Guayaquil, Group of

Group Of Guayaquil, a circle of twentieth-century social protest authors. This literary movement began in 1930 with the publication of a collection of short stories, Los que se van: Cuentos del cholo y del montuvio (Those Who Go Away: Stories of the Mestizos and Country People), by Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and Enrique Gil Gilberto. The authors angrily denounced the racial and class inequities of modern Ecuador. The group, all young novelists from Guayaquil, sought in their work to offer a realistic depiction of life in Ecuador. As with others in the indianista tradition in Latin American literature, the Group of Guayaquil took the side of the exploited—the Indians, montuvios, blacks, mulattoes, Cholos, peasants, and workers—and attacked the exploiters—the elite, the overseers, the priests, and the local police. Two particularly influential novels focused on the government massacre of Guayaquil workers in 1922: Gallegos Lara's Las cruces sobre el agua (1946); and Alfredo Pareja y Diez Canseco's Baldomera (1938). Other Ecuadorian authors who followed in this tradition were José de la Cuadra, Ángel Felicisimo Rojas, Pablo Palacio, Pedro Jorge Vera, Humberto Salvador, and, most notably, Jorge Icaza Coronel, author of the classic Huasipungo (1934).

See alsoHuasipungo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a discussion of Ecuadorian literature, see Angel F. Rojas, La novela ecuatoriana (1948). For the political context, consult David W. Schodt, Ecuador: An Andean Enigma (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Pérez Pimentel, Rodolfo. Joaquín Gallegos Lara: En el cincuentenario de su fallecimiento, 1909–1947. Guayaquil, Ecuador: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Núcleo del Guayas, 1997.

                                          Ronn F. Pineo