The Hegemonic and Cultural Implications of a Guayaquilean Romance

Perdona que no tenga palabras con que pueda
decirte la inefable pasión que me devora
para expresar mi amor solamente me queda
rasgarme el pecho, Amada, y en tu mano de
seda; ¡dejar mi palpitante corazón que te
adora!

—Medardo Ángel Silva, "El alma en los labios"

These last lines of Medardo Ángel Silva's influential poem, "El alma en los labios," have provided Guayaquileans a productive tool for self- and communal identification over the last century. (See Vallejo's novel about Silva [2003].) The poem, sung by legendary Guayaquilean artists such as Julio Jaramillo and Olimpo Cárdenas, has become an emotional outlet not only for love-torn individuals but also for those who, at different times, have faced the tragedy of not obtaining the ultimate object of their desire, whatever that desire might be. In this manner, Silva's life and work have provided a succinct form of national identification within the prohibitive nature of desire in the postcolonial setting of the city of Guayaquil. A century after his death Silva's poetry is sung, memorized, and studied with a keenness that betrays the central place it holds in the development of the city's national identity ("El arte se junta con la medicina" 2001). This is a phenomenon of remembrance that was already evolving only twenty-six years after his death ("Página literaria de 'El Telégrafo'" 1945).

The fact that Silva's production (in which category I include his life as well as his literary work) has assumed such a hegemonic stance in contemporary discourse is surprising precisely because he lived only twenty-one years, and his existence was fraught with unbearable emotional and social contradictions. Yet it is these same contradictions that, although directly contributing to Silva's death, also enabled him to become the dominant and iconic figure that he is today.

The importance of sentiment in the production of a national Guayaquilean identity was made explicit to me at a small gathering of friends as we listened to Silva's poem transformed into pasillo (a traditional Ecuadorian musical genre). As we shared drinks and nostalgic memories of our lives and the city, it became painfully obvious that these "individual memories" and "sentiments" were neither merely individual nor devoid of larger social significance. Rather, they were the most social of our effects and provided for our singular identification as Guayaquileans, marking us, naturally, as lifelong friends. In this manner, our feelings' explicitly individual markers—far from denying their social importance—allowed our nostalgia- and desire-driven sentiments to fulfill their nationalizing and political goal of fusing and providing for our geographical and cultural identification. It was this normalizing feature of sentiment that was most salient, due to its provocative silence.

This drinking episode (chupa in Guayaquilean parlance) fueled my research and made me decide to interview Guayaquileans, in both Guayaquil and the United States, regarding the national elements of the production of sentiment. Raymond Williams' (1977) work on the consolidation of hegemony through the structures of feeling was particularly helpful in organizing the research project. I carried out in-depth interviews and collected life histories of Guayaquileans. I asked them questions about national and regional identification, nostalgia for the city, pasillos, alcohol, motherly love, and other effusive sentiments. My research was supported by my own Guayaquilean identity and by my having lived in the city throughout my adolescence and early adulthood.

Almost at the outset, I was extremely intrigued by the ambiguous iconization of the Afro-Ecuadorian poet Medardo Ángel Silva. Everybody I spoke with knew who he was; many of them shared tears, alcohol, and memories with me as we listened to Silva's poetry and music as performed by Julio Jaramillo. However, what people said about Silva seemed always to be contradictory: they heralded him as representative of Guayaquilean pride but glossed over the more transgressive details of his character, such as his being expelled from high school (for refusing to cut his hair, melena) and, of course, his un-Catholic decision to commit suicide (if he in fact did). At the same time, most people's comments only vaguely related to the official version of Silva's life as expressed in the compulsory teaching of his work and in all the city's high school textbooks.

Therefore, even though he was almost exclusively the only Ecuadorian or Guayaquilean poet anybody could name, only a couple knew Silva was black, and even fewer had any inkling of the disturbing social (and sexual) contradictions that might have led to his early death. For example, everybody I interviewed was willing to emphasize his longing for his pubescent girlfriend but not his acknowledged despair over the death of his closest male friend just a couple of months before his probable suicide. Perhaps even more telling was that few if any of my informants wondered why or, even better, how a poor young black man who lived over a hundred years ago could provide such a significant means of identification and reaffirm our national Guayaquilean identity in such contemporary terms.

