every aspect of life is seen as having its
complementary part—male/female, day/night, wet/dry. “Puñales” expresses
this dualism by using contrasting metaphors in the lyrics, such as the idea of
“crying” and “rejoicing” in singing, and by juxtaposing a slow-tempo section
in the beginning with the rapid albazo at the end of the song.
Mi vida es cual hoja seca [My life is like a dry leaf

Que va rodando en el mundo That is roaming about the world
No tiene ningún consuelo, It finds no solace,
No tiene ningún halago It finds no affection
46 | Chapter 2
Figure 2.2 Yaraví “Puñales.” Source: Álbum musical: Enciclopedia de la música ecuatori-
ana. Partituras. Vol. 2. Quito: CONMUSICA. Courtesy of Pablo Guerrero Gutiérrez, 2005.
Por eso cuando me quejo For that reason when I complain

Mi alma padece cantando My soul suffers as well, singing
Mi alma se alegra llorando. My soul rejoices, crying.
Llorando mis pocas dichas Crying about the few joys I have
Cantando mis desventuras Singing out my misfortunes
Camino sin rumbo cierto I walk without a clear direction
Sufriendo esta cruel herida Suffering because of this cruel wound
Y al fin me ha de dar la muerte And finally death will give me
Lo que me niega la vida. What life denies me.
Albazo:
Que mala suerte tienen los What bad luck poor people have
pobres
Que hasta los perros le andan Even dogs bite them
mordiendo
Así es la vida guambrita This is life, little girl
Ir por el mundo, bonita, To wander through the world, pretty girl,
Siempre sufriendo. Always suffering.]
The indigenous musical character is found in the pentatonic flavor of the

melody and the cadence on the third of the tonic chord (bar 7), a typical
feature of Ecuadorian mestizo music. The piano transcription reproduces the
sound effect of the panpipe blowing (bars 4 and 5). These elements, together
with the swaying rhythm of the bass line and the performer’s weepy singing
style, reinforce the idea of the yaraví as a lament song. The harmonic accom-
paniment and the alternation of duple and triple meters, see bars 2–3, show
the Hispanic influence on the yaraví. (PURL 2.1)
Figure 2.3 Yumbo “Campesino de mi tierra” by Ángel Guaraca. Transcription by the

author.
Yumbo
The yumbo is an indigenous musical genre and ritual dance of pre-Inca origin
(known before the Inca conquest), which is popular in the midhighland prov-
inces, especially Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The term yumbo, which in Qui-
chua means “sorcerer,” also refers to the dancers in indigenous festivities, who
give thanks to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) for her blessings in the harvest.
In his ethnographic writings, Segundo Luis Moreno describes a yumbo perfor-
mance he observed in 1943 as a gracious and elegant dance (Moreno 1996).
Musically, the yumbo is a fast-tempo dance of energetic character. It has a
rhythmic pattern made up of sequences of short-long notes, which is usually
transcribed as an accentuated eighth note followed by a quarter note in com-
pound binary meter. Based on pentatonic scales, the traditional yumbo is nor-
mally danced to the accompaniment of an indigenous cane flute and a small
drum. With the introduction of the Spanish guitar in the Andes, the yumbo
became more elaborate in terms of harmonic language and musical form.
Despite its popularity in the midhighland region, there are not many yumbos
in the música nacional anthology. This musical genre has had great visibility
since the 2000s with the musical production of Ángel Guaraca, an indigenous
singer from Chimborazo Province who writes songs in this rhythm and sings
with the accompaniment of recorded tracks. This type of song is pejoratively
called chichera music by the elites (see Chapter 5). (PURL 2.2)
Danzante
As with the yumbo, the danzante denotes both a dance of pre-Inca origin and
the dancers at the Corpus Christi festivities. The celebration of Corpus Christi
takes place on the Thursday after the seventh Sunday after Easter, and it syn-
cretizes elements of Roman Catholicism and native Andean rituals such as
48 | Chapter 2
processions and food offerings. Salient aspects of this festivity are the danzantes
(costumed dancers), the pipe-and-tabor musical accompaniment, and the erec-
tion of castillos (fruit-bearing poles) with which indigenous people thank the
blessings received in the harvest and reciprocate with community members.
Musically, the danzante is characterized by a pentatonic melody and a
rhythmic pattern formed by sequences of long-short notes (a quarter and an
eighth note). Indigenous and urban renditions of the danzante greatly dif-
fer from each other. The former is always an instrumental music with short
melodies repeated with slight variations. The latter includes Spanish lyrics,
guitar accompaniment, and a more structured binary musical form.
There are not many urban renditions of danzantes in the música nacional
anthology. The only danzante that has entered this repertoire and is widely
known within and outside Ecuador is “Vasija de barro” (Clay pot), whose lyr-
ics were written in 1950 by a group of renowned intellectuals—Jorge Carrera
Andrade, Hugo Mayo, Jaime Valencia, and Jorgenrique Adoum—and whose
music was composed by Gonzalo Benítez (a member of Dúo Benítez-Valen-
cia) in a bohemian gathering at painter Oswaldo Guayasamín’s house. The
lyrics make allusion to death and the desire to be buried in a clay pot in order
to return to the earth, the place where one’s ancestors belong. Different types
of vocal and instrumental groups, including the National Symphony Orches-
tra, have recorded this song.
Yo quiero que a mí me entierren [I want to be buried

Como a mis antepasados Like my ancestors
En el vientre oscuro y fresco In the dark and cool womb
De una vasija de barro. Of a clay pot.
Cuando la vida se pierde When life is lost

Tras una cortina de años Behind a curtain of years
Vivirán a flor de tiempos Love and disenchantments
Amores y desengaños. Will live on in the flowering of time.
Arcilla cocida y dura Clay cooked and hard

Alma de verdes collados, Soul of green hills,
Luz y sangre de mis hombres Light and blood of my men
Sol de mis antepasados. Sun of my ancestors.
De tí nací y a tí vuelvo From you I was born and I return

Arcilla, vaso de barro Clay, vessel of earth
Con mi muerte vuelvo a ti With my death I return to you
A tu polvo enamorado. To your love dust.]
Figure 2.4 Danzante “Vasija de barro.” Source: Álbum musical ecuatoriano. Partituras para
piano. Guayaquil: SADRAM. n.d.
The pentatonic melody, the minor mode, and the regular pulsation of the
quarter and eighth notes in the bass line point to the indigenous roots of the
genre. The progression of I-III-V-I in the introduction of the piece presents
typical harmonic sequences reflecting the bimodal character of Ecuadorian
mestizo music. (PURL 2.3)
Sanjuanito
The sanjuanito or sanjuan is the most popular indigenous song-dance genre
in Ecuador. In the province of Imbabura, the sanjuanito is performed during
the Inti Raymi, a summer solstice festivity that coincides with the Roman
Catholic feast day on June 24 for Saint John the Baptist, after whom the
genre is presumably named. Indigenous peasants thank the Pachamama with
music, dance, and food for the harvest she has provided.
The sanjuanito has lively character, binary meter, pentatonic melodies, and
prominence of the minor mode. Music researchers classify the sanjuanito into
two types: the indigenous and the mestizo, which diverge in uses, functions,
musical structure, and social contexts. The former is basically an instrumental
piece played in a ritual context by two indigenous cane flutes, which play short
50 | Chapter 2
heterophonic melodies that are repeated with slight variations to the accompa-
niment of a drum. Participants dance in circles around the musicians on the
eve of Saint John’s Day. By contrast, the sanjuanito mestizo is structured in a
binary form and a more elaborate instrumentation, which includes lyrics and a
combination of guitar, accordion, violin, harmonica, and flutes.
Despite its enormous popularity in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury, as the numerous music scores for military bands found in the Fondo
Musical Vaca demonstrate, few sanjuanitos have entered the música nacio-
nal anthology.7 The most popular is “Pobre corazón” (Poor heart), composed
in the late 1910s by Guillermo Garzón, whose lyrics allude to a person who
says good-bye to a dear friend with a saddened heart. The Spanish lyrics, the
poetic structure (alternation of decasyllabic and octosyllabic verses), the gui-
tar accompaniment, and the short interludes intertwined between the verses
point to the Spanish heritage of the mestizo nation. The pentatonic melody
and the typical sanjuanito rhythmic pattern in duple meter point to the indig-
enous heritage.
Pobre corazón entristecido [Poor saddened heart

Ya no puedo más soportar. I cannot take it anymore.
Y al decirte adiós, yo me despido In bidding farewell, I leave you
Con el alma, con la vida With my soul, with my life
Con el corazón entristecido. With a saddened heart.]
This piece keeps a pentatonic melodic contour; however, the rhythmic pat-
tern avoids the four sixteenth-note formula typical for the sanjuanito mestizo.
The bass line imitates the drum rhythmic pattern in duple meter that usually
accompanies the sanjuanito. The harmonic progression of I-III-V-I in the
minor mode and the cadence of the third of the tonic chord gives this song a
sound flavor typical for Ecuadorian popular music. Overall, the urban rendi-
tion of the sanjuanito nacional in the música nacional anthology is stylisti-
cally different from both the indigenous and mestizo sanjuanitos. (PURL 2.4)
Fox Incaico
Also known as fox shimmy, fox indiano, fox nativo, or canción incaica, the
fox incaico combines Andean melodies with the North American fox-trot
rhythm. A popular dance music in the first half of the twentieth century, the
fox incaico lost its dance function and was transformed into a slow-tempo song
by the mid-twentieth century. “La bocina” (The horn), “Collar de lágrimas”
(Necklace of tears), and “La canción de los Andes” (The song of the Andes)
are three fox incaicos well known in the música nacional anthology whose
Figure 2.5 Sanjuanito “Pobre corazón.” Source: Guillermo Garzón: Canciones, letras y
partituras. Guayaquil: SADRAM. n.d.
lyrics depict the sadness and solitude caused by farewells with a loved one. In
“La canción de los Andes” by Constantino Mendoza, a mother cries over the
absence of her son who has left forever.
En las alturas de las montañas [In the height of the mountains

Existe un pobre rancho There is a poor ranch
Una viejita todas las tardes Every afternoon an old woman
Llora y suspira ahí: Cries and sighs there:
Triste es la vida así Sad is life like this
Quiero mejor morir. I prefer to die.
Suenan las notas del fiel rondador Sound the old notes of the faithful panpipe
En los labios del indio In the lips of the Indian
Que brinda su amor That gives his love
A la dueña de su corazón. To the owner of his heart.
Hijo de mi alma, Son of my soul,
de mi alma hijo mío Of my soul, son of mine
Dónde existes, no te veo Where are you, I can’t see you
No te oigo, dónde estás? I can’t hear you, Where are you?]
In this piano transcription, the fox-trot rhythmic formula appears first in the
melody (m. 1–6), then it switches to the base line (m. 7). The change of tempo
distinguishes the early twentieth-century fox-trot from the Ecuadorian fox
incaico of the música nacional anthology, which is observed in the rhythmic
notation of the 4/4 meter for the latter and the 2/2 meter for the original fox-
trot. (PURL 2.5)
52 | Chapter 2
Figure 2.6 Fox Incaico “La canción de los Andes.” Source: Álbum musical: Enciclopedia de
la música ecuatoriana. Partituras. Vol. 2. Quito: CONMUSICA. Courtesy of Pablo Guer-
rero Gutiérrez, 2005.
Albazo
The term albazo is said to derive from the Spanish alborada, a music per-
formed at dawn during religious festivities. In the eighteenth century, gov-
ernment authorities prohibited public performances of albazos due to the
cheerful and noisy atmosphere they generated. Considered a fast-tempo
yaraví, the albazo alternates 3/4 and 6/8 meters (sesquiáltera) in complex
guitar-strumming patterns that produce syncopated rhythms and accentua-
tion of specific beats. Despite its lively tempo, the albazo has a melancholy
character due to the pentatonic flavor of the melodies and prominence of the
minor mode. Variations of the albazo are known with the Quichua words
saltashpa, cachullapi, and capishca, terms that have no specific translation or
meaning in Quichua.
Most albazos can be recognized by the lyrics, which are written in coplas
(four-verse stanzas) that often include Spanish expressions of pain or com-
plaint such as “ayayay.” The lyrical content varies from unrequited love to
mischievous topics, though most are centered on love deceptions, such as the
case of the albazo “Morena la ingratitud,” by Jorge Araujo Chiriboga.
Morena la ingratitud, ayay [Dark-skinned woman, the ingratitude, ayay

Con qué me trata tu pecho How your breast treats me
Ayay morena Ayay, dark-skin woman
Hacen que de tí me aleje They distance me from you
Figure 2.7 Albazo “Morena la ingratitud.” Source: Álbum musical: Enciclopedia de la música ecu-
atoriana. Partituras. Vol. 2. Quito: CONMUSICA. Courtesy of Pablo Guerrero Gutiérrez, 2005.
Ayayay, ayayayay Ayayay, ayayayay

Entre lágrimas deshecho In between tears, I am down
Ayayay morena. Ayay, dark-skin woman.]
“Morena la ingratitud” has all musical features typical of Ecuadorian mestizo

music—sesquiáltera rhythms notated in a 6/8 meter, harmonic progressions
of I-III-V-I in the minor mode, and pentatonic melodies. Many Ecuadorian
songs end in cadences with the third note of the tonic chord in the melody,
and this albazo is no exception. The descending intervals of fourth and third
in the melody give this piece a lament character. (PURL 2.6)
Pasacalle
A duple-meter song-dance genre, the pasacalle presumably emerged as a popu-
lar music genre in the 1940s with the influence of the Spanish pasodoble, the
European polka, and the Mexican corrido. Historian Jorge Núñez defines the
pasacalle as a “canción de arraigo” (a song of belonging), “himno de la patria
chica” (a hymn to the homeland), and “canción de autoafirmación nacional” (a
song of national self-affirmation) because its lyrics allude to love and pride for
one’s birthplace (1998, 23, 41). In his view, the pasacalle propitiated a “healthy
patriotism and the development of a modern Ecuadorian consciousness” in the
aftermath of two catastrophic events in the 1940s: the loss of half of Ecuador’s
territories as a result of the invasion of Peru in 1941, and the devastating earth-
quake in Ambato on August 5, 1949, in which more than two thousand people
were killed and approximately one hundred thousand people became homeless.
Almost every city and province in Ecuador has a pasacalle dedicated to it,
which is generally more popular than the official city anthem. The pasacalle
forges a national conscience in which regional difference is accepted in the
54 | Chapter 2
Figure 2.8 Pasacalle “Chulla quiteño.” Source: Álbum musical: Enciclopedia de la música ecuato-
riana. Partituras. Vol. 2. Quito: CONMUSICA. Courtesy of Pablo Guerrero Gutiérrez, 2005.
musical imagination of the nation. This is observed in public reactions to per-

formances of medleys of pasacalles. The most popular include “Chulla quiteño”
(A man from Quito), “Chola cuencana” (Beautiful woman from Cuenca)
“Guayaquileño, madera de guerrero” (Guayaquilean, heart of a warrior), and
“Ambato, tierra de flores” (Ambato, land of flowers). The “Chulla quiteño,” by
Alfredo Carpio sings to the city of Quito and the beauty of its women.
Yo soy el chullita quiteño [I am a man from Quito

La vida me paso encantado I spend my life enchanted
Para mí todo es un sueño For me everything is a dream
Bajo éste, mi cielo amado. Below this, my lovely heaven.
Las lindas chiquillas quiteñas The beautiful girls from Quito

Son dueñas de mi corazón Are owners of my heart
No hay mujeres en el mundo There are no women in the world
Como las de mi canción. As the women of my song.]
The duple meter, lively tempo, and simple accompaniment of I-V harmonies
are typical features of the pasacalle. In this piano transcription, the melody is
played in parallel sixths, with the accompaniment of broken chords in eighth
notes which imitates guitar strumming. (PURL 2.7)
Pasillo
The pasillo is often defined in Ecuador as a poem set to music. In fact,
this definition actually describes the way in which popular composers wrote
their songs in the 1920s–1940s. They selected refined poems written by
waltz pasillo
Figure 2.9 Typical rhythms of the European waltz and the Ecuadorian pasillo.
contemporary upper- and middle-class poets, which they then set to music.
Its basic rhythm consists of a triple-meter waltz-derived rhythmic pattern,
made up of two eighth notes followed by an eighth rest, an eighth note, and
a quarter note. While sesquiáltera was characteristic of early vocal pasillos,
a more regular 3/4 meter has become standard since the 1950s. The har-
monic accompaniment is based on simple triadic chord progressions (I-IV-I,
I-V-I, and I-IV-V-I), often enriched with brief modulations in the second-
ary 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 cen-
tury, a binary form with predominance of minor keys and inclusion of an
instrumental refrain between the stanzas had become the norm. Although
the pasillo may be performed in various musical formats, the standardized
form features duet singing in parallel thirds accompanied by a guitar and a
requinto.8
It is commonly believed that the pasillo was introduced to current Ecua-
dorian territories from Colombia during the wars of independence in the
early 1820s and has had different functions over time. In the second half of
the nineteenth century, the pasillo was a dance and instrumental genre per-
formed by military bands and estudiantinas (ensembles of guitar-like instru-
ments) in outdoor venues. The pasillo was also a salon music genre written
by composers with musical training, such as Aparicio Córdoba (c. 1840–1934)
and Sixto María Durán (1875–1947). At the turn of the twentieth century the
pasillo was transformed from a purely instrumental music into a lively love
song frequently sung in serenades. In the mid-twentieth century, the pasillo
lost its danceable function and became a sentimental song for listening. Older
people I spoke to often commented that the pasillo was a gracious dance with
short, jumplike, waltz-derived steps. In fact, the name pasillo is a diminutive
form of paso (step). Younger Ecuadorians, however, are often unaware that
the pasillo was a popular dance and generally regard it as a sad song. Only
in recent years have professional dance schools attempted to re-create and
“folklorize” the pasillo dance with choreographies and outfits that recall late
nineteenth-century traditions.
Some parallels may be drawn between the Ecuadorian pasillo, the
Colombian bambuco, and the Peruvian vals criollo. All have been designated
56 | Chapter 2
“national” musics by an urban nationalistic bourgeoisie in the 1920s–50s,

and then marginalized by more modern, dance-oriented, commercial pop
genres, usually associated with lower classes or nonelite ethnic groups (Indi-
ans and people of African heritage). All are considered “creole” musics with
a strong European influence, noticeable in the use of poetic forms, triple
meter, and accompaniment of string instruments. The lyrics of the most
popular bambucos, pasillos, and valses criollos are related to love and the
beauty of the country’s landscapes and people. In addition, they were the
first popular musics to be recorded in the early 1910s, and then dissemi-
nated through the radio in the 1930s. Although they all are/were couple
dances with common roots in the European waltz, they have developed
particular rhythmic structures and are played with distinctive instrumental
ensembles.
The vals criollo, or vals peruano, is perhaps the genre that most resembles
the European waltz with its strong three-beat pattern strummed on the gui-
tar. The lead guitarist plays solos and strongly plucked phrases on the upper
strings, especially in the first beat, while a second guitarist performs elaborate
riffs (bordones) on the two lowest strings (Lloréns 1983). In the 1950s, the
cajón, a wooden box with a resonance hole, was incorporated to the instru-
mentation and provides a rhythmic base for the song (Lloréns 1983). The gui-
tar-and-cajón instrumentation is said to represent the European and African
heritage of música criolla.
The bambuco is identified by “an apparently syncopated triple time com-
bining elements of 3/4 and 6/8 meters” (Varney 2001, 124). The bambuco’s
musical notation has been an object of debate among music scholars and
composers due to the complex accent structure in both the melody and the
guitar accompaniment, which makes its notation possible in both meters
(Varney 2001; Santamaría 2007).9 The typical bambuco instrumentation is a
string ensemble (estudiantina) made up of guitar, tiple (a four-course, triple-
string guitar), and bandola (a 14- to 16-string mandolin). Although it has lost
its national status, the bambuco is fairly well known in Colombia through the
Bambuco National Folk Festival in the Department of Huilas, which congre-
gates the most talented dancers and musicians.
Music scores from the early twentieth century show that the Ecuadorian
and Colombian pasillos were quite similar in character. By the 1920s, how-
ever, they had become stylistically different. In Colombia, the pasillo was
typically played in an upbeat tempo by ensembles of bandolas, tiples, and
guitars (Waxer 2002). In Ecuador, different instrumental ensembles played
the pasillo, but since the 1950s the guitar-and-requinto trio with a three-voice
harmony arrangement, following the fashion imposed by the Mexican Trío
Los Panchos, became the norm.
Although the development of música criolla in Peru and música nacional

in Ecuador responds to specific sociocultural and historical contexts, there are
striking similarities in their forms of musical production. In his study of música
criolla in Lima, José Lloréns argues that social transformations in Peru in the
early twentieth century had a great impact on the modes of production of this
music (1983, 50). He distinguishes an “artisan” production, where there is no
mediation between the musicians and the public because music is performed
live in the context of serenades and jaranas (social gatherings), and a “modern”
production, which is largely based on the dynamics of the mass media and popu-
larity of the composers and performers (1983, 59). The figures of the composer,
the interpreter, and the author of the song lyrics are condensed in one person in
the “artisan” production, while a division of work between the people involved
in the production process is characteristic for the modern mode of production.
Lloréns rightly points out that the “Pinglo’s Generation” (1920s–50s) assim-
ilated and utilized features of the international music in vogue, thus “de-folk-
lorizing” (removing the folk traits) música criolla. In his view, this was possible
because creole musicians and their audiences in Lima did not set boundar-
ies between local and cosmopolitan musics (1983, 47). This is observed, for
example, in the emergence of genres such as the fox incaico, shimmy fox, and
other local forms of fox-trot that appeared in several Latin American coun-
tries, some of which became part of a national music repertoire.
Ecuadorian pasillos are distinguished according to the geographical ori-
gin—pasillo costeño (from the coast) and pasillo serrano (from the highlands).
Pasillos serranos tend to be slower, more melancholy, and in the minor mode,
while pasillos costeños are faster, happier, and harmonically more varied.
Although both types of pasillos display differences in tempo and musical char-
acter, they do not carry connotations of class. The pasillo “Guayaquil de mis
amores” (Guayaquil of my loves) exemplifies a pasillo costeño. This song was
composed by Nicasio Safadi, an Ecuadorian of Lebanese descent, to the lyrics
of Lauro Dávila, a well-known middle-class poet from Guayaquil. The lyrics
describe the splendor of the port city with metaphors highlighting its strate-
gic position in the Gulf of Guayaquil and the beauty of its women. Despite
the minor mode, this pasillo is always sung in a lively tempo, reflecting, to a
certain degree, the happy spirit of costeño people. Its harmonic structure is
more elaborate than that of the pasillos serranos, and its tonal plan includes
modulations to the major mode and frequent use of secondary dominant har-
monies (an usual feature for pasillos serranos). Guayaquileños used to dance
to this piece until the 1940s; however, today this song is only listened to. The
introduction shows sesquiáltera rhythms in the melody, which includes the
interval of an augmented second that gives this song a Middle Eastern flavor.
(PURL 2.8)
58 | Chapter 2
Tú eres perla que surgiste del más grande e ignoto mar

y que al son de su 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 . . .
[You are the pearl that emerged from the greatest and most unknown sea
And in the sound of its 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 . . . ]
The pasillo “Lamparilla” (Little lamp), composed by Miguel Ángel Casares

(1903–[?]) and set to a poem of Luz Elisa Borja, is a typical example of a
pasillo serrano. The lyrics talk about the pleasure of “crying when the dis-
tressed soul cannot heal its profound pain,” and they regard tears as “oil that
helps soften the rigor of cruel destiny.” This pasillo is usually performed in a
very slow tempo that emphasizes the tragic lyrics. As with most pasillos serra-
nos, it is written in the minor mode, with a brief modulation to the major. In
the 1920s, Mexican bel-canto singer Margarita Cueto recorded this pasillo for
Columbia Records, accompanied by a string orchestra in a very lively tempo,
which suggests it was still danced to. In the mid-twentieth century, however,
highland Ecuadorian singers began to record this song in a slow tempo and a
heart-felt manner. (PURL 2.9)
Widely known in the coastal and highland regions, “Lamparilla” and
“Guayaquil de mis amores” are examples of elite pasillos that have entered the
música nacional anthology. However, there are also well-known pasillos at the
national level, known as rocolera music, which are not part of this anthology
because they do not conform to the cultural aesthetics and sensitivities of the
elites. Other regionally known pasillos have not entered the national anthol-
ogy due to their “depressive” lyrical content, such as “Disección” (Dissection),
a song composed by highlander composer Víctor Valencia (1894–1966). The
author dreams he is dead in the morgue. The forensic doctors dissect his body
Figure 2.10 Pasillo “Guayaquil de mis amores.” Source: Álbum musical ecuatoriano. Parti-
turas para piano. Guayaquil: SADRAM. n.d.
to find out the reasons for his death. When they open his cranium they see
that his last thoughts were devoted to the woman he loved. When they raise
his eyelid, they see her face reflected in his pupils. When they dissect his
heart, they find a hole because the woman had stolen it when he was alive.
Finally, when the doctors check his veins, they found them empty because
he had used blood to write his pains of love. To a certain degree, these lyr-
ics recall those of early twentieth-century pasillos that conjure up images of
death and the cemetery as escape valves for heartbreaks. Obviously, this kind
of pasillo has never been perceived as exemplifying the national soul.
Authors, Composers, and Performers

To talk about música nacional is to talk about a group of authors, composers,
and performers whose names are frequently evoked in songbooks compiled and
published by Ecuadorian music enthusiasts. These are professionals (journal-
ists, lawyers, teachers) who write stories about the circumstances in which com-
posers wrote their songs and their sources of inspiration. These stories have been
told so many times that some have acquired a life of their own. For example, the
pasillo “El alma en los labios” (Wearing one’s soul on one’s sleeve), written by
Medardo Ángel Silva in 1919, has an aura of mystery because of the conditions
60 | Chapter 2
in which the poet died, with a gun shot to his head. In the 1970s, journalist
Hugo Delgado Cepeda wrote a series of articles in Revista Estrellas addressing
the possible reasons for Silva’s death. He was interested in finding out whether
the poet was killed or committed suicide, how the poet spent his last minutes on
earth, and who the woman he loved and apparently died for was.
The origin of the famous danzante “Vasija de barro” (Clay pot), which I
referred to earlier in this chapter in the description of the danzante, is another
frequently recalled story in the música nacional anthology due to the pres-
tige of painter Oswaldo Guayasamín and the poets and musicians who wrote
the lyrics and music. This story has received great attention because it rein-
forces the idea of Ecuadorian music being a spontaneous and cultivated artis-
tic form associated with renowned figures of Ecuadorian national literature,
music, and the fine arts.
Compilers of the música nacional anthologies have also been interested in
investigating the origin of unusual names for the pasillo, especially those having
little connection to the lyrics. This is the case of “El aguacate” (The avocado),
a song attributed to César Guerrero (1893–1975), whose lyrics are basically a
man’s declaration of love. Some compilers state that the author was sitting near
an avocado tree while writing the lyrics and that an avocado fell and hit him
on the head while he was trying to decide on a title for the song. Others believe
that the title alludes to a “love sick” person because the term “avocado” was
used to describe this state of being in the early twentieth century.
Other stories focus on the composers’ personal lives, as is the case with
“Sendas distintas” (Distinct paths), a pasillo composed by Jorge Araújo
Chiriboga for his wife, the famous singer Carlota Jaramillo, who was more
than twenty years his junior. The lyrics refer to this situation as follows:
“How distinct we are, your life begins to bloom / And I am already in the
middle of the day / You do not even start to live / And I am feeling tired of
living.” The blindness of Miguel Ángel Casares, the author of “Lamparilla”
(Little lamp), is often recounted as an irony of life because the lyrics of this
pasillo make reference to the eyes as the light that guides one’s path. Casa-
res (1903–75) was twenty-one years old when he set to music the poem of
Luz Elisa Borja, and he had no idea he would live the last years of his life in
complete blindness due to cataracts. All these stories have been published
in songbooks and passed on by word of mouth so many times that they are
now perceived as true.
More than a lucrative activity, music enthusiasts regard the compilation
of Ecuadorian songs as a “patriotic duty,” understood here as a moral obli-
gation to disseminate Ecuadorian music to the world. Normally, compil-
ers publish a small print using their own resources and sell them in book-
stores for only marginal profits. The songbooks include the lyrics of the
most popular songs as well as the music scores, biographies, and pictures of
the most popular composers. The best-known songs in the música nacional
anthology appear in almost every songbook. Florilegio del pasillo ecuato-
riano (The flowering of the Ecuadorian pasillo) by Alberto Morlás Gutiér-
rez (1961) was the first of this kind, followed by Antología del pasillo ecu-
atoriano (Anthology of the Ecuadorian pasillo) by Isabel Carrión (1986),
Florilegio de la música ecuatoriana (The flowering of Ecuadorian music)
by Mario Godoy (1988), Pasillos clásicos (Classic 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.).
The Authors
With very few exceptions, the authors of pasillo lyrics in the 1920s and 1930s
were upper-middle-class poets educated in Europe, or poets from less affluent
circles who visited elite literary circles on a regular basis. Medardo Ángel Silva
(1898–1919) is perhaps the best-known author for the grace, consonance, and
nostalgic overtones of his poetry. Born into a poor family, Silva moved in aris-
tocratic circles and worked as the editor of the literary section of El Telégrafo,
one of Guayaquil’s oldest newspapers. He is considered one of the best expo-
nents of Ecuadorian modernist poetry and is a member of the Generación
Decapitada (the “Beheaded Generation”), a group of upper-middle-class
poets who, like Silva, had an apathy for life. Silva’s poetry was recognized as
extraordinary during his lifetime, and his poems were published soon after
his untimely death at age twenty-one. Several of his poems have been set to
pasillo music, such as “El alma en los labios” by Francisco Paredes Herrera,
“Se va con algo mío” (She is leaving with something that is mine) by Gerardo
Guevara, and “El Verso” (The verse) by Nicasio Safadi.
Abel Romeo Castillo (1904–96) is the author of “Romance de mi destino”
(Romance of my destiny), a well-known pasillo in the música nacional anthol-
ogy. A historian, journalist, diplomat, and teacher, Castillo was born into a
wealthy family that founded Diario El Telégrafo (1884) and “Quinta Piedad,”
one of the first radio stations in Guayaquil. He studied history and journalism
in the United States, Spain, and Chile, where he met important literary fig-
ures such as Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. He was also actively
involved in Guayaquil’s cultural life and wrote a collection of poems and the
biography of Medardo Ángel Silva, whom he knew well as the literary editor
of the newspaper he directed.
62 | Chapter 2
Poet laureat José María Egas (1896–1982) represents Ecuadorian modern-

ist poetry in its most symbolic and elegant expression. He was born in the
coastal province of Manabí but was raised in Guayaquil after the loss of his
parents in early childhood. An erudite person, Egas was a member of the
Ecuadorian Royal Academy of Language and a judge of the Supreme Court.
Consonant and easy to set to music, several of his poems have been immor-
talized in the música nacional anthology, such as “Invernal” (Wintertime),
“Arias íntimas” (Intimate songs), and “Vaso de lágrimas” (Glass of tears).
Other authors of this period were upper-middle-class professionals who wrote
poems in their spare time, such as Wenceslao Pareja y Pareja, a medical doc-
tor devoted to the eradication of yellow fever in Guayaquil.
Unlike elite authors, middle-class poets such as César Maquilón and
Lauro Dávila (1885–1968), the author of the poem “Guayaquil de mis
Amores,” worked as literature teachers in public high schools. Born in the
coastal province of El Oro, Dávila had lived in various regions of Ecuador.
He went to high school in the southern highland city of Cuenca, and he got
his teaching degree in Quito. In the early 1910s, he moved to Guayaquil and
came into contact with the elite circles of the port city. Seventy of his poems
have been set to music by Nicasio Safadi, Enrique Ibáñez Mora, and the poet
himself. It was also a common practice to set foreign poems to pasillo music,
as is the case of “Sombras,” written by the Mexican poet Rosario Sansores
(1889–1972), and “Rosario de besos” by Colombian poet Libardo Parra.
The Composers
In contrast to the upper-middle-class poets, música nacional composers were
generally self-taught musicians from the lower-middle classes, most earning a
living as schoolteachers. Francisco Paredes Herrera, Nicasio Safadi, Enrique
Ibáñez Mora, Jorge Araújo Chiriboga, and Carlos Rubira Infante stand out for
their prolific and well-known musical production. Most were singers, song-
writers, and performers of their own music.
Known as the “King of pasillos” for his prolific pasillo production (more
than six hundred), Francisco Paredes Herrera (1891–1952) was born in Cuenca,
but he spent most of his life in Guayaquil. In the early 1920s, he worked for
José Domingo Feraud Guzmán perforating pianola rolls. Unlike other popu-
lar composers, Paredes Herrera had formal musical training and was able to
write more elaborate musical arrangements. He was known for his strictness
in the setting of verses, so that word stresses coincided with melodic accents.
He composed music in a variety of musical genres, such as pasodobles, pasa-
calles, fox-trots, one steps, danzantes, yaravíes, and sanjuanitos. Many of his
pieces were recorded by Victor and Columbia Records and published abroad.
His pasillos rank among the top favorite songs in the música nacional anthol-
ogy and are known for their lyricism, beautiful melodies, and intimate char-
acter. The most famous include “El alma en los labios” (1919), “Rosario de
besos” (Rosary of kisses, 1928), “Tú y yo” (You and I, 1933), “Manabí” (1935),
and “Como si fuera un niño” (As if I were a child, n.d.).
Known as “El Turco” (the Turk) for his Middle Eastern ancestry, Nicasio
Safadi (1897–1968) was one of the most prolific composers of pasillos. He came
with his father to Guayaquil from Lebanon at age five and immediately assimi-
lated to the local musical scene. He studied at the National Conservatory of
Guayaquil and played the double bass and various guitar-like instruments. With
a beautiful baritone voice, he was frequently invited to sing the second voice
in duets. In the early 1910s, he recorded pasillos for Columbia and Favorite
Records with singers José Alberto Valdivieso (known as “El diablo ocioso,” the
Lazy Devil), José Villavicencio, and Sebastián Rosado. His most popular pasil-
los include “Invernal” and those dedicated to Guayaquil, such as “Guayaquil de
mis amores” and “Romance criollo de la niña guayaquileña” (Creole romance
for the girl from Guayaquil). Safadi and Ibáñez Mora formed the famous “Dúo
Ecuador,” which traveled to New York in 1930 to record Ecuadorian music for
Columbia Records. Ibáñez Mora (1903–98), also known as “el pollo Ibáñez”
(Chicken Ibáñez), was a self-taught composer from Guayaquil who sang the
lead voice in duets. Both Safadi and Ibáñez Mora wrote a new repertoire of
songs for this important occasion. Safadi was given Ecuadorian citizenship
before the trip so that he would properly represent the country abroad.
Carlos Rubira Infante (b. 1921), a prolific composer and songwriter from
Guayaquil, has written numerous pasillos and pasacalles for almost every
city in Ecuador. In his youth he worked for the post office in Guayaquil and
was also involved in the production of radio programs in Guayaquil, Quito,
and Ambato. In 1946, he recorded with Olimpo Cárdenas his pasillo “En las
lejanías” (In the far distance) on the first record ever produced in Ecuador.
He has sung in duets with famous Ecuadorian artists such as Julio Jaramillo
and Fresia Saavedra, and he has trained young singers in the interpretation of
música nacional. Rubira Infante is considered a living national treasure and
has received numerous awards from the government.
Other important composers I will be referring to in the next several chap-
ters include Gonzalo Vera Santos (1917–89) and Jorge Araújo Chiriboga
(1892–1970). Vera Santos was born in the province of Manabí but spent most
of his life in Guayaquil. He formed a duet with Rubira Infante in the early
1940s and recorded “Romance de mi destino” (Romance of my destiny)
with him. This pasillo was composed shortly after Ecuador’s loss of half of
its national territory as a result of the Peruvian invasion in 1941. From 1946
until his death he lived in a mental hospital. Araújo Chiriboga (1892–1970), a
64 | Chapter 2
highland composer born in Riobamba, was an active member of the Compa-

ñía Dramática Nacional (National Drama Company) and a regular performer
on Radio El Prado, the first commercial radio station in Ecuador. He is the
author of the albazo “Si tú me olvidas” and the pasillo “Sendas Distintas,” an
autobiographical song dedicated to his wife, Carlota Jaramillo.
The Performers
As with composers, performers were lower-middle-class Ecuadorians who
helped to pass the elites’ songs on to the popular classes, thus reinforcing the
idea that música nacional was a people’s music. Pasillos were normally sung
in duets to the accompaniment of a single guitar and in a much livelier tempo
than they are performed today. The Alvarado-Safadi duo was the most popu-
lar duet in the 1910s, followed by the Dúo Ecuador in the 1930s. Duets were
frequently made up of siblings such as the Hermanas Mendoza-Sangurima,
the Hermanos Montecel, the Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, the Hermanas
Ron, and the Hermanos Miño-Naranjo. Well-known musicians also joined
their voices in duets, such as the Dúo Benítez-Valencia, the Dúo Aguayo-
Huayamabe, and the Dúo Saavedra-Rubira. All these artists set high stan-
dards of música nacional performance.
The Dúo Benítez-Valencia was the most popular male duo in Ecuador
from 1940 until the death of Valencia in 1970. They started singing in the
program “Canciones del Alma” (Songs of the soul) of Radio Quito three
times a week to the accompaniment of the group Los Nativos Andinos.10 Dúo
Ecuador had already disappeared from the national music scene when Dúo
Benítez-Valencia became famous in the 1950s. They recorded numerous
songs for Discos Granja and crystallized a distinctive singing style for música
nacional. In 1942, Carlota Jaramillo (1904–87) and Luis Alberto Valencia
recorded a series of Ecuadorian songs in duet format for the Argentine record
label Odeón. Soon afterward, Jaramillo continued her artistic career as a solo
singer, while Valencia joined Gonzalo Benítez in their successful duet. Con-
sidered the “Queen of the Pasillo,” Ecuadorians hold Carlota Jaramillo in
high esteem for her heartfelt interpretations of música nacional though the
younger generations find her singing style old-fashioned.
With their tenor-like and polished voices, the Hermanos Miño-Naranjo
began their artistic career in the early 1960s and further innovated the música
nacional singing style with their vibrant and sonorous voices. In 1964, they won
first prize in the Feria de la Canción Iberoamericana in Spain with the per-
formance of “Tú y Yo,” a pasillo composed by Paredes Herrera in the 1930s.
The Miño-Naranjo brothers have toured extensively in the United States and
Europe for a half century and continue to perform actively in música nacional
concerts.
With the influence of the Mexican Trío Los Panchos in the 1950s, the
pasillo adopted an instrumentation consisting of two guitars and a requinto
that plays melodic embellishments. Los Brillantes and Los Reales, the most
famous Ecuadorian trios of that period, distinguished themselves from other
trios because of the polished voices of their female lead singers Olguita Gutiér-
rez and Consuelo Vargas, both of Argentine birth. Homero Hidrobo, the first
requinto player of Los Brillantes, left the ensemble to establish his own trio, Los
Reales, with his wife, Consuelo Vargas. These trios innovated música nacio-
nal performance with more elaborate guitar and requinto arrangements and an
international singing style that was noticeably different from that of Ecuadorian
singers. The Dúo Benítez-Valencia tended to slow down the tempo, while the
Hermanas Mendoza-Sangurima sang with nasal and high-pitched voices.
Highland guitarists, such as Marco Tulio Hidrobo, Bolívar Ortiz,
Guillermo Rodríguez, Segundo Guaña, Rosalino Quintero, and Segundo Bau-
tista, developed a special style of guitar playing that had a great influence on
the popularization of música nacional between the 1930s and the 1960s. Guer-
rero and Mullo (2005) refer to these skillful musicians as “the Quiteño guitar
school” because, despite their different cities of origin, their musical activities
were centered in the capital. They used steel strings and a pick to mark the bass
line with accents and complex strumming patterns. With the introduction of
the requinto in the 1950s, this style of guitar playing gradually lost visibility.
Influenced by the canción romántica of the 1960s, solo performances
became as popular as those of the trios, especially in interpretations by Julio
Jaramillo (1935–78) and Olimpo Cárdenas (1919–91). Both singers developed
a personal singing style with their warm, smooth, and melodious high-pitched
voices. Known as “El ruiseñor de América” (The Nightingale of the Ameri-
cas), Julio Jaramillo sang both pasillos and an international repertoire of bole-
ros, tangos, and other well-known songs. Better known for his performances
of tango and bolero, Olimpo Cárdenas sang pasillo duets with Rubira Infante.
He established himself in Colombia with moderate success.
The notion of música nacional has been a social construct articulated
by upper-middle-class Ecuadorians in the period spanning the 1920s to the
1950s, which has permeated and conditioned the way Ecuadorians view and
express their sense of national belonging. Elite renditions of indigenous and
mestizo musical genres were incorporated to the música nacional anthology;
however, only the pasillo became the symbol of “Ecuadorianness” through a
process of nationalization.
|3
The Pasillo
Rise and Decline of the National Song
L
ike many middle-class children in Guayaquil, I grew up listening to
música nacional at home, in my neighborhood, and at school. In the
1960s and 1970s, it was a common feature to hear serenades of romantic
boleros and pasillos devoted to a mother or a woman one was in love with.
Curious people in the neighborhood would wake up at midnight and look
through their windows to see who was being serenaded. At home, my siblings
and I would listen to a variety of popular musics on radio and television pro-
grams, especially the famous boleros and pasillos by the Trío Los Panchos
from Mexico and Trío Los Brillantes from Ecuador, ensembles my mother
especially liked. When I was in my first year of junior high school, my class-
mates and I developed a special taste for the pasillo because our music teacher
had us spend most classes singing them to his piano accompaniment. Several
years later when I lived in Quito in the early 1990s, and again in the early
2000s, I attended informal social gatherings in which friends and coworkers
used to sing their favorite pasillos to the accompaniment of a guitar. There
was always someone in the group who played the guitar, and everyone knew
the lyrics by heart. When I attended música nacional concerts, I noticed that
people in the audience always requested the performers to sing the same rep-
ertoire of pasillos and joined them in singing their favorite songs, especially
“El aguacate” (The avocado) and “Sendas distintas” (Different paths).
The pasillo has played an important role in shaping Ecuadorians’ per-
ceptions of their national identity. This is observed in the different reac-
tions—pride, rejection, indifference, or passion—it generates among people of
The Pasillo | 67
different ages and social classes. For the older generations, the pasillo reflects
the gentle and cultured nature of Ecuadorian people through its poetic lyr-
ics and music. Many older people I spoke to told me stories of how they fell
in love to the music and lyrics of pasillos. The younger generations, how-
ever, tend to regard these songs as sad, depressing, and old-fashioned.1 Many
believe that the pasillo makes people drink and that it is appropriate music to
listen to when one wants to forget heartbreak. Why do older people refer to
the pasillo with reverence and fond memories, while the younger generations
disdain it? Are these people referring to the same music? How can a sad and
depressive music be considered a nation’s musical symbol?
This chapter examines the process of nationalization of the pasillo in the
1920s and 1930s and the attitudes of upper-middle-class Ecuadorians toward
música nacional. For these purposes, I analyze the role of the Liberal Revolu-
tion of 1895 and the mass media in raising the pasillo to national status. The
first section examines several hypotheses concerning the origin of the pasillo,
then I compare the lyrical content of early and mid-twentieth-century pasi-
llos to see how this musical genre was “cleaned up” of undesirable features.
Finally, I examine its golden period and the reasons for its decline in the
mid-1970s.
The Origin of the Ecuadorian Pasillo

Discourses about the origin of a musical genre often provide a forum for the
study of identity politics and people’s identification with particular ethnic or
social groups. Rather than looking for concrete answers to the question 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 ori-
gin based on questionable arguments. To explain their particular stances, they
have drawn attention to the etymology of the word, and to the musical char-
acter and lyrical content of the pasillos, but often eschewed detailed musico-
logical analysis. As a result, most of these hypotheses are subjective and only
reflect the intellectuals’ desires to locate the origin of Ecuador’s nationhood
in either the European or the 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 regards
the pasillo as a local version of the German lied, while Humberto Toscano
68 | Chapter 3
links its nostalgic character to the Portuguese fado (Guerrero 1996). The asso-
ciation of the pasillo with the lied and the fado is tenuous and reflects subjec-
tive ideological concerns rather than concrete historical or musical evidence.
The pasillo most resembles 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 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, which 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 Car-
los Aguilar Vásquez suggest origins in the Basque zortzico and the French
passepied, respectively, but, again, there is no solid support for these claims. A
folkloric 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 to the other. The hypoth-
eses suggesting a European origin for the pasillo reflect a desire to “whiten”
the pasillo and find its origin in the European heritage of the mestizo 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 tran-
scribed indigenous and folk melodies from the northern highlands, argues
that there is a close connection between the pasillo and the extinct toro rabón,
a triple-meter dance with a rhythmic pattern similar to that of the pasillo,
which was apparently popular in the late nineteenth century (Moreno 1996,
72).2 Writers Gerardo Falconí, Arturo Montesinos, and José María Vargas sug-
gest 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 typical 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 tri-
ple-meter pasillo. Finally, the ostensible association between the pasillo and
the pase del niño (the passing of the Infant 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,
none of which can be discerned.
From a diffusionist point of view—one that suggests that musics have
spread geographically from one region to another—most students of Ecua-
dorian music agree that the pasillo was a local form of the European waltz,
which came to current Ecuadorian territories from Colombia during the wars
The Pasillo | 69
of independence. The popularity of the Austrian waltz in the first half of the
nineteenth century, with the works of Johann Strauss (father and son), coin-
cides with the emergence of the instrumental pasillo in Venezuela, Colom-
bia, and Ecuador, which in the early 1800s were territories of the Viceroyalty
of Nueva Granada, and from 1822 to 1830 of the Gran Colombia Confed-
eration. It is logical to assume that local forms of the Austrian waltz had
immense popularity in the newly independent republics, though it acquired
a regional flavor in each country—the Colombian pasillo was influenced by
the bambuco, the Venezuelan one by the joropo, and the Ecuadorian one by
the sanjuanito and the yaraví (Portaccio 1994, 2: 136). Unlike the bambuco
and the joropo, which maintain its “creole” and diatonic flavor, the Ecuador-
ian pasillo, especially that from the highlands, acquired pentatonic inflec-
tions and typical cadences for Ecuadorian popular music, a process I call the
“yaravization” of the pasillo. Unlike the Ecuadorian pasillo, which has a regu-
lar meter and has lost the sesquiáltera rhythms, the bambuco and the joropo
are said to have African musical influences due to the multiple syncopations
and complex rhythmic structures between the melodic and bass lines.
The foreign origin of the Ecuadorian pasillo is a topic of frequent con-
cern of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Historian Jorge Núñez (1980), for
example, describes the pasillo as the “hijo bastardo de la independencia y her-
mano gemelo de la república” (the bastard son of independence and the twin
brother of the Republic), pointing to its illegitimate (that is, non-Ecuadorian)
origin and its close kinship to the Colombian pasillo. Many of my interview-
ees 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.
The pasillo is also popular in Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica; how-
ever, only in Ecuador did it become an enduring national symbol throughout
the twentieth century. In Colombia, it was an important national music of
the Andean region, but only second after the bambuco (Wade 2000). In Costa
Rica, marimba renditions of pasillos are popular in the region of Guanacaste,
a province bordering Nicaragua (Acevedo n.d.). In Panama, the pasillo sur-
vives in art music renditions. The Venezuelan pasillo was a local form of
waltz blended with other folk/popular music forms of the country.
The Making of a National Symbol

The nationalization of the pasillo in the 1920s and 1930s was the result of
social, economic, political, and technological factors intersecting with each
other. The Liberal Revolution of 1895 brought about profound social trans-
formations and a change of political power in a country previously ruled by
conservative highland landowners. The coastal bourgeoisie became the new
70 | Chapter 3
center of power and was expected to bring about the modernization of the
nation-state through the expansion of the market economy and the integra-
tion of the country through the railroad system. Their economic and politi-
cal power stemmed from banking, commercial development, and financial
activities originated by the cacao boom. Indigenous and working-class people
seeking the abolition of labor exploitation in the haciendas joined the revolu-
tion with hopes for a better future.
The Liberal Revolution brought about reforms that affected laws per-
taining to civil marriage and divorce (1902), the Registro Civil (1900), and
social security (Ayala Mora 1994; Quintero and Silva 2001). Most impor-
tantly, the Liberal Revolution was instrumental in abolishing the monopoly
on power held by the Catholic Church and establishing the secularization
of education, an area in which the church had its most extensive influence.3
The secularization of society and the interest in cultural expressions that
reflected the aesthetics of the new ruling class facilitated the arrival in the
early 1900s of Modernismo, a literary movement that expressed a “per-
sonal lyrism” and “the longing for a genuine American artistic expression”
(Handelsman 1981).
In Ecuador, Modernismo represented a counterreaction to the epic and
rhetorical literary styles of the second half of the nineteenth century. Modern-
ist poetry was easy to set to music because of its simple structure and caden-
tious rhymes. In my view, it is unlikely that the pasillo could have emerged as
a romantic love expression before the 1890s because the religious fervor and
conservatism of the Ecuadorian society 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 were essen-
tially salon music and military band music reinforces this view.
The new dominant classes sought to redefine Ecuadorian national iden-
tity through cultural forms that reflected their class ideology, aesthetic values,
and sense of modernity. In his study of Mexican modernity, Pedelty (1999)
poses that the bolero was a cultural form through which rural people were
instructed into a new urban life in Mexico, as opposed to the corrido and the
ranchera, which depicted rural life. Like the bolero, the pasillo shaped a new
urban sensibility that aptly reflected the search for modernity, especially after
the social transformations brought about by the Liberal Revolution and the
technological advances in transportation and communications in the early
twentieth century. The new urban sensibility was expressed through senti-
mental songs that underscored themes of loss and nostalgia for an idealized
past.
In Ecuador, cultural nationalism was designed in opposition to an antago-
nist “Other” represented by indigenous people, rather than Spaniards.4 The
The Pasillo | 71
pasillo, the quintessential sentimental song in Ecuador, came to symbolize

the elites’ ideas of nationhood because it was the only mestizo popular music
from the cluster of Ecuadorian musical genres devoid of indigenous and Afro-
Ecuadorian musical associations. Many Ecuadorians believe that the pasillo
has always been a romantic love song. However, this genre changed stylisti-
cally from a low-class cultural form in the very early twentieth century to an
elite poetic song in the 1930s. The stylistic changes were not just the product
of random artistic choices but a reflection of a cultural hegemony imposed
and naturalized from above. The pasillo of the 1930s stressed the Hispanic
component of the mestizo nation through the use of refined poetry and melo-
dies devoid of pentatonic flavor. In the selection of the pasillo as the Ecua-
dorian national music par excellence, the elites excluded alternate modes of
national representation.
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 twenti-
eth-century pasillos were associated with the images and speech of lower-class
ambiences. A type of pasillo, known in this period as a canción de maldición
(song of damnation), utilizes vulgar terms to express a man’s anger toward an
unfaithful woman who has deceived him. “A mi amor pasado” (To my past
love) by Julio Flores, for example, depicts the young woman to whom the song
is intended to describe as a “shameless whore” and a “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.
[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.
72 | Chapter 3
You made your body a commodity

That you exchanged for gold at high prices
And you partook in pleasure in the orgies
When you were only fifteen years old.]
Other pasillos, such as “Adiós” (Farewell), introduce the pathological idea of

death as an immediate relief from heartbreaks. The cemetery and the tomb
where mournful men claim their beloved women’s attention are recurrent
images.
Mañana cuando yo muera no me eches al olvido

Al ser que más te quiere no vayas a olvidar
Acuérdate un momento mujer de mis promesas
Llega a mi tumba helada un instante a llorar.
[Tomorrow when I die do not forget me

The person who loves you most do not forget
Remember for a moment my promises, woman
Come to my cold, hard tomb to cry for a while.]5
El Aviador Ecuatoriano also reveals what seems to have been a common prac-
tice during this period, namely, the recycling of popular pasillo tunes with new
words. “Te perdono” (I forgive you), for instance, introduces new verses to one
of the most popular pasillos in the 1920s, “El alma en los labios” (Wearing
one’s heart on one’s sleeve). An indication in the songbook shows that the lyr-
ics should be sung to the music of the famous pasillo composed by Francisco
Paredes Herrera. However, rather than a 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 who has been cheated on by his lover, girlfriend, or
wife. The lyrics are dedicated to “H. I. G. F.,” an espiritual damita (a “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.]
The Pasillo | 73
Despite the immense popularity of the “songs of damnation,” as their fre-

quent inclusion in songbooks indicates, these early twentieth-century pasillos
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 differ-
ences within a nation. Musical genres raised to national status are standard-
ized according to the elites’ cultural aesthetics so that one particular version
becomes the “official” national music (Moore 1997; Ochoa 2003). Ochoa
(2003), for example, points out the multiplicity of forms that the Colombian
bambuco had as a regional music before its nationalization, and how the
musical features highlighting its African roots were disguised to construct
images of a homogeneous nation. National musics from other Latin Ameri-
can and Caribbean countries, such as the tango, the samba, the Cuban son,
and the merengue, illustrate similar processes of lyrical and musical “editing.”
Sociologist Wilma Granda rightly indicates that in the process of national-
ization, hundreds of early twentieth-century pasillos with vulgar lyrics were
forgotten, while only a few dozen were “sacralized” (2004, 93).
The Pasillo in the 1920s–50s

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 such as Indigenismo and social realism in
Ecuadorian literature and painting. Concurrently with these cultural move-
ments, upper-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 transformed the “songs of
damnation” into “classy” songs that idealized the female figure and expressed
national pride using a refined modernist poetry. Modernist poetry was easy to
set to music because of its simple structure, consonance, and eloquence. In
Ecuador, Modernismo found its best exponents in the Generación Decapi-
tada (the “Beheaded Generation”), whose poets—Medardo Ángel Silva,
Arturo Borja, Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño, and Humberto Fierro—ended
their lives tragically in early adulthood. Other upper- 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 roman-
tic tone than did the Generación Decapitada.
César Maquilón, a schoolteacher and author of some of the most popu-
lar pasillos in the música nacional anthology, described in his old age how
middle-class poets and musicians cleaned up the “songs of damnation” in the
74 | Chapter 3
1920s and 1930s. In his youth, Maquilón and other middle-class musicians
and writers were often invited to social and literary gatherings in elite circles.
At these events, guests entertained themselves and each other by reading
poems and performing songs composed by members of the group. Maquilón
recalls that he and Nicasio Safadi, a renowned singer/songwriter of pasillos,
transformed 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, hussy woman), he employed more subtle expressions to depict the
man’s anger and only indirectly referred to the pains of love. Maquilón stated,
“I have never written out of hate or resentment. I have always sung about ten-
derness, emotion, sweetness, and true love.”6 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 inter-
ludes between the stanzas and embellishing the musical arrangement with
brief modulations and a walking bass line. I include the first stanza Maquilón
wrote for this song, which was recorded in 1930 with the title “La divina can-
ción” (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 song of love.]
“Invernal” (Wintertime), a poem written in 1920 by poet laureat José María

Egas (1896–1982) and set to music by Safadi, is an example of the type of
pasillo that was raised to the level of a national symbol. The verses are imbued
with a nostalgic air and flowing rhymes that suggest the illusion of love and
being loved. The consonance and rhymes of the lyrics make an ideal poem
to be set to music. (PURL 3.1)
Ingenuamente pones en tu balcón florido

la nota más romántica de esta tarde de lluvia
voy a hilar mi nostalgia, del sol que se ha dormido
en la seda fragante de tu melena rubia.
The Pasillo | 75
Hay un libro de versos en tus manos de luna

en el libro un poema que se deshoja en rosas
tiendes la vista al cielo y en tus ojos hay una
devoción infinita para mirar las cosas.
Tiembla en tus labios rojos la emoción de un poema

Yo, cual viejo neurótico, seguiré con mi tema
En esta tarde enferma de cansancio y de lluvia.
[Innocently in your flowery balcony you offer

the most romantic note on this rainy afternoon
I will spin my nostalgia from the sun that has set
in the fragrant silk of your long blond hair.
There is a book of verses in your moonlike hands

in the book a poem that is being stripped into rose petals
you turn your gaze toward the sky and in your eyes there is
an infinite devotion to look at things.
The emotion of a poem trembles in your red lips

Like an old neurotic, I will continue with my theme
On this afternoon that is sick with weariness and rain.]
It is often the case that popular musics raised to national symbols by the elites
are more likely to express affection for a country’s landscape and to praise the
beauty and bravery of its people than do “songs of damnation.”7 However,
the lyrical content by itself does not explain why these songs gained national
status both within and outside the country. The key factor leading to the
nationalization of the pasillo in the 1920s and 1930s lies in the recording and
promotion of the pasillo as emblematic by the elites, the government, and the
music industry.
The Mass Media

The mass media has exerted an enormous influence on shaping national
musics in Ecuador and elsewhere. Most Latin American national musics
crystallized in the 1920s and 1930s with the advent of recordings, the radio,
and cinema. In search of new music markets, Victor and Columbia Records
recorded the popular music of several countries in their recording studios in
Italy, Spain, and Germany in the early twentieth century. Pasillos recorded in
Spain were accompanied by castanets and performed in a faster tempo than
76 | Chapter 3
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 the Mexicans Margarita Cueto, José Mojica (PURL 3.2), and Carlos Mejía
(Pro 1997a, 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 on the articula-
tion of national musics. Did these companies select the pasillo because of its
local popularity, or was their choice based on parameters that had little rela-
tion to local preferences such as, for example, the international promotion of
sentimental songs like the tango and the blues in the early twentieth century?
In 1911, Antenor Encalada, an Ecuadorian music entrepreneur and rep-
resentative 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 1997a, 74). Although the record-
ings were made in Ecuador, the records were manufactured in Linden, Ger-
many. From a total of 272 pieces recorded, there were 67 pasillos, 47 valses,
43 canciones, 17 marchas, 13 polkas, 12 pasodobles, 10 habaneras, and smaller
numbers of chilenas, boleros, and bambucos (Pro 1997a, 83). About 25 percent
of the pieces were pasillos, and of these, soloists and duos with single-guitar
accompaniment comprised the majority (PURL 3.3, 3.4). It is worth noting
that, with the exception of two yaravíes, no other indigenous or mestizo musi-
cal genres from Ecuador were recorded in this local production, which sug-
gests that Encalada may have assumed that these types of music would not
sell well among their intended upper-middle-class clients.
A “Heroic Feat”
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 sing-
ers in Ecuador or by foreign artists abroad. The “heroic feat,” as the news-
papers called this accomplishment, was the idea of José Domingo Feraud
Guzmán, a visionary entrepreneur who financed the Dúo Ecuador’s trip to
New York. The Dúo Ecuador was made up of Nicasio Safadi and Enrique
Ibáñez Mora, two renowned pasillo interpreters and composers from Guaya-
quil. They recorded thirty-eight songs for Columbia Records, most of which
were especially composed for this trip.
The promotion of these records was centered on the release of the pasillo
“Guayaquil de mis amores” (Guayaquil of my loves), composed by Nicasio
Safadi with lyrics by Lauro Dávila. This song, which has become the popular
The Pasillo | 77
anthem of Guayaquil, was the first pasillo whose lyrics were devoted to a city
rather than to feelings of love and nostalgia. The song portrays the port city as
“a pearl emerging from the sea” that becomes “a garden blessed by God,” and
whose women are “loving and beautiful” (see lyrics in Chapter 2).
The recording of this song had an enormous impact on Ecuadorians’
perception of themselves and their country. Ecuadorians regarded Feraud
Guzmán’s initiative to record Ecuadorian music in New York as a way of put-
ting Ecuadorian music on display before the world. The Ecuadorian Con-
sulate sponsored several concerts of the Dúo Ecuador on the WNYC radio
station in New York to commemorate two important civic holidays in Ecua-
dor—the “Primer Grito de la Independencia” (First cry for independence)
on August 10, 1809, and the Independence Day of Guayaquil on October
9, 1820. The latter concert was simultaneously transmitted in Guayaquil on
a short-wave radio station. Galo Plaza Lasso, a university student who would
become the future president of Ecuador (1948–52), and Sucre Pérez, a jour-
nalist student and member of the family that owned the newspaper El Uni-
verso, Guayaquil’s leading daily, helped organize these concerts. They both
were pursuing graduate studies in New York City when they learned of the
activity that had brought the Dúo Ecuador to the skyscrapers city. On the
way back to Ecuador, the Dúo Ecuador gave several concerts in Cuba and
Panama with the sponsorship of the Ecuadorian embassies in those countries.
In Guayaquil, recordings of the Dúo Ecuador sold out as soon as they
reached the music stores. One advertisement in the El Universo newspaper
announced that thirty thousand people, about 30 percent of Guayaquil’s pop-
ulation in 1930, had gathered in the Plaza del Centenario (the 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 New York City
behind them, and throwing records toward South America and the entire world.
“Guayaquil de mis amores” accompanied a silent movie of the same name,
which was filmed for the triumphant return home of the Dúo Ecuador. The
film, also sponsored by Feraud Guzmán, was basically a love story 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. The film was so
popular that a newspaper advertisement announced that seventy thousand
people, nearly 70 percent percent of Guayaquil’s population, had seen it in
just a few weeks (Granda 2004, 132).
It must be noted that early sound movies never became a vehicle for the
popularization of the pasillo, as occurred with the ranchera and tango in
Figure 3.1 Cartoon of the Dúo Ecuador in New York. El Universo, 1930. Source: Feraud
Guzmán, J. D. Historia de una hazaña y sus protagonistas. Guayaquil.
The Pasillo | 79
Figure 3.2 Newspaper advertisement promoting the film “Guayaquil de mis amores.” El
Universo, 1930. Source: Feraud Guzmán, J. D. Historia de una hazaña y sus protagonistas.
Guayaquil.
Mexico and Argentina, respectively, countries that developed film industries

early in the 1930s. Unlike these countries, Ecuador did not develop a national
film industry and lacked the infrastructure and economic resources to pro-
duce sound movies. In the 1930s, orchestras, pianists, and duets accompa-
nied by guitars provided musical background to the scenes of silent movies in
Ecuador. The pasillo “Guayaquil de mis amores” was the soundtrack for the
movie by the same name, though it is uncertain whether pasillos were played
as soundtracks in other films as well.
“Guayaquil de mis amores” not only put the name of Ecuador on the inter-
national music map but also promoted the pasillo as an essential element of
Ecuadorian identity. Subsequent pasillos that praised 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)
80 | Chapter 3
and “Manabí” (a coastal province in Ecuador). It was this type of pasillo writ-
ten in praise of Ecuadorian cities and the figure of an idealized woman that
best reflected the elites’ aesthetics and class ideology. Gradually, the “songs
of damnation” disappeared and only those fulfilling the elites’ cultural aes-
thetics survived. The pasillos with allusions to death and the cemetery also
vanished from the songbooks as well as the practice of paraphrasing popular
pasillos.
Before the arrival of recording technology, pasillos were disseminated in
live performances by military bands and estudiantinas and through pianolas,
sheet music, and songbooks. Records and the radio, however, proved to be
more effective and immediate outlets for large-scale dissemination. Live per-
formances of pasillos had been limited to small audiences, but the radio was
now capable of reaching much larger audiences, and the low cost of receivers
made listening to 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 the
Dúo Benítez-Valencia and the Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, began their artis-
tic careers in the 1940s on Radio Quito.
The Ecuadorian Sentiment

Any foreigner who lives in Ecuador for several years will find out that to
sing with sentiment is an attribute highly valued in Ecuador. Alejandro Pro
(1997b), a music collector of pasillo and tango records, argues, “Anybody can
sing baladas, anybody can sing boleros; however, pasillos are not sung, they
are interpreted” [emphasis added]. To support his view, Pro quotes the words
of Hernán Restrepo Duque, a Colombian music researcher and record col-
lector, who once told him, “What do you [Ecuadorians] have to envy [refer-
ring to the tango], if the pasillo—in sentiment—is superior?” (Pro 1997a, 68).
Ecuadorian singers also express similar views regarding the importance of
singing and playing the guitar with sentiment. Rocolera singer Juanita Bur-
bano, 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.” Singer
Teresita Andrade proudly stated in an interview, “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 sentiment, one of happiness.” Then, with
even more emotion than his wife, he exclaimed, “Lo nuestro hace llorar!”
(Our music makes people cry!).
The Pasillo | 81
Many Ecuadorians claim the pasillo to be a sadder and a more sentimen-

tal song than other popular musics that also involve heartbreak, longing, and
nostalgia, such as the ranchera, the tango, the bolero, and the early bachata.
Rather than questioning the truth of these statements, I am more interested
in analyzing Ecuadorians’ ideas about a “supposed” uniqueness of the pasillo
in raising such a strong emotional response. When I asked Ecuadorians from
different walks of life why they thought the pasillo was an emblematic expres-
sion of Ecuadorian national identity, they often stressed “suffering” and being
“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 suf-
fering 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 being in love without the
melancholy, suffering, and sense of loss that typify the pasillo. Why are Ecua-
dorians proud of a music that moves them to tears (llorar)? Why is a song that
most Ecuadorians perceive as sad and maudlin such a strong metaphor for the
nation?
Pedelty (1999) examines the role of the Mexican bolero in cultivating a
modern consciousness among rural migrants who move to the cities in the
early twentieth century. For him, the sentimentality embedded in the bolero
is a reaction against modernity, which manifests itself in the celebration of
the private world of the personal emotions as opposed to all the alienating fea-
tures of impersonal modern society. Thus, the bolero portrays two people in a
sentimental relationship with little reference to the social context, which is a
way of dealing with the urban modernity. By the same token, the emergence
of the vocal pasillo in the early twentieth century coincides with a period of
modernization of Ecuadorian society, as the arrival of lighting, cars, sound
technology, and the creation of the train system and the laws of civil marriage
and divorce (1902) show.
It is safe to say that the elites’ articulation of a national sentiment seeks to
discipline people’s ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; once internalized, it
becomes a sort of doxa that remains uncontested and is reproduced uncon-
sciously (Bourdieu 1977). In other words, the collective belief that Ecuador-
ians are sentimental people has become an internalized form of domination
that guarantees the reproduction of a hierarchical social order from above,
but disguised in what people have come to believe is “an Ecuadorian way of
being.”
In his analysis of Guayaquilean identity, Benavides (2006) stresses
the importance of feelings and emotions in the production and mainte-
nance of social hierarchies, which are defined by ethnic, racial, and class
82 | Chapter 3
considerations. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feel-

ings,” he analyzes the social experiences that shaped Medardo Ángel Silva’s
life and poetry as a “cultural hypothesis” that needs to be reassessed once the
“structures of feeling” have been formalized and institutionalized. He exam-
ines Silva’s poem “El alma en los labios,” as well as his humble origins and
the aristocratic circles in which he moved as a poet. According to Benavides,
Silva crystallized with his modernist poetry “structures of feelings” that were
just beginning to emerge during his lifetime and gradually became a domi-
nant social formation over time. For him, Silva’s poetry “captures centuries
of defeat and rejection by a colonial past and a postcolonial rereading of the
past” (Benavides 2006, 38).
“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-
ing suicide. Journalists and literary critics have interpreted this poem as a fore-
warning of his death because one of its verses alludes to his thought of end-
ing his life the day his beloved leaves him. According to the stories narrated
in the annotated songbooks, Paredes Herrera, who had met with him a few
years earlier in 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 largely 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 nacio-
nal anthology and the story of Silva’s death has been frequently recounted in
newspapers and songbooks, but also because the study of Silva’s poetry, the
best-known modernist poet in Ecuador, is required reading 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. . . .
Por qué mi pensamiento lleno de este cariño

Que en una hora feliz me hiciera esclavo tuyo;
Lejos de tus pupilas es triste como un niño
Que se duerme soñando con tu acento de arrullo
[When the passionate flame of our love

You see has already been extinguished within your loving chest
The Pasillo | 83
Since it is only because of you that I cherish life

The day you leave is the day I will end my life. . . .
Why does my mind filled with this love

Which in a happy hour made me your slave;
Away from your eyes is just sad like a child
That sleeps dreaming with your cooing voice.]
“El alma en los labios” has been central to the cultural production of a feel-
ing of loss and 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, or any significant loss that leaves
one 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” (2006, 93), both ethnically and socially. According
to him, Ecuadorians’ self-rejection developed through years of colonial rejec-
tion of the native population; therefore, the expressions of unrequited love
and despair in the pasillo are intimately related to a postcolonial reality of
repressed desire, which makes suffering an essential element in the constitu-
tion of the self (2006, 93).
Espinosa Apolo (2000) argues that since the colonial period Ecuadorian
mestizos have developed a “negative ethnic identity” as a result of trying to
differentiate themselves from indigenous people in order to take advantage
of opportunities denied to the latter group. This attitude produces a rupture
between their external and inner selves because while in public mestizos
seek to “whiten” their appearance and lifestyle, thus giving the impression of
assimilating into the dominant culture, while in the private sphere they keep
alive their cultural values and traditions. For Espinosa Apolo, mestizos live a
life of continuous simulacrum that produces a low esteem for indigenous cul-
ture. If this is true, then white-mestizos’ feelings of denial toward their indig-
enous self may be expressed symbolically in the pervasive images of loss and
despair contained in the pasillo and other mestizo música nacional genres.
This analytical perspective might work well for certain mestizo groups, but
detractors will criticize it for being “essentialist” because it neglects the posi-
tion of indigenous and lower-class mestizos who, due to their long-term urban
cultural uprising, might not identify any more with their indigenous heritage.
While feelings of loss and nostalgia were embodied in the lyrics of “El
alma en los labios,” they were not yet present in the musical performances of
the 1920s and 1930s. A recording of this pasillo by Margarita Cueto illustrates
the absence of these feelings. Despite the sad lyrics, she sings this song in
an upbeat tempo suitable for dancing. (PURL 3.2) Other pasillos recorded
84 | Chapter 3
in this period, such as those by the Dúo Ecuador in 1930, also maintain a
lively and danceable tempo. These performances differ greatly from the pasi-
llos recorded in the late 1940s and 1950s by the Dúo Benítez-Valencia and
the Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, as well as from current performances, which
tend to be in a slower tempo and in a weeping tone. It is in the 1940s when the
“structure of feeling” embedded in Silva’s poem “El alma en los labios” began
to materialize in the musical performances.
The Pasillo in the Mid-Twentieth Century

I suggest that the pervasive discourse about the sentimental character of the
pasillo 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 tend to 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 the Dúo Ecuador in New York.
Second, the pasillo was a means of socialization in retretas, a courting song
in serenades, and a music Ecuadorians happily danced at in social gather-
ings. Third, the música nacional 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 opportunities,
rather than experiencing nostalgia for yesteryear.
In my view, 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, a treaty signed in
1942 to resolve a long-standing and bitter border dispute between Peru and
Ecuador (Quintero and Silva 2001). This loss was a painful experience for
Ecuadorian people who saw themselves defeated and mutilated in their sov-
ereignty.8 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 (B. Carrión 1941/42/43,
145–49). Greece and Israel, he asserted, were excellent illustrations of his
thesis because of the enormous influence their cultural legacies have had
on modern times. It must be noted that the Ecuadorian culture advocated
by Carrión was a “highbrow” culture, rather than the culture of the com-
mon people.
By the mid-twentieth century the pasillo was performed in a slower tempo
and had lost its danceable character. New pasillos showing overtones of
The Pasillo | 85
nostalgia for an idealized past were composed in the 1940s, such as “Romance
de mi destino” (Romance of my destiny), a poem by Abel Romeo Castillo set
to music by Gonzalo Vera Santos. Castillo, a journalist and writer from a
well-to-do family from Guayaquil, wrote this poem out of nostalgia for his
homeland when he was studying in Chile in the 1930s. The poem describes
one’s inability to hold on to the object of one’s desire, a leitmotif in Ecuador-
ian popular music and a theme that aptly expresses the sad feelings Ecuador-
ians were experiencing in that period. According to the annotated songbooks,
Vera Santos composed the music in the early 1940s and the song immediately
became a hit due to the border conflict with Peru.9 (PURL 3.5)
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.
Nadie sabe como yo lenguaje de los pañuelos

Agitándose en los muelles, sacudiendo el aire trémulos;
Nadie como yo nació con destino marinero
La única flor que conozco es la rosa de los vientos
La única flor que conozco es la rosa de los vientos.
[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
Nobody knows like me the language of handkerchiefs

Stirring in the docks, shaking the trembling air;
86 | Chapter 3
No one like me was born with a sailor destination

The only flower that I know is the wind rose.]
It was also in the 1940s when the pasacalle, a duple-meter and upbeat 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 birth. Pasacalles
were composed to reaffirm a local identity and also to elevate the morale
of people who had seen their country geographically diminished as a result
of the disastrous war with Peru. These songs became popular anthems for
the towns, cities, and provinces they sang the praises of, and they were
markedly different from the sentimental and nostalgic lyrics of the pasillo.
“Guayaquileño madera de guerrero,” “Ambato, tierra de flores,” and “Chola
Cuencana” 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 position and
impose their class ideology (Silva 2004). A closer examination of the social
history of the pasillo, however, reveals just the opposite. Critic Agustín Cueva
points out the fact that “the dominant classes popularized the most unpopu-
lar lyrics” with the pasillo in the sense that words found in pasillo lyrics are
seldom spoken in everyday life. In fact, more than once I have had to look
up words in a Spanish dictionary in order to determine their meaning and
translate them into English. In other words, Ecuadorians from different social
classes and educational backgrounds have made their own a poetic song
whose vocabulary is largely unfamiliar but meaningful to them.
While progressive artists and writers were denouncing the exploitation of
the subaltern populations through expressionist paintings and literary works
that brought their histories of oppression to 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 inter-
nalized these feelings to such a degree that being sentimental has become an
uncontested and highly valued cultural marker of Ecuadorianness. It is worth
noting that the message in the Indigenista 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.
The Pasillo | 87
The Golden Period of the Pasillo

The 1950s and 1960s were a period of political stability, economic prosper-
ity, and modernization of the country due to the banana export boom. It was
also a period of splendor for the pasillo due to advances in sound and record-
ing technology, the emergence of television programs, and the appearance
of a new generation of performers who innovated the pasillo with their sing-
ing style. The Hermanos Miño-Naranjo, the 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 the Mexican Trío Los Panchos. The addition of the
requinto and a three-voice harmonic arrangement produced what Mullo and
Guerrero have called the “bolerization” of the pasillo (2005). The Trío Los
Brillantes, made up of Argentine singer Olguita Gutiérrez, requinto player
Homero Hidrovo, and guitarist Héctor Jaramillo, gave the pasillo a romantic
overtone and a more international appeal with their polished singing style,
which was markedly different from the sentimental style of previous perform-
ers such as the Dúo Benítez-Valencia and the Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti.
Concurrently with the trio performance also appeared a new generation of
soloist singers, such as Julio Jaramillo who broke the traditional 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 prominent
businessmen from Guayaquil—Luis Pino Yerovi and José Domingo Feraud
Guzmán—who founded IFESA (1946) and FEDISCOS (1964), respectively.
These two family-owned companies controlled production and distribution
networks, including recording studios, radio stations, magazines, outlet stores,
and printing houses, which gave them complete control over the popular
music industry.
In 1916, José Domingo Feraud Guzmán opened his music store Alma-
cenes J. D. Feraud Guzmán in Guayaquil, where he sold musical instruments,
music scores, records, and pianolas. Feraud was a pioneer in introducing new
sound technology to Ecuador. In the late 1910s, he sold the first pianolas and
manufactured the first pianola rolls of música nacional.10 In 1925, he traveled
to New York to purchase radio receivers for his clients in Guayaquil. Feraud
was not only a successful businessman but also an enthusiastic promoter of
Ecuadorian music. In 1930 he traveled to New York with the Dúo Ecuador to
record and disseminate Ecuadorian music, an action he considered a patriotic
duty.
88 | Chapter 3
In 1936, Luis Pino Yerovi opened his music store Emporio Musical, and
ten years later he founded IFESA, the first phonograph company in Ecua-
dor. His close collaborators were Joe Magen, a sound engineer who became
IFESA’s manager and technical director, and American musicologist John
Riedel, who worked as IFESA’s artistic director in the 1940s. With the goal
of promoting its records, IFESA published Revista Estrellas (1964–80s), a
bimonthly magazine that published articles on Ecuadorian singers and com-
posers. During this period, Ecuadorian music competed with international
music for the top rankings on the Ecuadorian billboards, and Ecuadorians
were proud of their national music and artists.
The 1960s and 1970s were bonanza years for the national recording indus-
try due to a policy implemented by the Economic Commission for Latin
America (CEPAL), which promoted the industrial development of Latin
America through the economic model of import substitution. Both IFESA
and FEDISCOS were licensed to release records of international music in
Ecuador since foreign-record imports were prohibited. As a result, the national
economy was activated by the local production of phonograms, among many
other goods. Consumers also benefited from the lower cost of records of inter-
national music made in Ecuador.
From 1952 to the early 1980s, Cine Radial, a popular magazine from
Guayaquil, awarded the Trofeo Huancavilca to the most important figures of
Ecuadorian cinema, radio, and television. “Huancavilca” was the name of an
indigenous group from the coast that resisted the Incan invasion in the mid-
1400s. This award became a symbol of artistic excellence and provided public
recognition of the talent and professionalism of local musicians, especially
those who interpreted música nacional. There were several award categories,
such as best male or female singer of música nacional and música moderna,
best television show, best radio station, and so on. The gala ceremony orga-
nized every year in the Teatro 9 de Octubre received full coverage in the
media. Famous television shows with professional singers and aficionados
(amateur singers) were broadcast in the late 1960s, such as “Canta Ecuador
Canta” (Sing Ecuador, sing) on Channel 4, and “Puerta a la Fama” (The door
to fame) on Channel 10.
In 1957, Armando Romero Rodas founded Radio Cristal, a Guayaquil AM
radio station known as “la radio del pueblo” (the people’s radio). Besides pro-
viding everyday news, the radio station connected people who lived in the
rural and urban areas. People sent important messages or birthday greetings
through the radio in the hopes that their intended friends would receive it.
Although the radio catered its music to a rural audience that prefered to lis-
ten to popular sanjuanitos rather than to pasillos, it also organized singing
The Pasillo | 89
contests such as the Estrella Cristal (the star of Radio Cristal) with the inten-
tion of finding new voices for música nacional.
Professional música nacional singers had numerous performance oppor-
tunities during this period. They shared the stage with international artists
in the Feria de Durán and the Feria de Caraguay. These ferias (trade fairs)
took place in the surrounding areas of Guayaquil and were organized by the
Chamber of Commerce and the Cattlemen’s Association, respectively. People
were interested not only in seeing the products and services offered by the
companies participating in the events but also in attending the night shows
with famous international artists, such as Raphael, Julio Iglesias, Iris Chacón,
and the Dolly Sisters. Organized once a year, these ferias became an impor-
tant venue for the promotion of Ecuadorian singers.
In the early 1960s, Ecuadorians were proud of their music and artists. In
1962, the Hermanos Miño-Naranjo won first prize in the Second Interna-
tional Festival of the Ibero-American Song in Barcelona with the pasillo “Tú
y yo” (You and I), composed by Francisco Paredes Herrera in the 1930s.11
Música nacional competed with international songs for the top rankings on
the billboards. For example, in September 1963, the well-known albazo “Ave-
cilla” (Little bird), attributed to Nicasio Safadi, was in third place, and three
spots above the Spanish singer Raphael, who was just beginning his artistic
career.
In 1969, IFESA and SADRAM Editora Musical released the series
“Grandes Compositores Ecuatorianos” (Great Ecuadorian composers), a col-
lection of 33-rpm records with the most popular música nacional songs. In the
early 1970s, FEDISCOS released “Ecuatorianísima,” a recording series that
honored the best música nacional performers. In addition, SADRAM and
FEDISCOS published piano and guitar transcriptions of música nacional for
home music making. In the 1960s and 1970s, social parties always ended with
a round of happy and danceable pasacalles, sanjuanitos, and albazos to the
delight of middle-class Ecuadorians. The recording series, together with the
music scores and songbooks published every now and then, greatly contrib-
uted to the canonization of the música nacional anthology.
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 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 began to devote more
and more time to international music in their daily programs. Even Revista
90 | Chapter 3
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 to 27 percent. The increase of 7 percent over the pre-
vious tax greatly affected música nacional entrepreneurs because they were
required to pay 27 percent of the box office, regardless of the number of tick-
ets actually sold. Unable to recoup their investments, they stopped organizing
concerts, leaving Ecuadorian singers without revenue opportunities. Ironi-
cally, the tax increase worked against the government’s interests because it did
not produce the expected tax revenue. Few young artists were interested in
singing música nacional, and those who were new to the national music scene
were associated with either rocolera music or Ecuadorian pop music, which
had larger audiences.12
By the 1980s, the music industry centered on the pasillo had almost com-
pletely disappeared due these policies and the lack of support by entrepre-
neurs and the media. Music piracy also drove small record companies that
had previously promoted música nacional into bankruptcy. As a means of
surviving 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 capital outlay than the sponsoring of new produc-
tions. 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. The Hermanos Miño-Naranjo and the Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti,
whose artistic careers have now spanned more than half a century, continue
singing and attract a vast audience of older and middle-aged Ecuadorians.
To ensure Ecuadorian artists had performance opportunities, the govern-
ment created “La Ley Profesional de los Artistas” (The law on professional
artists) in 1979. This law required radio stations to devote 30 percent of their
music programs to música nacional; television stations air two thirty-minute
television spots with Ecuadorian artists every week; and the national record-
ing industry allocates 33 percent of its annual production to música nacio-
nal.13 While the radio quota of 30 percent was fulfilled in the early morning
hours when most people were still asleep, the other decrees have been poorly
enforced. Until 2004, the last year of my fieldwork in Quito, there was only
one thirty-minute spot on national television every Saturday at noon devoted
to Ecuadorian artists.
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 many
young people eventually turn to more conservative musics like pasillo as they
The Pasillo | 91
reach middle age or when they leave their home country and feel nostalgic.
This change in attitude toward the pasillo helps us understand how the pasillo
continually gains new enthusiasts and is not in danger of dying out completely.
The Female Figure in the Pasillo

Pasillos are invariably written from a male perspective and display a series of
ambivalent images and sentiments toward women. She is generally the sub-
ject of idealization or revenge, or 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 figure, either a
lover who has left him, 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 because he has been
unable to carry out the last promise he made to her while she was alive, which
was that he specifically not cry when he visits her tomb. A few pasillos, like
“Esposa” (Wife) by Carlos Rubira Infante, idealize the woman in her role as
wife and express the author’s desire to make her happy during his lifetime. In
“El Aguacate” (The avocado), a pasillo attributed to César Guerra and one of
the best known in the música nacional anthology, the woman is considered a
treasure and a source of happiness but describes the man as “suffering” and
“crying” for her love.
In the national pasillos of the 1920s to 1950s, the elites transformed the
female figure into a sublime human being who is idealized to such a degree
that she is always unattainable, intangible, or unreal. In the pasillo lyrics of
the 1920s and 1930s the woman’s corporality disappears, and she is “purified”
as a spiritual being. As a mother or as a beloved woman with whom the man
will start a family, she is a pristine figure who embodies the ideal of the moth-
erland and is a suitable metaphor for the nation. Literary critic Natasha Sal-
guero points out that pasillo lyrics avoid allusions to a woman’s corporality
and sexuality (Salguero 1995). According to her, the woman portrayed in the
pasillo is loved not for her body but for the tender feelings she inspires. A verse
from the well-known pasillo “Como si fuera un niño” (As if I were a child;
1930s) by Francisco Paredes Herrera expresses this ambivalence: “Yo no amo
en tí la carne, amo en tí el sentimiento” (What I love about you is not your
flesh, but your feelings). In a literary exercise, Salguero puts together verses
and metaphors of famous pasillos to describe the “intangible” body of the
idealized woman:
The beloved woman is invisible from the waist down; she has a blurred face,
green eyes or occasionally black or blond hair, and an ability to listen, but she
92 | Chapter 3
does not have ears. The man is welcomed into the woman’s arms as if he were
a child. He is cherished and consoled in his crying by silky or moon-colored
hands. He is kissed with a rosary of kisses by a mouth from whose bright red lips
trembles a poem, and he is looked at with eyes that are sometimes tempting,
sometimes lethal, and sometimes devoted. (Salguero 1995, 75)
Unlike the “songs of damnation,” where the man blames the woman for his
misery and sufferings, in the national 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 revenge 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.
Although women have frequently been the subject of pasillo lyrics,
women’s poems have only occasionally been set to music. One example is
“Sombras” (Shadows), based on a poem written by Mexican poet Rosario
Sansores, which expresses a sense of loss and nostalgia for a loved one, albeit
in a more idealized and romantic manner. Interestingly enough, there are no
pasillos composed by women in the música nacional anthology, which sug-
gests that women’s roles in popular music were circumscribed to the realm of
performance. Upper-middle-class women did compose music as music scores
of valses and pasodobles from the early twentieth century demonstrate. How-
ever, this music was basically the type of salon music performed in elite social
gatherings, rather than examples of popular music.
Changes in musical style have generally reflected social changes in soci-
ety (Blacking 1973). The evolution of the pasillo is a reflection of the socio-
cultural hegemony of the dominant classes during most of the twentieth cen-
tury. More than any other música nacional genre, the elite pasillo promoted
an ideology of exclusion of the subaltern population, and this is observed in
the lyrical content that chronicles the feelings and experiences of the upper-
middle classes, and in the music itself, which is devoid of indigenous and
Afro-Ecuadorian musical features. The most important change in the pasillo,
however, has been the construction of public discourses and performance
practices that underscore the sentimental nature of Ecuadorians as a distin-
guishing feature of Ecuadorian national identity.
Ecuadorian scholars have tried to explain from different perspectives why
the pasillo underscores a sense of loss in Ecuadorian national identity. For
social critic Agustín Cueva, for example, the pasillo reflects the loss of eco-
nomic and political power of the highland dominant classes in the aftermath
of the Liberal Revolution. According to him, “The ‘Generación Decapitada’
The Pasillo | 93
sang the eulogy of the aristocratic class that was defeated by General Alfaro’s
riffraff [Liberal Revolution] . . . combining popular sorrows and the evasive
torments of a feudal conscience [landowners’ view of themselves]” (Cueva
cited in Ayala Mora 1983, no. 13, 202–3). For Wilma Granda, the pasillo is a
liberating expression for men in a machista society such as Ecuador, where
men are supposed to be strong, dominant, and self-sufficient. She sees the
pasillo as “an exercise for the expression of men’s feelings” because to sing
pasillos about heartbreaks gives men the opportunity to express their emo-
tions without losing face (Granda 1995).
Other scholars have examined the pasillo outside of its historical context,
making assertions that have obscured our understanding of the processes that
elevated the pasillo to a musical symbol. Núñez (1980), for example, coined
the term canción del desarraigo (song of uprootedness) to refer to the new
working-class pasillo (the pasillo rocolero) that was emerging in the 1970s,
when rural-to-urban migration was at its peak. Other scholars began using the
same term, “canción del desarraigo,” for all styles of pasillos indiscriminately,
even though elite pasillos such as “Guayaquil de mis amores” and “Invernal”
have no association with the uprootedness theme or with the social processes
that led to the appearance of that theme in the pasillo.
The permanence of the pasillo as a symbol of “Ecuadorianness” during
most of the twentieth century was due to the influence of the mass media
and the invention of a pasillo tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). I often
heard older and middle-aged Ecuadorians saying that pasillos were “authen-
tic” expressions of Ecuadorianness because different generations have been
singing them ever since childhood. Tradition, however, “has little to do with
the persistence of old forms and more with the ways in which forms and val-
ues are linked together” (Erlmann 1991, 10). Tradition is closely related to the
concept of “authenticity,” which is a value judgment generated and manipu-
lated by the dominant classes to legitimate and distinguish their particular
way of doing things. The invention of a pasillo tradition became a tool used
by the dominant classes to impose their cultural canon and aesthetic values.
Conclusion
The pasillo has been central in articulating, maintaining, and contesting
images of the elite national identity throughout the twentieth century. Like
most national music forms raised to the status of national symbols, the pasillo
is a polysemous genre that generates multiple and different meanings for
its listeners. The pasillo is associated with the birth of Ecuador as a repub-
lic, with the military and aristocratic circles in the nineteenth century, and
with the popular and upper-middle classes in the twentieth century. It was a
94 | Chapter 3
courting music, an upbeat popular dance, a salon music, and a song of pride
and despair. At this point, it should be clear to the reader that the pasillo
underwent several stylistic transformations in the twentieth century—from a
“song of damnation” in the early twentieth century to a national pasillo in the
1930s to its golden period in the 1960s. (Appendix A.)
In general, Ecuadorians think of themselves as being sentimental people.
Obviously, this idea has been culturally and historically constructed and is so
deeply ingrained and taken for granted that it has become a doxa (Bourdieu
1977). The sentimental character of the elite pasillo is musically reflected in
the slow tempos, prominence of the minor keys, and changes in the singing
style. Listening carefully to pasillos performed by renowned singers from the
1930s (Dúo Ecuador), the 1950s (Dúo Benítez-Valencia), and the 1960s (Trío
Los Brillantes and Hermanos Miño-Naranjo) enables one to see how the
interpretation of pasillos has changed stylistically. In spite of media discourses
regarding the “disappearance” of música nacional in the 1980s and 1990s,
the pasillo has become an expression younger generations identify with when
they enter adulthood, or when they live abroad and feel nostalgia for their
homeland.
|4
Rocolera Music
New Urban Sounds in the City
T
he 1970s was a period of profound social, economic, and political
transformations in Ecuador. The discovery of petroleum in the Ama-
zonian region changed the country’s economic structure, which until
then had primarily been based on agricultural exports. Ecuador’s new wealth
was reflected in the development of national industries, the proliferation
of private banks, and the construction of roads connecting the coastal and
highland regions. In this decade, a military regime known as the National-
ist and Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces came to power and
moved the country toward modernization. The effects of modernization were
most evident in the growth of the capital city, which expanded rapidly to the
north and south with a national housing program implemented by the mili-
tary government. Quito’s physiognomy changed markedly with the conver-
sion of Amazonas Avenue into a banking sector, its modern new buildings
contrasting starkly with the area’s stately neocolonial homes. The processes
of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization generated a wealth of
employment opportunities and hopes for a better future. By the early 1980s,
however, the national economy was in a state of stagnation due to poor man-
agement of petroleum dollars and international loans taken out to finance the
modernization of the country.
Deep social changes in rural and urban areas also occurred during this
period. The Agrarian Reform of 1964 returned the lands of large haciendas
to the indigenous peasants; they, in turn, had difficulties working the fields
productively, and many migrated to urban centers in search of work. In the
96 | Chapter 4
cities, they learned to speak Spanish, changed their style of dress, and worked
in urban jobs, becoming cholos and longos, that is, lower-class mestizos with
different levels of assimilation to urban culture. Most rural migrants worked
in the construction, domestic service, or transportation sectors; those unable
to find jobs earned their living as street vendors, shoe shiners, or lottery-ticket
sellers. Indigenous people who, in the elites’ imagining, lived on haciendas
and in rural areas were now in the capital not just as seasonal workers but as
regular dwellers occupying the lowest strata of society. Paraphrasing Lavie
and Swedenburg in their study of geographies of identity and displacement,
one could say that “the ‘savage’ [the ‘Other’] is no longer out ‘there’ but has
invaded the ‘home’ Here and has fissured it in the process” (1996, 2).
During this time of transformation, two working-class styles of music—
chichera and rocolera—emerged, concurrently but independently, as mestizo
expressions of a rural population that was entering a new social environment
and forging new urban social identities. Each style encompasses various
Ecuadorian and non-Ecuadorian musical genres that have acquired differ-
ent functions and meanings for their listeners over time. While rocolera is a
style of urban popular music meant for listening and coping with heartbreaks
caused by feelings of despair and betrayal, chichera is the happy, modern, and
danceable music of cholos and longos. The discourses and stigmatization of
both styles of music by the upper-middle-classes (white-mestizos) reveal the
extent of ethnic and racial tensions among mestizo groups.
This chapter explores the emergence and development of rocolera music
as an element of working-class culture with which lower-class mestizos
express their urban experiences and frustrations, on the one hand, and also as
a style of music that contests elite images of a homogeneous national identity.
Rocolera needs to be examined within the broader Latin American context,
taking into account the emergence of analogous musical expressions respond-
ing to similar processes of rural-to-urban migration in other countries, such
as carrilera music in Colombia and bachata in the Dominican Republic in
the 1970s and 1980s.1 Songs that are similar to rocolera also emerged in Peru
(cebollera), Puerto Rico (vellonera), and Chile (cantinera). The elites of these
countries have stigmatized these repertoires for their association with drunk-
enness, episodes of violence, and life in shantytowns. However, it is important
to note that rocolera music distinguishes from other countries’ working-class
repertoires in that the pasillos composed in the 1970s and 1980s are also con-
sidered rocolera music, not música nacional. Because the pasillo is regarded
as Ecuador’s musical symbol, calling the pasillo rocolera music suggests a
class-based struggle over the nature and meaning of an established symbol of
national identity. The double perception of the pasillo as a national symbol
and as music for drinking is not an issue for carrilera and other rocolera-like
Rocolera Music | 97
songs because none of them is linked to the “official” national music reper-
toire of their respective countries.2
Ecuadorian music scholars have generally examined rocolera music as a
popular culture expression from a top-down perspective, reiterating the elite’s
tendency to dismiss it due to its low status, but seldom taking into account the
views of the popular classes, its main producers and consumers. My goal in
this chapter is to draw attention to the voices of composers, singers, and fans
who have shaped rocolera’s sounds and images in order to understand what
meanings it conveys to them, as well as the ethnic and racial tensions hidden
in the elites’ critiques. To these ends, I examine various discourses—in the
form of opinions, critiques, accolades, and debates—about the artistic and
aesthetic values of rocolera music from the perspective of both the upper-
middle-class and lower-class mestizos. I distinguish three stages of develop-
ment, each of which is represented by a group of singers and composers who
have become emblematic figures of this repertoire. I suggest that rocolera
music provides the urban lower classes a refuge to cope with their social and
economic problems, thus providing some sense of stability and identity.
Rocolera Music, the Jukebox, and the Cantina

Rocolera is an umbrella term that encompasses a repertoire of songs in three
specific musical genres—the bolero, the valse, and the pasillo—whose lyrics
deal with negative aspects of the male-female relationship (relación de pareja),
such as betrayal, revenge, love triangles, and breakups. Rocolera songs usually
present the perspective of a man who portrays himself as a victim of a merci-
less woman and drowns his heartbreak in drink. Women are often depicted in
vulgar and derogatory terms such as mala hembra or mujer bolera, expressions
that are synonymous with “bad woman.” Certain songs include spoken sec-
tions depicting the man’s emotional distress, which male singers often drama-
tize in a concert performance. Besides the typical acoustic guitar and requinto
accompaniment, rocolera arrangements may include synthesizers and, in the
case of boleros, light percussion in the form of congas (Cuban drum) and
maracas.
Rocolera is one of those polysemous terms that have different meanings
to and causes different reactions among different people depending on their
social and educational backgrounds. The earliest appearance of the term
rocolera I have found in the media is in an interview with singer Chugo Tovar
in a 1969 issue of Revista Estrellas, where the term is used as synonymous
with “people’s music.” Despite sharing a prefix with the word “rock,” the term
rocolera bears no relation to rock music. It derives its name from “rocola,”
the Ecuadorian word for jukebox. The term rocola, in turn, comes from
98 | Chapter 4
“Rock-Ola,” a jukebox brand in Ecuador whose name came to be applied

generically to any jukebox. Known in other Latin American countries as a
traganíqueles, vellonera, sinfonola, vitrola, or wurlitzer, the rocola popularized
the 45-rpm record in Ecuador with a variety of national and international
songs, such as boleros, mambo, tangos, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and pasillos, in per-
formances by national and international singers such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis
Presley, Dámaso Pérez Prado, the Trío Los Panchos, and Julio Jaramillo.
In Ecuador, there is no general consensus on what rocolera music is. Ecua-
dorian social scientists use the term rocolera to describe any type of Ecuador-
ian popular music of low social prestige, including dance musics like chichera,
tecnocumbia, and the Afro-Ecuadorian bomba from the Chota Valley. Many
Ecuadorians I spoke to on the streets of Quito and Guayaquil and at live con-
certs believe that rocolera is the music that is played on the rocola. However,
music producers, singers, and rocolera fans use the term much more narrowly,
classifying a song as “rocolera” more on the basis of its social function—rocolera
is music for listening and to cope with the pains of love, but not for dancing.
Rocolera music emerged in the 1970s in the coastal region as a repertoire of
boleros and valses about deceptions and treacherous women. It was in the late
1970s that musicians from the highlands began to compose and sing pasillos
that used colloquial language and had a working-class aesthetic similar to that
of the bolero and valse rocolero, which was significantly different from the elite
pasillo. It is worth noting that only certain types of boleros, valses, and pasillos
are considered rocolera by both fans and detractors. Mexican boleros román-
ticos by Agustín Lara, Trío Los Panchos, and Armando Manzanero, which
were interpreted with enormous success by Mexican singer Luis Miguel in
the 1990s, have not entered the rocolera repertoire. It is not the bolero román-
tico that addresses the experiences of falling in love, seduction, or reconciling
with an estranged lover, but the boleros associated with the cantina (“bars” in
lower-class neighborhoods) that are considered rocoleros. Nor have the refined
valses criollos (elites’ waltzes) by Chabuca Granda entered the repertoire, such
as “La flor de la canela” (The cinnamon flower), which extols the splendor of
Lima’s historic quarter, but the Carmencita Lara’s valses del pueblo (people’s
waltzes), which describe a man’s heartbreak. Her most famous song in Ecua-
dor, “Olvídala amigo” (Forget her my friend), epitomizes the way most Ecua-
dorians conceive of rocolera music. In this song, Lara advises a man to forget
his unfaithful lover and asks him why he drowns his pains of love in alcohol.
Likewise, it is not the elite pasillo of the 1920s to 1950s, such as “Guayaquil
de mis amores,” but the working-class pasillo of the late 1970s and 1980s with
colloquial lyrics that is considered rocolera music.
Images of the cantina and the rocola have linked rocolera music to drunk-
enness, violence, and the lower classes. Interestingly, the cantina and the
Rocolera Music | 99
rocola have not always been associated with each other, nor with the popu-
lar classes. Introduced in Ecuador in the 1950s, the rocola was at first an
expensive, swanky device found in upper-middle-class public venues, such
as coffee shops, ice cream parlors, and restaurants, where friends and fami-
lies would socialize (Ibarra 1998). To show its high social standing, Mario, a
middle-aged man who owned a couple of bars in a coastal town near Gua-
yaquil in the late 1960s, commented that the price of a new rocola at the
time was equivalent to that of a new pickup truck. Due to the high purchase
price of a rocola, many bar owners, like Mario, rented one instead, easily
paying the monthly fee with the profits generated by client requests and the
boost in beer sales. By the late 1970s, the rocola was an outdated technology
superseded by the 33-rpm record and the cassette, and it became confined
to cantinas and picanterías (small popular restaurants) located in lower-class
neighborhoods.
In the first half of the twentieth century the cantina was a public space
identified with middle-class men who gathered for social drinks, while the
chichería, a place to drink chicha (an indigenous home-brewed alcoholic
beverage made from corn), was identified with indigenous people and cholos
(Ibarra 1998, 76). The chichería was usually an outdoor patio where home-
made drinks, such as chicha and guarapos, were prepared and sold with little
or no sanitary restrictions. Writer Jorge Icaza, the author of the Indigenista
novel Huasipungo, describes the chichería atmosphere as follows: “Indians
drank and slept off their drunkenness on the floor . . . while cholos sat around
long and dirty tables, drinking from tin jars” (Icaza cited in Espinosa 2004,
78). With the arrival of indigenous peasants in the cities and the diversifica-
tion of public spaces as a result of urban growth, the upper-middle classes
abandoned the cantina and sought new venues for socializing in clubs, dis-
cotheques, peñas folklóricas (artistic centers for the performance of folklore),
and salsotecas (salsa dance halls), venues that promoted the international
musics in vogue. Concurrently, indigenous people who have lived and assimi-
lated into the cities for long terms, that is, cholos and longos, moved to the
cantina when the chichería disappeared due to sanitary reasons. It was during
this period that the cantina acquired the negative connotation it continues to
have today. In Quito, many cantinas and rocolas were concentrated on 24 de
Mayo Street, an area considered a “red-light district” before the restoration of
the Centro Histórico in 2003.
Prominent national and international artists such as Julio Jaramillo and
Daniel Santos have exalted the cantina and the rocola in their songs. “En la
cantina” (In the cantina), an Antillean bolero recorded by Daniel Santos and
Julio Jaramillo in 1974, describes this place as a shelter where men can drink
to cope with their misfortunes in love.
100 | Chapter 4
La cantina es el oasis del que tiene sed de besos

Del que tiene sed de abrazos, del que tiene sed de amor,
Del que pide entre sus rezos una luz que guíe sus pasos,
Una mano que lo lleve a donde no haya dolor . . .
Allí podrá contar la historia de su traición,

Allí podrá olvidar las penas del corazón.
Por eso en la cantina voy ahogando
Las penas que me quitan la razón . . .
[The cantina is an oasis for those who thirst for kisses

Of those who thirst for hugs, of those who thirst for love,
Of those who pray for light to guide their steps,
A hand to take them where there is no pain . . .
There (in the cantina) he will tell the story of his betrayal,
There he will forget the sorrows in his heart.
That is why in the cantina I am drowning
The pain that makes me lose my head . . . ]
If the cantina is seen as a shelter from heartbreak, the rocola is thought of as a

close and unconditional friend, who not only understands a man’s feelings but
also is able to talk to others for him. Fox addresses this sort of “ventriloquism”
in his study of Texas country music and draws attention to the fascination of
country music listeners with the “poetic figure of an inanimate object that
speaks with a human voice” (2004, 47). In “Rocolita de mis penas” (Little
jukebox of my sorrows), a man speaks directly to the rocola and asks it to inter-
cede with the woman he loves, who is referred to indirectly in the third person.
Rocolita de mis penas, eres mi fiel compañera

Y tú cuentas al mundo lo que sufro por su amor.
Quiero que con sentimiento ahora le hagas entender
Que aún la estoy esperando, que regrese por favor.
[Little jukebox of my sorrows, you are my faithful companion

And you tell the world how I am suffering for her love.
Please get her to understand, now and with passion
That I am still waiting for her, and hope she will return.]
According to Ibarra, rocolera emerged as a distinctive style of music when

the rocola’s popularity with the elites began to decline and the device was
Rocolera Music | 101
relegated to lower-class cantinas (1999b, 311). Therefore, Ecuadorians’ general

belief that rocolera is the music that is played on the rocola is highly question-
able. Rocolera music appeared as a fully recognizable style of working-class
culture in the 1980s, with what Coplan calls a “vocabulary of forms, activities,
and occasions which constitute and express social and cultural processes”
(Coplan cited in Pacini-Hernández 1995, 17). Keil reminds us that “the very
naming of a style of music is a declaration of consolidation” (1985, 126). On
the other hand, Fox points out the existing connection between hierarchical
structures in music and society, “the logics of value that appear to structure
hierarchies of musical styles and performances and talents are in fact the
same logics, in a symbolically condensed and projected form, that structure
hierarchies of people in social groups” (2004, 57). In other words, styles of
music reveal the social position of their producers and consumers and their
relationship to other social groups. Thus, elites’ disdain for rocolera music is
indicative of their disparagement of indigenous people and cholos.
Discourses About Rocolera Music

Many stereotypes surround rocolera music: it makes people drink, it is música
cortavenas (literally, music by which to slash one’s veins), it promotes violence,
it is the music of the underclass, and the list goes on.
“Esto es la musica chupable de mi país Ecuador, los viernes es infaltable una

chelita con esta musica, me acuerdo cuando andaba despechado ja ja, pero
todo pasa en la vida, que tiempos aquellos con los panas del barrio en la chupas
con chelas hasta que aguante, ja ja ja bueno pero todo cambia.”3
[“This is music for drinking in my country Ecuador, every Friday one should
get a beer with this music, I remember when I was heartbroken, ha, ha, but
anything can happen in life, what a great time we had with our buddies in the
barrio, in the drinking sessions with beers until one can hold himself, ha ha ha,
well, but everything changes.”]
From a musical standpoint, academic composers are apt to assert that rocolera
music lacks artistic quality and is responsible for the degradation of estab-
lished genres of música nacional such as the pasillo. According to classical
guitarist and composer Marcelo Beltrán (1996), rocolera music
[shows] no tonal variants, the harmonic accompaniment is restricted to four

or five chords, the melody has a narrow range and stays in the highest reg-
ister that an untrained voice can reach, which produces a constant weeping
102 | Chapter 4
and out-of-tune lament, supported by text of questionable literary value that has
the same aesthetic level of the music: scarce invention, defeated content, and
continuous calls for the excessive consumption of alcohol and the practice of
conjugal infidelity, showing it as something normal.
Mario Godoy, an advocate of the elite música nacional and author of several
publications on Ecuadorian popular music, criticizes rocolera’s short commer-
cial life span and condemns references in its lyrics to stabbings, prison, infi-
delity, and betrayal.4 He describes rocolera lyrics as “cheesy and catastrophic,
written by composers who have become ‘poets’ by forcing themselves to
write.” Reminiscent of Adorno’s critiques of popular music, these views must
be understood in relation to the views of upper-middle-class Ecuadorians who
regard the elite pasillo as poems set to music.
While upper-middle-class Ecuadorians and academic composers criticize
rocolera music for inducing people to drink, the popular classes criticize the elites
for having a double standard toward this music. Many working-class men and
women I spoke to commented that members of the elite secretly attend rocolera
concerts and go disguised by wearing coats, hats, and sunglasses to avoid being
recognized. The testimonial of “Teresita Sinceridad” (Sincere Teresa), a woman
interviewed by journalist Esteban Michelena in a cantina in the late 1980s, illus-
trates this: “I cannot explain the insincerity of our people. I have seen doctors,
architects, journalists, etc. attending our festivals with sunglasses and hats, as if
hiding from a neighbor or a colleague. Once inside, they take off the disguise and
enjoy, sing, drink, and dance. It seems that they are ashamed of getting together
with working-class people” (Michelena 1988, 28; emphasis added).
Teresita Andrade, a singer that started her artistic career singing pasillos
in the 1970s and 1980s at the height of rocolera music, recalls similar experi-
ences when hired to sing at private parties organized by well-to-do people. For
these occasions, she prepared a repertoire of elite pasillos that she anticipated
this audience would like to hear, but during the event she realized that they
also wanted to hear rocolera songs. “When they organize the ‘ding ding’ [par-
ties] in their houses, they ask for rocolera songs composed by Segundo Rosero,
such as ‘Seventeen Years [of age]’ and ‘Bolero rocolero.’ . . . In the beginning,
we sing ‘almidonados,’ [in a formal way], but then, everybody ends that night
sitting on the floor with their legs crossed and drinking from the same glass.
They like and enjoy our music” (personal interview, 2003).
Naldo Campos, a composer and arranger of both música nacional and
rocolera music, questions the negative images attached to the rocolera style:
I don’t understand this label. . . . Certain people underestimate its value. . . . Peo-
ple who sing these songs are able to draw two to four thousand people to a
coliseum. We should not underestimate it, we should not say with disdain, “rocol-
era.” . . . When I was very young, across the Parque El Centenario [the main park
in Guayaquil’s downtown area], in La Macarena, there was a coffee shop, and
there, there was a rocola. In this place I listened to Frank Sinatra’s song “I Will
Wait for You.” If we are going to underestimate the rocola, then Frank Sinatra is
also “rocolero.” (personal interview, 1997)
Campos complained about a sensationalist commentary aired in the 1980s

on Radio Cristal, an AM radio station known as “la radio del pueblo” (the
people’s radio), concerning his pasillo “Tendrás que recordarme” (You will
have to remember me). Armando Romero Rodas, a renowned radio com-
mentator and the owner of Radio Cristal, called this pasillo “El pasillo
asesino” (The assasin pasillo) because a man had committed suicide while
listening to it. The news reported that the victim had been drinking heavily
as a result of an unbearable depression caused by a breakup. His tragic death
was reminiscent of that of Medardo Ángel Silva, the author of the poem “El
alma en los labios,” who committed suicide in 1919. Upset by Rodas’s sensa-
tionalist label for his pasillo, Campos emphatically stated that his music was
not meant to make people drink and that such a choice was each person’s
decision. He pointed out that people also got drunk while listening to other
types of music, and he could not understand why the stigma was placed only
on rocolera music.
For rocolera singer Roberto Zumba, the phrase “popular music” is a more
suitable term for this repertoire because the word “popular” depicts the senti-
ments and life experiences of the “people” without the negative connotations
embedded in the word rocola (personal interview, 2002). Unlike the boleros
rocoleros, whose lyrics refer to breakups and revenge, composer Cristóbal
Vaca indicates that “pasillos rocoleros from the 1970s and 1980s were devoid
of derogatory expressions toward women; on the contrary, they expressed love
and admiration for them.” Listeners began to associate the new pasillos of the
1970s with rocolera music when singers of boleros and valses rocoleros began
to perform these pasillos in rocolera concerts. As the statements of Campos,
Zumba, and Vaca show, singers and composers cannot anticipate or have con-
trol over how their music will be received by listeners regardless of their origi-
nal intentions.
Periodization of Rocolera Music

The term rocolera needs to be historicized in order to understand the dif-
ferent meanings it generates among different people. I identify three stages
in the development of rocolera music. The first stage, the forerunners (1950s
104 | Chapter 4
and 1960s), introduces images of the cantina and the rocola in the repertoire
and performances of Daniel Santos and Julio Jaramillo. The second stage,
the transitional period (1970s), is represented by two groups of singers and
repertoires—young música nacional singers and composers whose pasillos are
identified as rocolera music, and amateur singers whose boleros deal with
unfaithful women and breakups. The third stage, the classical period (late
1970s and early 1980s), consolidates the singing style and repertoire known
today as rocolera music.
The Forerunners
Rocolera music is associated with the repertoire of Puerto Rican singer
Daniel Santos (1916–92) and Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo (1935–78), two
charismatic singers whose songs, lifestyles, and reputations as bohemians and
womanizers won them followers in many Latin American countries. They are
both seen as gente del pueblo (people from the lower classes) who never forgot
their humble origins and remained loyal to their people. They both became
legends that articulated stories of success, irreverence, and transgression of
societal values. Although many people identify them as rocolera singers and
their songs were indeed played on rocolas and in cantinas, they must be seen
as forerunners of a style of music that was still in its infancy.
Acclaimed for his performances of guarachas and Antillean boleros with
El Cuarteto Flores (from Puerto Rico) and La Sonora Matancera (from Cuba),
Santos was known throughout Latin America for his distinctive singing style,
characterized by a chopped delivery of the lyrics. Over the course of his career
his fans bestowed upon him several monikers, including “El jefe” (The boss)
and “El inquieto anacobero” (The impish little devil), which allude to his
profligate lifestyle. Santos is famous for his performances of romantic Antil-
lean boleros, such as “Dos gardenias” (Two gardenias) and “Perdón” (For-
give me), but it was his songs dealing with the cantina and life in prison that
brought him fame among the Ecuadorian popular classes.
In Ecuador, Santos’s performances frequently gave rise to scandals and epi-
sodes of violence involving members of the audience, which contributed to
the social construct of rocolera as dangerous music. In 1956, he gave a series
of concerts in the Teatro Apolo in Guayaquil. During the third performance,
he became indisposed and apologized to the audience for not being able
to finish the scheduled event. Some audience members reacted with unex-
pected violence, destroying the theater’s hall. Santos was fortunate to escape
the disturbance unharmed, but he was held responsible for the disaster and
imprisoned for several days. His fights, arrests, and spells in jail inspired him to
compose songs about the lives of prisoners, such as “El preso” (The prisoner),
“Cautiverio” (Captivity), and “Cataplúm pa’ dentro Anacobero” (Go to jail,

Anacobero).
Julio Jaramillo is considered an Ecuadorian icon, just as Carlos Gardel,
Pedro Infante, and Elvis Presley are in their respective countries. Known
as “El ruiseñor de América” (The nightingale of America) for his beautiful
voice, Jaramillo was a charismatic singer acclaimed for his performances of
Antillean boleros and valses throughout Latin America. His famous rendition
of “Nuestro juramento” (Our oath), a bolero by Benito de Jesús (1965), earned
him the nickname “Mr. Juramento” in Uruguay. In Mexico, he became the
best-selling international artist of his time and shared the stage with famous
Mexican artists such as José Alfredo Jiménez. Though acclaimed by the pop-
ular classes, Jaramillo was largely ignored by the upper-middle-classes for his
ethnic roots and scandalous lifestyle. Being a cholo from the coastal region and
leading a bohemian lifestyle in the cantinas did not open up doors for him in
elite circles, since the upper classes value lineage, family name, “whiteness,”
and “decency.” Seeking better opportunities for his artistic career, Jaramillo
left Ecuador and lived for extended periods of time in Venezuela, Mexico,
and Central America, which led fans from these countries to believe that he
was homegrown.
Before he became a famous singer, Jaramillo’s life was typical of the work-
ing class. Born into a poor family, he had to work hard at an early age in order
to help his single mother support the household. But his was a rags-to-riches
story: Jota Jota (J. J.), as people called him, was a shoemaker who succeeded in
his dream of becoming an international artist. He also personified the macho
man due to the many women he was involved with and the many children he
fathered in various Latin American countries. When he died of cirrhosis in
1978 at the age of forty-two, thousands of people in Guayaquil accompanied
his coffin to the cemetery for a final farewell.
His early death gave rise to a series of myths and discourses that reflect
the values, dreams, and desires of the popular classes. Rather than pointing
to his excesses and irresponsible behavior, he is depicted as a good son who
cared about his mother and a good father who acknowledged and supported
his children. The myths also underscore the idea that, despite his successful
and cosmopolitan life as an international artist, he never forgot his origins.
Many stories recall episodes of quick visits to Ecuador simply to meet with old
friends. Others stories refer to his addiction to alcohol, which is often down-
played and cast in a positive light. One story says that while on tour in Peru,
he was unexpectedly visited by a group of nuns who were collecting money
for charity. In a drunken stupor, he gave the nuns a bunch of bills he had
in his suitcase. When he woke up the next morning, a headline in the local
newspaper read, “Ecuadorian artist donated 20,000 soles to a good cause.”
106 | Chapter 4
The story goes that after reading the news, Jaramillo at first promised himself
that he would never again drink in excess, but later, upon reflection, he is
quoted to have said, “This drunkenness gave me the opportunity to provide
humanitarian help that, otherwise, I would not have provided.”5
Several of Jaramillo’s other presumed characteristics have been repeated
so often that they have acquired a life of their own, especially those stories that
tell of his generosity toward friends and his lack of interest in accumulating
wealth for himself, an idea that is underscored by the fact that he died a pau-
per. Rosalino Quintero, the requinto player who accompanied Jaramillo on
his first concert tours, described his generosity as follows: “I think it [money]
hindered his hands; he never refused to help someone in need, and he did so
silently.”6 Another prominent discourse that comes up in Jaramillo’s mythol-
ogy is the notion that Ecuadorians do not value their artists, especially those
coming from the lower classes, as Jaramillo did, which is why he had to leave
the country to gain fame and recognition.
As seen in this mythology, certain aspects of Jaramillo’s life are forgotten,
while others are highlighted. Anecdotes about Jaramillo have been recounted
countless times in newspapers, books, and films and are often taken at face
value by many Ecuadorians. Thirty-three years after his death, Jaramillo is
held in high esteem by all social classes because he is the only Ecuadorian
singer internationally known. He has become a reference point for Ecua-
dorian national identity despite his ethnic background and bohemian life-
style, both of which were initially rejected by the elites. Ironically, many fans
believe that Jaramillo sounds better now than he ever did in the past because
his music is better known today than during his lifetime when only the lower
classes listened to his music. Currently, middle-class singers, folkloric groups,
and even the Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra play arrangements of his songs.
Several radio stations air regular programs devoted to Jaramillo. In 1993,
President Sixto Durán Ballén declared Jaramillo’s birthday, October 1, the
National Day of the Pasillo.
Jaramillo’s early success as an artist in the mid-1950s coincided with a
prosperous period for the national music industry. He recorded numerous
elite pasillos for Onix, FEDISCOS’ record label. His reputation as an inter-
national artist, however, was linked to his performances of Antillean boleros
and Peruvian valses. His signature songs were the Caribbean boleros “Nuestro
juramento” and “Cinco centavitos” (Five little cents), and the Peruvian valses
“Fatalidad” (Fatality), and “Alma mía” (Soul of mine), among many others.
Although Jaramillo was not the first singer to record these songs, his interpre-
tations were appealing to a national and international audience.
Many Ecuadorians believe Jaramillo was a rocolera singer. In fact, he was
given this label in hindsight since it was only after his death in 1978 that
rocolera music emerged as a fully recognizable working-class style of music.

The boleros, valses, and pasillos that he recorded in the 1960s and 1970s do
not fall into the stigmatized category of rocolera music. His songs were played
on the rocola because of their great popularity (as was all rocola music in that
period), not because they were “rocoleras” since the term with the current
connotations did not exist at the time. The origins of the belief that he was
a rocolera singer lie in his drinking habits and in a specific song repertoire
devoted to the cantina that he recorded with Daniel Santos. With the passage
of time this label has come to encompass his entire body of work, including
his recordings of elite pasillos.
“Nuestro juramento,” a bolero composed by the Puerto Rican songwriter
Benito de Jesús and made internationally famous by Jaramillo in the mid-
1960s, provides a good illustration of the overlap between rocolera and Ecua-
dorian music. As with many boleros, the song is sung from a man’s perspec-
tive. The lyrics describe a promise made between a man and a woman in the
event one of them dies. If the man dies first, the woman will let her tears drop
on his corpse so that everyone will see how much she loved him. If she dies
first, the man will write their love story using blood from his heart as ink. Jara-
millo’s performance of this song when he was young is famous for the warmth
of his voice and the requinto arrangement that Rosalino Quintero wrote for
this song. (PURL 4.1)
No puedo verte triste porque me mata

tu carita de pena; mi dulce amor,
me duele tanto el llanto que tú derramas
que se llena de angustia mi corazón.
Yo sufro lo indecible si tú entristeces,

no quiero que la duda te haga llorar,
hemos jurado amarnos hasta la muerte
y si los muertos aman,
después de muertos amarnos más.
Si yo muero primero, es tu promesa,

sobre de mi cadáver dejar caer
todo el llanto que brote de tu tristeza
y que todos se enteren de tu querer.
Si tú mueres primero, yo te prometo,

escribiré la historia de nuestro amor
con toda el alma llena de sentimiento;
108 | Chapter 4
la escribiré con sangre,

con tinta sangre del corazón.
[I cannot see you sad because it kills me to see

Your little face in sorrow, my sweet love,
The tears you spill hurt me so much
That my heart fills with anguish.
I suffer the unspeakable if you are sad,

I don’t want you to cry because of doubt,
We have sworn to love each other until we die
And if the dead can love,
We shall love each other even more after death.
If I die first, it is your promise,

To let fall over my dead body
All the tears that spring from your sadness
So that everyone will know of your love.
If you die first, I promise you,

I will write the story of our love
My soul filled with sentiment;
I will write it in blood,
With ink from the blood of my heart.]
It is not an exaggeration to say that most Ecuadorians, regardless of their

social status, ethnicity, gender, or educational background, know the lyrics of
this song by heart. In addition, they consider it a pasillo! I noticed this early
on in my research when I asked people to name their favorite pasillos, and
“Nuestro juramento” was usually at the top of the list. Furthermore, this song
was frequently cited as the best-known Ecuadorian pasillo in television pro-
grams devoted to Ecuadorian music. Even scholars mistakenly identify this
bolero as an Ecuadorian pasillo (Benavides 2006).
To examine how “Nuestro juramento” has become an index of Ecuadorian
music and Ecuadorian national identity, I conducted short interviews in Quito,
particularly in the streets of the Centro Histórico and the Mariscal District,
asking people of different ages and social backgrounds who were selected at
random what kind of music “Nuestro juramento” was. In asking this question,
I was less concerned with the truth or falsity of their statements than with how
people conceive of this song. I also asked the same question to undergraduate
students at a private university in Quito. The majority of interviewees answered
that it was a pasillo; others thought it was música nacional; some people stated
that it was rocolera music; only a few identified it as a bolero.
Turino uses the term “semantic snowballing” to indicate a chain of indices
where “old indexical connections may linger as new ones are added, potentially
condensing a variety of meanings and emotions within a highly economical
and yet unpredictable sign” (2008, 9). In a series of indexical relationships, the
song “Nuestro juramento” points directly to Jaramillo because, according to
many Ecuadorians, he was the most popular performer of this bolero in Latin
America. In turn, Julio Jaramillo indexes Ecuadorian music because he is con-
sidered the only Ecuadorian singer who has reached international fame. To talk
about Ecuadorian music is to talk about the pasillo, the sine qua non expression
of “Ecuadorianness.” The indexical chain is described in the following schema.
NUESTRO JURAMENTO = PASILLO
“Nuestro juramento” ➝ Julio Jaramillo ➝ Ecuadorian music

➝ pasillo ➝ symbol of Ecuador
Other people who were interviewed, however, linked “Nuestro juramento”

to rocolera music because Jaramillo is associated with images of the cantina
and the rocola. The indexical chain in this case is as follows:
NUESTRO JURAMENTO = ROCOLERA
“Nuestro juramento” ➝ Julio Jaramillo ➝ cantina

➝ rocolera ➝ populace
The semiotic connection between “Nuestro juramento,” Julio Jaramillo,

and Ecuador is so strong that when Colombian singer Charly Zaa recorded
it and other signature songs of Jaramillo in the late 1990s, Ecuadorians from
all walks of life criticized the young artist for exploiting Jaramillo for his own
purposes. One YouTube comment on “Nuestro juramento,” for example,
reads: “El man es lo máximo . . . que Charly ni que Charly . . . Julio es el
mero mero” (Julio is the man. Charlie doesn’t even come close. Julio is the
real deal). As a result, Zaa did not receive the same warm reception in Ecua-
dor that he did in other Latin American countries.
Other forerunners of rocolera music emerged in this period along with
Daniel Santos and Julio Jaramillo, including Lucho Barrios and Pedro
Otiniano from Peru and Alci Acosta and Tito Cortés from Colombia. Lucho
Ba-rrios began his singing career in Guayaquil and was internationally
known for his repertoire of boleros cantineros such as “Cruel condena” (Cruel
110 | Chapter 4
conviction). Pedro Otiniano arrived in Ecuador in 1966 and popularized the

bolero “Cinco centavitos,” which became an international hit when Jaramillo
recorded it. Barrios and Otiniani recorded an LP titled “Los dos ases de la
rocola” (The two aces of the jukebox) for IFESA. They had a middle-class fan
base that enjoyed listening to this type of music, which in the mid-1960s did
not have the stigma it has today. Known for their choppy singing style remi-
niscent of that of Daniel Santos, in 1978, Alci Acosta and Tito Cortés were
invited to sing at the first rocolera music festival. Acosta’s singing style and
performance on the piano distinguished his boleros, such as “Un disco más”
(One more record) and “La copa rota” (The broken wine glass), whose lyrics
make references to the cantina environment.
Transitional Period
In the early 1970s, FEDISCOS and IFESA were seeking new composers
and interpreters of música nacional at a time when they were experiencing a
decline in the sales of Ecuadorian music due to the invasion of rock, disco,
salsa, cumbia, and the balada pop. A new generation of lower-middle-class
singers from the coastal provinces—Chugo Tovar, Juan Álava, Kike Vega,
Máximo León, and Roberto Calero—recorded new pasillos written by young
composers from the coastal and highland regions, such as Abilio Bermúdez,
Naldo Campos, Fausto Galarza, and Nicolás Fiallos. The young singers were
initially promoted by FEDISCOS as the new voices of música nacional. Soon
afterward they were marketed as “Los ases de la rocola” (The jukebox aces)
when they began to sing boleros about betrayals, revenge, and breakups. A
high-pitched and nasal vocal production characterized their solo singing
style, which signaled a new urban lower-class sensitivity different from that
of música nacional singers of the early 1960s, such as the Hermanos Miño-
Naranjo and Trío Los Brillantes, whose vocal arrangements were for two and
three voices in the middle register. I will henceforth refer to the new pasillo of
the 1970s and 1980s as the pasillo rocolero and the old pasillo from the 1920s
to the 1950s as the elite pasillo or pasillo nacional.
Concurrently with the new generation of música nacional singers
promoted by FEDISCOS, young amateur musicians from the coastal
provinces, such as Miguel Vélez, Víctor Franco, and Óscar Guerrero,
began to compose and record their own boleros and valses with topics
dealing with personal experiences, especially infidelity and betrayal in
love. Óscar Guerrero, a twenty-four-year-old singer from Milagro, a little
town near Guayaquil, was dubbed “Revelación Rocolera” (Jukebox revela-
tion) in 1975 for his vals “La pesetera” (The woman who loves money),
which broke sales records. A pesetera refers to a woman who toys with the
feelings of men and sells her love for money (pesetas). Because the lyrics
are offensive toward women, and are reminiscent of the early twentieth-
century “songs of damnation,” FEDISCOS changed the song title to “Me
engañaste” (You deceived me).
A few rocolera singers enjoyed commercial success in that period but are
now largely forgotten. It is worth noting that, unlike the new generation of
música nacional singers who sang both pasillos and boleros rocoleros, the ama-
teur musicians only sang boleros.
Yo pensaba que eras buena,

que me amabas de a de veras,
y resultaste perjuria;
Mis amigos me han contado
que tú eres una cualquiera,
que andas con uno y con otro
y te llaman la pesetera.
[I thought you were a good woman,

That you truly loved me,
But you turned out to be deceitful;
My friends have told me
That you are a whore,
That you hang out with this guy and that guy
And people call you the pesetera.]
It was also during this period that Discos Cóndor, a record label from Guaya-
quil specializing in “people’s music,” began to promote rocolera music with
images of the rocola and the cantina on long-play jackets. On the album Los
bravos de la rockola [sic] (The jukebox aces), a large bottle and four glasses
are shown with a rocola in the background. Each glass bears the photo of one
of the most popular rocolera singers: Miguel Vélez (Ecuador), Tito Cortés
(Colombia), Lucho Barrios (Peru), and Cecilio Alva, a Peruvian singer who
settled in Guayaquil in the 1970s. Another record cover shows Chugo Tovar
and Cecilio Alva surrounded by empty beer bottles in a cantina.
These images contrast markedly with the long-play jackets of FEDISCOS
and other record labels that recorded pasillos that were composed in the early
1970s, which featured images of Ecuadorian monuments and landscapes.
The album “ . . . Tremendo dúo” (Tremendous duo) by Kike Vega and Chugo
Tovar, for example, shows La Rotonda, a well-known monument commemo-
rating the encounter between independence heroes Simón Bolívar and José
de San Martín, with the riverside as backdrop.
Figure 4.1 LP album cover. Los bravos de la rockola. Miguel Vélez,
Tito Cortés, Lucho Barrios, and Cecilio Alva. Discos Cóndor.
Figure 4.2 LP album cover. Entre tragos. Chugo Tovar and Cecilio
Alva. Discos Cóndor.
Figure 4.3 LP album cover. Tremendo dúo. Kike Vega and Chugo
Tobar. Discos Estéreo.
The “Classics”
While amateur and professional musicians from the coastal region were
recording boleros and valses rocoleros, musicians from the highlands began to
sing new pasillos with a working-class aesthetic. These all contributed to what
can now be called the classical rocolera music style. Six lower-middle-class
mestizo singers from the highlands epitomize this style: Roberto Zumba,
Claudio Vallejo, Segundo Rosero, Ana Lucía Proaño, Juanita Burbano, and
Teresita Andrade. All these artists began their singing careers in the mid-1970s
and early 1980s on radio and television singing contests. Segundo Rosero, for
example, traveled from his hometown of Pimampiro in the northern prov-
ince of Imbabura across the country to Guayaquil in order to participate in
“Puerta a la fama” (The door to fame), a television contest organized by Canal
Diez. His participation in the program jump-started his successful career as
he won second prize. In 1973, Ana Lucía Proaño, a high-school student from
Riobamba, won the singing contest “Estrella Cristal” (Crystal star), organized
by Radio Cristal of Guayaquil, which afforded her recording opportunities
as well. Juanita Burbano was a teenager when she was offered the chance
to make her first recording in Quito. These singers were often described in
the media as being “artistas del pueblo” (artists of humble origins) thanks to
114 | Chapter 4
their hard work, discipline, and ability to express in their songs the deep senti-
ments of the Ecuadorian “people.” These singers were known for their emo-
tional performances of pasillos rocoleros, rather than of the elite pasillos of the
música nacional anthology.
Naldo Campos (b. 1949), a well-known composer, arranger, and requinto
player, composed many pasillos and boleros in the 1970s and 1980s. His musi-
cal production and arrangements deserve special attention because they have
shaped the sound of various styles of Ecuadorian music since the 1970s. Born
in the province of Manabí, he received formal music training at the National
Conservatory of Guayaquil and is respected by his peers as one of the few
popular music composers able to read and write music. Campos was the last
requinto player of the Trío Los Brillantes during the golden age of música
nacional, as well as the music arranger of FEDISCOS; as such, he embod-
ies the image of a professional musician. He is the author of well-known
pasillos, such as “Tendrás que recordarme” (You will have to remember me)
and “Parece mentira” (It’s hard to believe), which were recorded by Roberto
Zumba, Claudio Vallejo, and Ana Lucía Proaño in the 1980s, and are now
considered part of the rocolera canon. In addition, he is well known among
his fans and music peers for his heartfelt performances on the guitar and
the requinto, and he is often invited to perform in especial events at EPM
concerts.
I first met Campos in 1997 at a recording studio in downtown Guayaquil.
Subsequent interviews also took place at recording studios, where he spends
entire days working meticulously on every aspect of the recording process.
When preparing a song, he sketches a rough score in advance showing the
melody, a few chords, and the instrumentation he has chosen. The soundtrack
is arranged and recorded on the spot. He uses electronic sounds for the per-
cussion and wind instruments, but in the recording of pasillos and boleros,
he prefers to add the live sound of an acoustic guitar or requinto which he
himself plays. Many times I heard Campos say that it was important in the
recording of Ecuadorian music to play the guitar with sentiment in order to
transmit deep emotions in the songs. To achieve this, in his arrangements
he favors the high register of the acoustic guitar, whose timbre is intense and
dramatic, rather than the requinto, whose sound is normally high pitched due
to the small size of the instrument.
In addition to the use of the guitar, a typical feature of Campo’s arrange-
ments is the frequent change of timbres in the melody and melodic coun-
terpoints, which are generally organ- or accordion-like sounds in the high
register. His preference for this timbre is very much due to the popularity of
the electric organ in the 1970, which was used to entertain people at upper-
middle-class social events. Besides arranging and recording the soundtracks,
Campos supervises the recording process and offers advice to young singers
on the interpretation of the songs, and he emphasizes the importance of cor-
rectly pronouncing the words and singing in tune and with sentiment.
As FEDISCOS arranger and freelance composer, Campos has imbued
his personal style on the arrangements and performances of música nacional,
rocolera, and chichera music, thus blurring the timbric and stylistic features
that distinguish these styles. As the requinto player of Trío Los Brillantes, he
was one of the finest performers of música nacional and a master of the guitar-
and-requinto arrangements typical of elite música nacional. As a composer, he
is the author of several pasillos that today are regarded as “rocoleros,” much
to the chagrin of Campos. As an arranger, he likes to combine different tim-
bres, harmonies, and rhythms of Ecuadorian and foreign origins, especially
with chichera music. As a freelance musician, Campos is a mediator of elite
and working-class música nacional because he works for different patrons on
arrangements of elite pasillos, boleros rocoleros, sanjuanitos chicheros, Peru-
vian huaynos, and other types of international music.
The Blurring of Pasillos and Boleros Rocoleros

The Mexican and Antillean bolero romántico became popular in Ecuador
through Mexican cinema, the radio, and live performances of international
singers who toured Ecuador in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Trío Los Pan-
chos, Pedro Vargas, Leo Marini, Olga Guillot, and Armando Manzanero.
Despite its international appeal, Ecuadorian composers did not feel com-
pelled to write Ecuadorian boleros until the 1970s, partly because Ecuador
had its own romantic song in the elite pasillo of the 1920s to 1950s. Notably,
the presentation of the main character in the lyrics of the elite pasillo and
the bolero romántico are quite similar. As in the bolero romántico, pasillo lyr-
ics are vague and allow listeners to identify with the story of the song from
different perspectives. Knights affirms that the bolero commonly features a
dialogue between an uncertain “I” and an uncertain “you,” whose meanings
vary depending on the listener’s perspective. Thus, he or she can identify
with either the “I” who sings the song or the “you” the lyrics are written for
(Knights 2000, 2). This is also true of the pasillo, where the neutral “I” and
“you” and the variety of love situations narrated in the lyrics make it appealing
to listeners regardless of gender or age.
It is important to note that even though there was no local production
of Ecuadorian boleros until the 1970s, there were local performers such
as Julio Jaramillo, Olimpo Cárdenas, and Fausto Gortaire who recorded a
series of international boleros for national record labels. In the late 1970s, the
Ecuadorian bolero emerged as a working-class expression devoid of romantic
116 | Chapter 4
overtones, focusing instead on negative aspects of the male–female relation-

ship. Despite its popularity in working-class circles in many Latin American
countries, this type of bolero has received little scholarly attention and is not
included in international bolero anthologies such as those compiled by Jaime
Rico Salazar (1993) and Helio Orovio (1995). This is partly due to the fact that
scholars in literary and popular music studies have canonized the bolero as a
romantic expression linked to positive aspects such as the falling-in-love and
reconciliation experiences, rather than with breakups, unfaithfulness, and
revenge.
Although many Ecuadorians call the pasillo of the 1970s to 1980s rocolera
music, in fact the lyrical content of pasillos rocoleros and boleros rocoleros is
quite different. In a personal interview, Juanita Burbano noted that the lan-
guage of pasillos rocoleros is very different in tone from the coarse and vulgar
language of boleros rocoleros.
Our music has always been sad. The difference is that before, when the author
wanted to express feelings of pain or betrayal, he did so in a subtle and poetic
manner. When the rocola movement began, there were songs spoken in col-
loquial language. For example, instead of saying “It hurt me so much when you
dumped me, looking for another illusion,” the new style said “You betrayed me
and left with another.” That was the difference between the sentimental music
of the 1970s and rocolera music. (Personal interview, 2003)
In general, rocolera music presents the man as a victim in the couple relation-
ship. The bolero “La otra” (The other woman), for example, tells the story
of a man who announces to his wife that he has decided to leave her and
the children and join his lover because the latter gives him the passion and
understanding that he lacks in his marriage.7 The singer positions himself as
a man who has worked hard to save his marriage and has decided to leave
for the good of the children. The song includes a spoken section in which he
lists his grievances. In concerts, this song always generates strong reactions on
the part of the audience, perhaps many have firsthand experience with a love
triangle, be it as the wife, the husband, or the lover. (PURL 4.2)
(Hablado):
¡Por favor, por favor! ¡Entiéndeme, caramba!
Ya no quiero saber nada contigo
Ya estoy harto de tus caprichos,
la otra, la otra, todo el tiempo la otra
la otra la creaste tú; sí, tú,
con tu falta de afecto, cariño y comprensión que jamás tuviste.
¿De qué te quejas?

La casa, los muebles, todo se queda contigo.
Sólo me voy yo, yo que nunca signifiqué nada para ti.
Total, no pierdes nada.
Mis hijos, pobrecitos mis pequeñuelos.
Te los dejo porque no quiero que tengan otra madre,
Porque para ellos, para ellos tú eres la mejor.
¿Algo más? ¿Otra oportunidad?

¡Tú estás loca! ¡Ja!
¡No me hagas reir!
¿Qué cosa? ¿Que recién has comprendido que me quieres?
¿Que podemos empezar de nuevo?
¿Me estás pidiendo que me quede?
[(Spoken):
Please, please. Understand me! Wow!
I do not want to have anything to do with you
I am tired of your whims,
“The other woman,” “the other,” all the time “the other”
“The other woman” was created by you, yes, by you,
With your lack of affection, tenderness, and understanding that you never had.
What are you complaining about?

The house, the furniture, everything stays with you.
It is I who leaves, I, who never meant anything to you.
In the end, you do not lose anything.
My children, my poor little children.
I leave them with you because I do not want them to have another mother,
Because for them you are the best.
Something more? Another chance with me?

You are crazy! Ha!
Don’t make me laugh!
What? You have just now realized you love me?
That we can start over?
Are you asking me to stay?]
Mexican sociologist Anna María Fernández applies Bakhtin’s notion of

the carnivalesque in her analysis of gender roles in the bolero. According
to her, in the bolero it is usually the men who love unfaithful women,
118 | Chapter 4
who then betray and leave them at will. Fernández argues that in “real”
life it is normally not the man, but the woman, who seeks a stable and
monogamous relationship and who suffers and prioritizes the male–
female relationship (2002, 178). The apparent reversal of gender roles in
the lyrics seems to work as a coping mechanism for men who are under
great pressure to maintain a masculine front in a machista society. It is
only in songs that men can express their suffering, pain, and vulnerable
selves without their sense of masculinity being threatened. Fernández
states that such misogynist lyrics do verbal and symbolic violence toward
women through a sexualized discourse that diminishes the valuing of
women (2002, 240). These messages both reproduce and shape gender
relationships in a machista society, such as Ecuador, because the messages
encoded in the text are disseminated by the mass media and internalized
by men and women as normative behavior.
The elites’ image of rocolera music as a vulgar expression has been shaped,
to a great extent, by Aladino, the stage name of rocolera singer Enrique Vargas
Mármol (b. 1956). He was born into a poor family and grew up in the Barrio
Cristo del Consuelo, a lower-class neighborhood located on the outskirts of
Guayaquil. He possesses a sonorous bass voice developed in his early work
as a radio announcer. Known as “El mago de la rocola” (The Jukebox Magi-
cian) for his ability to break record sales with his songs, he was nominated the
“Jukebox Revelation” of 1977 by Revista Estrellas.
Most of Aladino’s songs are in the bolero genre and employ street lan-
guage and sexual allusions to and derogatory terms for women.8 In a newspa-
per interview, Aladino explained that his songs use street language because
they are testimonials of people’s lives. In a newspaper interview, he declared,
“I cannot sing about ‘Prince Charming’ or about memories of a date in New
York City, but rather about how you fell in and out of love in a poor house in
the street western suburbs of Guayaquil.”9 A recurrent topic in his songs is that
of a man whose wife has abandoned him for a lover. The following excerpt
from “La colorada infiel” (The unfaithful blonde) exemplifies this type of
lyric. The first stanza includes double entendres alluding to the couple’s sex-
ual incompatibility, while the second stanza presents the man as a generous
person who wishes her well despite a bitter breakup.
Cállate, no me digas nada que yo te ví

Un avión así como tú no puede aterrizar así en mi vida
en una pista tan pequeña como la mía.
Si te vas, que te vaya bien.

Pero yo quiero conseguir una, que cuando yo le diga
Mami, tú me quieres mucho?

Ráscame aquí que me pica.
¿Por qué? Porque yo no fui malo contigo.

Yo me la buscaba como un animal para darte todo lo que tú querías
Pero tú, tú no fuiste buena conmigo.
Yo me enojé, yo quiero que consigas a alguien,
alguien bueno, que te trate mejor que yo.
[Shut up, don’t tell me anything because I saw you

An airplane like you cannot land on my life this way
On such a small runway as mine.
If you leave, I hope things go well for you.

But I want to get a woman that when I say
Baby, do you really love me?
Scratch me here, where it itches.
Why? Because I was not mean to you.

I searched like an animal to give you everything you wanted
But you, you were not good to me.
I got angry, I want you to find someone else.
Someone nice who will treat you better than I did.]
His bolero “Asciéndeme a marido” (Make me your husband) portrays a man

who asks his girlfriend to “upgrade” him from the status of boyfriend to that
of lover, implying it is time for the couple to start an intimate relationship.
(PURL 4.3)
Ya me cansé de ser tu enamorado

Ahora quiero que me asciendas a marido
Si tú quieres así, seguiremos bonito
O si no de una vez rompamos nuestro amorcito.
Si en verdad me quieres, ven duerme conmigo

No te hagas la tonta, haz lo que te digo
Sube despacito y atrás yo te sigo
Y verás que juntitos seguiremos bien bonito.
[I am tired of being your boyfriend

Now I want you to make me your husband
120 | Chapter 4
If you want this, we’ll get along fine

Otherwise, let’s break off our little love.
If you really love me, come sleep with me

Don’t play the fool, do what I say
Go up the stairs slowly and I’ll follow you
And you’ll see that we’ll have a good time.]
Scholars have analyzed the meanings of song lyrics that show negative depic-
tions of women from various perspectives. Frances Aparicio, for example,
looks at how men’s role in a patriarchal society has been challenged by
women’s emancipation and ability to sustain themselves when they enter the
workplace. For her, the misogynistic lyrics in the bolero (and salsa music)
represent “a defensive stance by men against the new public spaces inhabited
by women who, as a result of urban migration, modernization, and their new
role in the work place, subverted the social values that restricted them within
the household” (1998, 128–29).
While sexist and patriarchal song lyrics might indeed be offensive to
women, scholars of cultural studies have pointed out the need to examine
the consumers’ reception of these songs in a broader context that takes into
account the social and cultural milieu. From this perspective, the listeners
according to their social background, individual predisposition, and situ-
ational context generate the meanings of songs. Manuel suggests that “song
lyrics do not represent social relations per se, but rather attitudes about them”
(1998, 18). A study he conducted among Caribbean female college students in
one of his classes revealed a wide range of reactions to the song lyrics and their
ability to adopt multiple subject positions. Many women listen to these songs
in a “cross-gendered manner,” that is, they can put themselves in the singer’s
persona and perceive the song as just being about an un-gendered heartbreak.
Manuel calls this cross-gendered listening “psychic transvestitism” (1998, 19),
a term that aptly explains why female rocolera fans enjoy singing and listen-
ing to rocolera songs at EPM concerts. Some women like these songs because
they highlight male vulnerability, while others are attracted to them because
of their danceable character (1998, 19). In addition, music brings memories
of places and times associated with particular listening contexts and people,
which may have little or no connection to the lyrics.
While boleros rocoleros have generally been written from the man’s per-
spective, in the late 1980s a few rocolera female singers responded to these
boleros with provocative lyrics of their own. Paraphrasing the initial text of
Aladino’s “Asciéndeme a marido,” a female singer responds that the man is
free to leave the relationship if he is tired of being just her boyfriend. In the
bolero “El matrimonio” (The marriage), the woman tells her boyfriend that
she will not enter into an intimate relationship prior to marriage. She says,
“Kisses I give you as many as you want, but beyond that not one more step.”
These songs, however, did not have the impact that Aladino’s songs have had
and do not remain in the rocolera “classical” repertoire.
Tú piensas que soy muy ingenua o caída de la mata

Crees que en mí has encontrado una víctima más.
Conmigo te equivocaste, primero el matrimonio.
Besos te doy los que quieras, pero de ahí ni un paso más.

¿Quieres que a ti yo me entregue sin ningún compromiso
Te estás pasando de listo, eso no vas a lograr.
[You think that I am innocent or that I was born yesterday?

You believe that in me you’ve found another victim.
You’re wrong, first we get married.
Kisses I’ll give you as many as you want, but beyond that not one more step.
You want me to offer myself to you without any engagement.
You think you’re smart, but you won’t get it.]
Although Aladino has recorded an extensive repertoire of boleros rocoleros,

he has never recorded or sung pasillos in public performances. His songs fre-
quently include street jargon and comments representing scenes of everyday
working-class life. Although he speaks with a bass voice and clearly enunciates
his words, in his singing style he imitates the speech pattern of the popular
classes and employs a nasal, loud, and high-pitched voice.10 Like Julio Jaramillo
who linked rocolera music to drunkenness and the cantina, Aladino became
a signifier linking rocolera to images of vulgarity, rudeness, and treacherous
women. These topics are associated with the experiences of uprootedness of
cholos, lower-class mestizos who try to cope with the bitterness of urban life.
The Elite Pasillo and the Pasillo Rocolero

The coexistence of both types of pasillo—the elite pasillo and the pasillo
rocolero—since the 1980s challenges official representations of the Ecua-
dorian national identity. Also known as “pasillos para el pueblo” (pasillos for
the people), pasillos rocoleros do not talk about infidelity and revenge in the
explicit manner seen in boleros rocoleros. One example is “Te quiero, te quiero”
(I love you, I love you), composed by Nicolás Fiallos in the early 1980s and
122 | Chapter 4
Figure 4.4 Musicians and singers who have shaped the image of rocolera music are Julio
Jaramillo, Naldo Campos, Aladino, and Segundo Rosero.
popularized by rocolera singer Ana Lucía Proaño. This song is basically a decla-
ration of love expressed in colloquial language and devoid of the metaphors and
poetic devices commonly employed in the elite pasillo. Proaño sings this song
in a slow tempo and with a high-pitched nasal voice; the musical arrangement
incorporates the sounds of a synthesizer with a high-pitched organ-like timbre.
These musical traits, reminiscent of indigenous musical features, are atypical of
the elite pasillo, which is normally sung with polished voices in parallel thirds
and accompanied by an acoustic guitar-and-requinto ensemble. (PURL 4.4)
Cada día que pasa, cada hora, un minuto

Yo siento que te amo, y te amo mucho más.
No hay distancia ni tiempo, ni santo en ningún templo
Que impidan que te diga te quiero, te quiero.
[Each day that passes, each hour, each minute

I feel I love you, and I love you more and more.
There is no distance, no time, no saint in any temple
That prevent me from telling you “I love you, I love you.”]
The pasillo “Diecisiete años” (Seventeen years [of age]) by Fausto Galarza
portrays a man confessing his love to a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl just
entering adulthood. He compares her eyes to sunbeams and asks God to
bless her life. As a working-class pasillo, “Diecisiete años” shows musical fea-
tures that are reminiscent of indigenous music, such as pentatonic melodic
contours and the use of high-pitched timbres in the instrumentation, which
includes guitar, requinto, electric bass, and keyboards. (PURL 4.5)
Yo vivía triste, sumido entre sombras

Sin pensar siquiera que existe la vida
Pero me ha llegado a mí este momento
Y a la edad que tengo me nace un amor.
Tiene en su mirada los rayos del sol

Y en su linda boca un lindo candor
Tiene en su mirada, tiene en su boquita un soplo de vida,
Tiene lo que nadie tiene en esta vida para ser bonita.
Diecisiete años cruzan por su vida y está en su delirio
Yo beso sus labios candorosa y linda, que Dios la bendiga.
[I lived sad, immersed in shadows

Without even thinking that life exists.
But this moment has come to me
And at my age a love is born.
She has in her glance the sun’s rays

And in her beautiful mouth a beautiful innocence.
She has in her glance, she has in her little mouth a puff of life,
She has what nobody in this life has to be pretty.
Seventeen years crisscross her life, and she is full of passion
I kiss her lips, candid and beautiful, may God bless her.]
“Diecisiete años” was first recorded in the early 1980s by current tecnocumbia
singer Gerardo Morán, but the song was popularized by Segundo Rosero.
Although this pasillo makes no reference to the cantina and breakups, and it
does not employ course language to describe the female figure, Ecuadorians
124 | Chapter 4
nonetheless perceive it as rocolera music because, through repeated experien-

tial associations, Segundo Rosero has become an indexical sign for rocolera
music. As a singer-songwriter and music producer, Rosero has composed suc-
cessful songs that are part of the rocolera canon, such as the boleros “Como
voy a olvidarte” (How am I going to forget you) and “Bolero rocolero,” his
signature song, which references the jukebox and the cantina as a man’s
true friends when he experiences a heartbreak. Born in Pimampiro, a little
town in the Chota Valley, Rosero grew up in a mixed cultural environment
surrounded by indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian musical practices and tradi-
tions. This cultural exposure is reflected in the production of the first com-
mercial recording of bombas that he and Afro-Ecuadorian musicians from
the Chota Valley made in the early 1990s. Some of the bombas included in
this CD have become favorite songs in EPM concerts, such as “Carpuela”
and “Pasito tun tun.”
Rosero is fairly well known in Peru and countries with significant Ecua-
dorian migrant populations. He travels with his ensemble on concert tours to
Peru, Europe, and the United States, and he produces his own records in his
private recording studio. Journalist Juan Carlos Morales, Rosero’s biographer,
indicates that international artists and dance orchestras have recorded his
bolero “Como voy a olvidarte” with different rhythms in other Latin Ameri-
can countries. Rosero has received national awards from major cultural insti-
tutions in Ecuador for his contributions to Ecuadorian arts and for promoting
peace with Peru when, in the 1990s, at the high point of the border conflict
between the two countries, he traveled back and forth bringing a message of
peace with his music.11 Despite these honors, his music is disdained by Ecua-
dorian elites because it carries the stigma of the cholo and the cantina.
In his biography of Rosero, Morales states that rocolera was once pejoratively
defined as “the music that Segundo Rosero sings” (2001, 136). This statement
has strong racial connotations given Rosero’s mixed Afro-Ecuadorian and indig-
enous heritage, noticeable in his physical characteristics that the elites would
identify as a cholo. Like Julio Jaramillo (a cholo from the coast), Rosero embod-
ies the ethnic “Other” that the ideology of mestizaje seeks to homogenize and
obliterate at the same time. Although Rosero has made a successful career and
his music is well known in Ecuador and Peru, he carries the stigma of being a
cholo, who is not accepted in the society of the “gente decente” (well-to-do peo-
ple), a term that reveals how upper-middle-class Ecuadorians (white-mestizos)
view themselves in relation to lower-class mestizo groups. For them, the “gente
decente” have more subtle ways to cope with the heartbreaks and do not air
their problems in the cantina as cholos apparently do.
Morales draws attention to the ways in which upper-middle- and lower-
class Ecuadorian mestizos mask, or downplay, the indigenous roots of their
mestizo identity. These attitudes are reflected in the plot of the movie Como
voy a olvidarte, which shows the story of a highland mestizo (a cholo played by
Rosero himself) who aspires to a singing career and who accidentally meets
an upper-class woman from the coast (a white-mestizo) in a little town of the
northern highlands. She has learned of the obscure activities of her father,
an influential political figure in the country, and shocked by the impression,
she runs away from him. The two fall in love, but their love is not viable due
to their social, ethnic, and regional differences. Being a cholo from the high-
lands, Rosero is not deserving of her love.
Rosero’s ethnicity and singing style embody the images upper-middle-
class mestizos have of rocolera music. They view the rocolera singing style
as lacking refinement because performers tend to sing with a high-pitched,
nasal, and weepy voice. Rocolera music, however, is not the product of impro-
vised and amateur musicians. Sociologist Santillán (2001) rightly points out
that there is a particular aesthetics in rocolera that is difficult to imitate and
makes it particularly appealing to listeners, implying it has intrinsic qualities
that require talented singers to transmit emotions.
If in Ecuador Rosero is seen as the embodiment of rocolera music, in
Peru he is perceived differently. During my short stay in Lima in 2004, I
realized that Rosero has a broad following among the lower-middle classes,
partly because the negative images associated with rocolera in Ecuador are
not easily transferable to Peru. Furthermore, Rosero’s song repertoire is
made up not only of boleros referring to the rocola and the cantina but also
songs with philosophical questions about life such as “Nadie es eterno” (No
one is eternal in life), songs that recount the bitter experiences of migrants
who are away from their families and home country such as “Peregrino del
Destino” (Pilgrim of destiny), and songs of nostalgia for a loved one such as
“Cómo voy a olvidarte” (How will I forget you). Unlike his signature song
“Bolero rocolero,” this repertoire is not related to themes of drunkenness
or negative aspects of the male–female relationship. In Ecuador, however,
Rosero has become a signifier of these themes, which are transferred to all
his songs regardless of their lyrical content. His phenotype, song repertoire,
and singing style index what the “gente decente” (decent people) perceive as
the music of cholos and longos, that is, the music of indigenous and lower-
class mestizos.
Rocolera Music Festivals

In the late 1970s, music entrepreneurs organized a large one-night concert
called the Rocolera Music Festival, an event that brought together thousands
of fans to listen to their favorite national and international rocolera singers.
126 | Chapter 4
The concerts began late in the evening and would last until the wee hours
of the morning. Each performer would only sing four to five songs, possibly
extending their performances to thirty or forty-five minutes, depending on
the public’s response and the singer’s prestige. Whistles, jeers, and modest
or no applause signaled to the artist that it was time to end the performance.
Ecuadorian liquor companies, such as Licor Cristal and Trópico Seco, spon-
sored these concerts and promoted their products, placing huge plastic repli-
cas of the liquor bottles on either side of the stage. Informal vendors roamed
the concert venue, selling the liquor either in bottles or in transparent plastic
bags hidden in their jackets where the sale of alcohol was prohibited. These
drinks were then mixed with soda and shared among the patrons.
There is a tendency among Ecuadorian scholars to view rocolera concerts
as a huge cantina (Ibarra 1998, 79). While rocolera detractors argue that the
music incites people to drink, this was not my experience when I attended a
concert organized by Radio Presidente, the station popular with taxi drivers,
for Valentine’s Day on February 16, 2003, at the Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo. I
arrived early and sat in the amphitheater section, where I met Fanny, a young
seamstress, and her husband, José, a construction worker. They were convers-
ing and sharing drinks with another couple sitting in front of them. I thought
these couples were friends by the way they talked and interacted. Later, I real-
ized that Fanny and José were sharing drinks with people they had just met at
the concert, as did many other people in attendance. Several times they offered
me a mixture of Trópico with soda in a small plastic cup, which they refilled
each time it was emptied and shared with other people. Not being much of a
drinker myself, and also being concerned with hygiene, I politely declined the
first offer. They both looked seriously into my eyes and assured me that I could
trust them because they were gente seria (or, “serious people”). As I did not want
to offend them, I relented and drank a sip. A few minutes later, I was passed
another drink. When I looked to see who had sent it, an old man several seats
to my left raised his plastic cup with a big smile and a cheering gesture, which
I reciprocated before taking a sip. After a couple of hours and many more sips
of Trópico, I moved to a section close to the stage, where I met a retired officer
with his girlfriend, who also insisted that I share a drink with them. People near
the stage also offered drinks to the singers while they were performing.
I came to realize that at this event, sharing drinks was less about drinking
for drinking’s sake and more about a social practice that brings lower-class
mestizos together as a temporal community and encourages camaraderie for
the duration of the event. I wrote in my field notes that I had the impression
that people at rocolera concerts drank to reciprocate the kindness and solidar-
ity manifested in the act of sharing. It also appeared to me that rocolera con-
certs serve as a time and a place apart from the routine of daily life in the city,
where lower-middle-class mestizos get together as a community and assert

their ethnic identity and cultural traditions, just as indigenous people and
lower-class mestizos do in their festivities in rural areas. The sharing of drinks
reminded me of indigenous festivals, where reciprocity functions as a way
of strengthening group solidarity and thanking in the Pachamama (Mother
Earth) symbolically for the blessings she has bestowed, thus ensuring prosper-
ity and a good harvest for the next year (Wibbelsman 2009).
The sharing of drinks is a common practice in indigenous festivities in
the Andean region, such as the Inti Raymi and the Corpus Christi, and in
life-cycle ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. William Carter notes
that among Aymara people “alcoholic consumption is a sine qua non of all
ritual activity” (cited in Schechter 1992, 177). In the Inti Raymi festival in the
Otavalo area, dancers gather in their respective communities and engage in
ritual drinking by offering and accepting drinks from a communal cup (Wib-
belsman 2009), just as the rocolera audience does at a concert. On the eve of
the Pase del Niño (the passing of the Infant Child) pageant celebrated in 2009
in Cuenca, I observed a couple of priostes (people providing the drinks and
food for the fiesta) offering drinks in a small plastic glass to people who were
watching an indigenous dance in the park. Generally speaking, ritual drink-
ing is an endogenous element in indigenous culture, a practice that indig-
enous peasants who migrate to the urban areas continue with some variations,
as my interpretation of rocolera concerts suggests. If so, drinking at rocolera
concerts can be viewed as an example of how indigenous people in the process
of becoming mestizos adapt their cultural practices and are able to maintain
their ethnic identity in the city. I suggest that lower-class mestizos transform
rocolera concerts into urban spaces where they re-create traditional aspects of
their indigenous culture. This thesis attempting to explain why people drink
collectively and copiously at rocolera concerts needs further research.
In the late 1980s, rocolera music festivals were also organized in New York
for the Ecuadorian migrant community. Many Ecuadorians from the south-
ern highland provinces of Azuay and Cañar had immigrated to the United
States in search of the “American dream” in the aftermath of the decline of
the Panama hat business, the main economic activity of the region (Jokisch
and Pribilsky 2002). They became the main rocolera audience outside of
Ecuador. These festivals were organized by two Ecuadorian music enthusi-
asts: Hugo Zavala, a music producer and música nacional singer, and René
Torres, a music entrepreneur who organized annual rocolera concerts in New
York for almost two decades until his death in the late 1990s. Zavala and Tor-
res organized only five or six concerts per year to avoid saturation of the small
rocolera market. Zavala’s son, Mauricio, noted that in the 1980s the colonia
ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian community) in New York was so small that concerts
128 | Chapter 4
were promoted by phone calls and organized in social clubs and restaurants
located in the Jackson Heights area of Queens with a capacity of about three
hundred people (personal interview, 2003).
Torres brought the most popular rocolera singers on concert tours to New
York and Chicago, cities with large concentrations of Ecuadorian migrants,
most of whom had already established themselves as lawful permanent resi-
dents. Claudio Vallejo, Ana Lucía Proaño, Naldo Campos, Roberto Zumba,
and Juanita Burbano were among the artists invited to these festivals on a
regular basis. The remuneration was low, but the airfare, lodging, and per-
formance opportunities were guaranteed. In Ecuador, rocolera singers pro-
moted themselves as “international artists” and the music they performed as
“international music” because it was performed abroad. Rocolera detractors,
however, claimed that the audience was not really international as it consisted
of merely Ecuadorian migrants abroad.
Middle-class Ecuadorians from Guayaquil and Quito also migrated
to New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the southern highland
migrants, their musical taste revolved around the elite música nacional. It
was during this period that Trío Los Brillantes and Hermanos Miño-Naranjo
toured frequently in the United States to perform at civic celebrations orga-
nized by the Ecuadorian migrant communities. Thus, Ecuadorian immi-
grants in New York (white-mestizos and lower-class mestizos) were divided in
their musical preferences in a way that reflected the aesthetics of their social
class, parallelling the situation back home. This class division, however, was
less noticeable in the city of skyscrapers, where Ecuadorians represent only
one of many Latino immigrant communities and upper-middle- and lower-
class Ecuadorians do not come into close contact as they do in Ecuador.
Conclusion
The study of rocolera music helps us understand social processes of urban
adaptation on the part of subaltern groups in Ecuador and elsewhere. Fur-
thermore, it shows the agency of performers, composers, and music arrangers
in shaping the musical styles and musical practices of the popular classes.
Four musicians—Julio Jaramillo, Naldo Campos, Aladino, and Segundo
Rosero—have shaped the image and sound of rocolera music with their con-
troversial lifestyles, musical arrangements, vulgar lyrics, and singing style.
Jaramillo’s bohemian lifestyle linked his song repertoire to the image of the
cantina. Campos blurred the stylistic distinctions between música nacional
and rocolera music with his musical arrangements. Using street jargon, Ala-
dino’s lyrics linked rocolera music to rudeness and vulgarity. Finally, Rosero’s
ethnicity and singing style associates rocolera with the lives of cholos and lon-
gos in the cities.
Rocolera music became the expression of a new working-class population
(the cholos) adapting to a new urban life. This music gives continuity to the
sentiments of loss, despair, and nostalgia expressed in the elite pasillos, albeit
in a new manner and in a new social context. The woman is no longer the
object of idealization, but rather a source of unhappiness and the target of
claims of not understanding the emotional needs of her partner. Rocolera
can also be regarded as a counterdiscourse to the elites’ vision of Ecuador-
ian music, that is, a music that portrays in colloquial language the actual life
experiences and frustrations of the people, rather than the elites’ eternal long-
ing of an idealized woman whose love is never attained. Most importantly,
rocolera gives visibility to the working-class people, that is, cholos and longos
who had been neglected in the imagining of the nation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, rocolera music was not identified with música
nacional at all, though there were elements that were beginning to relate one
style to the other, such as Ecuadorian singers interpreting boleros rocoleros
and working-class pasillos in the same music venues and with the same sing-
ing style. In this period, the distinction between rocolera and música nacional
was readily understood and no Ecuadorian would have dared call rocolera
música nacional, or vice versa, as was to happen later in the 1990s.
|5
Chichera Music
The “Tropicalization” of Música Nacional
T
he 1970s was not only a period of “rocolization” of the Ecuadorian
pasillo but also one of “tropicalization” of música nacional. By “trop-
icalization” I mean the fusion of música nacional genres with Afro-
Caribbean rhythms, particularly cumbia and salsa, which in the 1960s and
1970s were at the peak of their popularity. In Ecuador, as in most Latin Amer-
ican countries, Afro-Caribbean musics such as salsa, cumbia, and merengue
are collectively known as música tropical (tropical music), a term that points
to both its geographic origin and the stereotypes of a happy dance music.1
Música nacional underwent two processes of tropicalization. The first took
place in the 1960s and 1970s in upper-middle-class circles with the influence
of the cumbia and salsa craze; the second began in the 1970s among the pop-
ular classes with the cumbia rhythm. While upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
danced to salsa renditions of elite música nacional (pasillos, pasacalles, and
fox incaicos) at private parties and social clubs, the popular classes danced to
modern renditions of folk music of indigenous origin (sanjuanito, cachullapi,
saltashpas, and yumbo) at their homes and on the streets. While the former
is known as música tropical, a label that indexes cosmopolitan middle-class
values and modernity, the latter is pejoratively called chichera music by the
elites, a label that implies a lower-class mestizo culture, that is, the music of
cholos and longos.
In this chapter, I examine various discourses referring to the tropicaliza-
tion of elite música nacional and the urban sanjuanito between the 1960s and
the early 2000s. I view discourses in the form of opinions, praise, critiques,
Chichera Music | 131
and debates as sites where Ecuadorians make public their feelings and visions
of the nation as well as their attitudes toward social change and modernity.
I suggest that the upper-middle classes symbolically exclude indigenous and
working-class Ecuadorians from their imagining of the mestizo nation by
using derogatory labels, such as “chichera music,” which insinuate a low-brow
and uneducated following. In contrast, indigenous and working-class Ecua-
dorians proudly and spontaneously express their sense of national belonging
through the active production and consumption of chichera music, which
they began calling música nacional in the 1990s. The term música nacional,
in turn, had been applied by the upper-middle classes for most of the twen-
tieth century to musics that they felt embodied the Ecuadorian nation—and
these did not include the chichera style. I argue that the appropriation of the
term música nacional by the popular classes symbolically reflects their self-
inclusion in their own imaginary of the nation.
Música Tropical in Ecuador

The rise of música tropical in Ecuador in the 1950s and 1960s coincided
with a period of economic prosperity based on the increased production of
bananas, of which Ecuador is the largest exporter in the world. The value of
Ecuador’s banana exports climbed significantly from 1948 to 1952 as a result
of crop diseases in Central America and the increasing international demand
for the fruit after World War II. In the mid-1960s, however, the volume of
banana exports dropped significantly due to plant diseases and competitive
markets. This downturn was soon overcome by the discovery of new oil fields
in the Amazon region, which transformed the country into a world producer
of oil and resulted in large increases in government revenue. The great wealth
gave Ecuadorians a strong dose of optimism for a better future, to such a
degree that the mass media began to disseminate images of Ecuador “as if
the country had reached heaven’s doors and found solutions to its social prob-
lems and underdevelopment” (Acosta 2001, 130). The construction of mod-
ern buildings and national roads, the rapid urban growth of Guayaquil and
Quito, and the increase in jobs in the public sector reinforced this perception.
If the Cuban music craze (rumba, cha-cha-chá, and mambo) dominated
the 1940s and 1950s, the Colombian cumbia became the new music fever
in the 1960s. According to Wade, the urban form of the cumbia from the
Atlantic Coast symbolized happiness, prosperity, and modernity in Colom-
bia, and it acquired national overtones in the 1940s and 1950s to the point
of displacing the Andean bambuco as Colombia’s emblematic music (Wade
2000). Simplified versions of the porro, gaita, paseíto, and merecumbé, known
in Colombia as raspa music (literally, “scrape”), or chucu-chucu (referring to
132 | Chapter 5
the sound produced by the scraper), came to be known as cumbia outside of

Colombia (Wade 2000).
The cumbia fever arrived in Ecuador in the 1950s and 1960s via records
and live performances of Colombian groups such as Los Corraleros de Maja-
gual and the dance orchestras of Lucho Bermúdez and Pacho Galán. As the
southern neighbors of Colombia, Ecuadorians had immediate access to the
latest cumbia hits through Colombian records and radio stations such as Radio
Caracol, which was powerfully transmitted throughout the highland region.
Its tagline “Del Carchi al Macará” was a reference to its wide broadcast area
from the northern province of Carchi to the city of Macará in the southern
province of Loja. Colombian records were sold at the Plaza Ipiales, an outlet
market in the Centro Histórico of Quito where a wide variety of Colombian
products were sold such as candy and clothing. The plaza/market was named
after Ipiales, a Colombian city on the border with Ecuador. The peak of the
cumbia craze in the 1960s arrived with the repertoire of the Sonora Dina-
mita and Gustavo Quintero y Los Hispanos, whose famous song hits, such as
“Don Goyo” and “Adonay,” were played at all social events. Rodolfo Aicardí,
a successful bolero and balada singer in the 1970s, became the new singer of
Los Hispanos when Gustavo Quintero left the orchestra in the 1980s. With
Aycardí, Los Hispanos changed its artistic name to Los Graduados and had
great success with the cumbias “Colegiala” (Schoolgirl) and “Tabaco y ron”
(Tobacco and rum), which reached the top rankings in the música tropical
billboards in Ecuador.
The salsa fever arrived in Guayaquil in the early 1970s. The transnational
and pan-Latin American spread of this music is well known—it developed in
New York City’s Latino barrios based on Cuban and Puerto Rican forms and
has local expressions in various Latin American countries, primarily in Vene-
zuela and Colombia (Waxer 2002). In her study of salsa in Cali, Waxer points
out that sailors became important agents of the transmission of salsa as they
introduced the latest musical trends and records to the ports they visited. It
is not surprising that Guayaquil, a port city open to new trends, immediately
embraced salsa as a local music in the early 1970s. Unlike Guayaquileños,
it took some time for Quiteños, with a prominent Andean culture, to learn
to move their bodies to the complex syncopated rhythms of salsa, which are
atypical of Ecuadorian popular music and dances (Ibarra 1998).
Dance orchestras with a jazz band format proliferated in Ecuador to sup-
ply the demand for música tropical in elite circles. The Orquesta Blacio Jr.,
founded by Milo Blacio in the late 1910s and led in its heyday by his son
Enrique from the 1940s until his death in the 1970s, entertained parties at
prestigious hotels and elite social clubs such as the Tennis Club, the Club de
la Unión, and the now-defunct Hotel Humboldt in Guayaquil. In Quito, the
Orquesta Salgado Jr., founded in 1940 by brothers José Antonio, Jorge, and
Jaime Salgado Vargas, played not only the música tropical that was in vogue
but also saltashpas, an Ecuadorian term designating sanjuanitos and albazos
played by dance orchestras in a fast tempo and danced with small “saltos”
(jumps).
Although dance orchestras were popular in the 1950s, it was only with
the economic boom of the 1960s that they began to proliferate and appear at
large upper-middle-class family events, such as weddings, graduations, and
fiestas de quinceaños (birthday parties for fifteen-year-old girls). These orches-
tras resembled the mid-twentieth-century big band orchestras with their large
brass sections and musicians dressed in formal attire. They not only enter-
tained at social events but also provided musical accompaniment to interna-
tional artists touring Ecuador. The Orquesta América, for example, played
with international stars such as Daniel Santos, Leo Marini, and Celia Cruz.
As salsa became more prominent in the 1970s, dance orchestras grew
both in size and sound with the addition of synthesizers, the electric bass,
Caribbean percussion instruments, and one or more singers. They played a
vast repertoire of dance music, such as pasodobles, cumbias, salsa, baladas,
boleros, and medleys of música nacional, to please diverse musical tastes.2 In
Guayaquil, former members of Blacio Jr. founded their own dance orchestras,
such as El Pibe Arauz (1957), Juan Cavero y su Orquesta (1957), Orquesta
América, Los Cinco Ases (1960), and Los Azules (1964). In the 1960s in Quito,
prominent tropical groups were Los Titos, Polibio Mayorga and his Quinteto
Casino, Olmedo Torres and Los Locos del Ritmo, and Don Medardo y sus
Players (1969).
At first, dance orchestras played covers of Colombian cumbias, but soon
local musicians began composing cumbias with a distinctive Ecuadorian
flavor. Just as dance orchestras in Peru adapted the cumbia rhythm to the
huayno in the 1960s (Romero 2002), Ecuadorian orchestras mixed the cumbia
rhythm with sanjuanito-like melodies. Polibio Mayorga (b. 1932), a self-taught
musician from Ambato and the author of numerous pasillos, albazos, and san-
juanitos, was one of the first musicians to compose Ecuadorian cumbias. He
also introduced the electronic sound of synthesizers into Ecuadorian tradi-
tional music in the 1970s. He played the accordion, the organ, and the piano
in several ensembles of música nacional and música tropical in Quito. His
song “Cumbia triste” (Sad cumbia), which became a national hit in 1966,
featured an accordion, a saxophone, an electric guitar, and Latin percussion
(güiro, timbales, and congas). The saxophone and accordion had a prominent
melodic function, while the electric guitar played countermelodies to pro-
vide timbric contrast with the other instruments. The chucu-chucu (scraper)
sound is heavily accentuated, while the bass line is barely noticed. Despite its
134 | Chapter 5
danceable nature, the song is imbued with a melancholy character typical of

Ecuadorian popular music. This is observed in the use of the minor mode
and in the lyrics referring to a state of sadness,3 both of which are atypical
of the Colombian cumbia. The lyrics say, “When I remember you, I get very
sad / and this cumbia says that I always love you. I think about the night when
you went away / that is why I sing this sad cumbia to you.”
In Guayaquil, Juan Cavero adapted new lyrics to well-known salsa and
cumbia melodies. For example, “Guayaquil está de salsa” (Guayaquil is in
a salsa mood), based on the music of Venezuelan Ray Perez’s hit “Mi salsa
llegó” (My salsa has arrived), makes reference to the happy character of Guay-
aquilean people and mentions some of the city’s landmarks in the montuno
section, such as La Rotonda on 9 de Octubre Avenue and Urdesa, an upper-
middle-class residential area near the Estero Salado.4 “Camisetas amarillas”
(Yellow t-shirts), whose title is a reference to the color of the jerseys of the
Guayaquilean soccer team Barcelona, praises its players and loyal fans.
To expand their dance music repertoire, dance orchestras adapted cumbia
and salsa rhythms to famous songs of the elite música nacional anthology.
Juan Cavero, for example, played salsa renditions of Francisco Paredes Her-
rera’s pasillos “Como si fuera un niño” and “Rosario de besos.” Los Jokers
adapted to the cumbia rhythm the sanjuanito “Pobre corazón,” the danzante
“Vasija de barro,” and the fox incaico “La bocina.” The “tropicalization” of
these songs produced different reactions among Ecuadorian musicians.
Rudecindo Inga Vélez, the composer of “La bocina,” who was in his seventies
when Los Jokers recorded his song, was delighted to see people dancing to his
fox incaico, even though its tempo and character had been substantially modi-
fied. Música nacional advocates, however, considered the tropical renditions
a threat to Ecuadorian music’s “purity.” Pepe Jaramillo, a renowned música
nacional singer and brother of Julio Jaramillo, regarded the new arrange-
ments as “a sacrilege that should be punished by Ecuadorian law.”5 Héctor
“Manito” Bonilla (1935–84), IFESA’s music arranger in the 1970s and early
1980s, shared Jaramillo’s position: “In my view, it is preferable to keep the
purity of our rhythms. Record producers change [our national rhythms] to the
rhythm of cumbia, in this way tropicalizing the songs. . . . It is not our own
music anymore; these are only adaptations of foreign music. Music is disfig-
ured, though it is better known. I think this is wrong because the meaning
gets distorted.”6
Despite major critiques in the press about a supposed “contamination” of
música nacional, upper-middle-class Ecuadorians enjoyed dancing to tropi-
cal renditions of pasillos and fox incaicos as much as they enjoyed dancing to
original salsa and cumbia songs. Rather than stigmatizing the people who lis-
tened and danced to the tropical versions of música nacional, as was later the
case with chichera music in the 1980s and 1990s, critics were more concerned
about preserving the “purity” and “authenticity” of Ecuadorian music. They
were unable to view tropical dance orchestras as agents of modernization who
were transmitting to the younger generations the elite música nacional reper-
toire, albeit in tropical renditions.
Commenting on the process of blending local and foreign expressive
forms, Michael Handelsman notes in his study on globalization in Ecuador
that forms of cultural exchange have been an ongoing feature of the Ecua-
dorian arts. He states, “Ecuadorians have always been nourished by other
cultures, which they appropriate to create original expressions in all the
arts” (2005, 46). He provides the example of the Escuela Quiteña de Pintura
(Quito’s School of Painting) during the colonial period, whose members imi-
tated the religious imagery of the European arts using idiosyncratic textures
and colors that reveal the artistry and originality of Ecuadorian artists. In the
realm of Ecuadorian música nacional, musicians incorporated the guitar-
and-requinto arrangement and the three-part harmonic vocal style created by
the Mexican Trío Los Panchos to local performances of pasillo. This prac-
tice, however, did not raise objections on the part of “purists,” who saw these
changes as the refinement, rather than the “contamination” or “decadence,”
of Ecuadorian music.
Concurrent with the proliferation of tropical dance orchestras in the 1960s
was the arrival of the electric organ in Ecuador. It became a more affordable
source of dance entertainment due to its low cost, portability, and ability to
play several types of music. The most popular brands were the Hammond and
the Baldwin “fun machine.” They had a music box with a variety of instru-
mental timbres and preset rhythms (samba, bolero, waltz, swing, march, and
so on), which allowed organists to play the most popular musics of that period.
Needless to say, it was less expensive to hire one or two musicians (the second
for when a drum set was required), than to hire a full orchestra. It was also
much easier to fit these few instruments into the corner of a living room or
onto a patio than the ten to sixteen musicians of a live orchestra, each requir-
ing their own amplification system.
Eduardo Zurita (b. 1944), the main figure of this musical trend, was a law-
yer and self-taught organist who recorded more than twenty long-play records
of organ renditions of cumbias, boleros románticos, and elite música nacional.
He founded and managed El Candil, a middle-class bar in the Mariscal area,
where he performed his music. In recordings, he usually played accompanied
by a drum set, an acoustic guitar, and an electric bass. In the early 1970s, his
performances of pasillos and pasacalles were as famous as his performances
of the latest cumbia hits of Los Hispanos. Upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
in both the coastal and highland regions enjoyed dancing to his medleys of
136 | Chapter 5
música nacional, which included famous songs of the música nacional anthol-
ogy—the tonadas “La naranja” (The orange) and “Ojos azules” (Blue eyes),
the sanjuanito “Pobre corazón,” the fox incaico “La bocina” (The horn),
and the well-known pasacalles “El chulla quiteño,” “Chola cuencana,” and
“Ambato, tierra de flores.” In dancing to tropical renditions of Ecuadorian
music, men usually held a handkerchief in their right hands while women
picked up their skirts slightly on both sides, which is the way Ecuadorians
dance mestizo folk music. At the end of the medleys, couples danced happily
in rotating circles, jumping and crossing their arms with each rotation. Other
organists in the Costa followed Zurita’s performance style, such as Eduardo
Maruri and Omar Montalvo, and hired a singer to sing the lyrics if they them-
selves did not sing. They had a wide variety of songs in their repertoire as they
were eager to satisfy the public’s demands for favorite songs and secure new
performance contracts.
Medleys of elite música nacional were usually played at the end of the
evening, when many guests had left and most of those who remained were a
bit tipsy. Eventually, this practice gave rise to several discourses that pointed
to Ecuadorians’ lack of pride for their popular music. One states that if Ecua-
dorians were proud of their music, they would dance to the lively sanjuanitos
and pasacalles at the beginning or in the middle of parties, rather than at the
end. Alluding to this practice, Zurita once stated, “Ecuadorian music is in a
clandestine state [estado clandestino]. It is ‘played’ in the early morning hours
when nobody listens to it, or when those who do listen have lost their senses.”7
By the mid-1980s, many famous dance orchestras, such as Los Jokers and
Juan Cavero, had disappeared and the “fun machine” organ was less seen in
parties. The tradition of dancing tropical renditions of música nacional in
elite parties (even at the end of the event) also disappeared. Dance orchestras
still play at elite social events but have otherwise largely been displaced by
the “disco móvil” (mobile disco), which is less expensive and provides a much
broader range of dance music favored by the youth, such as rock, hip hop, and
reggaeton music, which are not played by these orchestras or an organ.
The Origin of Chichera Music

Chichera is a style of music identified more by the social contexts, musical
aesthetics, and ethnicity of its producers and consumers than by its musical
features. The term chichera is derived from chicha, an indigenous home-
made corn beer associated with cheap alcoholic beverage. It is safe to say that
Ecuadorian popular music that is not elite música nacional or rocolera music
is considered chichera, a label that references urban music associated with
low-class status and particularly caters to the musical taste of so-called cholos
and longos. Chichera music encompasses modern renditions of sanjuanitos

and yumbos, as well as working-class renditions of elite música nacional and
Afro-Ecuadorian bombas from the Chota River Valley.8 It must be noted that
lower-class mestizos seldom use this term to refer to the music they produce
and consume. While extensive research has been done on Peruvian chicha
music (Turino 1988; Hurtado 1995; Romero 2002; Quispe 2002), its Ecuador-
ian counterpart awaits scholarly attention. This neglect is due to the fact that
Ecuadorian scholars regard chichera as a subcategory of rocolera music (San-
tillán 2001; Ibarra 1998), rather than as an independent style of music with its
own history, uses, and functions.
While Peruvian scholars have described the presence of Andean migrants
in Lima as the “Andeanization” of Lima (Turino 1993), Ecuadorian social
scientists have referred to similar migratory movements of peasants to the
cities as the “rocolization” of Ecuador (Santillán 2001).9 The term “rocoliza-
tion” derives from the word rocola, the Ecuadorian word for jukebox, which
is an old device currently found in bars located in lower-class neighborhoods.
While the arrival of Andean migrants and the emergence of pueblos jóvenes
(shantytowns) in the peripheral areas of Lima changed the ethnic configura-
tion of the Peruvian capital, which had previously been known for its predom-
inantly criollo (white) population, the major impact of the rural migration in
Quito was on its social, rather than on its ethnic, configuration. As a highland
city, the population in Quito is made up of a high percentage of indigenous
and mestizo people.
The Centro Histórico of Quito can be viewed as a microcosm of the social
transformations occurring in the capital city in the 1960s and 1970s. Declared
a World Heritage Site of Humanity in 1978 because of its unique colonial
architecture, the Centro Histórico was transformed from a center of elite cul-
tural life in the first half of the twentieth century to a lower-class market of
sorts visited by peasants, foreign tourists, and white-collar workers in the pub-
lic sector.10 Important landmarks speak to the high prestige of this colonial site:
the Government Palace and the Cathedral of Quito located in the Plaza de la
Independencia; the Plaza de San Francisco and the Plaza de Santo Domingo
with their impressive old churches and monasteries built in the sixteenth cen-
tury; and the Teatro Sucre, the most important artistic center for the arts in
Quito. The house (now museum) of María Augusta Urrutia, an upper-class
woman, philanthropist, and former owner of most lands located to the north
and south of Quito, illustrates the splendor in which wealthy and aristocratic
families in the Centro Histórico lived. The interiors of the two-story house,
which has various rooms surrounding a central patio, are lavishly decorated
with European furnishings, elegant chandeliers, antiques, and the religious
paintings of renowned Ecuadorian artist Víctor Mideros (1888–1968).
138 | Chapter 5
The Centro Histórico was the heart of Quito’s social life until the 1940s
and early 1950s, when the elites moved to the Mariscal area, a district of large
estates (fincas) in north Quito that by the 1960s had become a residential
area of the bourgeoisie (Ortiz Crespo 2004). The Centro Histórico’s appear-
ance changed dramatically with the arrival of merchants and rural migrants
from neighboring areas. Old aristocratic houses were transformed into stor-
age places, retail stores, coffee shops, and small restaurants serving inex-
pensive lunches to white-collar workers employed by state and local govern-
ment agencies. The Centro Histórico became synonymous with low-priced
merchandise such as clothing, home appliances, pirated CDs, and other
discount products. By the 1970s, the streets of the Centro Histórico were a
market place with informal vendors selling contraband products and taking
over the sidewalks, including those around the Government Palace and the
Plaza de San Francisco. Itinerant shoe-shiners and indigenous women selling
their produce in the streets became commonplace. The 24 de Mayo, a street
located a few blocks south of the Plaza de la Independencia, acquired the
reputation of being a red-light district with numerous cantinas, picanterías
(small restaurants), and brothels. Gradually, the Centro Histórico became a
place that abounded in thieves and a dangerous neighborhood to walk in,
especially at night.11
Because of the constant flow of peasants and working-class people in
this area, the Centro Histórico became a strategic place for the performance
and distribution of chichera and rocolera music. The Plaza Marín at the
east entrance to the Centro Histórico was transformed into a conveniently
located bus transit center through which, because of the longitudinal layout
of Quito, all public transportation had to pass before circulating to the north
or the south of the city. Chichera and rocolera concerts were organized in the
Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo (CJCH), a sports arena located a few blocks away
from the Plaza Marín.12 Two important chichera producers, Lola Zapata and
Pablo Santillán, have their headquarters in the Centro Histórico, where they
sell their CDs at wholesale and retail prices. Interior offices in buildings that
function as small shopping centers, called pasajes (passageways), concealed
wholesale distribution centers for pirated CDs, which were sold by street ven-
dors in booths located in the Plaza Ipiales, the Plaza Marín, and the Plaza de
San Francisco.
Chichera music has invaded both the private and public spheres. To attract
buyers, street vendors in the Plaza de San Francisco play chichera music
on loudspeakers, giving the Centro Histórico a particular soundscape that
reminds visitors of the presence of the rural migrants, also known in Quito
as chagras (the Quichua word for “outsiders”). This was my experience when
consulting the music archives of the Archivo Histórico del Banco Central del
Ecuador in 2002. I could hear chichera music from the second floor of the old
building, even though the reading room did not have any windows facing the
street. It turned out to be courtesy of a vendor of pirated CDs whose booth
was near the building’s entrance and who was playing CDs as loud as possible
so as to attract customers.
The presence of the “Other” is audible not only in the Centro Histórico
but also in upper-middle-class households where maids, usually lower-class
mestizo women, listen to chichera on the radio while performing chores in
the kitchen. This music was also listened to in taxis and in buses, depend-
ing on the drivers’ musical preferences, to the consternation of some of the
passengers who dislike this music. A taxi driver and chichera fan once told
me that it was not unusual for patrons to request that he turn the radio off or
change the radio station during the ride.
Because chichera songs are basically modern renditions of mestizo sanjua-
nitos, it is important to examine the performance practices and social contexts
of the sanjuanito in order to understand where the stigma of chichera music
comes from and whose interests it serves. Not all sanjuanitos are considered
chichera music, just as not all chichera music is necessarily a sanjuanito, as
I will explain in the next section. Other types of musics labeled “chichera”
include the yumbo, the danzante, the cachullapi, and the Carnival song,
which for lack of space will not be examined in this chapter. Rather than pro-
viding a comprehensive history of the mestizo sanjuanito, a study that is yet
to be done, I provide here a brief overview of the different types of sanjuanito
performances encountered in the highland region.
The Sanjuanito
The sanjuanito is the quintessential symbol of indigenous culture and the
most popular indigenous song-dance genre in the Ecuadorian highlands.
Like the huayno—its counterpart in Peru—it is played in ritual/secular and
rural/urban contexts. It is sung in Spanish or in Quichua, the most prominent
indigenous language in Ecuador. The lyrics deal with a wide range of topics
related to love, everyday situations, sexual double entendres, and, since the
early 2000s, migration experiences. The instrumentation will vary depending
on its function, who the performers are, and where and when it is performed.
This broad range of characteristics thwarts any attempt to make generaliza-
tions about its musical characteristics, functions, meanings, and performance
practices.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, elite Ecuadorians and foreign
travelers have described the sanjuanito in somewhat negative terms. Fried-
rich Hassaurek, a world traveler and the U.S. embassador to Ecuador from
140 | Chapter 5
1861 to 1865, describes in his diary an indigenous sanjuanito performance at

a San Juan festivity in Cayambe, a town located a few miles north of Quito:
“The orchestra consisted of a trumpet, a big drum, two flutes and a horn.
They played the same tune, consisting only of a few notes during the whole
of the mortal two hours that the dance lasted.” He refers to the sanjuanito as
“monotonous” and “pitiable” (Meisch 2002, 130).
Manuel Fuente Bustamante, an upper-middle-class Ecuadorian who was
educated in Europe and played the piano, referred to the sanjuanito in a simi-
lar way. In 1937, he wrote in El Comercio, Quito’s main newspaper, that Ecua-
dorian music was perceived in Europe as weeping and sad. He questioned
whether the sanjuanito was “real music” (música verdadera) because, if this
were the case, the sanjuanito would be known throughout the world as much
as the music of Mozart and Beethoven is. Referring to its sad character, he
disdainfully wrote, “Melancholy music can only reach the soul of backward
people” (Guerrero and Mullo 2005, 104).
There is no consensus about the origin of the sanjuanito among musicians
and social scientists. Pedro Pablo Traversari (1874–1956), an academic com-
poser and compiler of the largest collection of musical instruments in Ecua-
dor, suggests a pre-Hispanic origin of the sanjuanito in Otavalo (Guerrero
Gutiérrez 2005. 2:1276–77).13 In their study of Inca music, French research-
ers Raoul and Marguerite d’Harcourt claim that the sanjuanito derives from
the Peruvian huaynito (1925), a belief that Ecuadorian academic composer
Gerardo Guevara supports in view of the Inca conquest of current Ecuadorian
territories before the Spaniards’ arrival (1990). Romero (1995, 388), however,
indicates that there is scant evidence of the existence of the huayno in pre-
Hispanic Peru, which contests Guevara’s thesis. For musicologist Segundo
Luis Moreno, the sanjuanito derives its name from San Juan Bautista (Saint
John the Baptist), the patron saint for whom the festivity that starts on June 24,
also known as the Inti Raymi, is celebrated (Moreno 1996). Anthropologist
Lynn Meisch, who has done extensive research among Otavalo merchants
and musicians, argues that the sanjuanito is a musical genre typical of the
Imbabura Province in northern Ecuador (2002, 129). My observations and
interviews with people from the southern highland provinces of Azuay and
Cañar confirm this view and show that the sanjuanito is not native to those
regions, and that local indigenous people frequently use recordings of Otava-
lan sanjuanitos to accompany their local dances.
Ecuadorian music scholars normally subdivide the sanjuanito into two
types—indigenous and mestizo—depending on the instrumentation, musi-
cal structure, and performance contexts (Moreno 1996; Guerrero 2005).
The indigenous sanjuanito distinguishes itself by its short repetitive melodies
consisting of one predominant motive in a pentatonic mode, which is played
by indigenous instruments (generally two transverse flutes or an indigenous

harp) in a heterophonic texture. In contrast, the mestizo sanjuanito is char-
acterized by more structured melodies that are arranged in a binary form, in
duple meter and played by instruments of European origin (the guitar, violin,
accordion, and so on). Moreno further distinguishes between two types of
mestizo sanjuanito: the sanjuan de blanco and the chucchurillu (little quaver).
The former is said to combine two sections in the major and minor modes,
respectively, while the latter has a predominant major mode in both sections
with only cadences in the minor mode.14
The indigenous sanjuanito in the area of Cotacachi has been studied
extensively within the context of the Inti Raymi (Wibbelsman 2009) and the
indigenous child’s wake (Schechter 1992). The ritual of the Inti Raymi, which
coincides with the Catholic celebration of Saint John’s Day on June 24, has
been examined as “encounters where Otavaleños reflexively evaluate, per-
form, and continuously redefine their sense of identity in ethnic relation to
urban mestizos, vis-à-vis one another, and as sacred beings within the Andean
universe” (Wibbelsman 2009, 73). In this weeklong festivity, indigenous
people thank the Pachamama (Earth Mother) by offering her festival food,
music, and dances for the blessings received from the harvest. The sanjuanito
plays a crucial role in providing musical context for several stages of the ritual
performance. At the child’s wake ritual (wawa velorio), the sanjuan (the local
name for the sanjuanito) accompanies the ritual meant to celebrate the entry
of a baptized child into heaven. It is danced to with back-and-forth stomps,
and it is played on an indigenous harp, often referred to as a diatonic harp
because it is tuned to one particular scale and has no pedals (Schechter 1992).
Just as the term “mestizo” is slippery and requires a contextual analysis
because it is conjuncturally defined depending on who does the identifying
and who is identified, the mestizo sanjuanito is likewise defined situationally
according to its functions, social contexts, and performance practices. It is
often hard to define even if these parameters are known. Is the sanjuanito
played on guitars and accordion in the Inti Raymi context mestizo or indig-
enous? Does the use of European instruments make it mestizo music? Does
the performance in the context of an indigenous ritual make it indigenous
music? Is the mestizo sanjuanito, following Espinosa’s view of mestizaje, an
indigenous sanjuanito with more Hispanic elements due to the use of Euro-
pean instruments? Can the same sanjuanito be considered both indigenous
and mestizo? These questions are applicable not only to the mestizo sanjua-
nito but also to chichera music as a working-class style of music.
To my knowledge, no scholarly study has ever been carried out of the
mestizo sanjuanito as an urban popular music, partly due to the sanjuanito’s
strong association with indigenous and folkloric festivals, on the one hand,
142 | Chapter 5
and the scant information about its production, circulation, and consump-
tion, on the other. From the 1940s to 1960s, IFESA, FEDISCOS, Discos
Granja, and other record companies recorded a significant number of sanjua-
nitos and other música nacional genres for diverse instrumental ensembles.
While these records are easily found in radio stations’ music archives, their
sleeves provide little information about the date on which the songs were
recorded, or whether a particular recording constitutes a new release of a song
recorded in previous years.15 Therefore, it is difficult to reconstruct the record-
ing and reception history of the urban sanjuanito in this period.
Information about the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mestizo
sanjuanito outside the ritual context is scant, with only a few surviving tran-
scriptions for piano and military band. The Ecuadorian composer and visual
artist Juan Agustín Guerrero compiled in the 1870s a collection of indigenous
melodies for Spanish historian Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, who presented
it at the Fourth Congress of Americanists in 1881 (Guerrero 1993). The col-
lection was published with the title Yaravíes, a generic term Jiménez de la
Espada assigned to all types of indigenous and montubio (coastal peasant)
music from Ecuador. The collection includes the transcription of one san-
juanito with the typical rhythmic pattern of four sixteenth notes followed by
two eighth notes in a minor mode harmonic progression VI-III-V-I, which is
characteristic of Ecuadorian mestizo music. There is no information about
when or where this sanjuanito would have been played in the original context
or what instruments would have been used.
The Fondo Musical Vaca, an impressive archive of approximately seventy
thousand folios of band music scores for national and international popular
music of the early twentieth century, constitutes an important source for the
study of the mestizo sanjuanito in urban areas. Compiled by José Miguel Vaca
Flores, a band conductor who served on different military bases in the coastal
and highland regions, this collection includes music scores printed in Europe
and the United States, as well as numerous pasillos, sanjuanitos, valses, fox-
trots, two-steps, and arias from operettas and zarzuelas transcribed by scribes
onto staff paper. The considerable number of sanjuanito instrumental parts
found in this collection suggests that they were performed frequently, though
the amount is significantly smaller than the hundreds of pasillo scores found
in the same collection. The disproportion suggests that the sanjuanito was far
less popular than the pasillo, at least for the public that congregated in the city
parks where the military bands used to play.16
In addition to the military band, the mestizo sanjuanito is popular in
the highland region in various performance styles. In small towns, bandas
de pueblo (village brass bands) play sanjuanitos and other types of Ecuador-
ian popular music in processions and at local festivities. In the Chota Valley,
Afro-Ecuadorian people play sanjuanitos on secular occasions with a conjunto

de bomba, an ensemble made up of guitars, a requinto, and a two-headed
drum called the bomba. The banda mocha, an original ensemble formed of
flutes, a drum, orange-tree leaf, and chopped-gourd instruments imitating
the sounds of brass band instruments, also play sanjuanitos in secular contexts
(Franco 1999).
The focus on an idealized indigenous culture of the distant past as the ori-
gin of the Ecuadorian nation compelled nationalist composers to adopt indi-
geous musical genres as the basis for an Ecuadorian art music. In the early
twentieth century, academic nationalist composers incorporated stylized ren-
ditions of the mestizo sanjuanito into their works for piano and symphony
orchestra, most prominently in the “Suite Ecuatoriana,” a cyclic composition
that alternates indigenous and mestizo folk numbers following the structure
of the baroque suite. In the first half of the twentieth century, Segundo Luis
Moreno, Luis Humberto Salgado, and Corsino Durán composed several
suites incorporating this scheme, which they sometimes called “mosaico”
(medley) or “aires nativos” (native airs). In an attempt to blend Ecuadorian
vernacular music with modernist European music, Salgado wrote in 1944 the
“Sanjuanito Futurista” (Futurist sanjuanito), a short and unique experimental
piece for piano inspired by the dodecaphonic system (Wong 2004).
The sanjuanito played by Pan-Andean folkloric ensembles, which I call
the “folkloric sanjuanito,” is perhaps the best-known type of sanjuanito within
and outside of Ecuador. Meisch provides a detailed history of the formation of
Otavalan folkloric ensembles, which have adopted the Pan-Andean ensemble
instrumentation of panpipes, quena, charango, and bomba, with the addition
of the violin and the rondador, idiosyncratic instruments of indigenous music
in the Otavalo area.17 Unlike indigenous people who have assimilated to the
urban lifestyles, Otavalans preserve their identity markers, such as dress, lan-
guage, and pride in their ethnic identity. Meisch argues that these ensembles
became significant agents of Otavalo’s cultural renaissance, a period that was
characterized by the expansion and development of the tourism and textile
industries (2002, 137). Founded between 1967 and 1977, the Charijavac,
Ñanda Mañachi, and Grupo Peguche ensembles have innovated and mod-
ernized the indigenous sanjuanito into a cosmopolitan Andean style. Indige-
nous and professional dance groups in Ecuador dance to folkloric sanjuanitos,
especially those composed by Ñanda Mañachi. Their songs have become the
standard repertoire that accompanies most dance festivals featuring indige-
nous culture in Ecuador.
Between 2002 and 2004, I attended several indigenous festivals in Quito
in which self-identified indigenous and lower-class mestizo people from vari-
ous highland provinces danced to Ñanda Mañachi’s famous sanjuanito “Ñuca
144 | Chapter 5
llacta” (Our land). Ecuadorian migrant associations in Madrid also dance to

this song in the cultural programs aimed at reaffirming their cultural identity
in the host country. “Ñuca llacta” usually accompanies the tukumán or “baile
de cintas” (ribbon dance), an indigenous dance reminiscent of a European
maypole. In this dance, participants weave long ribbons hanging from the
top of a pole in a colorful braid, moving then in the opposite direction to
reverse the weave back to the original position. It is possible that the tukumán
may have originated in Europe but is now considered a traditional indigenous
dance in Ecuador. The ubiquity of this song in dance festivals is partly due to
the availability of Ñanda Mañachi’s recordings and the fact that it is an Otava-
lan folkloric ensemble that has reached a high level of popularity outside of
Ecuador. More sophisticated in its melodic arrangement than the traditional
indigenous sanjuanito, the folkloric sanjuanito represents the aesthetics of
cosmopolitan indigenous people who have grown up in large cities and have
traveled around the world.
It is important to note that none of the sanjuanitos for military bands, ban-
das de pueblo, symphony orchestras, or folkloric ensembles mentioned above
is considered chichera music. And none has incorporated electronic instru-
ments or has been broadly disseminated on the radio or in records. Chichera
is an urban popular music associated with indigenous people and lower-class
mestizos who have migrated to the cities, the people the elites identify as
cholos and longos.
The Sanjuanito in the Música Nacional Anthology

The scant number of sanjuanitos recorded by Victor and Columbia Records in
the 1910s and 1920s shows that these companies had little interest in recording
a popular music style that would not sell well among their upper-middle-class
clients. Apparently, neither had Antenor Encalada, the Ecuadorian entrepre-
neur who produced the first local recordings of Ecuadorian music, since no
sanjuanito appears among the 278 songs that Favorite Records, the German
record company he represented, released in 1912 (Pro 1997a). Various singers
and instrumental ensembles recorded sanjuanitos as part of a música nacional
repertoire in the mid-twentieth century. In 1942, Carlota Jaramillo and Luis
Alberto Valencia recorded música nacional duets including several sanjuani-
tos. The recordings were made in Ecuador, but RCA Victor manufactured the
records in Argentina. Valencia sang the main melody while Jaramillo sang
the second voice.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Luis Aníbal Granja (1901–91), a composer, pianist,
accordionist, music arranger and producer, and conductor of several musical
groups (Los Chagras, Orquesta Quito, and Orquesta Granja), played música
nacional on Radio Quito on a regular basis.18 Granja also recorded many

instrumental sanjuanitos with his orchestra and in an arrangement for two
pianos with Segundo Bautista, the composer of “Collar de lágrimas” (Neck-
lace of tears), the fox incaico that became the hymn of Ecuadorian migrants.
Granja targeted his records to a highland audience judging by the repertoire
of aires típicos, saltashpas, cachullapis, and sanjuanitos that were recorded.
These genres are not popular in the coastal region due to the strong penta-
tonic flavor in the melodies that indexes indigenous culture. Titles such as
“Longuita” (Beloved woman from the highlands) and “Indiecito Otavaleño”
(Little Otavalan indian) allude to stereotypical highland figures.
In the late 1910s, highland composer Guillermo Garzón (1902–75) com-
posed “Pobre Corazón,” an urban mestizo sanjuanito that featured lyrics,
musical structure, and instrumentation that conformed to the elites’ Euro-
pean-oriented aesthetics and was thus eligible to enter the música nacional rep-
ertoire. Both the lyrics and musical arrangements distinguish this “national”
sanjuanito from other types of urban mestizo sanjuanitos recorded later by the
national record companies, such as “Por una guambrita” and “El conejito”
(which is discussed below), in that it conveys a sense of loss and sadness in a
musical style reminiscent of the elite pasillo. The lyrics deal with a man who
is brokenhearted because he must leave his lover and cannot stand the sad
farewell. The contrasting musical sections with descending and ascending
melodic lines in open-ended phrases illustrate the stylization of this musical
genre. The performance of this sanjuanito by the Trío Los Brillantes is based
on a three-voice harmonic arrangement and a guitar-and-requinto ensemble,
the typical instrumentation of traditional pasillos of the 1960s. (PURL 2.4)
In the 1950s and 1960s, national record labels released commercial san-
juanitos with costumbrismo-type lyrics that evoke scenes of everyday life. The
sanjuanito “No te has peinado” (You have not combed your hair) tells the
story of a woman who finds when she returns home that her husband has
neither combed his hair nor taken a bath all day. “El conejito” (The little rab-
bit) tells the double-entendre story of a little rabbit that jumps into bed during
the night and does not want to leave it. “Por una guambrita” (For a beautiful
indigenous girl), a song recorded in the 1950s by renowned música nacional
singers Fresia Saavedra and Carlos Rubira Infante, tells a story of misunder-
standings between an indigenous couple who approach the civil authorities to
solve their conjugal problems.19 The woman complains because her husband
does not sleep with her; the man acknowledges he cannot live without her.
The song ends with their reconciliation when both realize that they love each
other. The terms guambrita and longuita are diminutive forms of the Qui-
chua words guambra (indigenous woman) and longa (an expression of affec-
tion for an indigenous woman, when used by indigenous people).
146 | Chapter 5
Por una guambrita me encuentro aquí

Si ella no me quiere no sé que haré
Yo sé que algún día será mi amor
Y si será firme como soy yo.
Señor Comisario, justicia le pido

Que este mi marido no duerme conmigo.
Señor Intendente, esta mujer miente
Yo duermo con ella y ella no me siente
Ay longuita quiéreme así

Ay longuito yo te querré
Ay longuita no seas así
Ay longuito yo te querré
Si nos queremos vamos de aquí
[For an indigenous girl I’m here

If she doesn’t love me, I don’t know what I’ll do
I know that some day she’ll be my love
And if she’ll be firm as I am.
Mr. Commissioner, I ask you for justice

This man, my husband, doesn’t sleep with me.
Mr. Intendent, this woman lies
I sleep with her, but she doesn’t feel me.
Ah, dear woman, love me this way

Ah, dear man, I’ll love you
Ah, dear woman, don’t behave like this
Ah, dear man, I’ll love you.
If we love each other, let’s get out of here.]
The pentatonic melody, the typical sanjuanito rhythmic pattern of four

sixteenth notes followed by various combinations of eighth and sixteenth
notes, and the inclusion of nonlexical expressions during the performance
are typical musical features of Ecuadorian indigenous music. The Euro-
pean influence is seen in the poetic form of the lyrics (verses set in cou-
plets), the guitar accompaniment, and the polished singing style of Saavedra
and Rubira Infante. One rendition includes a requinto and a saxophone
playing melodic counterpoints and instrumental interludes between the
stanzas. (PURL 5.1)
Figure 5.1 Sanjuanito “Por una guambrita.” Transcription by the author.
The Rise of Chichera Music

According to composers Naldo Campos and Ricardo Realpe, the term
chichera as a music label was relatively unknown in Ecuador prior to the
1970s. Urban mestizo sanjuanitos were arranged for acoustic guitars only, fol-
lowing the performance practice of elite música nacional and the economic
interests of national record companies in keeping production costs as low as
possible. Campos recalls his first music arrangements for FEDISCOS:
When I started recording Ecuadorian music, arrangements were basically with

guitars and, if possible, accordion. I considered this instrumentation to be poor.
I tried to stage a revolution. At my young age [fifteen], I realized that something
was missing. When I turned eighteen [1967] , I began to direct my own record-
ings and had the opportunity to make innovations, but I had problems with
the record companies because they did not want to increase production costs.
There were restrictions: only three instruments. Sometimes I added a requinto
and did not charge for it. . . . I began incorporating the saxophone, but no per-
cussion. This was prohibited [because of additional cost]. (Personal interview,
2001)
Campos indicated that some percussion was added to the arrangements in

the 1970s, but it was almost unnoticeable: “A snare drum and a light cymbal
were added here and there. It sounded like an unsophisticated thing [cosita
pueblerina]” (personal interview, 2001). Campos not only introduced light
percussion but also blended the rhythms of the Colombian cumbia with the
melodies of sanjuanitos and pasacalles. He also introduced electronic percus-
sion and a variety of organ- and accordion-like timbres on the synthesizer.
Middle-class Ecuadorians listened to this type of mestizo sanjuanito as it was
not yet associated with the low social contexts of chichera music.
For Ricardo Realpe, the term chichera indicates modern performances of
sanjuanitos by music bands consisting of synthesizers, an electric bass, and
a drum kit. Rock Star, a group founded by Jaime Toaza in the early 1970s,
148 | Chapter 5
pioneered this music trend in Quito. According to Realpe, Toaza arranged

sanjuanitos with a particular timbre on the Yamaha 270 organ, which is
“loud [chillón], screaming, but at the same time, sweet and bitter” (personal
interview, 2004). Other music bands adopted this timbre soon afterward,
which, according to Realpe, gives chichera its peculiar sound. In the late
1990s, Rock Star popularized a tropical version of the fox incaico “Collar
de lágrimas” (Necklace of tears), a song Segundo Bautista composed out of
nostalgia for his homeland when he first left Ecuador on a concert tour in
1958 (personal interview, 2004). Bautista’s recording of this song became a
hit in Ecuador and is part of the música nacional anthology. It should be
noted that while the original version performed on guitar and requinto is
considered música nacional, Rock Star’s modern dance is regarded as chich-
era. Rock Star altered the slow tempo and sad character of this song, chang-
ing it into an energetic and fast-tempo dance. Because the lyrics speak to
the experiences of Ecuadorians who have left their homeland, their moth-
ers, and their sweethearts, this song has become the popular anthem of
Ecuadorian migrants. (PURL 5.2, 5.3)
Así será mi destino, partir lleno de dolor

Llorando lejos de mi patria,
Lejos de mi madre y de mi amor.
Collar de lágrimas dejo en tus manos

Y en el pañuelito consérvalo mi bien.
En las lejanías será mi patria,

Que con mis canciones recordaré.
A mi madre santa le pido al cielo

Me conceda siempre la bendición.
[This will be my destiny, to leave full of pain

Weeping far from my homeland,
Far from my mother, and from my sweetheart.
A necklace of tears I leave in your hands

And in the little handkerchief keep it safe, my love.
In the distance will be my homeland,

That I will remember with my songs.
To my saintly mother I pray to heaven

May she always grant me her blessing.]
Rather than being flattered by the success of his song, Segundo Bautista was
upset and rejected the dance version performed by chichera bands. He felt
that his song had been distorted and did not express the deep sentiments
he felt when he composed it. In addition, he did not receive any copyright
fees from the recording and performance of the modern version (personal
interview, 2004). Unlike Los Jokers’ tropical rendition of “La bocina,” which
was seen as música tropical and danced to by the upper-middle classes in
the 1970s, Rock Star’s arrangement of “Collar de lágrimas” was considered
chichera from the outset due to the ethnic background of the singers and audi-
ence, who were predominantly lower-class mestizos.
I listened to Rock Star’s rendition at an EPM concert organized by Radio
Presidente on Valentine’s Day in 2002 at the CJCH. The song aroused vary-
ing emotional responses. Many people danced happily to it despite its sad
lyrics. Some people cried bitterly and inconsolably for absent loved ones. I
saw a few men drunk and slumped over on their seats or lying on the floor.
Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid experienced similar feelings of sadness when
they listened to this song, as I observed during my stay in Spain in April 2003.
Many people I spoke to in the concerts stated that the song expresses the feel-
ing of longing for their previous lives in Ecuador.
The Chichera Music Market

Producciones Calle, a family-owned record company with a series of record
labels in Guayaquil and Quito, released the first recordings of modern san-
juanitos; however, it was Producciones Zapata that launched the first chich-
era music stars on a national level. Lola Zapata, a lower-middle-class mestizo
woman who worked for Producciones Calle for several years, opened her own
music store in 1970 and started producing chichera music in 1986. Zapata pro-
moted two kinds of performances: one with chichera bands such as Star Band,
a group she formed in the 1990s, and the other with solo singers such as Azu-
cena Aymara and María de los Ángeles, who became tecnocumbia stars when
they changed their repertoire in the early 2000s. Zapata is known among
musicians as having a sixth sense for anticipating a song hit. One chichera
singer stated that one of her strategies consists of recycling old songs using
modern arrangements that the younger generations would perceive as new.
An example of this strategy is the sanjuanito “El conejito” (The little rabbit),
an older song recorded by Los Conquistadores in the late 1990s for Producto-
res Independientes, another chichera record label in Quito.
150 | Chapter 5
I observed Los Conquistadores several times in 2002 and 2003. This is a

group from Ambato made up of one singer and three dancers performing set
choreographies. The singer, Francisco Manobandas, sings the Spanish lyrics
with a heavy Quichua accent that reveals his ethnic background. “El cone-
jito” employs a rabbit figure to tell the story of a man who comes to visit a
woman at midnight and jumps into her bed without underwear. When they
perform the song, Los Conquistadores wear rabbits’ ears and tails. The group
performed “El conejito” at a fast tempo using recorded tapes for accompani-
ment, thus underscoring its primary function as a dance. The choreography
includes vigorous movements across the stage. (PURL 5.4)
Ay mi conejito era tan vanidón, ay caramba

Subiendo a la cama no quiso bajar, ay caramba
A la media noche llegó sin calzón, ay caramba.
[Ay, my little rabbit was so vain, ay caramba

Jumping into bed, he did not want to get out, ay caramba
At midnight he came in without underwear, ay caramba.]
Both música nacional and rocolera artists disparage this piece for its vulgar
lyrics. Rocolera singer Teresita Andrade, for example, refuses to perform this
type of song in concerts. When Ecuadorians in New York ask her to sing “El
conejito,” she replies, “I do not sing to animals but to my beloved people.”
In a personal interview, Andrade realized that as a rocolera singer, she had
the same negative reaction toward chichera music that elite música nacional
artists had had toward rocolera music when it first emerged in the 1970s.
Upper-middle-class audiences also disapprove of “El conejito.” Many young
people of this social sector I spoke to acknowledged occasionally watching
the video on the television program Diez sobre Diez, which airs on a UHF
television channel in Quito. The lyrics, the body gestures, and the singers’
outfits were the subject of mockery because they were considered coarse and
tasteless. However, chichera fans reacted enthusiastically to this and other
happy chichera songs.
Chichera Trends at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Realpe, the quintessential chichera composer, once pointed out that the fig-
ure of a charismatic solo singer was the only thing that chichera music lacked
to reach national prominence. Until then, music bands and little-known sing-
ers had recorded modern sanjuanitos with moderate success at the local level.
It was only in the late 1990s when chichera music reached higher levels of
Figure 5.2 Los Conquistadores singing “El conejito.” Photograph by the author.
popularity with two charismatic singers—Ángel Guaraca from the highland

province of Chimborazo, and Bayronn Caicedo from the eastern province of
Pastaza. Unlike Los Conquistadores and Rock Star, Guaraca and Caicedo do
not recycle or modernize old songs, but write new ones in sanjuanito, yumbo,
and other popular music genres. They sing in Spanish and/or Quichua, and
their songs deal with a variety of topics related to love, breakups, migration,
and Ecuadorian pride. Their singing style is devoid of sobbing intonations
and nasal voices typical of rocolera singers; nor do they feature nonlexical
expressions typical of the national sanjuanito.
Following the tecnocumbia performance style in Ecuador, Guaraca and
Caicedo sing to the accompaniment of recorded tracks, though they do not
include dance choreographies in their performances. Both singers tour the
United States and Europe extensively, performing to the Ecuadorian migrant
communities and selling more records than singers of música nacional and
rocolera put together. Despite the abundance of pirated copies of their record-
ings, their CDs sell extremely well in Ecuador and abroad, thus represent-
ing a secure investment for music producers. Due to their enormous success,
Guaraca and Caicedo are now producing their own records.
Ángel Guaraca (b. 1975), who proudly calls himself the “Indio cantor de
América” (Indian Singer of America), was a peasant who used to work the
land and later earned a living as a plumber and a taxi driver in the province
of Chimborazo. He began singing in rural areas and gradually conquered
the local market in Quito with his first CD release produced by Produccio-
nes Zapata. He transformed the sound and lyrical content of the yumbo, a
traditional indigenous song-dance genre from the central highland region
152 | Chapter 5
Figure 5.3 Ángel Guaraca. Photograph by the author.
typically performed during the Corpus Christi festivals. Unlike the sex-
ual double entendres characteristic of early chichera songs, Guaraca’s lyr-
ics express pride for his indigenous culture, region, and country, and they
address the immigration experience of his fellow Ecuadorians. At concerts,
he speaks and sings to his audience in both Quichua and Spanish. He has
been interviewed on mainstream television programs as a “música nacional
phenomenon.”20
Guaraca projects an image of modernity with his carefully selected outfits
featuring a cowboy hat, leather pants with fringes, leather gloves with metal
studs, leather boots, and a vest woven with indigenous designs or the Ecua-
dorian coat of arms. He wears his long hair loose rather than in a braid, thus
keeping an indigenous cultural trait (long hair) but displayed in a modern
way. Guaraca projects a high level of self-esteem on stage when he refers to
himself as “la revelación musical del milenio” (the musical revelation of the
millennium). In the song “Campesino de mi tierra” (Peasant of my land), he
employs the poncho as a symbol of the national culture and promotes the
unity of Ecuadorian people living in and outside the country. With statements
such as, “Para todos mis compatriotas que están fuera de nuestra patria” (For
all my compatriots who are outside of our homeland), Guaraca acknowledges

the idea of a de-territorialized Ecuadorian nation with a diasporic population
united by emotional bonds and a recognition of a common origin. (PURL 2.2)
Soy campesino de mi tierra, sí señor

Con mucho orgullo cantaré para Ecuador.
Miles descubren la vencida sí señor

Pobres hijos y humildes somos Ecuador.
Este es mi poncho, es la cultura nacional

Angel Guaraca es el vocero del pueblo indio de mi patria.
[I am a peasant of my land, yes sir

With great pride I will sing for Ecuador.
Thousands of people discover our land, yes my lord

Poor and humble sons we are Ecuador.
This is my poncho, it’s the national culture

Ángel Guaraca is the spokesman of the Indian people of my homeland.]
His song “El migrante” (The emigrant) tells a well-known story for thousands
of Ecuadorian migrants who have left their children at home under the care
of their grandmothers. The song starts with a phone conversation between a
migrant father and his little son, who tells his father that he wants to see him,
instead of receiving beautiful toys and clothes by mail. The father explains to
him that he is working to improve the family’s economic situation and can-
not return to Ecuador. The song narrates the experiences of undocumented
migrants who risk their lives to cross the border and suffer for not being
close to their children. The migrant asks God to protect his children and
the grandmothers, who have become substitute parents. This song has had
a great impact on lower-class mestizos because it addresses the Ecuadorian
migrants’ experience of not being able to see their children grow. The song
has an upbeat rhythm in a sanjuanito form.
While Guaraca has many followers among the indigenous and lower-class
mestizo population, both in the rural and urban areas, he is criticized and
mocked by upper-class mestizos who view his songs as the music of cholos
and longos. YouTube comments reveal a hidden racism in the opinions of fans
and detractors, which, to a great extent, point out the white-mestizos’ denial
of their indigenous heritage:
154 | Chapter 5
“Angel Guaraca hace música chichera y les gusta solo a los longos e indios.”
[Angel Guaraca makes chichera music and only the longos and Indians like it.]
“La cara de ese puto indio se parece al culo de una gallina jajaj fuk up!”
[The face of that fucking Indian looks like a chicken’s asshole, ha hah what a
fuck up!]
In contrast, Guaraca’s fans point to their pride of being indigenous people and
criticize white-mestizos who do not acknowledge their common ethnic roots.
“Bravo guaraca haces bailar hasta los criticones aunque los que te critican sean
tus coterráneos.”
[Bravo, Guaraca. You make even your picky critics dance, even though the guys
who criticize you are your countrymen.]
“Mi humilde opinión, en Ecuador la mayoría somos decendientes [sic] de indí-

genas y el que es blanco ojos azules ese no es un auténtico ecuatoriano yo orgul-
loso de ser 100% indígena carajo.”
[In my humble opinion most people in Ecuador are descendants of indigenous

people and someone who is white and has blue eyes is not an authentic Ecua-
dorian. I am proud of being 100% indigenous.]
“Hola no entiendo xq se averguenzan de su musica si es tan linda y muy alegre

para bailar . . . ayq sntirseorgullosos [sic] de lo que es nuestro[.] yo soy peruana
pero me gusta mucho la musica ecuatoriana . . . gracias a que tengo muchas
amistades ecuatorianas y si he visto personas en mi instituto que son de Ecua-
dor y se averguenzan de su musica o prefieren no oirlas.”
[Hi, I don’t understand why [Ecuadorians] are ashamed of their music. It is so

beautiful and lively to dance to. One should feel proud of one’s own culture. I’m
a Peruvian but I really like Ecuadorian music . . . because I have a lot of Ecua-
dorian friends. And I’ve seen people in my institute who are from Ecuador and
are ashamed of their music or prefer not to listen to it.]
The government officially recognizes indigenous peoples, languages, and

cultures within its national territory. According to the 1998 Constitution,
Ecuador’s official language is Spanish, though Quichua and other indigenous
languages are recognized as part of the national culture.21 The recognition of
Ecuador as a pluriethnic and multinational country has led to an educational
system that allows indigenous children to study elementary school in their
native language. The Quichua language has become more visible through
government broadcasts on radio and television. In search of multinational sym-
bols that represent Ecuador’s pluriethnic population, the government released
in 2008 a multilingual version of Ecuador’s national anthem, which is sung in
Quichua and Spanish and presents a marimba arrangement in the stanza.
Likewise, indigenous intellectuals have great visibility at the national and
international levels due to the indigenous uprisings and their service to the
country in important government positions. Luis Macas was the minister of
agriculture in 2003 and a presidential candidate in the 2006 elections, 22 while
Nina Pacari was the minister of foreign affairs in 2003 and is a judge of the
Supreme Court of Ecuador since 2007.23 Furthermore, the Confederation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) has led protest rallies and
ousted constitutional presidents, and by doing so has confronted one of the
foundational myths of the Ecuadorian nationhood (myth of the “defeated
race”).24 In addition, indigenous people administer their own forms of jus-
tice within their communities, some of which have been criticized by non-
indigenous people. Despite the official recognition of the various indigenous
nationalities within the Ecuadorian territory and the political achievements
of an intellectual indigenous elite, common indigenous people are looked
down upon and scorned, just as the previous YouTube comments show. This
attitude is also observed in everyday interactions and in the use of the terms
cholo and longo as forms of insult.
Ángel Guaraca embodies a blurring line between an indigenous and a
mestizo identity. He identifies himself as an “Indian,” though some of his
listeners may identify him as a mestizo because of his costumes, success,
and urban lifestyle. His music can be classified as “indigenous” for its overtly
indigenous roots (sanjuanito and yumbo), or “mestizo” (meaning lower-class
mestizo) for the modern instrumentation in the songs. What kind of music
Guaraca sings will be perceived differently according to the social and cul-
tural background of the listeners. It is worth noting that chichera music is
rarely used as an indigenous cultural symbol among the indigenous social
movements and the intellectual elites, which look at traditional rituals as
emblematic cultural elements.
Known as “El duro del Ecuador” (The Tough Man of Ecuador), Bayronn
Caicedo is a mestizo singer and songwriter who has composed songs in a wide
variety of genres—cumbia, paseíto, sanjuanito, danzante, yumbo—with inno-
vative lyrics reflecting Ecuadorians’ migration experiences. “El anillo” (The
ring), for example, describes a man who asks his former fiancée to return the
engagement ring he gave her when he was in Ecuador since she has a new
partner and their relationship has ended. The song blends pentatonic melo-
dies with an eclectic mixture of different rhythms such as the sanjuanito, the
156 | Chapter 5
cumbia, the paseíto, and disco music. The sanjuanito influence is especially
noticeable in the theme of the instrumental interlude and the use of organ-
like timbres in the synthesizer. The arrangement includes the timbres of pan-
pipes and flutes, underscoring the indigenous roots of the music. The cumbia
rhythm throughout the song highlights its tropical and danceable character.
Devuélveme el anillo que yo te regalé

Ya no debes usarlo, lo nuestro terminó
Ya tienes otro amor, eso no puede ser
Que luzcas en tu mano el anillo que te dí.
Tan solo, tan solo vivo sin tu amor (bis)

Que rápido buscaste quien me reemplace a mí
En cambio solo vivo con mi amigo el dolor.
[Return to me the ring that I gave you

You should not use it any more, our relationship is over
You have another love, you cannot
Carry on your hand the ring I gave you.
So lonely, so lonely I live without your love

How quickly you found someone to replace me
On the other hand, I live only with my friend, pain.]
In “Dos cariños” (Two loves), Caicedo tells the story of a married man who
migrates to Spain hoping to have a better future. Feeling lonely in the host
country, he engages in a new relationship but feels guilty for his infidelity,
then tells his wife the truth and asks her to forgive him. Unlike rocolera lyr-
ics, where the man views himself as a victim of a treacherous woman, in
Caicedo’s song the man acknowledges his unfaithfulness and regrets the pain
he has caused his wife. (PURL 5.5)
(Hablado)
Lo que aquí gano no sirve para vivir
Me voy al extranjero.
Por Dios cuida a esos guaguas
y no me traiciones, amor.
Vuelvo pronto. Confía en mí.
(Cantado)
Yo que por bien hacer, darte vida mejor
De tí me ausenté por un tiempo no más.
Pero la soledad me comenzó a afectar

Por falta de calor otra me abrigó.
Por diversión no más cuando todo empezó

Quien iba a imaginar que iba a durar
Perdóname Señor esta infidelidad
Quiero pagar mi error con mi sufrir.
[(Spoken)
What I earn here is not enough to live on
I am going abroad.
Please take care of the children
And do not cheat on me my love.
I will return soon. Trust me.
(Sung)
Because I wanted to give you a better life
I left you only for a while.
But solitude began to affect me
Another woman warmed me up when I needed it.
It was only diversion when it began

Who could imagine that it would last
Forgive me, Lord, this infidelity
I want to pay for my mistake with suffering.]
Caicedo released the album Cojiéndote los calzones (Taking your panties)
with a selection of his most popular songs. The album jacket shows the singer
against a background of the colors of the rainbow, which are the colors of the
indigenous flag in the Andes. As a mestizo person, he wears a hat and a vest
that signify his pride for his indigenous heritage. Both Caicedo and Guaraca
perform regularly in small towns in the highland and oriental regions, and
their audiences include children, adults, and the elderly of both indigenous
and mestizo origin.
Negative references to indigenous people are also observed in the You-
Tube comments for Caicedo. For example,
“Que le pasa a este hombre, de que manera hay qexplicarle, ni siquiera la bola
de indigenas asquerosos q estan alrededor le siguen el baile estupido eso, q asco
de letra es una vergüenza para mi pais.”
158 | Chapter 5
Figure 5.4 CD jacket. Bayronn Caicedo. El duro del Ecuador. Cojiéndote los
calzones. Productores Independentes. Source: Santillán, Pablo.
[What’s with this guy, why doesn’t he get it? Not even the pack of dirty Indi-
ans hanging around are doing those stupid dance steps of his. The lyrics suck.
They’re an embarrassment for my country.]
“JAJAJAJAJA este marik es lo maximo. Yo le compro el dvd solo pa reirme todo

el dia.”
[Ha ha ha ha ha that jerk takes the cake. The only reason I buy the DVD is for
a few good laughs.]
“Hay q dejarle al pobre hombre, en si, es feliz en su propia ridicules; pero si por
favor no digan q representan a ecuador, q hacen quedar mal en el extranjero.”
[Let’s let the poor guy be, if he’s happy playing the fool, fine. But don’t tell me
that he represents Ecuador because he makes us look bad abroad.]
These critiques of Caicedo, a mestizo singer with a broad following among

the indigenous and lower-class Ecuadorians, are symptomatic of the associa-
tion of chichera music with “backwardness” and bad taste, elements that are
not associated with the elite música nacional. Despite his success with com-
mercial hybrid forms of Ecuadorian folk and popular music, Caicedo remains
on the margins as a singer who sings to the cholos and longos.
Música Nacional Bailable

How people label their music and the music of other social groups reveals
how they view themselves and the “Other” within the national context.
Three prominent music labels in Ecuador—música nacional, rocolera, and
chichera—have acquired particular connotations and have become ethnic
identity markers of the people they represent and the social contexts they
reflect. Música nacional refers to the song repertoire of the upper-middle
classes (white-mestizos) that was nationalized in the 1920s and 1930s. Rocol-
era points to a working-class music stereotyped as music of cantinas and
betrayals and consumed by lower-middle-class mestizos (cholos and longos).
Chichera had acquired the negative attributes linked to indigenous people,
such as “ridiculous” and “tasteless” music. What happens when the lower
classes appropriate and resignify the labels that the elites have chosen to
name their own music? Since the late 1990s, the popular classes have been
using the term música nacional bailable (danceable national music) to refer to
chichera music. In this usage, the adjective “bailable” qualifies música nacio-
nal’s function for dancing and distinguishes it from the elite música nacional,
also known as música nacional antigua among the popular classes because it
is perceived as old, sad, and undanceable music.
Since the early 2000s, the label música nacional frequently has appeared
on the jacket covers of pirated CDs of chichera music, such as the music
of Los Conejitos, Rock Star, Ángel Guaraca, and Bayronn Caicedo. It is
worth noting that I never saw a jacket cover promoting this style of music as
chichera, a label used by the elites, rather than by the popular classes. At a
symbolic level, the term música nacional elevates chichera to an emblematic
expression of the nation, similar to the way the upper-middle classes heralded
the pasillo and other folk musical genres as the official national music during
the pasillo’s golden age.
In order to attract male buyers, pirate vendors download pictures of sexy
women from pornographic websites and print them on the jacket covers.
One vendor I interviewed in the Centro Histórico stated that men were more
inclined to buy CDs with these pictures rather than with pictures of singers,
monuments, or landscapes. Another marketing strategy consists of including
the term in album titles, such as “Nacional de impacto” (National music of
impact) or “Los duros de la música nacional” (The tough guys of national
music; meaning the best singers of Ecuadorian music). These labels, which
appear sporadically on jacket covers depending on the vendors’ taste, have
never become as popular as the term música nacional bailable.
160 | Chapter 5
Figure 5.5 Total mix nacional. Jacket cover of a chichera pirated CD.
Conclusion
The tropicalization of elite música nacional and the mestizo sanjuanito
reveals two approaches toward modernity and the reception of foreign inter-
national musics. While salsa and cumbia renditions of música nacional in the
1960s and 1970s reflected the optimism of upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
for a better future in a period of bonanza and modernization, the emergence
of chichera music in the 1970s and 1980s represented a response by rural
migrants to the same phenomenon from their social and economic positions.
Chichera groups and solo singers, such as Rock Star and Ángel Guaraca,
embraced modernity by incorporating electronic instruments and modern
arrangements into indigenous and mestizo music in the 1980s–2000s. How-
ever, música nacional singers disdained tropical renditions of the pasillo in
the 1960s for its rhythmic and stylistic modifications.
It is worth noting that although Peruvian chicha and Ecuadorian chichera
music share similar histories of stigmatization, they have developed different
sounds and meanings in each country. While Peruvian chicha modernized
Figure 5.6 Nacional de impacto. Jacket cover of a chichera pirated CD.
the urban commercial huayno, Ecuadorian chichera modernized the sanjua-

nito and the yumbo. The former is typified by the timbre of an electric lead
guitar playing the melody, whereas a synthesizer with an accordion-like tim-
bre characterizes the latter. Differences, however, are more noticeable in the
performance style. While Peruvian chicha is played with a live band, Ecua-
dorian chichera is typically performed by soloists to the accompaniment of
recorded tracks. For Andean migrants in Lima, chicha articulates a modern
urban identity through which they distance themselves from images of “Indi-
anness.” In Ecuador, chichera singers emphasize their indigenous identity by
singing in Quichua and by wearing indigenous clothing such as hats, vests,
and ponchos.
In his study on hybrid cultures, García Canclini analyzes various ways
in which Latin American people enter and exit modernity (García Canclini
1992), a notion that Romero (2001) uses in his study of music making in the
Mantaro Valley, Peru. He claims that indigenous people in this region keep
playing their traditional music at indigenous festivals, while they listen and
dance to modern chicha music in urban contexts. There is no contradic-
tion or acculturation in these seemingly opposed musical practices because,
although both types of music have different functions, contexts, and mean-
ings, they share a common origin. In a similar vein, chichera singers in Ecua-
dor have innovated and modernized the sanjuanito and the yumbo without
162 | Chapter 5
sacrificing the traditional forms of these genres. At the Inti Raymi festivities
they dance to indigenous and mestizo sanjuanitos played by indigenous flutes
and drums, yet at EPM concerts in Quito they dance to “El conejito” with
recorded tapes.
Tradition and modernity are often thought of as binary oppositions that
challenge notions of “authenticity” and continuity; however, they are not nec-
essarily opposed to each other. By modernizing sanjuanitos and yumbos with
electronic instrumentation and new lyrics alluding to current migration expe-
riences, lower-class Ecuadorians are showing not only their ability to innovate
traditional music but also their agency in ensuring continuity of their musical
traditions in the context of globalization. The prominence of chichera music
in the 1990s and early 2000s reflects how the popular classes have decentered
the center and how they are changing commonly held notions of elite música
nacional, indigenous people, and the mestizo nation.
|6
The Tecnocumbia Boom in Ecuador

“A Letter with My Kisses Sent with Love by Internet”
I
t seems that almost every Ecuadorian has a close relative, friend, or acquain-
tance who has left the country in the aftermath of the economic crisis at the
turn of the twenty-first century, as I learned in myriad conversations with
taxi drivers, street vendors, domestic servants, teachers, musicians, acquain-
tances, and people in better-off positions. When I arrived in Quito in October
2001, all international airlines with connections to Europe were flying full
airplanes to Madrid, Amsterdam, and Rome. Men and women from all walks
of life were emigrating in search of better opportunities, including rural peas-
ants who had never left their hometown, urban lower-class Ecuadorians who
had never traveled outside of Ecuador, and upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
whose financial situation had been severely affected by the economic crisis of
the late 1990s. While some travelers were the first of their families to go, oth-
ers were joining spouses and relatives who had already departed.
The economic crisis reached its peak with the collapse of the national
bank system and President Jamil Mahuad’s decision to dollarize the economy
on January 2000. Ecuadorians not only lost the sucre, the national currency
and a symbol of national sovereignty, but also the real value of their savings
and incomes in the conversion to the dollar. Many small and large companies
went into bankruptcy and the unemployment rate increased to 15 percent
nationwide. Middle- and lower-class Ecuadorians were unable to buy basics
like food and medicine or make their mortgage or rental payments. This situ-
ation resulted in increased levels of delinquency, burglary, and violence, mak-
ing people feel unsafe even in their own homes. The government’s neglect
164 | Chapter 6
of social demands for health, education, and social security aggravated the
crisis, resulting in multiple riots organized by teachers, doctors, and jubila-
dos (retired people) who had not received their paychecks for several months.
Ecuadorians responded to the economic crisis with unprecedented legal and
illegal migration. Many emigrated to the United States, Spain, and Italy; oth-
ers left for Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Canada.
It is not a coincidence that the Peruvian tecnocumbia, an urban popular
music with romantic lyrics about long-distance relationships and breakups,
mushroomed in Ecuador concurrently with the rise of Ecuadorian emigra-
tion. With its catchy melody and fusion of eclectic danceable rhythms, tecno-
cumbia became a sort of escape valve that helped the popular classes forget,
at least momentarily, the nostalgia and economic hardships of everyday life.
“Me abandonaste” (You left me), an Ecuadorian tecnocumbia composed by
Guido Narváez and performed by his wife, tecnocumbia star María de los
Ángeles, became a hit in 2001 with its lyrics referring to the suffering caused
by the departure of a loved one. When I arrived in Quito in 2001, this song
was continuously heard on the streets, on AM radio stations, and at EPM con-
certs, disappearing as quickly as it had risen a year and a half later. The term
EPM (Ecuadorian popular music) is used here as a general category to indi-
cate working-class styles of music such as rocolera, chichera, and tecnocumbia,
which are markedly different from elite música nacional. (PURL 6.1)
The tecnocumbia boom and the massive exodus of Ecuadorians at the
turn of the twenty-first century brought about significant changes in the pro-
duction, consumption, and dissemination of EPM. It revitalized the local
music scene with the organization of large EPM concerts in coliseums, bull-
fighting arenas, and stadiums, which huge crowds of middle-lower- and lower-
class Ecuadorians would attend. Little-known rocolera and chichera singers,
who switched to the tecnocumbia repertoire with great success and became
the new people’s idols, began to produce and market their music indepen-
dently through an alternative music media.
While tecnocumbia quickly became the craze of the popular classes, it
took some time to make inroads into the mainstream media. The untimely
death of Thanya Paredes Aymara, a beloved tecnocumbia singer in her
early twenties and member of a family of musicians known as the “Aymara
Dynasty,” drew attention to the tecnocumbia in newspaper headlines.1
Thanya died in a car accident in September 2001 when she and her husband
were driving from Quito to the southern highland city of Cuenca, where she
was to perform. Intrigued by the crowds who attended her funeral, journal-
ists began to cover tecnocumbia in Ecuador. Newspaper headlines such as
“La tecnocumbia desplaza a la rockola [sic]” (Tecnocumbia displaces the ro-
cola),2 and “Tecnocumbia: la decepción con ritmo bailable” (Tecnocumbia:
The Tecnocumbia Boom in Ecuador | 165
Deception to a dance beat) reflect the journalists’ outlook on this musical

phenomenon.3
The ubiquity of the tecnocumbia became a hot topic of debate on national
television. In 2002, Este Lunes (This monday), a highly respected television
program featuring debates on current topics, organized a panel with tecno-
cumbia singers, sociologists, and journalists to discuss the standing of elite
música nacional in relation to the tecnocumbia boom. Two Sunday television
magazines—La Televisión and Día a Día—presented extensive interviews
with tecnocumbia singers, who were introduced as the “new generation of
Ecuadorian singers.”4 They suddenly became the center of attention in the
mainstream media, even though they had been in the music business for
many years as rocolera and chichera singers and had previously been ignored.
This chapter examines the influence and effects of globalization and
international migration on Ecuadorian popular music through two readings
of the tecnocumbia boom in Ecuador. The first reading explores the agency of
the popular classes in appropriating and resignifying a foreign music as their
own through discourses that underscore the reproduction of a national music
aesthetics that gives continuity to pervasive themes in Ecuadorian music (sen-
timents of loss, uprootedness, and nostalgia), albeit conceived as dance music.
The second reading examines the discourses of upper-middle-class detractors
who criticize the lack of professionalism and creativity of Ecuadorian popular
singers because they sing covers and use recorded tapes, instead of live music,
in their performances. I regard these discourses as technologies of “Other-
ness” through which the elites erect social boundaries between them and the
popular classes.
The Arrival of the Tecnocumbia

In September 1999, Rosy War, the “tecnocumbia queen” from Peru, arrived
in Quito on a concert tour with her Banda Kaliente and captivated the Ecua-
dorian popular classes with her romantic songs, dance choreographies, and
performances imbued with a new sense of modernity. Aside from a small
article commenting on her successful performance, which appeared in the
evening newspaper Últimas Noticias, the Peruvian tecnocumbia was barely
known in the mainstream media at that time. According to chichera producer
Lola Zapata, it was Widinson, a little-known rocolera singer from Quito,
and Sharon, a young woman from Guayaquil in her early twenties, who first
began singing covers of Peruvian tecnocumbias in Ecuador (personal inter-
view, 2002). Other rocolera and chichera singers from the highland region
who are now considered tecnocumbia stars immediately followed this trend,
such as María de los Ángeles, Gerardo Morán, Jaime Enrique Aymara, and
166 | Chapter 6
Azucena Aymara. They all had in common long and unremarkable artistic
careers singing rocolera and chichera songs. Gerardo Morán had been in the
music business since the early 1980s but was barely known in Quito. A for-
mer housewife, Azucena Aymara began recording huaynos and sanjuanitos
in 1990 with only moderate success. María de los Ángeles, a young singer in
her early twenties, had recorded five CDs with pasillos, boleros, and cumbias
before she became famous with the song “Me abandonaste.”
Female ensembles singing covers of Colombian cumbias and Rosy War’s
songs to the accompaniment of a band appeared on Quito’s music scene con-
currently with the rising tecnocumbia soloist singers. Jorge Yunda, the direc-
tor of the music management company Herencia Musical, promoted the first
groups—Magia Latina and Tierra Canela—made up of four or five young
women. The commercial success of these groups helped spur the formation
of other female ensembles in Guayaquil, such as Grupo Deseo, Las Musas,
Sangre Latina, and Dulce Veneno. Unlike their predecessors, who sing to
the accompaniment of a band, the latter groups sing to pistas and wear more
revealing outfits. They became the center of attention on TV shows and at
private parties, and they were frequently hired to attract the populace in polit-
ical campaigns. Most people in the Costa associate the tecnocumbia with this
type of female ensembles, rather than with the (chichera and rocolera) singers
from the highland region.
In Ecuador, the term tecnocumbia has become a generic name for an
eclectic style of danceable music that combines the rhythm of the Colombian
cumbia with an array of national and international musical influences, such
as the sanjuanito, the pasillo, the balada, salsa, and pop music. The prefix
“tecno” in tecnocumbia has no relation to the “techno” movement, a style of
music originated in Detroit in the late 1970s, which is known for the use of
experimental electronic arrangements (Romero 2002, 231). “Tecno” simply
indicates the use of electronic instruments and the innovation of the musical
genre that the term precedes. For Azucena Aymara, for example, tecnocumbia
and tecnobachata are simply cumbia and bachata arranged with modern
instrumentation (personal interview, 2003). It is worth noting that Ecuador-
ian singers, unlike their Peruvian counterparts, have introduced a variety
of “techno” effects in remix songs, such as filters and delayed echo, which
are used to announce the singers’ entrance onto the stage. Although singers
do not sing to the accompaniment of remix songs in live concerts, they do
include them as bonus tracks on their CDs to appeal to younger generations.
Turino suggests that the process of blending eclectic elements indexes
youth culture and a new cosmopolitan subjectivity that results from the
exposure of young people to a multiplicity of soundscapes disseminated by
the media (2008b, 122). While this premise is true of Ecuadorian youth, it
is noteworthy that most Ecuadorian tecnocumbias have been composed and

arranged by middle-aged popular composers who creatively mix national
and international musical influences into an organic whole shaped by local
aesthetic preferences. “Por internet” (Over the Internet), a tecnocumbia com-
posed by chichera composer Ricardo Realpe and popularized by Azucena
Aymara in 2000, exemplifies the blending of disparate musical elements that
reference modernity. The lyrics refer to a long-distance relationship that sur-
vives thanks to “a letter with my kisses sent with love by Internet.” (PURL 6.2)
Una foto, una carta con mis besos [sanjuanito rhythm]

Te los mando con cariño en internet
Mil recuerdos, mil abrazos, mil caricias
Como prueba de que siempre te amaré.
Por internet, por internet [salsa and cumbia rhythms]

Todo mi cariño te lo mandaré
Por internet, por internet
Un millón de besos te los mandaré.
Que te llegue a cualquier parte del mundo [sanjuanito rhythm]

A España, a Europa, a Nueva York,
Más de prisa que el mismo pensamiento
Yo te envío mi amor con mucho amor.
[A photo, a letter with my kisses

I send to you with love by Internet
A thousand memories, a thousand hugs, a thousand caresses
As proof that I will always love you.
By Internet, by Internet
All my love I will send to you
By Internet, by Internet
A million kisses I will send to you.
May it reach you anywhere in the world

In Spain, in Europe, in New York,
Faster than the thought itself
I send to you my love with lots of love.]
“Por internet” combines salsa and cumbia rhythms in the refrain and stanza
sections and incorporates pentatonic-like melodies and the accordion timbre
168 | Chapter 6
typical of arrangements of mestizo sanjuanito. The song starts with a conga

rhythmic pattern implying salsa music, but immediately switches to cumbia
with the typical eighth–two sixteenth-notes rhythm played on the güiro and
the woodblock marking a regular beat. The introduction, which alternates
melodies and countermelodies played by the trumpet, the accordion, and the
keyboard, has a prominent Caribbean flavor. The stanzas, however, introduce
bimodal melodic inflections in major and minor modes, as well as a rhythmic
section combining the typical sanjuanito motif of four sixteenth-notes and
melodic cadences ending on the third of the tonic chord, which are typical
musical features of Ecuadorian mestizo music. The refrain returns to the
Caribbean music sphere and presents a salsa riff on the piano juxtaposed with
a cumbia rhythm.
Although most tecnocumbias performed in Ecuador are covers of Peru-
vian tecnocumbias, some are modern versions of baladas and pop songs that
were popular in Ecuador in the 1970s and 1980s. The modernization consists
of making these songs happy and danceable, as opposed to música nacional
genres like the pasillo, which are perceived as sad and undanceable. Thanya
Paredes Aymara, for example, became famous with a tecnocumbia rendition
of the balada “Yo soy rebelde” (I am a rebel), a song originally recorded by
Spanish singer Jeannette in 1970. Silvana, a singer from Guayaquil elected
to Congress in 2003, also popularized the balada “A las puertas del cielo” (At
Heaven’s gates) in a cumbia rendition.
George Yúdice aptly points out that musical modernity in Latin America
is more the result of innovating and/or refashioning old musical traditions
than creating a break from the past. According to him, “[it] is more an issue of
establishing new relationships with tradition than of leaving it behind” (cited
in Handelsman 2005, 31; my translation). By modernizing and adapting their
musical practices to new social contexts, Andean people are able to pass on
their musical traditions to subsequent generations. Chicha music, for exam-
ple, illustrates the innovation of the huayno in the context of urban migra-
tion and globalization (Romero 2002). Los Shapis’s rendition of “El aguajal”
(The water stream), a huayno from the 1960s originally released as “El alizal”
in the early 1980s, helped preserve a regional tradition for the children of
Andean migrants growing up in Lima. Ecuadorian musicians have likewise
composed tecnocumbias that have musical features characteristic of the Ecua-
dorian sanjuanito and keep the local musical traditions alive.
It is important to note that regionalism manifests itself in the types of
tecnocumbia and tecnocumbia singers that are popular in the highland and
coastal regions. Musicians from the coast, such as Sharon, Jasmín, and the
numerous female ensembles, tend to produce tecnocumbias that are closer in
style to the Colombian cumbia than to the Peruvian cumbia andina, or to the
performances of highlanders such as Widinson, Azucena Aymara, and María

de los Ángeles. As a result, tecnocumbia singers who are popular in the Sierra
are relatively unknown in the Costa, and vice versa. Because my study focuses
on Quito’s popular music scene, this chapter examines the tecnocumbia pro-
duced and consumed in the Ecuadorian capital. The impact of the tecno-
cumbia in Guayaquil and other regions of Ecuador awaits further research.
EPM Concerts in Quito

In this section, I explore the dynamics of large EPM concerts organized
in the Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo (CJCH) at the peak of the tecnocumbia
boom in 2002 to examine the meanings it conveys to its fans. In addition to
the tecnocumbia, these concerts include a variety of musics for listening and
dancing, such as rocolera, chichera, música folklórica (performed by local pan-
Andean ensembles), and música del recuerdo (music of yesteryear), a reper-
toire of romantic baladas from the 1960s and 1970s currently popular among
lower-class youths. Because of the variety of Ecuadorian working-class musics
performed at these events, I will refer to them as “EPM concerts” (Ecuador-
ian popular music concerts), rather than tecnocumbia concerts. Elite música
nacional (pasillos, pasacalles, and albazos) is rarely performed at these events.
EPM concerts normally take place at one of three social venues: large
concerts organized in sports and bullfighting arenas for thousands of people,
middle-sized concerts held at discotheques, restaurants, or recreational cen-
ters for several hundred people, and parties celebrating a birthday, graduation,
or quinceañera event at a private home. When I arrived in Quito in 2001,
tecnocumbia concerts were held at the CJCH, a sports arena with a capacity
of about three thousand located near the Plaza Marín, a busy traffic center in
the eastern part of the Centro Histórico. By 2003, these concerts had mush-
roomed and were taking place in more “respectable” venues such as the Ágora
of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, the Plaza de Toros on Amazonas Ave-
nue, and Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, an important tourist site on the outskirts
of Quito where the equator is located. EPM concerts were also organized in
small towns near Quito, such as Pifo, Sangolquí, and Tumbaco.
The organization of EPM concerts is quite different from that of elite
música nacional concerts. The former are normally organized around a mini-
mum of ten to fifteen artists who sing different types of music over a time
span of approximately eight hours, while the latter includes three or four per-
formers in concerts that last about three hours. Although from a European or
North American perspective concerts lasting eight hours would be considered
overwhelming, the EPM concert format is thought to be strategic because it
attracts larger audiences than those presenting only two or three renowned
170 | Chapter 6
singers. For music producer Patricio Cóndor, the logic behind this strategy
is that fans have the opportunity to listen to all their favorite singers at one
concert for the price of a single ticket. “[The audience] would not pay three
or four dollars to see just a few singers. I would rather buy the CD or DVD
and see them at home. The public looks for variety . . . Gerardo [Morán] sings
five songs, fine. Then Jayak performs . . . the public cheers, and for one single
price they see everything. . . . Ten or fifteen artists are fine” (Patricio Cóndor,
personal interview, 2003).
Radio station owners and television producers use their music programs as
promotional outlets to promote EPM concerts on holidays such as Valentine’s
Day and Father’s Day.5 The production costs are relatively low as the organiz-
ers offer to release songs and video clips on radio and television programs for
the artists in exchange for free performances. In 2002, the entrance ticket
was kept low—only $3 for the amphitheater section and $5 for closed seating,
which nonetheless generated large profits due to the volume of attendees at
these concerts.
EPM concert organizers were eager to promote Ecuadorian popular music
but lacked the experience to organize such large events. The concerts seldom
started on time and intermissions between performances were poorly man-
aged. Frequently, the sound system did not work well, causing angry reactions
from the audience. Many singers arrived late or stayed onstage too long, espe-
cially when the public requested numerous encores. EPM concerts became
more organized when radio DJs began to host the events. The DJs not only
entertained audiences while the bands set up but also controlled the time
scheduled for each performer.
The audience attending EPM concerts was diverse in terms of age, ethnic-
ity, gender, and occupational background. Most people worked in low-income
jobs as maids, bus drivers, and market vendors; others were lower-middle-class
people who would not normally attend concerts at the CJCH but were curi-
ous about the tecnocumbia boom and its artists. Attendees came in couples, in
large groups, or alone. I often encountered huge families made up of middle-
aged adults and their children, parents, and extended family members. Those
whose spouses or significant others had left the country came alone or with
their children, as anyone under the age of twelve was given free admittance.
The first EPM concert I attended in Quito was organized by Radio Presi-
dente on the ocassion of Valentine’s Day in 2002. The concert was supposed
to start at noon but by 1 p.m. sound technicians were still on stage installing
the sound system. Informal vendors walked around the premises selling sodas,
candy, and typical snacks such as tostado con chochos (roasted corn with a type
of lupin bean) and homemade thinly sliced fried potatoes packed in paper bags.
The concert began with brief performances by little-known singers to modest
Figure 6.1 Promotional flyer of an EPM concert to be held on Father’s Day, 2002, at the
Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo. The concert was sponsored by the liquor companies adver-
tised in the flyer.
172 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.2 Audience in the Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo. Photograph by author.
applause. Well-known artists and music bands performed in the late afternoon
when the arena was packed. The audience especially warmed up when Azu-
cena Aymara, María de los Ángeles, and Gerardo Morán appeared on stage
and encouraged the audience to sing and dance with them. Their charisma was
evident in their interaction with the public—they asked people to make noise,
to raise their hands, or to whistle a tune along with them. They frequently asked
questions that asked in a humorous way whether the man or the woman was
the head of the household, in a sort of battle of the sexes that always received an
enthusiastic response from both the men and women in the audience.
Another activity at this concert that engaged the public in demonstrations
of regional and national loyalty was to publicly claim loyalty to a particular
soccer team. While some people identified themselves as fans of Barcelona
and Emelec, teams from Guayaquil, others supported Aucas and Liga Nacio-
nal from Quito. This momentarily created a tense atmosphere, but the artists
immediately restored order by emphasizing the fact that, as Ecuadorians, they
were all fans of the National Team. This type of performer–audience interac-
tion, which is not characteristic of música nacional concerts, reveals regional
identities that are immediately diluted as people are reminded of being united
by a stronger and overarching national identity.
As the afternoon progressed, the CJCH became a huge dance floor con-
necting people in a common desire to have a good time and forget their every-
day problems. Unlike the bailes sociales (social dances) in Peruvian chichó-
dromos (open parking lots), where young people dance facing each other in
couples, in Quito they dance on the steps of the coliseum and have limited
space to move around and meet new people. The spatial limitation for danc-
ing, however, does not constrain other types of socialization. As in rocolera
concerts, people share drinks with people sitting near them, including those
sitting in front and behind, with a significant difference that rather than sim-
ply drinking and listening to music as if they were in a large cantina, people
also dance. Although alcohol consumption was officially forbidden, vendors
nevertheless always found creative ways to sell alcoholic beverages without
being sanctioned. For example, they would hide bottles in jacket pockets or
sell the liquid in transparent plastic bags, which people then pour into plastic
soda bottles. People would drink from the same small plastic glass, which
would be continuously refilled and shared with others. The police were
always present at EPM concerts to prevent or break up fights caused by intoxi-
cated members of the audience.
Concert dynamics at the CJCH encouraged close interaction between the
audience and the artists. Organizers built a temporary stage in the center of
the basketball court and placed rows of chairs in front for seating close to the
stage. Most people purchased tickets in the amphitheater section, which was
cheaper than the floor seating but far away from the artists. This, however,
did not prevent fans from crossing a small three-foot screen door connecting
these areas, and the guard at the door did little to stop them. Fans near the
stage were able to share drinks with their favorite singers or film the entire
performance with their camcorders. Other fans, including children, climbed
up on stage in the middle of a performance to take pictures of themselves
with their favorite artists. María de los Ángeles was used to posing with her
fans without interrupting her singing or losing track of the dancing. There
was considerably less ability to interact with fans at EPM concerts held at
the Estadio Aucas, a soccer stadium in the southern district of Quito with a
capacity of ten thousand, because the stage was built in the center of the soc-
cer field and far away from the audience.
The Modern Outlook of Female Tecnocumbia Singers

Female tecnocumbia singers have designed their artistic image on stage that
use features and attires that “whiten” their mestizo look and project a sense
of modernity. They wear high-heeled over-the-knee leather boots that elon-
gate their short figures and tiny outfits that accentuate their sensual bodies,
174 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.3 María de los Ángeles on stage with a

young fan. Photograph by the author.
including items such as mini-skirts, hot pants, and bras ornamented with
sequins and rhinestones. In addition, they dye their dark hair blond, an atypi-
cal hair color for Ecuadorian mestizo women, as if they were trying to mask
or disguise their mestizo-ness and appear like a “white-mestizo” person. This
image of tecnocumbia female singers strongly contrasts with those of the same
singers portrayed on jacket covers of chichera music. On her first CD of huay-
nos and sanjuanitos (1990), for example, Azucena Aymara appears in a tight
white mini-dress with a plunging neckline and platform shoes. Her black hair
is coiffed in a chignon with bangs. Her posture and a window in the back-
ground suggest that the picture was probably an amateur snapshot taken at a
party. Aymara’s image has changed dramatically over the years. On the cover
of her thirteenth album (2003), obviously professionally done, she has long
blond hair and wears a provocative skirt that is open on the side and shows her
entire leg up to the waist.
The image of María de los Ángeles has also changed over the years. On
one of her first albums in the mid-1990s, Del Ecuador para el mundo (From
Ecuador to the world), she appears in her late teens with natural dark hair. On
Figure 6.4 Azucena Aymara. Album covers. Left: CD PZ-CD-028. Right: CD Vol. 13.
Source: Producciones Zapata International.
the jacket cover of her seventh album, she has blond hair and wears a typical
revealing tecnocumbia outfit. The body posture in both pictures is also quite
different. In the earlier one, she is demure; in the more recent one, she is
sensual.
Other tecnocumbia singers in Quito, such as Patty Ray, Hipatia Balseca,
and Gigi, wear similar outfits and the blond look of Azucena Aymara and
María de los Ángeles. Concurrently, amateur female ensembles in Guayaquil
followed this aesthetic trend but showed their voluptuous bodies with even
more revealing clothing. The tiny outfits generated criticism from detractors,
who attributed the success of tecnocumbia singers to the display of sensual
female bodies rather than to the singers’ musical talent, as the following You-
Tube comments indicate:
“Are these girls singers, whores, or strip dancers? Why are they almost naked
and dressed as whores with boots?”6
“Esto es una mierda, hacen quedar mal a la música ecuatoriana, deberían tomar
clases de canto, una cosa sí es cierta, se exhiben como si estuvieran en venta.”7
[This sucks. They make Ecuadorian music look bad. They should take singing
lessons. One thing is certain, they act like trash.]
“Que vergüenza me da ser ecuatoriano, cuando en todo el mundo a travez [sic]

de internet se muestran todas estas chilteras que de cantar no tienen ni la menor
idea, de bailar mucho menos, la única cosa que devo [sic] reconocerles es que
176 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.5 María de los Ángeles. Album covers. Left: Early CD jacket. Right: CD jacket,
Vol. 7. Source: Producciones Zapata Internacional.
están más o menos de carne, pero no bastan dos tetas y un culo para representar
a un país hermoso como el Ecuador. Compatriotas no pierdan la cabeza por un
culo, el ecuador tiene artisas de gran talento.”8
[I am ashamed to be Ecuadorian when these girls, who have no idea how to sing
or dance, are seen all over the world through the Internet. The only thing that
I can say is that they are fairly hot, but a pair of tits and an ass are not enough to
represent a beautiful country like Ecuador. Compatriots, don’t go gaga over a
piece of ass. Ecuador has artists who are really talent.]
Música nacional singers, who take pride in having made an artistic name
with their voices, discipline, and hard work, were the most forceful critics,
condemning the lack of professionalism of tecnocumbia female ensembles.
Nonetheless, many people I spoke to at EPM concerts viewed the tecno-
cumbia outfit as simply one element of the artistic performance. Several
people suggested that it was the singers’ ability to sing with sentiment, rather
than their sensual movements or outfits, that attracted them most.
“Este grupo es muy bueno. Yo en lo personal veo que grupos como éste . . . hacen
lo mejor con los limitados recursos que tienen y creo que tienen buena voz y el
que salgan con poca ropa no las hace mujerzuelas porque tienen talento. Tal
vez les falta más creatividad a sus videos, pero apoyemos los videos latinos y no
los critiquemos solo por eso y los comparemos con videos gringos o europeos
que tienen mucho más recursos pero a veces menos talento.”9
[This group is really good. In my personal opinion groups like this one . . . they
do their best with the limited resources they have, and I believe that they have
good voices, and the fact that they perform with scanty clothing on does not
make them tarts because they have talent. Maybe their videos ought to be more
creative, but let’s support Latin American videos and not criticize them because
of that. We shouldn’t compare them to American or European videos, which
are much better funded but sometimes have less talent.]
“Mueren de envidia mucha gente porque estas niñas están cantando por un
futuro y lo hacen con música nacional de nuestro Ecuador, y lo hacen bien. En
primer lugar esto no es merengue ni salsa, y si estas niñas están sexy, so what? La
Madonna estava vestida igual y [a] nadie le importó. También se lo hace Lady
Gaga. Vayan a joderle a ellas para ver a donde se las mandan a ustedes pinches
viejas celosas. Disfruten de nuestra música con más cache y piquanteria.”10
[Many people are green with envy because these girls are singing for a future and
do so singing national music from our country, Ecuador. And they do it well. First
of all, this is not merengue or salsa, and if these girls are sexy, so what? Madonna was
dressed the same way and no one batted an eyelid. Lady Gaga does likewise. Why
don’t you pick on them and see where that gets you. They’ll tell you right where to
shove it, you jealous old bitches. Just enjoy our music. It’s cooler and hipper.]
The tecnocumbia boom of 1999 satisfied the desire of lower-class youth for a
modern dance expression. As in Peru, tecnocumbia singers in Ecuador have
incorporated into their performances dance choreographies that resemble
energetic aerobic movements such as jumping and moving their arms in
circles and semicircles. These choreographies have been central to the suc-
cessful reception of tecnocumbia in Ecuador as they are visually entertaining
and catchy. They captivate the attention of the public and seem to make up
for the absence of a live orchestra on stage.
Música del Recuerdo and Folkloric Music

EPM concerts are designed to please a mixed audience and include vari-
ous types of music appropriate for listening and dancing. Besides rocolera
music, which talks about breakups and revenge, attendees listen to música del
recuerdo, a romantic music that has positive themes. Performances of Andean
folkloric groups are included in these concerts so long as the lyrics allude to
love themes and not social protest. Porque recordar es volver a vivir (Because
178 | Chapter 6
remembering is like living again) is the motto that, according to many adult
people I spoke to at EPM concerts, moves people to listen to music of yester-
year. The term música del recuerdo is used here to refer to a specific repertoire
of baladas from the 1960s and 1970s, which during that period were most
popular among the upper-middle classes; now, their market is predominantly
lower-class young people listening to versions done by local Quito bands.
While it is obvious why those who were young in the 1960s and 1970s would
continue to enjoy these songs today, it is less clear why lower-class Ecuadorian
youths from the 1990s and 2000s identify with them. To understand this phe-
nomenon, it is necessary to examine the different meanings that música del
recuerdo generates for the upper-middle and popular classes as well as each
group’s social and economic background.
The balada, the musical genre that displaced the bolero romántico in the
1960s and 1970s, emerged as an expression of youth culture and modernity
by fusing bolero and pop music elements. The balada has two variants: the
balada romántica, with a moderately slow tempo similar to that of the bolero
and accompanied by an orchestra; and the balada rítmica, with catchy melo-
dies and lively rock ’n’ roll instrumentation of electric guitars, a synthesizer,
drum set, and tambourine. Early exponents of the balada romántica were
Armando Manzanero (Mexico), Roberto Carlos (Brazil), and Raphael (Spain),
followed by a group of Spanish singers led by Julio Iglesias and Camilo Sesto
in the 1970s. Prominent singers of balada rítmica, which in Latin America
came to be known as Nueva Ola (New wave), include Enrique Guzmán,
César Costa, Alberto Vásquez, and Angélica María in Mexico, Palito Ortega
and Leo Dan in Argentina, and Los Iracundos in Uruguay. Not all baladas
that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s have entered the musica del re-
cuerdo repertoire performed at EPM concerts. The songs of Leo Dan and Los
Iracundos make up the bulk of it, for example, Leo Dan’s “Te he prometido”
(I have promised you) and “Sé que me amarás” (I know you will love me), and
Los Iracundos’ “Puerto Montt” and “Y la lluvia caerá” (And the rain will fall).
In the mid-1970s and 1980s, music bands from Quito, such as Caravana,
Israel, and Sahiro, began to play covers of this type of balada with enormous
success among the popular classes. Later, its bandleaders composed original
songs addressing the experiences of falling in love. Franklin Villegas, Carava-
na’s lead guitarist and singer, wrote several songs, such as “Mónica,” “Chiqui-
lina” (Little girl), and “Eres un ángel” (You are an angel), that became hits
with lower-class youth. Although the lyrics were generally based on personal
love experiences, they were expressed without the despair and sentimentality
that characterizes música nacional and rocolera music. This song repertoire
did not appeal to an elite audience because of the social status of the singers
and listeners.
In 1988, Caravana disbanded, and one of its members, Oswaldo Vásquez,

founded the group Sahiro with Jorge Yunda and Saulo Proaño. Yunda, the
music entrepreneur who promoted the all-female tecnocumbia groups Tierra
Canela and Magia Latina, played the guitar in the group, while Proaño was
the composer and arranger. Proaño noted in a personal interview that the
band sought a specific romantic style of music and was careful to include
cover songs that would fit this style. Sahiro disbanded in 1995 and reunited in
the early 2000s with the rise of EPM concerts in Quito and abroad; Caravana
and Israel followed a similar trajectory.
Villegas and Sahiro became agents of musical continuity between the
youth of the 1970s and those of the early 2000s, which explains why baladas
that were popular in the 1970s are in high demand by lower-class youth.
Música del recuerdo has become a surrogate term for romantic music to
a lower-class youth that identifies neither with the nostalgic pasillo of the
1920s to 1950s nor with rocolera music of the 1980s, both of which deal
with feelings of despair and unrequited love. No other style of Ecuador-
ian music has emerged in the past decades that gives lower-class youths an
outlet for optimistically expressing feelings about love as well as música del
recuerdo. When I asked young people in their late teens or early twenties
why they liked this music, they usually answered, “I like the romantic lyrics
and catchy melodies, rather than the sad pasillos about lost love.” Others
associate these songs with memories of their childhood and the music their
parents listened to, as the following YouTube comment shows: “What beau-
tiful memories of a wonderful time when we were children, we grew up
with this music. In my case it was not necessary to be in love with a girl to
remember such nice moments.”11 It is worth noting that although the balada
rítmica represented an upper- and middle-class aesthetic in the 1970s, the
same music is now associated with the popular classes. This association is
partly due to common modes of production, marketing strategies, and per-
formance contexts, which are similar to those employed by chichera and
rocolera entrepreneurs.
New bands promoting música del recuerdo appeared at the peak of EPM
concerts in the early 2000s, such as Los Búfalos, a group from the central
highland city of Ambato that sings covers of Leo Dan’s and Los Iracundos’s
songs. In May 2003, I had the opportunity to attend one of their performances
at a discotheque in Queens, New York. Their audience, mostly people
in their twenties and thirties, joined the band in singing but not dancing.
When I asked them why they liked música del recuerdo, many responded that
this music was reminiscent of Ecuador. Through a chain of semiotic links
that relates music to place, memory, and nostalgia, música del recuerdo has
become an index of Ecuadorianness for young immigrants in New York.
180 | Chapter 6
Folkloric music and pan-Andean ensembles are associated with the Nueva
Canción (protest song) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was criti-
cal of cultural imperialism and authoritarian regimes, on the one hand, and
sought social justice for the poor, on the other. In Chile, these ensembles
were prohibited during General Pinochet’s dictatorship because they were
considered subversive. Ecuador received a stream of Chilean immigrants who
were running away from the military regime; some of them formed folkloric
ensembles. Young lower-middle-class Ecuadorian students entered the Nueva
Canción movement playing covers of Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún. Jatari,
one of the first folkloric groups in Quito, set the basis for the protest-song
movement in Ecuador. They compiled and studied Ecuadorian folk music in
order to create their own songs, which addressed social, economic, and politi-
cal concerns in Ecuador. One song, for example, inquires where the money
received from banana and petroleum exports has gone. Few of these folkloric
groups survive, and those still active have innovated their repertoire.
The type of folkloric repertoire performed at EPM concerts also features
an ensemble of Andean instruments (quena, charango, bombo, zampoñas, and
guitar), but avoids protest themes in favor of romantic ones. Jayac, a folkloric
ensemble founded in 1989 by young musicians from Zámbiza, a small town
located a few miles north of Quito, frequently performed at EPM concerts
between 2002 and 2004. They have recorded several albums with original
songs composed by the group’s members, and they often travel to Europe
and the United States on concert tours. I had the opportunity to speak to
the group and attend one of their performances at a small bar in Queens,
New York. Their repertoire is attractive to a broad audience for the variety
of music they play (sanjuanito, danzante, tonada) and for the message of love
and nostalgia in their lyrics, which speaks to people’s experiences in general.
For example, “Por un amor” (For a love) deals with the anguish of living far
away from a loved one.
Por un amor estoy sufriendo, estoy llorando por un amor.

Porque la amé con gran pasión y le entregué todo mi ser.
[For a loved one I am suffering, I am weeping for a loved one.

Because I loved her with great passion and I gave her my heart.]
The different styles of music performed at EPM concerts were strategically

intertwined in order to maintain audience interest. Concerts usually started
with tecnocumbias, followed by alternate segments of chichera, rocolera,
música del recuerdo, and folkloric music.
An Independent Music Industry

As readers may now realize, the tecnocumbia boom did not bring new social
actors to the national music scene because both the performers and the lis-
teners were basically the same people who produced and consumed chichera
and rocolera music. Numerous ensembles and amateur singers appeared on
the music scene but few singers, including Gerardo Morán, María de los
Ángeles, Azucena Aymara, and Jaime Enrique Aymara, have made names
for themselves and been able to stay in the music business actively for more
than a decade since their debuts as tecnocumbia singers. Although all-female
tecnocumbia groups in Guayaquil have mushroomed, few maintain the level
of followers and acceptance that the highland singers mentioned above have.
It is important to note that the stereotyped image that most Ecuadorians have
of tecnocumbia today is precisely the one projected by the female groups
of the coastal region. In the next section, I will discuss the musical strate-
gies employed by highland singers who initiated the tecnocumbia boom in
Ecuador.
A grassroots music industry developed alongside the mainstream media
to promote EPM singers at local, regional, national, and transnational lev-
els. Their most powerful promotional tool was television. Eduardo Terán,
a music entrepreneur who first promoted rocolera music on the radio in the
1980s, pioneered the EPM television programs with Diez sobre Diez (10 out
of 10), the most popular TV show among the popular classes in Quito. Terán
used the television as a promotional outlet for the EPM concerts he orga-
nized, which he then filmed as new video material for his show. He secured
enough performers for the concerts by exchanging free publicity on his TV
show for free concert performances. Terán’s strategy was indeed a creative
way of promoting Ecuadorian popular music and singers with a minimal
financial investment and generated large audiences and high profits. While
this exchange worked well for lesser-known singers, more well-known artists,
on whom the success of an event tended to rest, felt that the arrangement
amounted to exploitation.
While in the 1990s there were no television programs devoted to EPM
besides “10 out of 10,” by the early 2000s they had proliferated. Several eve-
ning and night shows were broadcast on local channels, such as Energía Total
(Total energy), Kandela (Flame), and Farra Total (Party all night). They fea-
tured one or two hosts interacting with the audience through telephone calls
similar to the standard DJ practice on the radio. At first, these shows pre-
sented video clips produced in an old-fashioned manner with a static video
camera placed facing a wall where the singer would stand in a single take for
the length of the song. But with the tecnocumbia boom, video production
182 | Chapter 6
became more stylish and began to make use of important monuments and
streetscapes of Ecuadorian cities as backdrops. Aware that the main viewers
of EPM videos abroad are Ecuadorian migrants, Patricio Cóndor, the pro-
ducer of Energía Total, commented that he made sure to incorporate images
of Ecuadorian landmarks that would remind them of their homeland. These
video clips were in such high demand among the popular classes that street
vendors began to sell pirated copies. Upper-middle-class Ecuadorians, how-
ever, made fun of the videos, and viewed them as kitsch and lacking in techni-
cal sophistication.
In 2004, Cóndor introduced further changes to the video clips by drama-
tizing the lyrics in the vein of MTV-style videos. In “Compárame” (Com-
pare me), Azucena Aymara appears as a commentator for a romantic scene
between her former boyfriend and his current girlfriend. Convinced that she
(the singer) is the woman he needs, Aymara asks her former boyfriend to com-
pare her with his current girlfriend. Following the story narrated in the lyrics,
the video is filmed in several places—a restaurant, a living room, and the
streets of Quito. In the video “Palomita” (Little dove), Gerardo Morán drives
a motorcycle alone on a country road, begging his girlfriend to return to his
side and forgive him for whatever he has done because he feels lonely; the iso-
lated road reinforces his longing. Many artists and EPM fans have uploaded
their favorite chichera and tecnocumbia videos on YouTube. Some are videos
broadcast on television shows, others are selected scenes of live performances
combined with images of Ecuadorian landscapes, and others are simply a col-
lection of pictures that appear with the music.
Marketing Strategies
Tecnocumbia singers have developed their own marketing strategies to pro-
mote themselves and their music. During their performances, they raffle their
CDs and posters to the most enthusiastic audience members. They include
their contact information (cell phone and fax number) on the CD jackets
and in video clips for “pedidos y contratos” (requests for performances at pri-
vate events), which is their main source of income. They appear on televi-
sion shows inviting the public to attend their concerts. While such marketing
strategies seem basic, they were rarely implemented to promote elite música
nacional in the 1990s, when debates about the standing of the pasillo as an
Ecuadorian musical symbol were at their peak. Even today, when música
nacional artists organize concerts, they tend to avoid using video clips to pro-
mote them, not only because they are expensive to produce but also because
of an ingrained belief that a true artist is devoted to art for art’s sake rather
than for economic gain.
Unlike música nacional artists, who blame music piracy for the decline of
their genre, tecnocumbia singers see it as an advantage because pirated CDs
that cost a dollar translate into a huge listenership, which in turn generates
requests for private performances. They sell their CDs in music stores located
in lower-class neighborhoods and also compete with street vendors by sell-
ing their CDs as inexpensively as possible during their performances at EPM
concerts. While original CDs sell for seven or eight dollars in music stores,
the singers sell them at EPM concerts for five dollars (in jewel boxes), and
since 2004, for only three dollars (in cardboard jackets). EPM singers encour-
age their fans to support national artists by purchasing originals. María de los
Ángeles, for example, frequently tells her concert audiences that “We Ecua-
dorians should listen first to Ecuadorian music, second to Ecuadorian music,
and third to Ecuadorian music.” Fans are often willing to buy an original CD,
instead of a cheap pirated copy, because they receive a free poster of the artist
as a bonus.
Tecnocumbia singers are able to sell their CDs for such low retail prices
because their production costs are significantly lower than those incurred
in other types of music production. Only one studio musician is needed to
arrange and record the pistas, and the vocals require just a few hours of studio
time. Because the CDs are made in Peru, the pressing costs and shipping fees
are significantly lower than if they were made in the United States. The favor-
able exchange rate of dollars to the Peruvian currency, the sol, significantly
reduces the overall production cost. Cover-design expenses are reduced to a
minimum by featuring only a photograph of the artist and basic song informa-
tion. Since there is no intermediary or music store that adds a commission
tag to the retail price when they sell the CDs at EPM concerts, more profits
accrue to the singers themselves.
In order to maintain their popularity, successful tecnocumbia singers
release a CD every year. Azucena Aymara, for example, started singing in
1990, and by 2003 had recorded thirteen CDs. María de los Ángeles already
had ten CDs completed by the time she was in her late twenties. In an inter-
view in 2003, she stated that the secret to a successful artistic career is to
maintain visibility by releasing a catchy new song every year. “Every artist
has his/her successful moment. They go up into the clouds. The ideal thing
would be to always stay on top. For this reason, we are preparing another CD”
(personal interview, 2003).
Producing one CD per year is an easy task for tecnocumbia singers because
the majority of songs they record are covers of Peruvian tecnocumbias, huay-
nos, or modern arrangements of música nacional and romantic songs. To
avoid copyright problems, they simply include the acronym D.R.A, on the
jacket cover, which stands for derechos reservados de autor (author’s reserved
184 | Chapter 6
copyrights). This is common practice in Ecuador, especially for discs of for-

eign songs interpretated by local artists. Knowing that I was seeking permis-
sion to reproduce several Ecuadorian songs on a CD accompanying a pub-
lication on Ecuadorian music, one EPM producer suggested that I use this
acronym in lieu of more specific copyright identification. It would not only
protect me legally but also avoid the bureaucratic and time-consuming paper-
work required to get the letters of authorization.
Another strategy Ecuadorian popular singers use to maintain a high pop-
ularity rating is to keep a couple of video clips rotating on a regular basis,
especially when they are touring abroad or when EPM concerts are promoted
on television. It is important for singers to produce video clips of their songs
because many EPM television shows are organized around phone calls from
viewers requesting their favorite videos. These calls function as barometers of
a singer’s popularity. One television producer observed that those unable to
be seen on television have fewer concert offers and gradually lose visibility.
For example, Widinson, one of the first tecnocumbia singers in Ecuador, was
very popular from 2000 to 2003, but declined in 2004. Unlike María de los
Ángeles, whose video clips were constantly aired on television, Widinson did
not have any to keep himself in the public eye.
By using modern technology, shows are often filmed in private homes,
usually that of the program’s producer, rather than in television studios in
order to reduce costs. Patricio Cóndor, for example, had in his home a special
room equipped with audio and video technology and a big screen curtain that
was used as a background for the host. Interviews with singers were also filmed
in this room. Gradually, TV shows became more sophisticated and began to
be devoted to single artists. On La Negra (The black woman), the host, a
woman who is affectionately called by this nickname, interviewed María de
los Ángeles about her life, family, travels, and the steps she had taken to build
her artistic career. Other shows, like the one devoted to chichera singer Ángel
Guaraca, introduced his family and hometown in the mountains of Chimbo-
razo Province, as well as his future plans. This type of program was meant to
present the personal side of the artists as a way to connect them to their fans.
No TV shows analogous to these programs were presented on mainstream
television for música nacional singers.
The tecnocumbia boom promoted family-run businesses, an effective
strategy for minimizing the cost of artistic performances. Spouses and family
members became the singers’ managers and public relations associates. They
handled the publicity and contracting for performances. They also changed
the pistas, checked playback volume during performances, and drove sing-
ers and dancers to the next performance. Mothers and spouses selected, and
often sewed, the singers’ outfits, while the dancers were usually friends and
relatives.
The Elites’ Reading of the Tecnocumbia Boom

Some upper-middle-class journalists and música nacional artists claim that
Ecuadorian tecnocumbia singers lack a sense of originality because most songs
in their repertoire are basically covers of Peruvian tecnocumbias, especially
those of Agua Marina and Armonía 10, two tropical dance orchestras from
Piura in northern Perú. “El aguajal” (The water stream), a song from the early
1980s sung by the Peruvian group Los Shapis, was a hit for Gerardo Morán
in Ecuador in 2003. Jaime Enrique Aymara recorded “Maldito corazón”
(Damned heart), a song first released by the Argentine group Ráfaga, and
“Lágrimas de hombre” (A man’s tears) and “Juraré no amarte más” (I swear I
won’t love you anymore), originally sung by Agua Marina and Armonía 10,
respectively. In 1999, Widinson recorded “Tu amor fue una mentira” (Your
love was a lie), a hit by Agua Marina. Hipatia Balseca popularized “El arbo-
lito” (The little tree), originally performed by Grupo Néctar. Tierra Canela
recorded “Tu recuerdo” (Your memories), a Rosy War song from 1999. These
are but a few examples. EPM singers seem little concerned about the “bor-
rowing” and recording of foreign songs without the authors’ consent as it
enables them to release new CDs every year. It is worth noting that Peruvian
singers also “borrow” and record Ecuadorian songs in Peru.
In a personal interview (2003), rocolera singer Juanita Burbano criticized
Ecuadorians’ lack of creativity and preference for foreign dance musics, which,
in her view, are symptomatic of a weak national identity. When she recorded
her first album in the early 1980s, she recalls that the music producer gave her
a large box of Peruvian records from which she was to choose the repertoire
she would like to record, instead of giving her the option of recording Ecua-
dorian music. Like most popular singers, she blamed the government and the
media for not providing enough support to Ecuadorian artists who want to
promote Ecuadorian music.
Now our country, in terms of music, is only a copy of other countries. . . . The
tecnocumbia is in fashion, but it came from Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia. I don’t
know if you have seen something that has been created in Ecuador, something
that identifies Ecuador.
When Ecuadorians are at a dance, they ask for bachata and they know how
to dance bachata, but they don’t know how to dance to Ecuadorian music. This
is how [our] identity is getting lost. Why? Because in our country there is not
186 | Chapter 6
enough support, there is not enough capital to have a good television program
that promotes Ecuadorian music.
YouTube comments make allusion to the “supposed” lack of creativity of

Ecuadorian musicians, as the following statements regarding several female
tecnocumbria groups show:
“Nada, nada, nada nuevo, todas las canciones de este ‘GRUPO’ son copiadas,
éstas [the singers] no crean absolutamente NADA, solo sirven para mostrar sus
tetas y culos, hasta cuando!”
[Nothing, nothing, nothing new, all songs from the “Group” are copied, they
(the singers) do not create absolutely NOTHING, they only serve to show their
tits and asses.]
“No es nada creativo cantar una canción que ya ha sido éxito, pero este grupo
no tiene que dar mas nada que mostrar unos cuerpos desnutridos . . . ”
[There is nothing creative in singing a song that has been successful, but this
group does not have anything to show other than some malnourished bodies.]
Singing covers of foreign songs is not new in Ecuador; nor is it unique to the
tecnocumbia. Local bands, such as Los Corvets and Grupo Bodega in Guaya-
quil, and Caravana in Quito, played Spanish covers of rock ’n’ roll songs
and baladas in the late 1960s and 1970s, just as Enrique Guzmán and The
Teens sang “refried” rock ’n’ roll songs in Mexico (Zolov 1999). Juan Cavero
y su Orquesta played covers of cumbia and salsa in the 1970s, as did many
tropical dance orchestras in other Latin American countries. Julio Jaramillo
is internationally known for his performances of Antillean boleros and Peru-
vian valses, such as “Nuestro juramento” by Benito de Jesús, and “Fatalidad”
by Laureano Martínez, which many Ecuadorians perceive as Ecuadorian
popular music today. So why do tecnocumbia detractors perceive the singing
of tecnocumbia covers, but not these other musics, as demeaning?
Aside from a lack of originality, detractors criticize the commercial
impulses of today’s Ecuadorian singers because they have changed their song
repertoire continuously during the past decade due to commercial interests.
Gerardo Morán, for example, recorded Peruvian tecnocumbias, Dominican
bachatas, and Colombian cumbias between 2002 and 2004. Hipatia Balseca,
one of the youngest tecnocumbia singers from Quito, became famous with a
cover of “La colegiala” (The schoolgirl), a Dominican song that mixes ele-
ments of bachata and reggaeton. Rosita Cajamarca, a chichera singer from
the early 1990s, recorded successful tecnocumbias in the early 2000s; in 2004
she released two video clips in which she appears singing traditional huaynos
dressed in Peruvian indigenous costumes.
To justify their constant change of repertoire, Ecuadorian singers often
express a desire “to reach Ecuadorians’ hearts” or “to bring happiness to their
people.” Azucena Aymara, for example, considers it her job as an artist to
help her public cope with the “suffering” produced by economic hardship,
long-distance relationships, and nostalgia for their home country. According
to many tecnocumbia singers, they simply follow their fans’ wishes because
they are indebted to them. Gerardo Morán highlights this point as follows:
“One has to be in fashion. . . . If people want pasillos, then we record pasi-
llos; if people want boleros, then we play boleros. . . . I have noticed that the
tecnocumbia has a short life span in people’s preference, but the public wants
to listen to it now, and we are definitely indebted to our public. What people
request is an order for us, what they tell us to do is an obligation” (Gerardo
Morán, cited in Santillán 2001).
Although Ecuadorian singers often claim that a “moral obligation” is an
important factor in defining their repertoire, commercial concerns play a
more decisive role. They insist that they must follow the public’s demands
because otherwise they would be unable to sell their CDs. According to Cón-
dor, “A singer may have the best musical themes and arrangements in the
world, but what happens if the public doesn’t like his songs?” María de los
Ángeles commented on the same issue from a singer’s perspective: “Most
young people do not value our music. I started singing música nacional. I sang
yaravíes, tonadas, pasacalles. I like pasillos, boleros, and valses. I won singing
contests for music amateurs [of música nacional], but we cannot record this
music because the public does not buy it” (personal interview, 2003). Since
the tecnocumbia boom in the late 1990s, Ecuadorian singers have had more
national and international visibility than rocolera singers. They have loyal fol-
lowers who attend their concerts, buy their CDs, and watch their videos on
television. However, as one music producer succintly put it, what is visible
today are Ecuadorian singers, not Ecuadorian music.
Peruvian tecnocumbia performance practices are quite different from
those of Ecuador. While Peruvian singers perform to the accompaniment of
live music, Ecuadorian singers normally sing with recorded tapes arranged
by popular composers. Journalist and writer Esteban Michelena contends
that tecnocumbia singers are simply karaoke singers who perform in front of
a live audience instead of in a karaoke box (Michelena 2003, 45), an opinion
shared by many upper- and middle-class Ecuadorians. One YouTube com-
ment reads, “Mmmita ahora se enamoran hasta de un costal de huesos y lom-
brises bailando sin talento y puro playback. Tan mal están que ningún músico
quiere tocar en vivo para ellas; ni modo seguirán cargando sus cd pistas, ja ja,
188 | Chapter 6
ja” (They now fall in love with a bag of bones and lombrises, dancing without
talent and only with playback. They are so bad that there is no musician will-
ing to play live with them).
It is well known that many artists—amateur and professional—sing with
recorded tracks when a full band or orchestra is logistically or financially not
viable. Tecnocumbia singers see numerous advantages in using these pistas.
Azucena Aymara and María de los Ángeles note that pistas save them time
and money by not having to hire musicians and deal with the transportation
of instruments and amplification equipment. This is particularly important
on weekends, when singers may have three or more performances in different
locations.
I would like to sing with guitars, accordion, bass, and percussion, but this rep-
resents a lot of expense and investment. People who organize concerts always
try to minimize costs. For this reason I have been forced to work with pis-
tas . . . (Azucena Aymara, cited in Santillán 2001)
We would not be able to be in other shows if we had to set up and take down
the amplification system. We would be talking about four thousand dollars. It is
better for us to use pistas. We can schedule two, and even three shows [in one
day] . . . (María de los Ángeles, personal interview, 2003)
According to Gerardo Morán, pistas not only provide better sound quality,
they are also more reliable, since band playing with faulty amplification
systems can jeopardize performances. He prefers to sing with pistas because
all instruments can be heard clearly. “Now everything is [sung] with pistas.
Sometimes it sounds better. . . . Unfortunately, there is no good sound here
and with the pista, which has the whole orchestra on it, you can hear better.
However, this is sad for musicians because there are many good ones who,
unfortunately, can only work on the recording [of a song]” (Gerardo Morán,
cited in Santillán 2001).
It is worth noting that Peruvian tecnocumbia singers are not successful in
Ecuador, nor are Ecuadorian singers in Peru. On January 13, 2003, Agua Bella,
a Peruvian female group, made its debut in Quito’s Plaza de Toros, an impor-
tant venue where the Feria Taurina takes place during weeklong annual festivi-
ties commemorating the foundation of Quito. The audience, made up of lower-
middle-class mestizos, had an unusual reaction to Agua Bella’s performance in
comparison to those I have seen at the numerous EPM concerts I had attended
before. Rather than dancing, as they usually do when their favorite artists are on
the stage, they were seated in silence observing the four young women’s sensu-
ous dancing. Although Agua Bella included a set of well-known Ecuadorian
popular songs, such as the bombas “Carpuela” (PURL 6.3) and “Pasito tun tun,”
they did not receive an enthusiastic response from the audience as Azucena
Aymara and Widinson did at the same concert. The musical arrangements,
sound equipment, lighting, and overall performance of the group were indeed
professional but not enough to boost the audience.
Several elements in Agua Bella’s performance were noticeably different
from those of local tecnocumbia, particularly the presence of a live band
accompanying the singers. The live band did not make Agua Bella’s perfor-
mance more appealing to the public than the use of pistas, as tecnocumbia
detractors think. It seems to me that the two or three dancers who normally
accompany Ecuadorian tecnocumbia singers with energetic choreographies
make up for the loss of the physical presence of the band. In addition, the
show included an announcer, who interacted with the audience and intro-
duced each song. While the announcer seems to be a common figure in pop-
ular music concerts in Peru, in Ecuador there is no such equivalent figure.
Obviously, Agua Bella was trying to win over the Ecuadorian public with the
same strategies they had used in Peru. Finally, Agua Bella dressed in a more
provocative outfit (high-cut mini shorts) than their Ecuadorian counterparts,
something new and unexpected at that time. Having seen all sorts of outfits
at numerous EPM concerts, I must confess that I, too, was surprised at their
audacity.
The lack-of-professionalism discourse is yet another way in which elites
raise barriers between themselves and the popular classes. This discourse posi-
tions elite música nacional and Ecuadorian pop-music singers as professional
artists because they sing with live instrumental accompaniment, while tecno-
cumbia singers are deemed nonprofessionals because they sing to recorded
tapes. However, it is clear that performances with live music accompaniment
are not a barometer of musical professionalism, as tecnocumbia critics sug-
gest. The fact that there are no live musicians and spontaneity in tecnocumbia
performances, something that contrasts inmensely with the image of guitar
and requinto players performing with the Ecuadorian sentiment, seems to be
of little concern for tecnocumbia fans. They seem to enjoy tecnocumbias for
what they are, not just for the physical appearance of the female singers.
Conclusion
Tecnocumbia best reflects the Ecuadorian experience of international migra-
tion at the turn of the twenty-first century with lyrics about long-distance
relationships, breakups, and family separation. These images of suffering and
loss resonate with those portrayed in música nacional and rocolera songs, thus
giving continuity to themes intrinsic to most Ecuadorian popular music. The
190 | Chapter 6
agency of both EPM producers and singers in marketing their music in inno-
vative ways was crucial to the dissemination of tecnocumbia at the national
level in the early 2000s. The popular classes supported this music by attend-
ing the concerts, purchasing CDs, and hiring tecnocumbia artists for private
events. Tecnocumbia eventually came to be perceived as Ecuadorian music,
not for its musical roots but for the fact that it was produced in Ecuador. This
perception was reinforced by the fact that it used the same dissemination net-
works of chichera and rocolera music and it was performed by former chichera
and rocolera singers.
Romero (2002) and Quispe (2002) suggest that the tecnocumbia was ini-
tially accepted by most social sectors in Peru because it was perceived as an
international tropical music. The absence of Andean melodies, the upbeat
character of the music, its origin in the Amazonian region, and the presence
of female figures dancing with exotic outfits and sensual movements were
not typical of Andean popular music. Unlike in Peru, the tecnocumbia never
appealed to upper-middle-class Ecuadorians, and it was often the object of
mockery and ridicule for a supposed lack of artistic quality expressed in the
lack-of-originality and lack-of-professionalism discourses. Most importantly,
tecnocumbia was promoted and targeted to the popular classes since its emer-
gence in the late 1990s.
While many people regard Ecuadorian renditions of tecnocumbia as
“unimpressive” because these are covers of Peruvian songs and are performed
without a live music band, the comments of people I spoke to at EPM con-
certs and those found on YouTube reveal that tecnocumbia fans seem to
enjoy the songs for what they are. My view of the tecnocumbia phenomenon
in Ecuador differs from those of scholars who regard this commercial boom
as the result of a media bombardment that pushes listeners to consume this
music. While it is true that TV and radio programs have a great influence on
people’s psyche, I noticed that tecnocumbia fans in Quito were attracted to
particular singers and songs, though they were generous with their applause
to all performers. Issues of class, race, and ethnicity are expressed in the ten-
sion between professional and “karaoke” musicians, original and “imported”
songs, and modern and traditional music.
In the highlands, it is difficult to draw a fine line between tecnocumbia
and chichera music because the differences between these styles are perceived
more in extra-musical terms (for example, the performer’s ethnicity, dress, and
performance contexts) than in specific musical features. Because of this com-
mon perception, upper-middle-class Ecuadorians regard the tecnocumbia as
the music of lower-class mestizos and cholos, while the lower-class mestizos
and cholos consider it a working-class música nacional repertoire. Interestingly
enough, while the mainstream media “discovered” the tecnocumbia boom in
the early 2000s, tecnocumbia singers were looking for new repertoires because
their fans were already losing interest in the genre. While some singers were
innovating their repertoire with covers of new styles of music, especially of for-
eign origin, others were seeking to modernize Ecuadorian traditional musics.
Tecnocumbia came to represent a sense of Ecuadorianness for the popular
classes, especially for Ecuadorian migrants, who support EPM development
in the host countries.
|7
The Translocation of Ecuadorian

Popular Music
W
hile rural-to-urban migration has been a common occurrence
in Ecuador throughout the twentieth century, emigration to the
United States and Europe was rare before the 1970s (Jokisch 2001).
Ecuador has experienced two major waves of emigration—one in the 1970s
and the other in the 1990s. The first was centered on the southern highland
provinces of Cañar and Azuay and was triggered by a decline in the Panama
hat business, the main economic activity of the region (Kyle 2000). This ear-
lier emigration was characterized by an exodus of a predominantly male rural
population to the United States, most of whom settled in the New York met-
ropolitain area and took jobs in factories, the construction sector, and restau-
rants as busboys or dishwashers. While these migrants initially left with the
intention of returning to Ecuador once the economic crisis was over to build
homes and establish small businesses, many went on to establish permanent
residence in the United States (Goycoechea and Ramírez 2002).
By contrast, the wave of emigration of the late 1990s had national over-
tones and was triggered by several events that had devastated the national
economy, including a plunge in international oil prices, the floods caused
by El Niño between 1997 and 1999, the global economic crisis originating
in East Asia, and the collapse of the Ecuadorian national banking system
due to financial mismanagement and corruption in the banking sector. The
exodus was broad-based, with citizens from all parts of Ecuador leaving for
the United States, Europe, and South American countries such as Venezuela
and Chile. The migrants were predominantly female and urban, and many
The Translocation of Ecuadorian Popular Music | 193
were educated. They found jobs in the agricultural and domestic service sec-
tors, including childcare and care of the elderly (Jokisch and Pribilsky 2002).
Most settled in Spain due to the relative absence of language barriers, the
ready availability of legal employment in the informal economy, and the lack
of a visa requirement to enter the European Community until August 2003.
National Migration Office reports reveal the magnitude of the exodus, stating
that in only three years, from 1999 to 2001, Ecuadorian emigration exceeded
one million people, or approximately 10 percent of the national population
(INEC).
This chapter examines the Ecuadorian migrants’ vision of Ecuador as a
de-territorialized country with a diasporic population that maintains close
ties to the homeland. First, I explore the impact of international migration
on the lives of Ecuadorian people and how Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid
re-create social spaces that “recall” and “materialize” the nation. I then ana-
lyze their views of música nacional when they leave the country and the stig-
matized social venues with which it is associated in Ecuador. I focus on the
period 2001–3, which was the peak of Ecuadorian immigration and Ecua-
dorian singers’ concert tours in Spain. The term “Ecuadorian migrants” is
used here to designate lower-class mestizos from rural and urban areas who
emigrated in the early twenty-first century seeking better opportunities out-
side their home country. Although this term may be applied to any Ecuador-
ian citizen who has left the country, technically speaking, in Ecuador this
term has become a sort of ethnic label with negative connotations similar to
that of a lower-class mestizo or cholo. Upper- and middle-class Ecuadorians
(white-mestizos) who live abroad do not self-identify, or refer to themselves, as
Ecuadorian migrants.
Why Do Ecuadorians Migrate?

Though poverty and unemployment were the catalysts for the Ecuadorian
exodus of the late 1990s, migration scholars have found that other factors
played a significant role in the decision to migrate. Sassen, for example, sug-
gests that poverty triggers migration only under certain given conditions since
many countries with high rates of poverty and unemployment do not have a
significant history of migration. For her, migration is determined by social,
economic, and political factors such as the effects of globalization, forms of
capitalism, migration networks, and the effective demand for low-salary work-
ers in the host society (Sassen 2004, 63–64). In Ecuador’s case, the Spanish
government’s demand for temporary agricultural workers greatly influenced
Ecuadorians’ choice of Spain as a destination. Furthermore, it was less com-
plex to travel to Spain than to the United States because any Ecuadorian
194 | Chapter 7
citizen could enter Spain as a tourist so long as they could produce a bolsa (an
amount of money shown at the port of immigration) of US$2,000. Once the
migrant passed immigration controls, the bolsa would be returned to Ecuador
to pay the loan or help the next family member go through the same immigra-
tion process. This situation continued until 2003 when the Spanish govern-
ment imposed the tourist visa requirement for Ecuadorian citizens.
Goycoechea and Ramírez (2002) argue that social and cultural factors,
such as the social imaginaries constructed around the migration experience
and the articulation of social networks, play an important role in people’s
decision to migrate. According to these scholars, the social imaginaries about
what life will be like in the host countries are usually associated with ideas of
success and progress that nonmigrants want for themselves. From a psycho-
logical perspective, Emily Walmsley explains the massive exodus in terms of
a “migratory syndrome,” which affects the values, attitudes, and aspirations
of people who have not migrated. This syndrome makes them believe that
they experience a “relative social deprivation” because they are unable to
afford a lifestyle that migrants and their families appear to enjoy (Walmsley
2001, 156), for example building a house, buying fashionable clothes, send-
ing their children to private schools, or attending concerts and dancing in
discotheques.
Herrera views migration as a family strategy and a family investment,
rather than an individual decision. The decision of which household member
migrates first, the man or the woman, is defined by power relations as well
as by the job market in the host country (Herrera 2005, 91). The demand for
in-house domestic service in Europe attracts middle- and lower-class women
because the monthly salary (about five to six hundred euros, plus free room
and board) is about three to four times the amount a maid, waitress, or public
schoolteacher makes in Ecuador. Other noneconomic factors, such as domes-
tic violence and the excitement of travel, induce people to migrate as well.
The risks and costs of international migration are high, but Ecuador-
ians continue to venture off in order to fulfill the “European dream.” Hav-
ing social networks in the host country is extremely important to succeed in
finding a job and a place to stay during the first few months. Once migrants
find work, they begin sending remittances back to Ecuador to pay off debts
and support their relatives back home. The increasing flow of money, peo-
ple, and products has triggered a migration industry that provides travel and
courier services, money transfer, legal advice, and long-distance communica-
tion on both sides of the Atlantic. Cybercafés and locutorios (long-distance
telephone cabins) that connect migrants with Ecuadorians back home have
mushroomed in both Ecuador and Spain. Radio programs in both countries
help migrants and Ecuadorians in Ecuador stay in touch. The emergence
of coyoteros and chulqueros (alien smugglers) offering illegal immigration, a

strong trend in the United States, have played a minor role in the emigration
to Spain as Ecuadorian migrants were able to enter Spain without a visa until
August 2003.
Ecuadorians’ ideas about their nation have changed with the increasing
flow of people and money traveling back and forth and building social fields
between the home and host countries, a type of migration Basch, Glick Schil-
ler, and Blanc-Szanton (1992) conceptualize as “transnational migration.”
Many Ecuadorian migrants travel to Ecuador on a short vacation to supervise
the construction of a house, or to attend a wedding, baptism, or graduation
ceremony of a family member. They are also able to buy home appliances in
Ecuadorian home-store branches in Spain, which are immediately delivered
to their families in Ecuador. With this service, Ecuadorian migrants are able
to purchase a refrigerator or a washing machine for their mothers or spouses
back home. A picture of the happy recipient with the gift is sent to the buyer
as proof of delivery and also as a memento of the happiness he or she has
brought to a loved one. Often purchased for Mother’s Day, this type of gift
translates into social prestige for the sender and recipient since home appli-
ances are quite expensive to acquire given their high cost and the low salaries
in Ecuador.
Ecuadorian migrants retain the same citizenship rights as their conationals
in Ecuador. They can vote in presidential elections in the Ecuadorian Con-
sulates abroad and have representatives in the National Assembly. In Novem-
ber 2006, approximately eighty-five thousand Ecuadorians living in forty-
two countries around the world voted in the presidential election (Jokisch
2007). In 2002, the Ecuadorian government passed new laws designed to
assist migrants in their host countries, such as the Ecuadorian Living Abroad
National Plan and the Program of Help, Savings and Investment for Ecuador-
ian Migrants and their Families. The Ecuadorian government has opened up
offices of the Secretaría Nacional de Migración (SENAMI) in the countries
with large communities of Ecuadorian migrants—Spain, Italy, the United
States, Venezuela, and Chile—in order to secure their rights abroad and assist
them in their return to Ecuador if they decide to do so. The success of these
programs can only be determined in the future.
Ecuadorian Migrant Associations in Madrid

Ecuadorian migrants receive assistance not only from the home government
but also from independent Ecuadorian migrant associations that provide fam-
ily counseling, legal advice on labor and regularization of immigration sta-
tus, skills training to increase the chances of finding work, and a social space
196 | Chapter 7
for cultural and recreational activities. The Asociación Hispano-Ecuatoriana

Rumiñahui was one of the first associations to defend Ecuadorian migrants’
legal rights on the basis that, rather than being a problem, immigration makes
a positive contribution to the cultural diversity and economic development
of Spain. In 2001, the late Juan Carlos Manzanillas, one of the Asociación
Rumiñahui’s leaders known as the “defensor de los migrantes” (the migrant
defender), led the “Marcha por la Vida” (the march for life) between Lorca
and Murcia, two southern Spanish cities located thirty miles apart. These cit-
ies are known for their large concentration of Ecuadorian immigrants work-
ing in the agricultural fields. The march aimed to bring public attention to
the lives of migrant workers in the countryside in the aftermath of a train acci-
dent in which twelve illegal Ecuadorian immigrants traveling in a van were
killed. The march sought to legalize their status as immigrants by granting
them working visas before the passing of a new immigration law providing for
the expulsion of undocumented aliens. Other immigrant communities expe-
riencing similar problems joined the march to show their support. Spanish
people on the road comforted the exhausted marchers with food, beverages,
and words of encouragement. The “Marcha por la Vida” not only made a
political statement but also drew attention to the Ecuadorian nation as a col-
lectivity with the right to a dignified life and that was deserving of recognition
for their economic contribution to Spain in the form of taxes and consump-
tion of local products.
Most Ecuadorian migrant associations in Spain are sociocultural in char-
acter and promote Ecuadorian music, dance, and cuisine. These associations
are organized around common interests (sports, dance, or theater) or are
based on a common place of origin in Ecuador. Enrique Pulupa, a hand-
craft merchant from Llano Grande (a community north of Quito) who arrived
in Madrid in the 1980s, founded the Asociación Ecuatoriana Sociocultural
Puriccuna in 2001. With the sponsorship of the program “Creando espacios
de convivencia e integración” (Creating spaces of coexistence and integra-
tion) of the Comunidad de Madrid, Puriccuna has organized events that aim
to introduce the culture and traditions of the Ecuadorian highlands to the
Spanish community. As with many other Ecuadorian migrant associations,
Puriccuna celebrates the Inti Raymi (summer solstice) in June, the Pawcar
Raymi (flowering of the maize) in March, and the Pase del Niño (the passing
of the Infant Child) in December, as well as national holidays such as the 10
de Agosto (first shout of independence), the 24 de Mayo (Independence Day),
and the Fiestas de Quito (the founding of Quito) on December 6.
In general, Ecuadorian migrant associations look to Otavalo for iconic
symbols of Ecuadorian culture (music, dances, and costumes), thus project-
ing an indigenous image of Ecuador. Otavalan music has had more visibility
in Spain than that of other indigenous communities in Ecuador for several

reasons. The sanjuanito is linked to the celebration of the Inti Raymi, the
most important festivity in the agricultural calendar in which indigenous
people give thanks to the Pachamama for the harvest received. Although the
Inti Raymi is celebrated in various indigenous communities in the northern
highlands, the ones in the Otavalo region are perhaps the best known and
also the best documented by scholars. The prestige of Otavalans as successful
merchants and musicians around the world and the availability of recordings
made by renowned folkloric groups from this region, such as Ñanda Mañachi
and Charijayac, have also made the Otavalan sanjuanito stand out more than
other indigenous musics.
Puriccuna celebrates the Inti Raymi with ritual bathing, the entrega del
bastón de mando (handing over of the baton of authority), food offerings to
the Pachamama, and ritual dances, though adapted to the local environment
in Madrid. The ritual bathing (Armay Tuta) takes place in the open in a river
on a Saturday night. Any person who wishes to be “purified” by Pachamama’s
energy is welcome to participate. The only requirement is to bring a list of
products specified on Puriccuna’s website (candles, incense, food, flowers,
and so on), which will be used for cleansing and the food offering.
The Inti Raymi dances (Tushuy Puncha) take place the following week-
end. The ones I observed in the summer of 2008 occurred in the amphi-
theater of the Tierno Galván Park. The event opened with a speech by the
Ecuadorian ambassador, who was accompanied by the secretary of culture,
the consul general, and other members of the Ecuadorian diplomatic corps
in Madrid. The speech made reference to rediscovering Ecuador’s roots and
the need for and benefits of cultural exchange between the two countries.
After the official speech that highlighted Ecuador as an immigrant nation
within Spain, Pulupa offered the bastón de mando to the government rep-
resentative of the Comunidad de Madrid, who was dressed in a poncho.
Accompanied by two other members of Puriccuna, Pulupa and the Span-
ish official walked around a circle with the offerings of food (grains and
plants) spread out in the center of the field. Then, the Spanish official gave
a brief speech in which he stressed the Comunidad de Madrid’s interest in
facilitating the integration of Ecuadorians into Spanish society, either as
legal migrants, permanent residents, or tourists. The Ecuadorian nation was
underscored in this ceremony through the presence of Ecuadorian authori-
ties and discourses that made reference to Ecuador’s pre-Colombian tradi-
tions. The celebration ended with performances by folkloric dance troupes
from Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, displaying their traditional folk music,
dances, and costumes in a show that highlighted their cultural commonali-
ties rather than their differences.
198 | Chapter 7
As with other immigrant communities in Spain, sports events provide a

recreational venue for both “recalling” and “materializing” the homeland in
the host country. Ecuadorian migrant associations from different neighbor-
hoods organize soccer and volleyball competitions in public parks on week-
ends. The best soccer team competes in the Mundialito de la Inmigración y
Solidaridad (The little world cup of immigration and solidarity), a competi-
tion that has been organized by the Comunidad de Madrid every summer
since 2003 and was modeled after soccer’s World Cup. The tournament forges
a strong sense of nationhood with the participation of teams representing the
immigrant communities in Madrid. Although the main goal of the event is to
integrate immigrant communities into Spanish society, ironically, no Spanish
soccer team participates in this competition as they are not immigrants. Like
the World Cup, the Mundialito provides an international venue to display the
Ecuadorian nation among other nations.
Ecuadorian Migrants’ View of Ecuador

In 2003, Ecuadorians were the second largest immigrant group in Spain
after Moroccans. In that year, talking to Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid
was relatively easy because they were out in the streets, parks, and locutorios
looking for jobs. I asked some to share their immigrant experiences with me
as well as their reasons for leaving Ecuador. Some had successful stories to
recount. They had found jobs soon after their arrival and had been able to
legalize their residencies and reunite with their spouses and children within
a few years. The testimony of Fausto, a thirty-two-year-old welder who grew
up in La Comuna, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Quito,
typifies how most Ecuadorian migrants I interviewed in Madrid view Ecua-
dor. I met him on a Saturday afternoon opposite the Prado Museum. He
was waiting for a friend with whom he had made plans to play soccer. He
said that although he was certified as a welder by SECAP, a technological
instructional center in Quito, in Ecuador he could only work as an assistant,
for which he was paid the minimum salary, about US$200 a month. Not
earning enough to support his wife and two children, he decided to immi-
grate to Spain in 2000. He managed to find a job in Valencia immediately
after his arrival, which consisted of picking onions at a low rate of 700 euros
a month. Not happy with this exhausting work, the following year he moved
to Madrid and found a job as a welder. A few months later, he was promoted
to the position of associate welder with a monthly salary of 2,000 euros.
Fausto pointed out that in Spain employers value the expertise of their
employees and recognize it in monetary terms, something that Ecuadorian
employers do not. He was able to save money to buy a house, something he
would never have been able to afford earning Ecuador’s minimum monthly
salary. Overall, he believed that the standard of living in Spain was better
than in Ecuador.
In general, Ecuadorian migrants are seen in Spain as disciplined and
hard-working people, an opinion not held by many of the upper-middle-class
Ecuadorians I interviewed in Quito. They regard the Ecuadorian popular
classes as lazy and could not understand why they would be more responsible
workers in Spain than in Ecuador. Fausto’s comment sheds light on this point:
he was willing to do his best work and go beyond the call of duty because he
felt his work was valued and well paid.
Ecuadorians are not lazy. The thing is that there [in Ecuador] is exploitation.
Here [in Spain] there is also exploitation but in a different way. Here you can
have better living conditions; there are more opportunities to prosper, be com-
fortable, and get an education for yourself and your children. In Ecuador, even
if you work hard it is impossible to live comfortably and educate your chil-
dren . . . because, aside from exploitation, there is extreme poverty. Here there is
exploitation, but there is no extreme poverty. This is the big difference between
Ecuador and Spain. The Ecuadorian sees that with the money he is paid here,
he can live well and even save some money. He accepts the conditions and he is
encouraged to work even harder because he knows his work is recognized and
well paid, and one day he is going to return and open his own business.
Like Fausto, women who work as domestics and in health care felt more
respected and valued in Spain, not only because of the better salaries but
also because of better working conditions and better treatment by employers.
Women who take care of elderly people, such as Mariana, a woman in her
early forties who left an abusive relationship with her husband in Ecuador, not
only cook the meals but also sit at the dining table and eat dinner with their
employers. In Ecuador, this type of interaction would never happen given
the social hierarchies that prevent egalitarian interaction between employers
and employees; a maid usually eats in the kitchen after the employers have
finished their meal.
Fausto, like many migrants I interviewed in Madrid, wants to return to
Ecuador once he saves enough money to build a house and open his own
business. However, he did not trust the government and did not have hopes
for a better future in Ecuador. He was aware that the social and working con-
ditions in Ecuador were different from those in Spain; as a result, people back
home had a different attitude toward their work. “I think that Ecuadorians
are afraid of taking risks. . . . To give you an example, a thousand dollars [in
Ecuador] is the amount of money you make in one year. Here [in Spain] you
200 | Chapter 7
can make one thousand dollars in fifteen or twenty days. So, if you lose this
amount of money, you can get it back the next month. In Ecuador you need
several years to get this amount of money back.”
While Fausto’s story is a successful one, there were sad stories of people
having problems finding jobs and adapting to the new cultural environment.
They were unable to cover basic expenses, much less to send remittances back
to their families or pay off debts. Some found new relationships and left their
spouses and children behind in Ecuador. Many were living in overcrowded
rooms, where they paid minimal rent, literally, just enough space to sleep and
take a bath. Those with jobs might rent a room in an apartment, sharing the
kitchen and bathroom with other tenants. Those with even less means rented
what is known as camas calientes (shared beds), where two or more people
agree to share not only a bedroom but also the bed. The person who has a
nighttime job sleeps in the bed during the day, while the roommate sleeps
in it at night. In extremely desperate cases, three people rotate the use of the
same bed, thus finding the bed always “warm” when they lie down to go to
bed (Becerra 2005).
In the host country, Ecuadorian migrants find that both their lives have
changed and the way they view Ecuador. They are vocal about their immense
love for Ecuador, but at the same time they are critical of the social hierar-
chies and the lack of opportunities and social welfare. They claim there is no
better place to live than in Ecuador, yet complain about its government and
high levels of corruption and impunity. Many Ecuadorian migrants I spoke
to in Quito and in Madrid commented that when they return to Ecuador on
vacation, after a few days they want to return to Spain because they suffer
reverse culture shock and have a hard time readapting to the standard of liv-
ing in Ecuador.
While some first-generation migrants easily assimilate into the host soci-
ety, others resist integration and feel nostalgic for Ecuador and the lifestyle
they had. Their comments appear in messages sent to their relatives through
El Universo and El Comercio, the major newspapers in Guayaquil and Quito,
respectively. These newspapers have created columns and Internet editions
that connect Ecuadorians living abroad with their families back home. The
newspapers print letters and greetings from various places in the world:
Toronto, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, Berlin, and Santiago de Chile, to
cite just a few. They send pictures of the places where they live and announce
births, college graduations, engagements, and marriages. Most greetings pub-
lished in El Comercio express nostalgia and a valuing of Ecuadorian culture.
Evelyn, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Quito who studies biology and
has lived in Hannover, Germany, since 2000, writes:
I have learned to . . . appreciate the richness and diversity of our culture, our
flora, and our fauna which are without equal. Here, there is a lot of order, but
people are closed into themselves, they do not think about the family, only in
succeeding for their own well-being. In addition, there is no juice made from
fresh fruit, and if you find some, it is not tasty. The food in my country cannot
be compared to the food here; I crave a tasty hornado,1 chugchucaras,2 mote con
chicharrón,3 ceviches from the Rumiñahui.4 . . . This is a completely different
world, developed indeed, but at the same time cold and intended for one pur-
pose only: material well-being. I am sure all [Ecuadorians] who live abroad, for
whatever reason, yearn to go back to beautiful Ecuador. There is no place more
full of love, peace, and diversity than my homeland.5
International migration is changing Ecuadorians’ perceptions of nation-

hood, particularly because the national imaginary is occurring in territories
outside Ecuador’s borders. Interestingly enough, while upper-middle-class
Ecuadorians living in Ecuador look down on local cultural forms, Ecuadorian
migrants find new value in their culture, food, music, and traditional social
relations. Some greetings published in the electronic version of El Comercio
reveal how Ecuadorians both in Ecuador and overseas imagine their country
at the turn of the twenty-first century. Some of these letters read:
I send greetings from Madrid. I am an Ecuadorian who has Spanish nationality

and have lived in Madrid since the year 2000. As with all of you, I had to leave
my homeland because of the economic situation affecting all social strata. It
was due to bad management and theft by all governments that we were led to
the greatest poverty in the world.
Being a foreigner is often cause for suffering, but we have to bear this
with hopes that our country gets better and that someday we can return to our
homeland.
I would like to send greetings to all Ecuadorians all over the world [emphasis
added] as well as those who are living in Ecuador. I would like to contact any
compatriot living in England.
These greetings reveal that some Ecuadorian migrants conceive of Ecuador

as a transnational community made up of compatriots living in different loca-
tions who are united by emotional bonds and common roots and experiences.
It also reveals the feelings of many Ecuadorians who love their homeland but
believe that the government cannot guarantee a safe and decent life in their
home country.
202 | Chapter 7
Recalling and Materializing the Nation

As happens with other immigrant communities elsewhere, it is the first gener-
ation of Ecuadorian immigrants who generally resist assimilation to the host
culture more than subsequent generations, who tend to adapt better to the
host country. First-generation immigrants often attempt to re-create aspects
of their national culture in the host countries, and Ecuadorian migrants in
Madrid are no exception. They try to reproduce abroad what Foster calls “a
national frame of reference,” where the nation is materialized in the ways
things are done (2002, 18–19). For him, these practices become “sites where
the nation as imaginative construct or narrative is made and made real”
(Foster 2002, 6). For Billig (1995), the nation is “reminded” (that is, recalled)
through ordinary, everyday activities such as listening to music and eating
typical foods from the home country. According to him, the routine and
familiar forms of “banal nationalism” are usually overlooked because domi-
nant notions of nationalism are associated with passionate demonstrations of
patriotism and ideological expressions of the dominant classes. Banal nation-
alism takes place continuously and generally goes unnoticed through daily
routines and habits that are not consciously registered as “recalling.” The
daily reminders of the nation are so numerous that they operate mindlessly
rather than mindfully (Billig 1995). Such habits include activities like telling
jokes, eating typical food from the home country, or listening and dancing
to popular music. Nationals of a country socially and culturally reproduce
humor, flavors, smell, gestures, and ways of talking about a country.
Like other immigrants in Madrid, Ecuadorians gather in public parks on
weekends, where they interact with conationals for mutual support and to
share information regarding job opportunities and how to obtain legal resi-
dence. These parks temporarily become Ecuadorian spaces marked by leisure
activities, musical sounds, culinary tastes, and smells that are reminiscent of
the homeland. The immigrants play Ecua-fútbol and Ecua-volley,6 sing pasi-
llos to a guitar accompaniment, or listen to tecnocumbias and chichera music
on portable CD players. People arrive and leave the parks at their conve-
nience. In general, the environment Ecuadorian immigrants create for them-
selves in these parks replicates those found in the parks of Quito. In Quito’s
El Ejido, for example, it is commonplace to see people playing volleyball or
watching street performers. Young artists sell paintings and handmade jew-
elry on sidewalks, while informal vendors walk around the park selling candy
and typical snacks in large baskets.
By reproducing similar recreational activities in Madrid, Ecuadorian
immigrants are able to recall and materialize the national space just as much
as Ecuadorians living in Ecuador do. Flavors and smells awake memories of
Figure 7.1 A Sunday afternoon in the Park Casa de Campo. June 2008. Photograph by the
author.
place and childhood through sensory experiences. From an anthropology-

of-the-senses perspective, Seremetakis explains how “[cultural] artifacts can
provoke the emergence, the awakening of the layered memories, and thus the
senses contained within it” (1994, 10). For her, the object invested with sen-
sory memory (for example, food, songs) speaks and causes emotions, memo-
ries, and feelings in the perceiver to be recalled. In this view, the senses are
seen as “record-keepers of material experience” (1994, 6) and as a medium of
communication that is socially shaped and understood. Ecuadorian typical
food, such as fritada con mote (deep fried pork with hominy), papas con cuero
(potatoes with pork rinds), hornados (roasted pork), and grilled cuys (guinea
pigs) evoke memories of Ecuador because they awake sensual experiences
(smell, taste, images) associated with joyous family moments.
To “recall” the homeland is one of the factors motivating Ecuadorian
migrants go to the parks to taste a plate of fritada, or to buy brand products
from Ecuador at high prices in specialized Latino stores, such as Galletas
Amor (wafer cookies), Tango (chocolate-covered cookies), and Cola Tropi-
cal (a pink-colored soda). A family-sized bottle of Cola Tropical, for example,
cost six euros in 2003, almost the price of lunch at an Ecuadorian restaurant
in Madrid. Although wafer cookies and chocolate-covered cookies can be
204 | Chapter 7
purchased anywhere in the world, it is Galletas Amor and Tangos, previously

produced by the Ecuadorian chocolate and candy manufacturer La Univer-
sal, that Ecuadorian immigrants long for. These products are perceived as
“authentically Ecuadorian” because they have been produced and sold in
Ecuador for decades and because of the many generations that have tasted
them.7
While Ecuadorian migrants in Spain have earned a general reputation
for being responsible and disciplined workers, they are also viewed as messy
people because they leave trash in parks. Although garbage containers were
placed at strategic locations, at the end of the day parks were filled with empty
beer bottles and plastic glasses strewn about. When the municipal authori-
ties prohibited gatherings in El Retiro, Ecuadorian migrants moved to Casa
de Campo, a suburban park located on the outskirts of Madrid. Food ven-
dors organized and paid someone to clean up the area at the end of the day
in order to avoid problems with the municipality. This measure reduced the
amount of trash, though it did not solve the problem entirely.
As I exited the Casa de Campo metro station and surveyed the area
occupied by Ecuadorian migrants, I noticed that some people were stand-
ing around the soccer field cheering their favorite teams, others were at the
playground with their children, but most were standing near a concentration
of food stalls. Food vendors had arrived early in the morning to set up a din-
ing area with portable tables and chairs they had brought in a van. Some
were selling Ecuadorian snacks such as maduro con queso (pieces of fried
ripe plantain with cheese) or green mango slices with salt; others sold typical
dishes that they kept warm on portable stoves. The salads, rice, grains, and
potatoes accompanying the main dishes were kept in large containers or in
plastic bags. The aroma of hornados and fritadas, the best-selling foods, was
pervasive. Having grown up in Ecuador eating fritadas, I, too, experienced
what Seremetakis calls “the compression of space and time” encapsulated in
the smell, taste, and sight of the fritada. I could not resist the aroma that
awakened my own personal memories of Ecuador, and I ended up buying a
big plate of it. I sat with other customers at a table and listened to their jokes
and conversations, perceiving a familiar environment that re-created social
ambiences found, for example, at a typical restaurant in a working-class neigh-
borhood in Quito or in a small town. The conversation was about how tasty
Ecuadorian food is and how they long for the social life in Ecuador, especially
the weekend gatherings with the family.
Near the food stalls, a group of migrants were offering haircuts for the
modest sum of five euros, an amount significantly lower than that charged
at a standard hair salon. The basic tools required for this work were a pair of
scissors, a comb, a spray bottle with water, a towel, and a portable stool. As
the hairdressers did not have work permits, much less a permit to provide this
service in public parks, they ran away with their tools every time the police
appeared in the park, in a sort of cat-and-mouse game. Needless to say, the
hairdressers did not remove the cut hair from the grass.
Most people visited the park to talk and share experiences with compatri-
ots. They tended to gather with people from the same hometown, but it was
also common to see people from small and large cities of the Costa and the
Sierra coming together. They usually stood around a big bottle of beer and
drank from a plastic glass that was passed around, much like at EPM concerts
in Quito. Since Spanish laws prohibit the sale of beer in parks, vendors have
found ingenious ways of selling it, just as vendors in the CJCH did by hiding
bottles of Trópico Seco in their jackets. The beer bottles in Spain are large, so
vendors place them in a large cooler, which they hide inside a baby stroller.
Then, the vendors pretend to be caring parents walking their babies around
the park until a customer approaches and extends a bill. This strategy worked
out well because many Ecuadorian women have babies in Spain and women
in parks with strollers are part of the visual landscape in Madrid. Strollers
were also used to transport food.
In another area of the park, Ecuadorian migrants were singing pasillos,
listening to chichera and tecnocumbias on a CD player, and buying pirated
CDs displayed on the grass. Like Fausto, the welder I met opposite the Museo
El Prado, many young people I spoke to stated that they had learned to appre-
ciate the beauty and deep emotions of Ecuadorian music now that they were
far away from their homeland. They said that they never listened to pasillos
at home because they thought they were too sad and old fashioned. How-
ever, they listen to them in Spain because the lyrics and music make them
feel closer to Ecuador. Many young people praised Julio Jaramillo’s music,
especially “Nuestro juramento.” It is important to note that most Ecuadorian
migrants in Madrid continue to use the term música nacional when referring
to any type of Ecuadorian popular music, including the elite pasillo, rocolera,
chichera, and tecnocumbia. I was intrigued by this naming practice because
the term “Ecuadorian music” would apparently make more sense (at least to
me) to distinguish it from other types of Latin American music in Madrid.
The Translocation of Música Nacional

In the early 2000s, EPM music entrepreneurs and singers began to refer to
their performances in Europe and the United States as the “internationaliza-
tion of Ecuadorian music.” EPM detractors criticize this view on the basis
that Ecuadorian music has not actually gained non-Ecuadorian audiences
abroad, pointing out that a music can be called “international” only when
206 | Chapter 7
people from different nationalities listen to it, as happens with mariachi and
salsa music. Rather than “internationalization,” I suggest the term “transloca-
tion” to designate the change of locality of Ecuadorian musical practices and
the implications of this change of locality for new perceptions of Ecuadorian
national identity. The translocation of EPM does not simply imply a change
of geographical location; it also involves processes of mediation and recontex-
tualization that generate in the audience new images, sounds, and percep-
tions of “imagined community.” For example, many lower-class Ecuadorian
migrants in Madrid regard chichera and rocolera music as música nacional
(meaning the Ecuadorian music representative of the country) due to its ubiq-
uity and popularity among the Ecuadorian migrant community in Spain.
This idea is reinforced by the fact that upper-middle-class Ecuadorians who
criticize and stigmatize these styles of music in Ecuador comprise too small
a proportion of the migrant population in Spain to be able to impose their
aesthetic values.
I view tecnocumbia, rocolera, and chichera music as expressions of popular
nationalism that shape a way of imagining and feeling the nation from a bot-
tom-up perspective that challenges dominant notions of nationhood within
Ecuador. Pallares rightly points out in her study of Ecuadorian communities
(colonias ecuatorianas) in Chicago that “immigrant forms of popular nation-
alism can be quite inventive. . . . In many instances, they may actively ques-
tion dominant forms of representation or create new ones” (2005, 349–50).
This is particularly true for young Ecuadorian migrants who are not familiar
with the images and sounds of the elite pasillo of the 1930s to 1950s and per-
ceive chichera, rocolera, and tecnocumbias performed by Ecuadorian singers
as the emblematic national expressions. This is, perhaps, the only Ecuadorian
music they know and with which they have grown up.
The translocation of Ecuadorian music to Madrid brings about disloca-
tions and transformations of musical practices, which are observed in its orga-
nization, promotion, logistics, and performance contexts. EPM concerts in
Quito feature ten to fifteen artists, start at noon, and are organized in large
sports arenas and stadiums. These concerts combine dance music (chichera
and tecnocumbia), sentimental music (rocolera), and romantic music (música
del recuerdo and folkloric music) to fulfill the demands of a heterogeneous
public made up of lower-class mestizos (for example, service-sector and con-
struction workers, maids, street vendors). Informal vendors circulate, sell-
ing food, drinks, and snacks. Large groups of family members, friends, and
classmates make up the audience in Quito. Conversely, the EPM concerts I
attended in Madrid were put on in small- to mid-sized bars and discotheques,
started after midnight, and featured only two Ecuadorian singers due to the
high cost of transportation and lodging. Performances were usually scheduled
at two or three in the morning when the place is filled with dancers. The
colors of the Ecuadorian flag (yellow, blue, and red) placed at the entrances of
the discotheques temporarily mark these spaces as a little “piece of Ecuador,”
as one person I interviewed mentioned.
Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid are not a homogeneous group and their
musical practices differ by social class, age, and geographical region of origin.
This is observed in the type of musical preferences and places they visit during
the weekends. I attended several EPM concerts in various discotheques dur-
ing my stay in Madrid in April 2003. One of them was at the Caché Latino, a
discotheque near the Nuevos Ministerios metro station. The place was packed
because the organizers oversold the tickets. Most patrons were Ecuadorians
because the headliners were Sharon, a young tecnocumbia singer from Guay-
aquil, and Tormenta, an Argentine singer who had been popular in the early
1970s. The latter, famous in Latin America for her nueva ola songs, “Chico de
mi barrio” (Boy from my neighborhood) and “Brindo por ti y por mí” (I make
a toast for you and for me), awakens memories of a period of progress and
modernity in Ecuador. The public, made up of middle-class mestizos whose
ages ranged from early twenties to late forties, enjoyed both performances and
joined the singers in their songs.
A few days later, I attended another EPM concert at a small discotheque a
few blocks away from the Plaza España, near the San Bernardo metro station.
This venue was smaller and not as sophisticated as Caché Latino. The tick-
ets were relatively inexpensive (eight euros) in comparison to Caché Latino
(twenty euros). The latter had a middle-class audience (white-mestizos) danc-
ing to cumbias, modern bachatas, and pop music. In contrast, the small dis-
cotheque attracted lower-class mestizos in their early twenties, who danced
to the tecnocumbias that were popular in Ecuador. Their social status was
reflected not only in their preference for tecnocumbia but also in their style of
dress. The promotional posters I saw in the locutorios advertised rocolera sing-
ers Jenny Rosero and Cecilio Alva as guest artists for the night show; however,
only Rosero performed. The organizers informed the audience that Cecilio
Alva had been unable to travel due to visa problems. Later I learned that it was
a common tactic of music entrepreneurs to advertise a well-known singer in
order to attract a larger audience without actually having booked the artist.
In Spain, Ecuadorian singers portray themselves as messengers who bring
news and greetings from the homeland, while back home they comment on
how difficult it is for Ecuadorian migrants to live away from their families.
Ecuadorian singers reproduce in Spain the typical atmosphere at EPM con-
certs in Quito when they ask the audience questions like, where are the chu-
padores (drinkers)? Where are the bulliciosos (noisy people)? Who wears the
pants in the household? Where are the hinchas (fans) of the national soccer
208 | Chapter 7
team? As in Quito, regional differences were revealed in the recognition or

rejection of a soccer team from the coastal or highland regions. These dif-
ferences, however, melt away when the singers remind the audience that it is
the duty of every Ecuadorian citizen to support the national team because it
represents Ecuador abroad.
As in Quito, Ecuadorian singers gave several performances during a week-
end. In fact, their contract included a series of presentations in different cities
of Spain during a period of time. They performed in Madrid on a Friday night
and traveled six to eight hours the next day by car in order to make their next
performance in Murcia, in southern Spain. Lorca, a small city close to Mur-
cia, was a mandatory stop for EPM singers because it has the largest concen-
tration of Ecuadorian migrants, mainly working in the fields. When I arrived
in Lorca in 2008, I saw dozens of posters glued to fences and poles advertising
prior concerts of María de los Ángeles, Widinson, Las Chicas Deseo, Héctor
Jaramillo, Claudio Vallejo, and Ana Lucía Proaño.
The translocation of EPM concerts generates new meanings and images
of the Ecuadorian nation for both migrants to Spain and Ecuadorian nation-
als at home. Rather than being stigmatized as working-class musics, for Ecua-
dorian migrants chichera and rocolera become musics that embody their
national sentiment. Tecnocumbia was not just an urban popular music from
Peru, but a music that indexes “Ecuadorianness” because it is sung by and for
the Ecuadorian people. This connection was not merely imagined, but made
clear by the singers themselves in their verbal interactions with audiences.
The discourses about a supposed lack of national identity and lack of inter-
nationalization of Ecuadorian music among EPM detractors are blurred in
Spain because of the ubiquity of EPM concerts there. It is worth noting that
Ecuadorian migrants dance not only to Ecuadorian popular music but also to
other types of Latin American popular musics, particularly the Dominican
bachata from the 1990s, which projects a sense of modernity with its dance-
able character and romantic lyrics.
In Madrid, EPM singers target their performances to an Ecuadorian
migrant audience. They are not interested in reaching a Spanish audience,
just as they are not interested in attracting an upper-class audience in Ecua-
dor. This was made clear in conversations I had with a pair of Spanish arts
promoters who had worked with Ecuadorian singers and were disappointed
by their lack of seriousness. One promoter complained about EPM singers
accepting contracts to perform at other venues, or even in other European
countries without letting him know. Another believed that Ecuadorian singers
were burning out their market by coming to Spain two or three times a year
rather than allowing themselves the time to be “missed” by their audiences.
Market saturation worked negatively for both the singers and organizers.
There were instances when two concerts were organized the same day in the
same town, reducing the potential audience for both shows. Acknowledging
that they were saturating the market, one Ecuadorian organizer said, “If I
don’t do it, someone else will.”
Conclusion
The wave of emigration of the late 1990s has brought about an increase in
images of a de-territorialized Ecuadorian nation with a diasporic population
connected to the homeland through remittances, communication technolo-
gies, cultural practices, and citizenship duties. Ecuadorian migrants in Spain
are not homogenous in their musical tastes, just as the popular classes in
Ecuador also are not. Some identify with EPM, while others prefer to listen to
international musics such as salsa and pop music. Some attend the weekend
gatherings at the Casa de Campo to taste, smell, and hear the sounds of the
nation; others dislike this environment and prefer other venues and leisure
activities.
Ecuadorian migrants are (re)valorizing música nacional in Spain, though
what kinds of music they consider música nacional varies depending on
their age, ethnicity, and social background. Judging by the Ecuadorian sing-
ers who tour Spain, Ecuadorian migrants’ música nacional encompasses
chichera, rocolera, and tecnocumbia, rather than the elite pasillos, pasacalles,
and albazos of the 1920s to 1950s. Many times I heard young Ecuadorian
migrants express admiration for música nacional and highlight the fact that
they had learned to appreciate it only after they left Ecuador. They referred to
the “pasillos” performed by Julio Jaramillo, especially “Nuestro juramento,”
which we know is not a pasillo, as I discussed earlier in Chapter 4. The cita-
tion of Jaramillo’s song repertoire begs the question of whether the música
nacional they were referring to were the internationally known boleros and
valses that Jaramillo popularized in Latin America, or the elite pasillos the
popular classes consider “old música nacional.”
It is safe to say that the national image Ecuadorian migrants portray in
Spain is one that highlights the indigenous heritage of the mestizo nation.
The Ecuadorian migrants’ associations and cultural groups have greatly con-
tributed to the shaping of this image by celebrating the indigenous festivals of
Inti Raymi and Pawcar Raymi and through the indigenous dances frequently
performed at sociocultural and civic events. Some cultural groups, such as
the Ballet Quitus, directed by professional dancer and choreographer Edgar
López, a former member of the folkloric dance company Jachigua in Quito,
re-create pasillo dance choreographies. This kind of performance, how-
ever, has not become a mainstream cultural expression among Ecuadorian
210 | Chapter 7
migrants. The weak presence of mestizo dances in the dance repertoire of

Ecuadorian migrant associations is due not only to the highland origin of
most Ecuadorian migrants but also to the weak presence of mestizo cultural
practices in Ecuador. Finally, the highland population of Ecuador in Madrid
has been more proactive in demonstrations of pride for Ecuadorian culture
than has the coastal population, which is prone to international music forms.
Some working-class popular musics associated with a migrant population
and despised as “backward” in previous decades, such as the bachata from the
1970s to 1980s and norteña music, have changed their social status not only
through innovations in the lyrics, musical arrangements, and singing style by
charismatic singers and songwriters, but also through the new visibility pro-
duced by the economic power of return migrants, who organize concerts in
more “respectable” venues. Examples include the romantic bachata interna-
tionalized by Juan Luis Guerra (early 1990s) and the Dominican group Aven-
tura (late 1990s), on the one hand, and the (narco)corridos by Los Tigres del
Norte, on the other, who have an international audience beyond the migrant
population (Pacini-Hernández 1995; Ragland 2009). This, however, is not
the case of the tecnocumbia and chichera music in Ecuador. Although its
spread among the popular classes within and outside Ecuador also responds
to migration experiences, its strong association with indigenous and lower-
class mestizo groups has not made possible a cross over. Chichera music and
tecnocumbia are not even appealing to all diasporic Ecuadorians. Finally, no
upper-middle-class musicians making these musics attractive to a middle-
class audience have appeared.
Epilogue
T
his book has explored different repertoires of Ecuadorian and non-
Ecuadorian music which at some point have been considered (or
labeled) música nacional. In analyzing the ideology of mestizaje as a
nation-building discourse in Ecuador, I have examined música nacional as a
metaphor for Ecuadorian national identity. I have suggested that the types of
music that upper-middle- and lower-class Ecuadorians include or exclude in
the notion of música nacional reveal how they envision the ethnic configu-
ration of the mestizo nation. A central argument of this book has been that
upper-class Ecuadorians (white-mestizos) do not acknowledge the indigenous
heritage of their mestizo identity, which is symbolically observed in the stereo-
types and derogatory labels they use to refer to the music produced and con-
sumed by indigenous people and lower-class mestizos. They identify chichera
and rocolera music with drunkenness and the music of cholos, longos, and
underclass venues, while associating the term música nacional with upper-
middle-class, educated, respectable Ecuadorians. These music labels func-
tion as a mechanism of “Othering” through which the upper-middle-class
mestizos construct and perpetuate social hierarchies separating themselves
from the popular classes. These labels are used to emphasize a supposed lack
of moral and artistic values of lower-class mestizo music and reveal the eth-
nic, social, and racial tensions among mestizos, which is not a homogeneous
group as the ideology of mestizaje seems to portray.
I have shown elite and working-class perceptions of música nacional
through the analysis of two musical genres that are considered to embody a
sense of Ecuadorianness—the pasillo and the sanjuanito. They generate differ-
ent meanings for different people depending on the song repertoire, who the
singers and listeners are, and the social contexts in which they are performed.
212 | Epilogue
For upper-middle-class Ecuadorians, the notion of música nacional excludes

genres associated with the indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian population. They
identify with the pasillos, albazos, and pasacalles of the 1920s to 1950s, and
they scorn the commercial sanjuanitos and pasillos of the 1970s due to their
lyrics, association with drunkenness, and the ethnic groups these genres
represent. By contrast, the notion of música nacional for the popular classes
includes rocolera and chichera music, first because these repertoires are part of
their everyday life and have shaped their sense of Ecuadorianness since child-
hood, but most importantly, because they are performed by national artists
who express the sentiments of “el pueblo” (the people) and share with them a
common social profile. It is worth noting that while the popular classes regard
elite música nacional as antigua (old), they do not reject it. Thus, while the
popular classes imagine a heterogeneous community by considering different
styles of Ecuadorian music as música nacional (including the elite música
nacional), the upper-middle classes exclude the popular classes from their
“imagined community” by ignoring or stigmatizing their musical activities
with labels such as chichera and rocolera. (Appendix B.)
To examine the ideas that the popular classes have of música nacional, in
2002 I visited the Centro Histórico of Quito and interviewed street vendors
who sell pirated CDs. As the music providers for the low-income sector, they
know their customers’ musical preferences as well as the labels they apply
to their favorite styles. Several times I approached street vendors with the
excuse that friends of mine who lived in Madrid were nostalgic for Ecuador
and had asked me to send them CDs of Ecuadorian music, and I would ask
the vendors for suggestions. Many recommended that I send CDs of música
nacional, especially sanjuanito recordings, because this happy and dance-
able music would raise their spirits. Although I used the term “Ecuadorian
music” in my question, most vendors employed the term “música nacional”
in their answers. Some asked me if I was looking for música nacional antigua
or música nacional bailable, distinguishing through the use of these terms the
elite pasillos from chichera music and underscoring the difference I observe
in the usage of the term among Ecuadorians. Most vendors did not have CDs
of elite pasillos because, according to them, “that music did not sell well.”
At EPM concerts, the responses to my questions about música nacional
were quite similar. I asked people in attendance what kind of music we were
hearing when a tecnocumbia or a chichera singer was performing on stage.
Many people replied that it was música nacional, thus drawing attention to
the Ecuadorian origin of the singers. When I asked them if chichera and tec-
nocumbia were Ecuadorian music, they usually reponded, “Yes, it is música
nacional.” When I told them that the tecnocumbia was a Peruvian music, they
immediately explained to me that the tecnocumbia we were hearing at the
Epilogue | 213
concert was “nacional” because it was sung with the national sentiment by
and for Ecuadorian people. Many people I spoke to at these concerts also con-
sidered rocolera songs (both pasillos and boleros rocoleros) to be música nacio-
nal for the same reasons. It should be noted that respondents seldom used the
term chichera to refer to the sanjuanito, instead favoring “música nacional.”
Conversely, many upper-middle-class Ecuadorians I spoke to in Quito
rejected the idea that sanjuanitos such as “El conejito” were Ecuadorian
music. For them, it was simply chichera music, that is, the music of cholos,
“Indians,” and the populace. Other respondents identified the working-class
pasillo of the 1970s, such as “Te quiero, te quiero” and “17 años” as rocol-
era—that is, music inciting people to drink—rather than as pasillos. In both
cases, respondents did not use the term “Ecuadorian music,” instead referring
to these musics as rocolera and chichera, thus implying that they did not see
them as examples of Ecuadorian music.
Despite their different functions and stylistic features, rocolera, chichera,
and tecnocumbia are related to one another and to the popular classes through
a semiotic process that connects these three styles of music to particular
social contexts and ethnic groups. These musics have become what Turino
refers to as “indices of similarity and identity between individuals . . . [who]
share a commonality of background” (2004, 11). The connection stems from
frequent performances of these repertoires in lower-class venues such as the
Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo. The fact that tecnocumbia stars began their artis-
tic careers singing rocolera and chichera songs has also led the public to iden-
tify the three styles of music with one another. The popular classes are aware
of the foreign origin of the tecnocumbia, but embrace it as national music
when it is performed by and for the Ecuadorian people.
Chichera, rocolera, and tecnocumbia do not compete with each other for
audiences or record sales in the music market. Pacini-Hernández (1995) sug-
gests the term “lucha sonora” (a battle of sounds) to refer to the battle between
salsa and merengue for the Latino music market in New York in the 1980s. In
the case of Ecuador, however, there is no such competition between rocolera,
chichera, and tecnocumbia because none of these musics flourished at the
expense of the others. On the contrary, they complement each other at EPM
concerts with their different social functions and characters. For lower-class
mestizos, chichera and tecnocumbia are meant for dancing, while rocolera is
meant for listening. (Appendix C.)
The EPM Continuum

To better understand the differences between the elite and working-class ver-
sions of música nacional, I draw a line that represents a continuum of degrees of
214 | Epilogue
mestizaje of Ecuadorian music, placing the elite pasillo and the indigenous san-
juanito at opposite ends of the spectrum. The extremes represent the European
and indigenous heritage of Ecuadorian music, connected by a continuum repre-
senting different possible combinations of these elements. A style of music with
more European features will be located more toward the European end, while
more indigenous traits will place the music more toward the indigenous end.
European Heritage Indigenous Heritage

mestizo music
pasillo sanjuanito
Figure 8.1 The European and Indigenous heritage in mestizo music.
While the pasillo “Invernal” (1930s) epitomizes the elite música nacional
with its refined poetry and elaborate musical arrangements, the working-
class pasillo “Te quiero, te quiero” (1980s) introduces indigenous features,
such as pentatonic melodic contours and high-pitched timbres in the instru-
mentation and singing style. “Te quiero, te quiero” is located more toward
the indigenous end of the continuum, as it has less European elements and
more indigenous ones than “Invernal.”
elite pasillo working-class passillo

“Invernal” “Te quiero, te quiero”
Figure 8.2 The pasillo as mestizo music.
I place the sanjuanito played with two f lutes and a drum during the
Inti Raymi festival on the extreme right side of the continuum as an exam-
ple of an indigenous music with few European elements. “El conejito” by
Los Conquistadores (late 1990s version) tends toward the European side
because it includes Western elements such as Spanish lyrics, harmonies,
electric instruments, and modern dance choreography, though the lyrical
content, melody, cadences, and singing style stem from the indigenous
heritage. “Pobre corazón” by Guillermo Garzón is situated even further
toward the European side because it follows the elite música nacional
aesthetic with its lyrical content, vocal arrangements, and acoustic-guitar
accompaniment. In addition, it is performed in upper-middle-class social
venues.
Who the performers and the intended audience are defines the labeling of
and social status of these two styles of urban sanjuanito. Elite música nacional
Epilogue | 215
elite sanjuanito chicha music indigenous sanjuanito

guitar + requinto electronic instruments two flutes + a drum
“Pobre corazón” “El conejito” ritual context
Figure 8.3 The sanjuanito as mestizo music.
singers do not perform sanjuanitos like “El conejito,” while chichera singers
do not sing national sanjuanitos such as “Pobre corazón.” A similar situation
occurs with the elite pasillo and the pasillo rocolero. In general, elite música
nacional singers do not sing pasillos rocoleros, while rocolera singers do not
sing elite pasillos. The pasillo rocolero exhibits indigenous musical influences
more clearly than the older variety. It could be argued that it actually does a
better job of symbolizing the mestizo nation with its pentatonic-based melo-
dies, slow tempos, and preference for high-pitched and nasal voices, which are
typical features of indigenous and mestizo popular music rather than of the
elite música nacional.
How does the recent usage of the term música nacional by the popular
classes challenge the ideology of mestizaje as a homogeneous projection
of Ecuadorianness? How does música nacional take issue with concepts of
authenticity, which looks at musical roots as a defining category for national
music, by focusing instead on the perceptions of its listeners and the social
origin of the performers? How does working-class música nacional also
account for heterogeneity within the urban popular classes (rocolera, chichera,
and tecnocumbia), thus broadening the vision of Ecuadorianness in relation
to education, age, occupation, ethnicity, and gender? Whose música nacional
best represents Ecuadorian national identity(ies)?
This book presents a case study of an elite national music that struggles for
hegemony over national representation and has been resignified by the lower
classes. Several Latin American countries have experienced similar musical
stages, comprising a urban/bourgeois/creole-nationalist stage that defined the
official national musics in the 1920s to the 1950s, which did not represent the
majority of the population. With the migratory movements of the 1960s and
1970s, the ethnic “Other” invaded the cities and developed their own popu-
lar musics, which later became “national” in quite a different way, provoking
much controversy in the process. This is the case of the Colombian bam-
buco and the cumbia (Wade 2000), the Peruvian vals criollo and the huayno
(Lloréns 1983), and the Ecuadorian pasillo and the sanjuanito (Wong 2007).
Raymond Williams’s view of hegemony is pertinent to understand-
ing the resignification of música nacional in Ecuador. According to him,
216 | Epilogue
“Hegemony is never a complete process, it has to continually be renewed,

recreated, defended, and modified” because “it is also continually resisted,
limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (1977, 112). At
the turn of the twenty-first century, the elites have lost hegemony over the
musical representation of national identity. This is observed in the loss of
commercial visibility of the elite música nacional and the appropriation of
this term by the popular classes to designate a different style of music. In the
early 1980s, no Ecuadorian would have labeled the pasillo rocolero as música
nacional because the social hierarchies that the elite pasillo and the working-
class pasillo represented were strict and clear to everyone. Also at that time,
no Ecuadorian would have classified Julio Jaramillo’s signature song, the
bolero “Nuestro juramento,” as música nacional as he was not yet associated
with Ecuadorianness. He died in 1978, and it took several years for upper-
middle-class Ecuadorians to overcome their bias against his excesses in life
and accept him as an Ecuadorian singer of national and international stature.1
It is not Jaramillo’s music itself, but the constructed image of Jaramillo that
has become an indexical sign connecting his songs, in this case “Nuestro
juramento,” to a collective sense of Ecuadorianness.
Almost every country in Latin America has a working-class style of music,
usually a repertoire of bolero-like songs, dealing with topics of unrequited
love, breakups, and drunkenness. These include the early bachata from the
1970s (Dominican Republic), música carrilera (Colombia), and música can-
tinera (Chile). While the elites disdain this repertoire as immoral and deca-
dent, in none of these countries are they considered a threat to the national
musical identity. Ecuadorians, by contrast, engage in passionate discourses
about the artistic and moral values of rocolera music because the pasillo,
Ecuador’s emblematic music, has entered the rocolera repertoire. This is not
the case in the countries mentioned above, where the early bachata, carrilera,
and cantinera are bolero-like marginal musics that are not associated with the
official national musics, that is, the merengue, the cumbia, and the cueca.
It is worth noting that música nacional has not attracted new perform-
ers that give continuity to its song repertoire as has happened with other key
Latin American genres. In Mexico, for example, famous singers and actors,
such as Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, popularized the canción ranchera
in Mexican films in the 1930s. Subsequent generations of singers, such as
Vicente Fernández, Juan Gabriel, Rocío Dúrcal, and Lucero have kept this
repertoire current with their personal singing styles, which is appealing to
the new generations. In Ecuador, however, national artists who were popu-
lar in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Hermanos Miño Naranjo and the
Hermanas Mendoza Suasti, have continued to sing the same repertoire of
songs they sang in those decades. These singers are now in their seventies
Epilogue | 217
and eighties, and no major figures have appeared on the national music scene
to take their place. What will happen to elite música nacional when these
singers are gone? A few national artists, such as Paulina Tamayo and Trío
Colonial, organize and perform música nacional concerts in Quito, but they
are relatively unknown in the coast, particularly in Guayaquil. Middle-class
artists such as Margarita Laso and the group Quimera (a singer-and-guitar
ensemble) include an elite música nacional repertoire in their presentations.
However, they are also identified with other types of popular musics such as
the bolero romántico and Latin American folk music.
In May 2010, Juan Fernando Velasco, a well-known Ecuadorian pop
singer/songwriter who participated in Juanes’s “Concert for Peace” in Havana
(2009), released a CD of elite pasillos titled Con toda el alma (With all of my
soul). The repertoire of pasillos recorded in this production was among the
best-known pasillos in the música nacional anthology, most of which I have
discussed in this book.2 The singers and the repertoire of pasillos selected
for this record were intended to legitimize Velasco’s performances of música
nacional and attract both older and younger generations of listeners. Famous
música nacional artists of the 1960s sang in duets and trios with Velasco, such
as the Hermanos Miño-Naranjo and singers Olguita Gutiérrez (lead singer of
Trío Los Brillantes) and Consuelo Vásquez (lead singer of Trío Los Reales).
Famous requinto players Guillermo Rodríguez, one of the first requinto players
in Ecuador, and Rosalino Quintero,3 the arranger of the famous requinto part
of “Nuestro juramento,” gave the pasillo the distinctive sound of its golden
period with which the elder generations can identify. International singers
Franco de Vita (Venezuela) and Fonseca (Colombia), and young Ecuador-
ian pop singers Daniel Bethancourt, Paulina Aguirre, and Velasco himself,
secured a broader audience and gave the pasillo a cosmopolitan image. The
El Comercio newspaper sponsored the music production and sold the CD
for the price of five dollars with the May 9, 2010, edition (on Mother’s Day).
More than sixty thousand copies were sold with the newspaper in only three
hours, and Velasco won a platinum disc for the record sales and was nomi-
nated for a Latin Grammy. This was not Velasco’s first experience with the
pasillo because he had already recorded two (“Ángel de luz” [Angel of light]
and “El aguacate” [The avocado]) in a previous CD of romantic pop songs, but
with only moderate success. While in these first recordings the music arrange-
ments and the typical rhythmic pattern of the pasillo were adapted to a pop-
music style, Con toda el alma maintained the guitar-and-requinto format and
the duet singing that characterizes the elite pasillo. The effects of this CD on
Ecuadorians’ esteem for their música nacional and national identity are yet to
be determined.
218 | Epilogue
Ecuadorian Discourses and Practices

I have examined a series of elite discourses that have shaped and maintained
official images of Ecuadorian national identity, images that portray indige-
nous people in a negative light. Discourses, however, are not facts. Discourses
about the lack of artistic value and originality of EPM are “technologies of
Otherness” with which the elites raise and perpetuate social hierarchies.
They pinpoint the ideas and beliefs of the people who proclaim them more
than the ideas and beliefs of those to whom they refer. In my view, elite dis-
courses in many ways reveal Ecuadorians’ denial of the mestizo nation’s
indigenous heritage. One discourse claims that Ecuadorians do not have a
national identity because their popular music is little known internation-
ally. The previous chapters have shown that Ecuador has not one, but several
popular musics and visions of national identity representing different ethnic
and social groups. The Ecuadorian sanjuanito played by Otavalan groups and
Pan-Andean ensembles is perhaps the best-known Ecuadorian music outside
of Ecuador, and the music with which most non-Ecuadorians attribute to
Ecuador. People who have seen a pan-Andean ensemble playing music in
the streets of Paris, Madrid, New York, or Berlin will most likely have listened
to an Ecuadorian sanjuanito. Inti Illimani, Los Kjarkas, and other famous
folkloric ensembles also play them in concerts. This music, however, has not
reached national status because it indexes “Indianness” and the elites do not
perceive it as representative of the white-mestizo nation they envision. Thus,
EPM that presents alternative visions of mestizaje is either ignored or pre-
sented as folkloric renditions, as is the case of the sanjuanito played by pan-
Andean ensembles.
The critique of rocolera as music inciting people to drink is another
“Othering” discourse that places indigenous people and lower-class mes-
tizos outside of the elite national imaginary. For rocolera detractors, drink-
ing at EPM concerts is associated with the cantina in lower-class neighbor-
hoods, a place reminiscent of the extinct chicherías of the first half of the
twentieth century, where indigenous people and cholos gathered to drink
chicha. Naldo Campos rightly points out that people drink and get drunk
with other types of music as well, but only rocolera music (and by exten-
sion the working-class pasillo) and its listeners carry this stigma. While it is
true that many lower-class mestizos get drunk at rocolera concerts, it is also
true that many others do not and attend these concerts for other reasons,
such as the emotional freedom men experience with the sentimental songs.
As I explained in Chapter 4, indigenous people carry and adapt their cul-
tural practices to the urban context when they leave rural areas, and ritual
drinking is an important element of the festivities they celebrate to show
Epilogue | 219
reciprocity toward the Pachamama for the blessings received and also to
show solidarity with their community.
Ecuadorians perceive themselves as sentimental people and maintain a
discourse that their ability to display their emotions publicly is an emblematic
expression of Ecuadorian nationhood. As I have shown in this study, senti-
ments of loss are pervasive in the elite pasillo and all types of EPM. Many
elite pasillos sing to the loss of a woman’s love or are about one’s mother.
Rocolera songs express feelings of uprootedness caused by the massive migra-
tion of rural people seeking opportunities in the city. In a similar vein, tecno-
cumbia lyrics describe the loss of the homeland and loved ones in the context
of Ecuadorian emigration in the late 1990s. Why do Ecuadorians from all
walks of life identify with feelings of loss? Following Espinosa’s idiosyncratic
view of mestizaje, I view the pervasive images of loss in Ecuadorian popular
music reflecting the feelings of upper-middle- and lower-class mestizos who
seem to live a life of constant simulacrum, striving to hide their indigenous
heritage and thus experiencing and identifying with sentiments of loss.
Two additional discourses that undervalue indigenous and mestizo cultural
practices appeared in the late 1990s with the tecnocumbia boom in Ecuador.
The lack of originality and lack of professionalism arguments are reminiscent
of other public discourses used to justify the obstruction of the integration of
the indigenous people into concepts of the nation, such as their lack of educa-
tion and modernization. The alleged lack of originality and professionalism
of EPM singers supports the elites’ view that EPM should be prevented from
being accepted as a truly Ecuadorian music. In their lack-of-professionalism
critiques, particularly the use of recorded tracks instead of a live music band,
they fail to see EPM singers as “cultural brokers” with great ingenuity in tak-
ing advantage of sound technology to solve economic and logistical problems.
The negative discourses surrounding EPM singers prevent detractors from
seeing that foreign musics are not simply adopted, but are being innovated
and appropriated into the service of domestic agendas.
It is safe to say that elite nationalism in Ecuador exists on more of an ideo-
logical and rhetorical level and consists of something to be displayed on civic
holidays, than it does in everyday life. On the contrary, popular nationalism
is practiced spontaneously in routine and familiar ways. As Billig states, with
daily forms of nationalism “the nation is flagged, but the flagging itself is
forgotten as the nation is mindlessly remembered” (1995, 143). The flag raised
at the Olympics and the flag that stands outside of a public building everyday
are examples of these two types of flagging.
Although Ecuadorians of all walks of life refer to the elite pasillo as an
“old” music that has lost its national status, the truth is that, in practice, it
coexists with other forms of EPM styles and has a big following among the
220 | Epilogue
elder and middle-aged population. As mentioned earlier, discourses are not

facts, though they can reveal major social concerns. It is safe to say that the
elite pasillo is not a “museum piece” but an urban popular music, which may
have lost commercial visibility but not active listeners who enthusiastically
engage in singing the poems set to music in concerts and social gatherings.
My view of elite and popular nationalisms does not mean that the popular
classes do not express their views of national identity in verbal forms, or that
the elites feel reticent about national cultural practices. Lower-class Ecua-
dorians do criticize the upper classes for having a double standard toward
rocolera music, that is, for disparaging its supposed decadence and lack of
artistic value in public discourses, on the one hand, while secretly listening
to it in private, on the other. Likewise, upper-middle-class Ecuadorians do
enjoy eating typical food and watching Ecuadorian folk dances displayed in
civic parades. However, their discourses and practices in these cases are not as
audible and as visible as the ones presented in this study.
With the ubiquity of EPM concerts inside and outside Ecuador, the
popular classes are producing a “disturbance” in the system that does not
necessarily challenge or subvert power relationships, but opens up “room
for maneuver” in which a change can potentially occur due to people’s new
ideas, attitudes, values, and feelings for the nation (Chambers 1991, xiii, 1).
The disturbance consists of “making use of dominant structures for ‘other’
purposes and in ‘other’ interests, those of the people whom power alienates
or oppresses” (Chambers 1991, xiii, 1). In the case of EPM, the commercial
decline of the elite pasillo, the fragmented musical preferences of the upper-
middle classes, a low esteem for their popular culture, and the emergence of
socioeconomic and technological conditions for the development of EPM in
the late 1990s created “room for maneuver” (negotiation) for national expres-
sion from below. I am stressing here the agency of the popular classes in pro-
posing and shaping their own visions of the nation, rather than viewing them
as passive consumers bombarded by commercial music forms and unable to
make musical choices that reflect who they are, or who they want to be.
It would be misleading on my part to claim that EPM singers and entre-
preneurs promote their music with nationalistic impulses because different
interests move them to produce concerts, records, and videos, which ulti-
mately play an important role in shaping Ecuadorians’ views of a national
identity. EPM entrepreneurs and singers in search of economic profit and
stardom find alternative mechanisms to produce and disseminate EPM
in ways that are appealing to their audiences. They sell their CDs during
their performances and include their contact information for future gigs on
posters, CD covers, and in video clips. In this way they bypass traditional
media structures, controlled largely by the professional classes. From this
Epilogue | 221
perspective, their strategies to produce and disseminate their music do not

necessarily involve a counterhegemonic nationalist agenda. Likewise, EPM
consumers are looking for entertainment and a musical expression that speaks
to their actual experience (economic hardship, breakups, and emigration and
migration within Ecuador), rather than to a musical form of resistance or vin-
dication of a popular national identity. In spite of the motivations moving
both producers and consumers, the boom of EPM has had an unexpected
result, namely, a growing perception on the part of lower-class Ecuadorians
that EPM is a national music expression encompassing all citizens, including
themselves, more effectively than the old música nacional.
I have not addressed the music of Afro-Ecuadorians in my analysis of
música nacional. This is not out of neglect on my part, but rather an indica-
tion of their almost invisible position in the way the nation is imagined in
Ecuador. Rahier puts it succinctly: “Afro-Ecuadorians constitute the ultimate
Other, some sort of historical aberration, a noise in the ideological system of
nationality . . . they are not part of mestizaje (cited in Roitman 2009, 109). I
never encountered Ecuadorian people referring to the happy Afro-Ecuador-
ian bomba from the Chota Valley as música nacional, even though some bom-
bas, such as “Carpuela” (PURL 6.3) and “Pasito tun tun,” have entered the
repertoire of elite and working-class música nacional singers. The bomba is an
“unclassified” and invisible musical genre in the elite música nacional anthol-
ogy, as much as Afro-Ecuadorians have been invisible in the construction of
the mestizo nation. Just as Afro-Ecuadorians have been conceptualized as
not mestizo, not white, and not indigenous (Roitman 2009, 110), the bomba is
also perceived as neither mestizo, nor indigenous, nor white music. Due to its
happy and danceable character, the bomba is neither perceived as sentimental
music, nor as music for drinking. Furthermore, its lyrics make no allusion to
unrequited love or breakups, as is the case of most rocolera songs.
I made a follow-up trip to Madrid in the summer of 2008 to examine Ecua-
dorian migrants’ perceptions of música nacional a decade after the start of
the period of massive Ecuadorian emigration. The Ecuadorian migrants were
more established, and it was not as easy to find them in the streets as it was on
my first visit in 2003. The Schengen visa requirement that was signed into law
in 2003 drastically reduced Ecuadorian immigration to Europe. I noticed a
significant presence of Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants, who had arrived
in recent years by taking advantage of the lack of a visa requirement to enter
Spain. They were going through similar situations Ecuadorian migrants had
experienced when they first arrived in Spain in the early 2000s, with the dif-
ference that the economic crisis in 2008 in the United States had resulted in a
worsening of the job market in Spain. Many Ecuadorian migrants, especially
those working in the construction sector, had lost their jobs and could no
222 | Epilogue
longer pay their rents or mortgages or, worse still, could no longer send remit-
tances to their families. Those in extremely precarious conditions were con-
sidering the possibility of returning to Ecuador; others had received, or were
in the final process of receiving, Spanish citizenship and preferred to stay in
their new home country.
EPM singers continue to tour Europe. I attended a pair of concerts by
Héctor Jaramillo (former member of Trío Los Brillantes), Dulce Deseo (a
female tecnocumbia group), and María de los Ángeles in Madrid and Lorca,
the “Ecuadorian village” in southern Spain. Ecuadorian migrants also con-
tinue to gather at the Casa de Campo in Madrid to “recall” and “material-
ize” the nation with food, music, and sports events. In addition to Ecuador-
ian migrants, I also noticed a considerable presence of Peruvian, Bolivian,
and Paraguayan communities in the parks. Migrants from these countries
played soccer at the Casa de Campo while their families and friends watched
them from the sidelines, sharing experiences, commiserating, and expressing
hopes for a better future. Paraguay had won the 2007 championship of the
Mundialito de Inmigración in Madrid, and Paraguayan immigrants were dis-
playing their culture with their food and mate (their national drink) that was
consumed during the games. Latin American immigrants were remembering
and materializing their respective nations while being part of a transnational
imagined community of immigrants who have been displaced from their
homelands.
One issue that awaits further research concerns the sense of identity of
second-generation Ecuadorians who have been born and/or raised in Spain.
They are growing up in a “contact zone” where they view themselves as nei-
ther from Ecuador nor from Spain. The hyphenated identity of Ecuadorian-
Spaniards (or any other host country, for that matter) is still at an early stage of
formation after only a decade of immigration.
Ironically, while hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have left their
home country for economic reasons, Ecuador has become a host country for
Peruvian and Colombian immigrants. It is hard to estimate their numbers as
most are there illegally. For working-class Peruvians, dollarization has been
the main attractor as the value of their salaries increases in the conversion
of dollars to Peruvian soles. Colombian immigration is less the result of eco-
nomic hardship as of the violence and armed conflict perpetuated by the
Colombian military, paramilitaries, and the FARC (Colombian Revolution-
ary Armed Forces). Unlike in the case of Peru, Colombian immigrants come
from diverse economic and educational backgrounds and primarily seek a
safe environment in which to live. The presence of Colombians in Quito is
noticeable in the proliferation of Colombian restaurants, coffee shops, retail
stores, and business offices in different areas of Quito. It is commonplace, for
Epilogue | 223
example, to hear people speaking with a Colombian accent in the streets or

listening to vallenatos in metropolitan buses and on the radio. Colombian
music, however, has had little impact on the organization and repertoires of
EPM concerts.
The boom of EPM forms in Ecuador at the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury reflects the weakening of the dominant classes’ sociocultural hegemony
and political leadership. From a theoretical stance that privileges quotidian
expression and actual experience over ideological formulations, this study
shows how the popular classes articulate and reproduce their sense of Ecua-
dorianness through spontaneous musical practices and consumption patterns,
through which they destabilize, de-homogenize, and pluralize elite percep-
tions of nationhood. Moreover, in an even more emphatic move away from
dominant conceptions of national inclusiveness (that is, exclusiveness), the
popular classes are also accentuating the indigenous heritage of the mestizo
nation. The question that remains is whether upper-middle-class Ecuadorians
will be receptive to a national identity that accommodates the heterogeneous
and ethnically diverse Ecuadorian population when it becomes obvious that
their nationalist claims do not coincide with the reality of Ecuadorian experi-
ences in general.
Appendices
Appendix A
Appendix B
“Working Class Música Nacional.” Percentages are general approximations by the author.
Appendix C
ECUADORIAN POPULAR MUSIC IN THE 20th CENTURY
elite pasillo (1920s–1950s) = elite música nacional
--1900-------------------1920--------------------1940-------------------1960--------------------1980----------------------2000--------------------------
pasillo rocolero (late 1970s–1980s)
rocolera music (bolero and valses) = 1970s

chichera music/sanjuanito (early 1980s) = música nacional bailable (late 1990s)
tecnocumbia (late 1990s)
Notes
Introduction
1. Rocola is the Ecuadorian expression for the jukebox.
2. Indigenous organizations from the highland and Amazon regions formed the Con-
federation of Ecuadorian Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) in 1986, which has organized
indigenous protests and actively participates in Ecuador’s politics.
3. Sections of the multilingual national anthem are sung in Spanish as well as in Qui-
chua and other indigenous languages. The musical arrangement also incorporates the
sound of marimbas to represent the Afro-Ecuadorian population.
4. In Cuenca, chola cuencana (feminine noun) refers to a beautiful indigenous woman
from the region. The masculine noun has negative connotations.
5. Cholificación is the opposite of blanqueamiento (“whitening”), and it basically means
making things look more “Indian-like.”
6. Herzfeld’s notion of “cultural intimacy” points to the “recognition of those aspects of
cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment . . . the self-stereo-
types that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense” (1997, 3).
7. Ecuador has actually been highly successful in exporting music, at least to the rich
countries, via the Otavalan folkloric ensembles. However, the elites do not identify with this
type of music that points to “Indian-ness” and do not view it as representing Ecuador in the
international arena.
8. The Ecuadorian name for the “Panama hat” is sombrero de paja toquilla (or, toquilla
straw hat). They were originally woven from the leaves of the toquilla straw plant in Mon-
tecristi, a small town in the coastal province of Manabí. In the 1940s and 1950s, they were
massively produced in the highland provinces of Cañar and Azuay. Like other South Ameri-
can goods, the straw hats were shipped first to the Isthmus of Panama and then delivered to
their final destination in Asia, Europe, and the rest of the Americas. The straw hats came
to be known for their point of international sale (Panama), rather than their place of origin
(Ecuador).
9. The Meiji period began in 1868, ending feudalism and isolationism in Japan.
230 | Notes
10. The self-appointed name of Puerto Ricans living in New York.

11. The indigenous population in Guayaquil has largely assimilated into the port city
life and is too small to have an impact on the local music scene.
12. I researched the following archives: in Quito—all issues of Revista Estrellas (1962–
80s) in the Biblioteca Aurelio Espinoza Pólit; the photograph archives, the collection of
78-rpm records, and the band scores of Ecuadorian music in the Archivo Histórico del
Banco Central del Ecuador; early twentieth-century newspapers in the Biblioteca del Banco
Central del Ecuador; and the record collections from the 1940s to the 2000s of the Radio
de la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana. In Guayaquil—music magazines and early twentieth-
century songbooks and piano scores in the Biblioteca Carlos A. Rolando; and record collec-
tions of music enthusiasts.
Chapter 1
The title of this chapter is taken from the three-volume study, Ecuador: Una Nación en
Ciernes, by Rafael Quintero and Erika Silva (2001).
1. Jefferson Pérez won the bronze medal in the twenty-kilometer march.
2. According to the World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
3. Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, accessed June 8, 2011. http://www.state
.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35761.htm
4. For a detailed history of mestizaje in Latin America, see Race and Ethnicity in Latin
America by Peter Wade (1997).
5. El Universo, November 2001.
6. The Indian tax was abolished in 1857.
7. New textbooks have been published to update and correct the distorted narrative of
Ecuadorian preconquest history. For example, Manual de historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique
Ayala Mora (2008a).
8. Juan de Velasco does not provide approximate dates of the Caras’s arrival on the
shores of Ecuador.
9. The Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de Ecuador (CONAIE, Confedera-
tion of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) forced the government to negotiate on issues
of bilingual education, agrarian reform, and recognition of the plurinational nature of
Ecuador.
10. The Bourbon Reforms were a series of measures taken by the Spanish crown in the
eighteenth century to increase political and economic control over Spain itself and over its
American colonies.
11. Ecuador honored Mariscal (marshall) Antonio José de Sucre by naming the national
currency after him.
12. In Ecuador, the war of 1941 is seen as an invasion of Ecuador’s southern territories by
the Peruvian army. In Peru, this war is known as the Battle of Zarumilla, a military campaign
that sought to stop the advance of Ecuadorian troops into Peruvian territories (Ibarra 1999a).
Chapter 2
1. The medley usually starts with the albazo “Esta mi tierra linda” (My beautiful land),
followed by a set of pasacalles devoted to the cities of Quito (“El Chulla Quiteño”), Cuenca
(“Chola Cuencana”), Guayaquil (“Guayaquileño, madera de guerrero”), Ambato (“Ambato,
tierra de flores”), and the province of Carchi (“Soy del Carchi”).
2. The sanjuanito “Pobre corazón” (Poor heart), the danzante “Vasija de barro” (Clay
pot), and the yaraví “Puñales” (Daggers) are examples of urbanized renditions of indigenous
musical genres.
Notes | 231
3. Only in 1900 were the current Ecuadorian flag and shield declared national symbols
of Ecuador by Congress. The sucre was adopted in 1885 as the national currency.
4. The term “creole dance” refers here to European ballroom dances adapted to the
Latin American environment. The European waltz, for example, was transformed into vari-
ous types of “vals del país” (national waltzes) and was called the pasillo in Colombia, Ven-
ezuela, and Ecuador.
5. I have found several music scores of rondeñas, quiteñas, and zapateados in national
and private music archives, and none of these creole dances have any indigenous musical
traits such as pentatonic melodies or rhythms of indigenous dances.
6. The Suite Ecuatoriana usually starts with a sanjuanito dance in a moderate fast
tempo (similar to that of the allemanda), followed by the slow tempo yaraví (sarabanda),
the danceable tempo of the danzante (minuet), and an albazo or aire típico as the final fast-
tempo dance (giga).
7. The Fondo Musical Vaca is a collection of approximately seventy thousand folios of
band music and printed sheet music compiled by military band director José Vaca. The col-
lection can be found in the Archivo Histórico del Banco Central.
8. Pasillos were performed by military bands, orchestras, ensembles of harps and gui-
tars, guitars and accordion, or any combination of instrumental ensemble. They were most
often performed on a piano.
9. See Varney (2001) and Santamaría (2007) for detailed information about the bam-
buco notation debate.
10. The group Los Nativos Andinos was formed by Marco Tulio Hidrobo, Bolívar Ortiz,
Carlos Carrillo, and Gonzalo Veintimilla in 1940.
Chapter 3
1. These views on the pasillo are similar to those on the ranchera, tango, and bolero. The fact
that Ecuadorians verbalize these ideas out loud does not necessarily mean that the pasillo is sadder,
or more depressive, than other musical genres, though many Ecuadorians may believe so.
2. In La música en el Ecuador (1930), Moreno transcribes 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.
3. After the Concordato signed by President Gabriel García Moreno with the Vatican
in 1869.
4. The Ecuadorian elites were basically “creole” people, that is, Spaniards born in the
Americas.
5. El Cancionero del Guayas, 1918, no. 2, p. 13.
6. Estrellas 5:65, 14–17.
7. 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 that praises the
beauty of Brazil’s landscapes.
8. 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
center of power was in Cuzco, Peru). It continued in the colonial 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, eventually leading to the Rio de Janeiro Protocol,
following the Ecuadorian-Peruvian war of 1941.
232 | Notes
9. Revista Estrellas 5:52.

10. Pianola rolls were first made by hand; after 1926, they were made by machine,
which allowed Feraud Guzmán to produce sixteen rolls per hour.
11. Revista Estrellas, 1964.
12. Ecuadorian pop singers usually opened the shows of international artists, a man-
datory law decreed by the Ecuadorian Federation of National Artists. In this case, the 27
percent tax was paid with the money generated by the entrance tickets for the international
artist’s show. In the case of rocolera concerts, the cost of renting out the popular arenas was
relatively low and given the large audiences attending the concerts, the organizers were able
to pay the 27 percent tax easily.
13. El Comercio, May 17, 1980.
Chatper 4
1. Since the 1990s, the Dominican bachata has lost its status of marginal music and
is appealing to an international audience. This is partly due to Juan Luis Guerra and other
musicians, such as Aventura, who have modernized and stylized the song lyrics and arrange-
ments. These artists sing to romantic love, rather than to bitterness, sexual double enten-
dres, and the cantina, which were typical features of this genre in the 1970s.
2. In contrast to the cumbia, which is considered the quintessential musical symbol of
Colombia, carrilera does not bear the status of national music. None of the songs labeled
música cantinera and música cebollera are related to the Peruvian vals criollo or the Chilean
cueca.
3. YouTube comment on Juanita Burbano’s video “Volverás.”
4. Hoy, June 9, 1987.
5. Revista Estrellas, n.d.
6. El Universo, Actualidad, February 9, 1993.
7. This song is frequently performed at EPM concerts. I have not been able to identify
the author and composer of this bolero.
8. Aladino also sings bachatas from the 1970s and 1980s.
9. El Universo, Especial, May 27, 2001, p. 8.
10. Despite the criticisms, Aladino has a large following and has made a successful
career on television.
11. The Peruvian government declared him an “Ambassador of Peace” and the Ecua-
dorian National Congress honored him with the Cultural Merit Award.
Chapter 5
1. The same group of Afro-Caribbean dances is also known as música caribeña in many
Latin American countries. In Colombia, the term música tropical has a more specific con-
notation—it refers to “cosmopolitan adaptations of folkloric styles of the Atlantic coast of
Colombia” such as the cumbia, porro and gaita, while the term música antillana designates
Cuban and Puerto Rican styles disseminated to the rest of Latin America in performances
by dance orchestras from the 1920s through the 1950s (Waxer 2002, 41–62).
2. During this period in Guayaquil, social parties usually started at 9:00 p.m. and lasted
until the early morning hours (2:00 or 3:00 a.m.). The party usually started with a toast, fol-
lowed by Johan Strauss’s waltz “The Blue Danube,” which was danced to by the bride and
the groom, the quinceañera and his father, or the graduate with his mother or her father.
The first dance was usually followed by a pasodoble, an elegant duple-meter embraced
dance of Spanish origin usually danced by adults, and a set of cumbias, salsas, and baladas
rítmicas (baladas with rock ’n’ roll rhythm), which brought people of all ages to the dance
Notes | 233
floor. Slow-paced music, like the bolero romántico, was usually played to break up a long set,
providing a romantic setting for those in love and allowing exhausted dancers to rest.
3. “Cuando te recuerdo me pongo muy triste / y esta cumbia dice que siempre te quiero.
Yo pienso en la noche cuando tú te fuiste / por eso te canto esta cumbia triste.”
4. Urdesa has changed since the 1990s, and its main avenues are now a commercial and
entertainment area.
5. El Comercio, January 3, 1986, p. B-5.
6. El Universo, September 22, 1981.
7. El Comercio, January 3, 1986, p. B-5.
8. The bomba combines indigenous, African, and European musical elements in the
use of pentatonic melodies, the bomba (a cylindrical two-membrane drum played with bare
hands), and guitar accompaniment and lyrics set in couplets, respectively.
9. The term “rocolization” is not used today as much as it was in the 1980s and early
1990s.
10. The Centro Histórico is home to several public and state institutions such as the
offices of the Municipality of Quito and various government ministries.
11. The operation of the Trole and Ecovía transport systems and the rehabilitación (res-
toration) of the Centro Histórico in the early 2000s have changed this situation. Sidewalk
vendors and the bars on 24 de Mayo have been relocated and police regularly monitor the
area.
12. It is important to note that when the elites lived in the Centro Histórico, the CJCH
was a reputable performance center for national and international concerts.
13. This collection belongs to the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito and is
located in the Museo de Instrumentos Musicales Pedro Pablo Traversari.
14. According to Moreno, the chucchurillu was danced in circles until the dancers’ bod-
ies began to tremble as if they had chills from a cold (Guerrero Gutiérrez 2005, 2:1279).
The term chucchurillu may have been popular in the early twentieth century when Moreno
wrote his observations of indigenous music in Imbabura Province, but it is rarely used today
to refer to any type of sanjuanito.
15. The catalog number printed on the jacket cover and the disc number that appears
on the disc are often useless as most record companies have disappeared and their produc-
tion or sales records have been lost. As a result of music piracy in the 1980s, small record
companies went bankrupt; those that are still in the market either have not been careful in
keeping sales records or have been reluctant to speak about them with me.
16. This collection awaits further cataloging and analysis of its content. Once made
available to the public, it will provide information on the repertoire and role of military
bands in shaping social life in the small towns, as well as acquainting Ecuadorian people
with the new popular music forms in the world, when recordings and radio programs were
not yet accessible to common people.
17. See detailed information in Meisch 2002, ch. 5.
18. Granja launched the artistic careers of the Dúo Benítez-Valencia and the Herma-
nas Mendoza-Suasti, whose performances are now considered classics of the música nacio-
nal repertoire.
19. Fresia Saavedra and Carlos Rubira Infante were among the first música nacional
singers who recorded Ecuadorian music for IFESA.
20. La Televisión. http://www.last.fm/music/Angel+Guaraca/+videos/+1–vD1KpcWhq_8
21. Ecuador’s 1998 Constitution, Article 2.
22. Luis Macas is a politician and intellectual from Saraguro. He was one of the
founders and president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador
(CONAIE) and the Pachakutik Movement. He was also a member of the National
Congress.
234 | Notes
23. Nina Pacari is a politician, lawyer, and indigenous leader from Cotacachi, who has
fought for indigenous rights and the defense of the Quichua language.
24. The CONAIE took an active role in the ousting of President Jamil Mahuad in 2000.
Chapter 6
1. A family formed by well-known singers Azucena Aymara (Thanya’s mother), Jaime
Enrique Aymara (uncle), Gustavo Aymara (uncle), and Tamara Aymara (cousin).
2. El Comercio, August 19, 2001.
3. El Comercio, August 20, 2001.
4. Widinson was interviewed on La Televisión. Jaime Enrique Aymara was interviewed
on Día a Día.
5. EPM concerts are rarely organized on Mother’s Day because this holiday is consid-
ered to be a family celebration focusing on the home; going to a concert would be consid-
ered inappropriate.
6. YouTube comment on a video by Grupo Deseo.
7. YouTube comment on a video by Doble Sentido.
8. YouTube comment on a video by Grupo Deseo.
9. Ibid.
10. YouTube comment on a video by Doble Sentido.
11. YouTube comment on the Video by Franklin Villegas.
Chapter 7
1. Roasted pork.
2. Thin slice of grilled beef.
3. Fried pork rinds.
4. Shrimp cocktail.
5. El Comercio, “Ecuatorianos en el mundo,” July 18, 2005.
6. Ecua-volley is played by only three people on each side, as opposed to standard vol-
leyball. Ecua-fútbol refers to the soccer game played by less than eleven players on each side.
7. La Universal was founded in 1889 and manufactured chocolate and candy bars until
its sale in 2004. Chocolate products are now produced by Ecuadorian Nestlé.
Epilogue
1. I remind the reader that it is not the elite pasillo of the 1920s to 1950s but the work-
ing-class pasillo of the 1970s to 1980s that bears the stigma of rocolera music.
2. The pasillos recorded in this CD include “El alma en los labios,” “Sendas distintas,”
“El aguacate,” “Romance de mi destino,” “Guayaquil de mis amores,” “Manabí,” “Ángel de
luz,” “Pasional,” “Acuérdate de mí,” and “Sombras.”
3. Rosalino Quintero died in January 2011 at age eighty.
Glossary of Ethnic
and Musical Terms
Albazo: A mestizo musical genre of lively tempo that alternates 3/4 and 6/8 meters. Despite
its fast tempo, it has a melancholy character because of the pentatonic flavor of the
melodies and prominence of the minor mode.
Banda mocha: A musical ensemble made up of chopped (mocha) gourds, orange leaves,
flutes, and guitars; typical in the Imbabura Province.
Bomba: The name of an Afro-Ecuadorian musical genre, drum and dance of the Chota Val-
ley in the Imbabura and Cañar provinces. The rhythm is characterized by a long-short-
short-long rhythmic pattern played with bare hands on the drum. Besides the drum, the
ensemble is made up of guitar, requinto, and flutes. This music is traditionally danced
by women carrying a bottle on top of their heads.
Chicha: A fermented indigenous corn beer.
Chichera music: An urban working-class music associated with indigenous and lower-class
mestizo people.
Cholo: A person of mixed ancestry (indigenous and “white”) with different levels of urban-
ization. It may refer to indigenous people of the coast or the highlands. Most often this
term has a pejorative meaning and is used as an insult.
Criollo: People of Spanish descent born in the Americas.
Danzante: An indigenous musical genre and dance of pre-Inca origin usually performed
during the Corpus Christi festivity in the Ecuadorian highlands. Traditionally accom-
panied by a flute and drum, the typical rhythm is made up of sequences of long-short
notes.
Ecuadorian migrants: Lower-class mestizos who left Ecuador in the late 1990s due to eco-
nomic hardship.
Fox incaico: A slow-tempo mestizo musical genre that combines the American fox-trot
rhythm with Andean melodies.
Longo: A term used in the highlands to point to people of mixed ancestry (indigenous and
“white”). It has a pejorative meaning and is often used as an insult.
Mestizaje: A term that refers to a process of racial, ethnic, and cultural mixture.
Mestizo: A person with mixed European and indigenous ancestry.
236 | Glossary of Ethnic and Musical Terms
Música del recuerdo: A specific repertoire of baladas from the 1960s and 1970s, such as
those of Leo Dan and Los Iracundos, which are listened to by the Ecuadorian lower-
class youth in Quito.
Pasacalle: A duple-meter mestizo musical genre derived from the pasodoble, the European
polka, and the Mexican corrido. Pasacalles devoted to particular cities are considered
popular anthems.
Pasillo: A waltz-like song in triple meter usually defined as a poem set to music. It is charac-
terized by guitar accompaniment and lyrics about love and pride for the homeland. It is
considered the musical symbol of Ecuador.
Rocolera music: A working-class popular music (boleros, valses peruanos, and pasillos) that
emerged in the 1970s with the processes of modernization and urbanization. It is stig-
matized as the music of drunkards and the cantina.
Sanjuanito: The most popular indigenous musical genre in Ecuador. It accompanies the
ritual dances of the Inti Raymi festival in the Imbabura Province. Of lively character,
it has binary meter, pentatonic melodies, and prominence of the minor mode. Mod-
ern sanjuanitos played with electronic instruments are pejoratively known as chichera
music.
Tecnocumbia: An urban popular music of Peru that combines the rhythm of the Colom-
bian cumbia, Andean melodies, and sounds of electric instruments.
White-mestizo: An ethnic label used by Andean scholars to designate upper-class mestizos
who do not identify with indigenous cultures and their aesthetic values.
Yaraví: An indigenous musical genre characterized by a melancholy character and slow
tempo in a minor mode. It usually ends with a fast section called the albazo.
Yumbo: An indigenous musical genre and ritual dance of pre-Inca origin very popular in the
mid-highland provinces. Accompanied by a flute and drum, the rhythmic accompani-
ment is made up of sequences of short-long notes.
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El Universo, Guayaquil.
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María de los Ángeles, Quito, September 27, 2002; 2004.
Azucena Aymara, Quito, December 12, 2003.
Segundo Bautista, Quito, June 16, 2004.
Los Búfalos, New York City, May 24, 2003.
Juanita Burbano, New York City, May 23, 2003.
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Francisco Feraud, Guayaquil, July 9, 1997.
Norberto Fuertes, Quito, August 3, 2009.
Héctor Jaramillo, Madrid, June 30, 2008.
Jayak, New Jersey, May 19, 2003.
Edgar López, Madrid, May 6, 2003; July 3, 2008.
Juan Carlos Manzanillas, Madrid, April 30, 2003.
Noé Morales, Ambato, July 16, 2002.
Saulo Proaño, Quito, June 8, 2004.
Enrique Pulupa, Madrid, June 28, 2008.
Ricardo Realpe, Quito, August 23, 2005.
Tanya Realpe, Quito, January 29, 2003.
Carlos Rubira Infante, Guayaquil, 2004–10.
Pablo Santillán, Quito, 1997, September 9, 2002.
René Torres, Quito, August 5, 2009.
Cristóbal Vaca, Quito, May 6, 2002.
Claudio Vallejo, Madrid, June 23, 2008.
Franklin Villegas, Quito, August 23, 2005.
Lola Zapata, Quito, 1997; December 9, 2003.
Hugo Zavala, New Jersey, May 19, 2003.
Mauricio Zavala, New Jersey, May 19, 2003.
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Index
Figures are indicated by an “f.”
Acosta, Alci, 109–10 Araújo Chiriboga, Jorge, 63–64

Adoum, Jorgenrique, 5, 17 “Asciéndeme a marido” (Make me your
Afro-Ecuadorians, 221 husband), 119–20
Agua Bella, 188–89 Asociación Ecuatoriana Sociocultural
“El aguacate” (The avocado), 60, 66, 91 Puriccuna, 196
“El aguajal” (The water stream), 168, 185 Asociación Hispano-Ecuatoriana Rumiñahui,
Aicardí, Rodolfo, 132 196
Aladino, 118–21, 122f, 128 associations, for Ecuadorian migrants, 195–98
Álava, Juan, 110 El Aviador Ecuatoriano songbook, 71–72
albazo: in anthology of música nacional, Ayala Mora, Enrique, 26, 33–34, 70, 165, 181, 185
52–53, 53f; defined, 39, 45, 235. See also Aymara, Azucena, 166–68, 172, 174, 175f,
specific songs 181–83, 187–89
“El alma en los labios” (Wearing one’s soul on Aymara, Jaime Enrique, 165, 181, 185
one’s sleeve), 59–60, 72, 82–84
Almeida, José, 24 bachata, 13, 166, 185–86, 208, 210, 216, 232n1
Alva, Cecilio, 11, 112f balada, 178
Anderson, Benedict, 8, 18, 21, 35 bale de cintas (ribbon dance), 144
Andrade, Teresita, 80, 102, 113, 150 Balseca, Hipatia, 185–86
anthology of música nacional (antología de bambuco, 21, 55–56, 69, 78, 131
la música nacional): albazo in, 52–53, banda mocha, 143, 235
53f; authors, 59–62; composers, 59–64; Barrios, Lucho, 109–10, 112f
concerts, 38–39; danzante in, 47–49, 49f; Bautista, Segundo, 145, 148–49
defined, 38–40; establishment of, 84; fox Benavides, Hugo, 81-83, 108
incaico in, 50–51, 52f; genres in, 44–59, Benítez, Gonzalo, 48–49, 49f
46f–47f, 49f, 51f–55f, 59f; música tropical Benítez, Ulpiano, 45–46
and, 134; origin of, 40–44, 41f; pasacalle Bermúdez, Abilio, 110
in, 53–54, 54f; pasillo in, 54–65, 55f, 59f; Billig, Michael, 9, 20, 202
performers, 59–61, 64–65; regionalism and, Blacking, John, 92
39–40; sanjuanito in, 49–50, 51f, 144–46, blanqueamiento (whitening), 3–5, 16, 26, 36,
147f; yaraví in, 45–46, 46f; yumbo in, 47, 47f 173–74
Aparicio, Frances, 120 “La bocina,” 134, 149
248 | Index
bolero: Mexican, 81, 98; pasillo blurred with, “Chulla quiteño,” 53–54, 54f
115–21; rocolero, 81, 97–98, 109–11, 115–21; El Chulla Romero y Flores (Icaza), 30–31
romántico, 115 Cine Radial, 88
“Bolero rocolero,” 124–25 CJCH. See Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo
bomba, 124, 143, 189, 221, 233n8, 235 Coliseo Julio César Hidalgo (CJCH), 38, 138,
Bonilla, Héctor “Manito,” 134 169–73, 171f–72f, 233n12
Bourdieu, Pierre, 81 “Collar de lágrimas” (Necklace of tears), 145,
Brescia, Domingo, 43 148–49
Los Búfalos, 179 Colombia: bambuco of, 21, 55–56, 69, 131;
Burbano, Juanita, 80, 113, 116, 128, 185 Cali, 7–8, 132; carrilera music of, 96,
232n2; cumbia of, 21, 131–34, 156, 232n2;
Cadena, Marisol de la, 25 genres in, 40; immigrants from, 222–23;
Caicedo, Bayronn, 151, 155–59, 158f pasillos in, 55–56, 69, 80
Cajamarca, Rosita, 186–87 “La colorada infiel,” 118–19
Calero, Roberto, 110 community: imagined, 8, 18–19, 35, 206; of
Camas calientes, 200 sentiment, 18
“Campesino de mi tierra” (Peasant of my Cóndor, Patricio, 170, 182, 184, 187
land), 47f, 152–53 “El conejito” (The little rabbit), 145, 149–50,
Campos, Naldo, 102–3, 114–15, 122f, 128, 147 151f, 162, 214–15
canción del desarraigo (song of uprootedness), 93 Los Conquistadores, 145, 149–50, 151f, 162, 214
“La canción de los Andes” (The song of the Cortés, Tito, 110, 112f
Andes), 50–51, 52f Costumbrismo, 42–44, 145
canción de maldición (song of damnation), creole dance, 41–42, 231n4
71–75, 80, 92, 111 Cueto, Margarita, 58, 76, 83
cantinas, rocolera music and, 15, 97–101 Cueva, Agustín, 6, 86, 92–93
capitalism, 18–19 “Cumandá,” 42–43
Caravana, 178–79, 186 cumbia, 21, 131–34, 156, 232n2
Cárdenas, Olimpo, 65, 115 “Cumbia triste” (Sad cumbia), 133–34
carrilera music, 96, 232n2
Carrión, Benjamín, 34, 84 Dahlhaus, Carl, 42, 44
Casares, Miguel Ángel, 58, 60 danzante: in anthology of música nacional,
Castillo, Abel Romeo, 61, 73, 85–86 47–49, 49f; defined, 39, 235. See also
Cavero, Juan, 134, 136, 186 specific songs
Centro Histórico of Quito, 137–39, 212, Dávila, Lauro, 57–58, 59f, 62, 73, 76–77
233nn10–12 de-Indianization, 25d’Harcourt, Raoul and
Chambers, Ross, 21, 220 Marguerite, 140
Charijayac, 143, 197 “Diecisiete años” (Seventeen years [of age]),
Chicha: drink, 99, 136, 235; music, 160–61, 168 123–24
chichera music: data on, 12; defined, 16, Discos Cóndor, 111
21, 96, 136, 235; as disturbance, 21; “Disección” (Dissection), 58–59
emergence of, 96; genres, 137, 139; label “La divina canción” (The divine song), 74
of, 159; market, 149–50; migrants and, 210; Donoso Pareja, Miguel, 6–7, 24
as música nacional, 1; música nacional “Dos cariños” (Two loves), 156–57
bailable and, 159–61; origin of, 136–39; Dúo Benítez-Valencia, 64, 84, 87, 94
pejorative connotations of, 4–5, 10, 13, 130– Dúo Ecuador, 63, 76–77, 78f, 83–84, 87, 94
31; perceptions of, 213; pirated, 159, 160f– Durán, Corsino, 143
61f; rise of, 147–49; sanjuanito as, 139–47;
stigmatized, 96, 136–37; tecnocumbia early sound movies, 77, 79, 79f
compared to, 190; terminology, 13; trends, Ecuador: in bloom, 17–37; Colombian
150–58; tropicalization and, 10, 130–62 immigrants in, 222–23; cultural setting,
chichería, 99 22–23; discourses and practices in, 218–23;
cholo: defined, 4, 27–28, 235; pejorative economic crisis in, 163–64; Ecuadorian
connotations of, 4, 10, 27, 124, 155 migrants’ view of, 198–201; goods
chucchurillu (little quaver), 141, 233n14 made in, 6; history, readings of, 31–36;
Index | 249
inferiority complex in, 5–6; map of, 35, 35f; Fondo Musical Vaca, 142, 231n7
modernization of, 95–96, 131, 168; música Foster, Robert, 9, 20, 22, 202
tropical in, 130–36; Peruvian conflict with, foundational myths, 32–33
34–36, 84–85, 231n8; rocolization of, 137; fox incaico: in anthology of música nacional,
sentiment in, 18, 80–84, 86, 92, 94, 114, 50–51, 52f; defined, 39, 235. See also specific
219; unifying elements of, 36 songs
Ecuadorian migrants: associations for,
195–98; defined, 14, 235; Ecuador viewed Galarza, Fausto, 123–24
by, 198–201; elite música nacional and, García Canclini, Nestor, 161
128; influence of, 165; in Madrid, 11, 16, Garzón, Guillermo, 50, 51f, 134, 145, 214
149, 193–200, 202–10, 221–22; música Generación Decapitada (“Beheaded
nacional perceived by, 221–22; music Generation”), 73, 92–93
festivals for, 127–28; national identity of, globalization, 22, 165
222; nation recalled and materialized by, glocalization, 22
20, 202–5, 203f; in New York, 11, 127–28, Godoy, Mario, 12, 77, 102
179; reasons for migrating, 17–18, 37, Los Graduados, 132
193–95; translocation of EPM and, 192– Granda, Wilma, 12, 73, 93
210; transmigrants, 37; waves of, 192–93; Granja, Luis Aníbal, 144–45
working-class música nacional and, 37, 210 Guaraca, Ángel, 47f, 151–55, 152f, 159, 184
Ecuadorian popular music (EPM): boom in, “Guayaquil de mis amores” (Guayaquil of my
223; concerts, 169–73, 171f–72f, 176–78, 206– loves), 57–58, 59f, 62, 76–77, 79f
9; continuum, 213–17, 214f–15f; defined, 164; Guayasamín, Oswaldo, 60
discourses, 218–23; disparaged, 4, 44; double Guerrero, César, 60, 66, 91
usage of, 2; in Guayaquil, 10; in Quito, 10–11, Guerrero, Juan Agustín, 42, 44–45, 142
169–73, 171f–72f, 206; styles, 10; terminology, Guerrero, Óscar, 110–11
12–13; translocation of, 192–210; in twentieth Guevara, Gerardo, 45, 140
century, 228. See also specific genres Gustavo Quintero y Los Hispanos, 132
Egas, José María, 62, 73–75
elite música nacional: Campos and, 114; Handelsman, Michael, 70, 135
concerts, 169; data on, 12; defined, 2; Hassaurek, Friedrich, 139–40
discourses, 9; emotional performances of, hat, Ecuadorian, 6, 229n68
18; on EPM continuum, 213–17, 214f–15f; hegemony, 21, 215–16
exposure to, 10–11; genres, 39, 227; Hermanas Mendoza-Suasti, 64, 84, 87, 90, 216
labels, 10; migrants and, 128; nationalism Hermanos Miño-Naranjo, 64–65, 87, 89–90,
and, 40–41, 65; perceptions of, 211–13; 94, 110, 216–17
preservation of, 134–35; salsa dancing to, Hidrobo, Marco Tulio, 91
130; whitening by, 4–5, 16 Historia del Reino de Quito (Juan de Velasco),
Encalada, Antenor, 76, 144 31–32
“Encargo que no se cumple” (Duty that Huasipungo (Icaza), 43, 99
cannot be fulfilled), 91 huayno, 13, 139–40, 168
EPM. See Ecuadorian popular music
Espinosa Apolo, Manuel, 5, 16, 27–30, 39, 83, Ibáñez Mora, Enrique, 76–77, 78f. See also
141, 219 Dúo Ecuador
ethnic identity: labels of, 4, 28; negative, 83 Ibarra, Hernán, 12, 40–41, 99–101, 126, 132
European waltz, 55, 55f, 68–69 Ibarra, Velasco, 90
Icaza, Jorge, 30–31, 43, 99
fado, 68 IFESA, 87–90, 110, 134
FEDISCOS, 87–90, 106, 110, 114–15, 147 imagined community, nation as, 8, 18–19,
female singers, of tecnocumbia, 173–77, 35, 206
174f–76f, 186 imagined territory, 35
Feraud Guzmán, José Domingo, 76–77, 87 independent music industry, 181–82
Fernández, Anna María, 117–18 Indians: archaeological, 3, 32, 43–44;
Fiallos, Nicolás, 121–23 mestizos distinguished from, 29. See also
folkloric music: sanjuanito, 143 indigenous people
250 | Index
indigenous culture: art music and, 143; drink “Marcha por la Vida” (march for life), 196
sharing in, 127; in EPM continuum, 213– María de los Ángeles, 64–66, 181, 183–84,
15, 214f–15f; sanjuanito, 49–50, 139–41, 208, 222; commercial concerns of, 187;
upper-middle classes denying, 26, 30, 36, modern outlook of, 172–75, 174f, 176f;
125, 131, 153–54, 201, 211, 223; view of, 3; pistas used by, 188
working-class música nacional and, 5 marimba music, 45
indigenous people: cantinas and, 99; as Martínez, Luis A., 42
Other, 30, 70–71; perceptions of, 31–33; Mayorga, Polibio, 133–34
undervalued, 3, 219 Meisch, Lynn, 12, 140, 143
inferiority complex, 5–6 Mendoza, Constantino, 50–51, 52f
Inga Vélez, Rudecindo, 134 Mendoza–Walker, Zoila, 25
intimacy, of nation, 5–8, 229n6 Mera, Juan León, 42–43
Inti Raymi, 140–41, 162, 197–98, 214 mestizaje: blanqueamiento and, 16, 26;
“Invernal” (Wintertime), 74–75, 214, 215f defined, 25, 27, 235; Ecuadorianness and,
Iracundos, los, 178 25–31, 36–37; Espinosa Apolo on, 16,
29–30; history of, 32–33; as hybrid-identity
Jaramillo, Carlota, 60, 64, 144 discourse, 3–4; ideology, música nacional
Jaramillo, Héctor, 87, 208, 222 and, 215–16; national identity molded by,
Jaramillo, Julio, 65, 87, 115, 122f, 124, 128; 2–3, 26–27
“En la cantina” and, 99–100; national mestizo(s): defined, 235; etymology, 28–29;
identity and, 106, 108–9; mythology Indians distinguished from, 29; indigenous
of, 105–6; “Nuestro juramento” and, roots downplayed by, 125; negative ethnic
105–9, 186, 205, 209, 216–17; as rocolera identity of, 83; relational concept of, 4;
forerunner, 104–7 sanjuanito, 49–50, 140–44, 147, 160; status
Jaramillo, Pepe, 134 among, 2
Jayac, 180 Mexico: bolero of, 81, 98; modernity, 70; new
Jiménez de la Espada, Marcos, 45, 142 performers in, 216
Michelena, Esteban, 187
labels: ethnic, 4, 28; music, 10, 159; Other migrants. See Ecuadorian migrants
revealed by, 159, 211 migratory syndrome, 194
lack-of-originality discourse, 185–86, 219 military band, 142, 144
lack-of-professionalism discourse, 189, 219 mishi, 4. See also mestizo
“Lamparilla” (Little lamp), 58, 60 misogynist lyrics, 118–20
Lara, Carmencita, 98 Modernismo, 70, 73
Larraín, Jorge, 20 Morales, Juan Carlos, 124–25
Leo Dan, 178 Morán, Gerardo, 123, 166, 172, 181–82,
León, Máximo, 110 185–88
Liberal Revolution, 8, 16, 69–70, 92 “Morena la ingratitud,” 52–53, 53f
Lloréns, José, 56, 57, 215 Moreno, Segundo Luis, 2, 68, 140–41, 143,
longo: defined, 4, 27–28, 235; pejorative 231n2, 233n14
connotations of, 4–6, 10, 27–28, 155 Mundialito de la Inmigración y Solidaridad
López, Edgar, 209 (The little world cup of immigration and
Lorca, 208 solidarity), 198
música criolla, 56–57
Macas, Luis, 29–30, 155, 233n22 música del recuerdo: 177–80
Madrid: concerts in, 206–9; migrants in, 11, música montubia, 40
16, 149, 193–200, 202–10, 221–22 música nacional: Afro-Ecuadorians and, 221;
Magia Latina, 166 attitudes toward, 2, 9, 14, 67; bailable, 159,
Mallon, Florencia, 19, 20, 25 160f; best-known songs, 61; chichera music
Manobandas, Francisco, 150 as, 1; defined, 1–2, 4, 38–40, 159; discourses,
Manuel, Peter, 7, 120 9; foreign music forms adapted in, 8, 22, 135,
Manzanillas, Juan Carlos, 196 160, 185–86; genres, 16, 41, 44–59, 46f–47f,
map, of Ecuador, 35, 35f 49f, 51f–55f, 59f; label of, 159; macro picture
Maquilón, César, 62, 73–74 of, 14; mestizaje ideology and, 215–16;
Index | 251
migrants’ perceptions of, 221–22; national Otiniano, Pedro, 109–10

identity and, 5; nationalism and, 42–44, “La Otra” (The other woman), 116–18
206; origin of, 40–44, 41f; pasillo as, 1, 39;
perceptions of, 211–13; rocolera music as, Pacari, Nina, 155, 234n23
1; terminology, 13–14, 38–39; theoretical Pacini-Hernández, Deborah, 13, 210, 213
framework, 8–10; translocation of, 205–9; Panama hat, 6, 229n68
tropicalization of, 10, 130–62; unknown Paredes Aymara, Thanya, 164, 168
internationally, 6. See also anthology of Paredes Herrera, Francisco, 62–64, 72, 89,
música nacional; elite música nacional; 91, 134
working-class música nacional pasacalle: in anthology of música nacional,
música tropical: defined, 130, 232n1; in 53–54, 54f; defined, 39, 53, 236; origin of,
Ecuador, 130–36. See also chichera music 86. See also specific songs
myths, foundational, 32–33 pase del niño (passing of the Infant Child),
68, 127
nación pequeña (small nation) thesis, 34, 84 pasillo: adoption of, 8; in anthology of música
“Ñanda Mañachi,” 143–44, 197 nacional, 54–65, 55f, 59f; authors, 59–62;
nation: concept of, 42; defined, 20–21; as bolero blurred with, 115–21; canción del
imagined community, 8, 18–19, 35, 206; desarraigo, 93; canción de maldición,
intimacy of, 5–8, 229n6; migrants recalling 71–75, 80, 92, 111; challenges to, 21; in
and materializing, 20, 202–5, 203f; unifying Colombia, 55–56, 69, 80; composers,
elements of, 36 59–64; in Costa Rica, 69; costeño, 57; as
national identity: consolidated images of, dance, 55, 84, 209–10; defined, 54, 236;
18–19; Ecuadorianness and, 23–24; global discourses, 219–20; early sound movies
forces influencing, 22; from international and, 77, 79, 79f; as Ecuadorianness symbol,
recognition, 6–7, 24, 218; Jaramillo, Julio, 65, 93, 96; elite, 1–2, 39, 71, 73–75, 80–81,
and, 106, 108–9; mestizaje molding, 2–3, 84, 86, 89–94, 121–25, 215f, 216–17, 228;
26–27; of migrants, 222; música nacional on EPM continuum, 214–17, 214f–15f;
as metaphor of, 5; music capturing, 1, 19; female figure in, 91–93; golden period
negative, 5–6; “Nuestro juramento” and, of, 87–91; heroic feat of, 76–80, 78f–79f;
108–9; pasillo shaping, 66–67, 81, 92–94; migrants and, 209–10; as música nacional,
perceptions of, 2, 18; themes influencing, 1, 39; national identity shaped by, 66–67,
15–16 81, 92–94; nationalization of, 16, 69–80,
nationalism: daily, 9; elite, 20, 40–41, 65, 78f–79f; origin of, 67–69; in Panama, 69;
219–20; musical, studies of, 9, 44; música perceptions of, 211–12, 231n1; performers,
nacional and, 42–44, 206; nacionalismo 59–61, 64–65, 89; of Peru, 55–57; rhythms,
académico, 44; popular, 20, 206, 219–20; 55, 55f; rise and decline of, 67–94; rocolero,
styles of imagining nation, 19 58–59, 93, 96–98, 110, 121–25, 129, 214,
national territory, 34–36, 35f 216, 228; sentiment in, 80–84, 86, 92,
negative ethnic identity, 83 94; serrano, 57–58; strong reactions to,
negative national identity, 5–6 15; study of, 12; terminology, 13; timeline
“Nuestro juramento” (Our oath), 105–9, 186, of, 226, early-twentieth-century, 71–75;
205, 209, 216–17 mid-twentieth-century, 84–86, 226; in
Nueva Canción (protest song) movement, 180 Venezuela, 69; working-class, 93, 98, 215f.
Núñez, Jorge, 12, 53, 69, 93 See also specific songs
passepied, 68
Orquesta Blacio Jr., 132 Pedelty, 81, 170
Orquesta de la Luz, 7 Peru: Andeanization in, 137; chicha of, 160–
Orquesta Salgado Jr., 133 61, 168, 235; conflict with, 34–36, 84–85,
Otavalo, 140, 143, 196–97, 229n7 231n8; huayno of, 139–40, 168; Rosero
Other: chichera music and, 139; discourses, in, 125; tecnocumbia in, 11, 164, 168, 183,
218; female figure as, 91–93; gaze of, 7; 185–90; vals criollo of, 55–56, 98
indigenous people as, 30, 70–71; labels Pino Yerovi, Luis, 87–88
revealing, 159, 211; migration and, 215; pirated music, 159, 160f–61f, 182, 212, 233n15
Rosero as, 124 “Pobre corazón” (Poor heart), 50, 51f, 134, 214
252 | Index
popular classes: agency of, 8–9; defined, Romero Rodas, Armando, 103
13–14 rondador (panpipe), 45, 143
“Por internet” (Over the Internet), 167–68 Rosero, Segundo, 113, 122f, 123–25, 128–29
“Por una guambrita” (For a beautiful Rubira Infante, Carlos, 63, 91, 145–46
indigenous girl), 145–46, 147f
Pro, Alejandro, 80, 144 Saavedra, Fresia, 145–46
Proaño, Ana Lucía, 113–14, 122, 128, 208 SADRAM, 89
Proaño, Saulo, 179 Safadi, Nicasio: “Avecilla” and, 89; in Dúo
Producciones Calle, 149 Ecuador, 76–77, 78f, 83–84, 87, 94;
Producciones Zapata, 149–50 “Guayaquil de mis amores” and, 57–58, 59f,
psychic transvestitism, 120 62, 76–77, 79f; “Isabel” transformed by, 74
Pulupa, Enrique, 196 Sahiro, 179
“Puñales” (Daggers), 45–46 Salgado, Luis Humberto, 143
Salguero, Natasha, 91–92
Quichua, 3, 139, 154–55 sanjuanito: in anthology of música nacional,
Quintero, Gustavo, 132 49–50, 51f, 144–46, 147f; as chichera
Quintero, Rosalino, 106–7, 217, 234n3 music, 139–47; defined, 39, 236; on EPM
Quito: cantinas in, 99; Centro Histórico continuum, 214–15, 214f–15f; folkloric, 143;
of, 137–39, 212, 233nn10–12; changes in, indigenous, 49–50, 139–41, 215f; influence
95; economic development in, 22; EPM of, 68; international recognition of, 218;
concerts in, 10–11, 169–73, 171f–72f, 206; Inti Raymi and, 140–41, 162, 197–98,
música tropical in, 132; parks, 202; Radio, 214; mestizo, 49–50, 140–44, 147, 160;
80; in Real Audiencia de Quito, 33 perceptions of, 211–13; terminology, 13. See
also specific songs
Radio Cristal, 88, 103, 113 “Sanjuanito Futurista” (Futurist sanjuanito), 143
Radio Quito, 64, 80 Sansores, Rosario, 92
Realpe, Ricardo, 147–48, 150, 167–68 Santillán, Pablo, 138
recording industry, development of, 87–88 Santos, Daniel, 99–100, 104–5, 107, 109–10
Revista Estrellas, 88, 90 Schechter, John, 12, 141
Riedel, Johannes, 12, 88 self-esteem, 6, 25
Río de Janeiro Protocol, 34–36, 84 “Sendas distintas” (Distinct paths), 60, 64, 66
ritual drinking, 127 sentiment: community of, 18; Ecuadorian, 18,
Rock Star, 147–48, 159 80–84, 86, 92, 94, 114, 219; elites and, 81;
rocola (jukebox): 97–101, 137 rocolera music: in pasillo, 80–84, 86, 92, 94
boleros, 81, 97–98, 109–11, 115–21; cantinas Seremetakis, Nadia, 203
and, 15, 97–101; classics, 113–15; context shameful identity (identidad vergonzosa), 5
of, 96–97; data on, 12; defined, 96–98, Los Shapis, 168, 185
236; discourses, 101–3; as disturbance, Sharon, 165, 207
21; emergence of, 96, 98, 100–101; Silva, Erika, 24, 31, 32, 34–36, 86
forerunners, 103–10; genres, 97; label of, Silva, Medardo Ángel, 59–61, 72, 82–84, 103
159; modernization and, 95–96; as música “Sombras” (Shadows), 92
nacional, 1; music festivals, 125–28; pasillo, song of damnation, 71–75, 80, 92, 111
58–59, 93, 96–98, 110, 121–25, 129, 214, structures of feeling, 82–84
216, 228; pejorative connotations of, 4–5, Stutzman, Ronald, 26, 65,
13, 98; perceptions of, 213; periodization “Suite Ecuatoriana,” 143, 231n6
of, 103–15, 112f–13f; rocola and, 1, 97–101;
stigmatized, 96–97, 101–2, 118, 125, 218; tecnocumbia: adoption of, 8; arrival of,
transitional period, 110–12, 112f–13f; 165–69; boom, 16, 163–91; chichera
women in, 97, 117–21, 129 music compared to, 190; in Costa, 166,
rocolization, of Ecuador, 137 168–69; dance and, 176; defined, 166, 236;
Roitman, Karem, 3–4, 27, 221 discourses, 219; elites’ reading of, 185–89;
“Romance de mi destino” (Romance of my EPM concerts and, 169–73, 171f–72f,
destiny), 61, 85–86 176–78; female singers of, 173–77, 174f–76f,
Romero, Raúl, 25, 133, 137, 140, 161, 166, 168 186; independent music industry, 181–82;
Index | 253
marketing strategies, 182–85; migrants Velasco, Juan de, 31–32

and, 210; pejorative connotations of, 13; Velasco, Juan Fernando, 217
perceptions of, 212–13; performance style, Vera Santos, Gonzalo, 63
151; in Peru, 11, 164, 168, 183, 185–90; in Villegas, Franklin, 178
Sierra, 168–69; terminology, 13; themes,
189–91; YouTube comments about, 175–76, Wade, Peter, 5, 20–21, 69, 131–32, 215
186–88. See also specific songs Walmsley, Emily, 194
“Tendrás que recordarme” (You will have to War, Rosy, 165–66, 185
remember me), 103, 114 Waxer, Lise, 7–8, 56
“Te quiero, te quiero” (I love you, I love you), white-mestizo: defined, 4, 27, 236; dominance
121–23, 214, 215f of, 3; female tecnocumbia singers, 173–74
Terán, Eduardo, 181 whiteness, 2–3
Tierra Canela, 166 Whitten, Norman, 3, 12, 26
Toaza, Jaime, 147–48 Wibbelsman, Michelle, 12, 127, 141
Torres, René, 127–28 Widinson, 165, 184–85, 189, 208
Tovar, Chugo, 97, 110–11, 112f, 113f Williams, Raymond, 21, 82, 215–16
transnational migration, 37, 195 working-class música nacional: Campos
Traversari, Pedro Pablo, 140 and, 114; class hierarchies and, 9; defined,
Traverso, Martha, 24 2; emotional performances of, 18; on
Trío Los Brillantes, 65, 87, 94, 110, 114, 135, EPM continuum, 213–17, 214f–15f;
145, 222 genres, 227; indigenous elements of, 5;
Trofeo Huancavilca, 88 migrants and, 37, 210; perceptions of,
tropicalization: beginning of, 10; chichera 211–13; working-class pasillo, 93, 98, 215f.
music and, 10, 130–62 See also chichera music; rocolera music;
“Tú y yo” (You and I), 89 tecnocumbia
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 10
Turino, Thomas, 42, 109, 137, 166 yaraví: in anthology of música nacional,
45–46, 46f; defined, 39, 142, 236; influence
upper-middle classes: defined, 14; discourses of, 68. See also specific songs
of, 9; hybrid identity of, 3–4; indigenous “Yo soy rebelde” (I am a rebel), 168
heritage denied by, 26, 30, 36, 125, 131, 153– YouTube comments: about Caicedo, 157–58;
54, 201, 211, 223; inferiority complex and, 6; about Guaraca, 153–54; issues articulated
labels of, 4. See also elite música nacional in, 11; about tecnocumbia, 175–76, 186–88
Yúdice, George, 168
Vaca, Cristóbal, 103 yumbo: in anthology of música nacional, 47,
Vaca Flores, José Miguel, 142 47f; as dance, 47; defined, 39, 236. See also
Valencia, Luis Alberto, 64, 144 specific songs
Valencia, Víctor, 58–59 Yunda, Jorge, 166, 179
Vallejo, Claudio, 113–14, 128, 208
vals criollo, 55–56, 98 Zaa, Charly, 109
valse, 97–98, 103 Zapata, Lola, 138, 149, 165
“Vasija de barro” (Clay pot), 48–49, 49f, 60, Zavala, Hugo, 127–28
134 Zumba, Roberto, 103, 113–14, 128
Vega, Kike, 110–11, 113f Zurita, Eduardo, 135–36
About the Author
Ketty Wong is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University

of Kansas. In 2010, she received the prestigious Casa de las Américas Musi-
cology Prize for La música nacional: Identidad, mestizaje y migración en el
Ecuador, the Spanish language version of this book.

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Whose National Music?

In the series Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music,

ALSO IN THIS SERIES

Peter Manuel, ed., Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean

Cathy Ragland, Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation

Christopher Washburne, Sounding Salsa: Performing Popular Latin Dance Music

David F. Garcia, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin

Sergio Navarrete Pellicer, Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala

Whose National Music?

Copyright © 2012 by Temple University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Ethnomusicology Multimedia (EM) is an innovative, entrepreneurial, and cooperative effort

List of Multimedia Examples vii

1 | The Nation in Bloom: A Search for “Ecuadorianness” 17

2 | La Música Nacional: An Anthology of Songs 38

3 | The Pasillo: Rise and Decline of the National Song 66

4 | Rocolera Music: New Urban Sounds in the City 95

5 | Chichera Music: The “Tropicalization” of Música Nacional 130

6 | The Tecnocumbia Boom in Ecuador: “A Letter with My Kisses

7 | The Translocation of Ecuadorian Popular Music 192

Epilogue: Whose National Music? 211

Glossary of Ethnic and Musical Terms 235

A selection of enhanced media examples (still images, audio, or video recordings)

PURL 2.1 Yaraví, “Puñales” (Daggers). Trío Los Brillantes.

PURL 4.1 Bolero, “Nuestro juramento” (Our oath). Julio Jaramillo.

and assistance during my research conducted in Spain in 2003 and 2008. I

As a hybrid-identity discourse, mestizaje is “an extensive construct that

mixture through stylization of the lyrics, musical arrangements, and singing

The Intimacy of the Nation

when confronted by someone whom he or she perceives to be superior based

For intellectuals such as Donoso, Ecuadorian national identity is defined by

of cosmopolitan culture” (2002, 2). Salsa in Cali is, therefore, an expression

This study integrates “a discourse-centered approach” (Sherzer 1987;

Music labels are usually thought of as strategies used by the recording

during my sojourn in Quito in the early 1990s as a music researcher of several

A Note on the Terms Used in the Book

musical genres and styles (rocolera, chichera, and tecnocumbia) associated

A Glance in the Mirror

often revealed me as a mona (a “monkey”), a pejorative term used by serranos

include the impact of rural-to-urban and international migrations, the effect

The Nation in Bloom

Preguntan de donde soy They ask where I come from

T his chapter examines how Ecuadorians of different social classes and

connected people in a simultaneity he refers to as “homogeneous empty

it as a “cosmic race,” it is looked down upon as a cause of cultural shame and,

The study of national identities in the late twentieth century needs to

The Cultural Setting

Ecuador’s National Identity

elsewhere since many countries experience similar problems with migration,

countries are different, a low self-esteem is bound to be present among those

According to Ayala Mora (2008), Ecuador’s republican history is divided

Readings of Ecuadorian History

Perceptions of Indigenous People

The National Territory

desire to defend their nation. Anderson’s view on patriotism is pertinent here

Unifying Elements of the Ecuadorian Nation

ideology of mestizaje, which ostensibly supports the blending of Spanish and

6 | The Tecnocumbia Boom in Ecuador: “A Letter with My Kisses