Tellingly and in this same vein, none of my informants were able to place Silva and his work within the politically troubled turn of the twentieth century. During Silva's life (1898-1919), Guayaquil lived through what is arguably its most violent period and the consolidation of Ecuador's Liberal Revolution (1895-1912). The Liberal Revolution would catapult Gen. Eloy Alfaro to power and allow the coastal bourgeoisie to challenge the highland hacendado elites' claim to national government while producing an enormous impact in terms of national restructuring of economic and race relations. Silva's lifetime would also include the vast mobilization of workers, many of whom would perish in the massacre of November 15, 1922, which ultimately resulted in the founding of socialist and leftist political parties. However, these two processes, Silva's intense poetic images, and his troubled social surroundings are never integrated but, rather, function as two totally different sources of effusively sentimental identification. On the one hand, one has a nostalgic image of a representational Guayaquil Antiguo (Old Guayaquil) as a paradisiacal and ephemeral tropical fantasy city at the turn of the century; on the other hand, we have a troubled Silva feeling love-torn emotions that led to his early death. These are the similar individual emotions that Guayaquileans share in their continual engagement with their past while drinking and listening to pasillos with enormous feelings of sadness and nostalgia.

This book focuses on these two seemingly contradictory, if romantic, images and assesses how is it that they not only coexist but also are actively invested in the production of a Guayaquilean identity and the image of the city as we know it today. In this book I question, using Williams' structures of feeling, the cultural amnesia essential for the nostalgic production of the past that enables the city's contemporary political structure of domination and oppression. In this manner, I am investing Silva's memory with the romantic memorialization of a Guayaquil Antiguo and the troubled historical period that this metonymic image so effectively and ambiguously represents and conceals (see Chapters 1 and 2). At the same time, I use Silva's memory, life, and work as a hermeneutical tool for assessing the cultural, gender, and racial problematics that a Guayaquilean identity necessarily affords (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Ultimately, I use Silva and Guayaquil Antiguo as cultural forms that engage Guayaquilean modernity and assess how they came to serve the present political project while necessarily providing an effusive form of social agency for Guayaquileans. It is this same social agency that continues to attract most of the national migrants from throughout the country to Guayaquil. This is why I have interviewed Guayaquileans living in the United States, specifically, New York City. These diasporic interviews provide a way of assessing the migration of Guayaquilean modernity as well as the reoccurring disruption of Guayaquilean identity as an essential constitution of its dynamic, modern rearticulation.

The Soul on Medardo Ángel's Lips

Silva's early death is described with unbearable horror in the newspaper reports of the period ("Medardo Ángel Silva" 1919; see also Gómez Iturralde 1998), and even a century later it is shocking to his fellow Guayaquileans ("El arte se junta con la medicina" 2001; "Medardo A. Silva: Le fueron duros sus años" 1999). As I argue throughout the book, however, the emotions, ideas, and intimate pain reflected in his writing and in his tragic life are not shocking to the same Guayaquilean population that seems unwilling to legitimate his suicide as a valid cultural act. Silva's poetry is an integral part of the cultural composition of Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest urban center and port. Silva is unarguably the most influential poet in the city's modern history. His relevance is expressed in the monuments erected to his memory, his poems' transformation into popular pasillos, and the requirement that his poetry be read in all of the city's high schools.

The Liberal Revolution and the workers' (i.e., the socialist) movement (1910-1930) were central formative experiences for the still-emerging Ecuadorian nation, and therefore were vital to Silva's preoccupation with race, sexuality, and class. This preoccupation could not but problematize the European (i.e., white) and elite modernist ideal that pervaded the young Ecuadorian republic and its intellectuals during Silva's lifetime. His oeuvre thus came to ambiguously represent the popular strands of daily sentiment inherent in the city's vibrant street life as well as the refined tastes of the city's elite and most powerful cultural circles. It is this hegemonic ambiguity that makes Silva's life a useful source for assessing the dynamics of cultural power and the production of popular culture.

I question how sentiments both determine and are determined by the social milieu that they embody and explore how feelings are intimately woven into and produced within the social tapestry of racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, and age differentiation. Thus, rather than assessing them as independent subjective elements, I judge emotions as essential in the production and maintenance of social hierarchies (see Davis 1998; McCarthy and Franks 1989; Shank 2000; Wexler 2000).

There is little doubt that Silva's use of romantic distance and a pseudoautobiographical approach afforded him poetic license. It would seem that these literary concealments were warranted by the hostile social environment in which he lived. There is also little doubt that this harsh social environment was central in providing him the (painful) inspiration and motivation for the ambiguous emotions and feelings that are traditionally kept in check by the normative Guayaquilean cultural order. In this respect, Silva's writing is very much in keeping with a postcolonial legacy harbored between ingrained and internalized forms of domination and less-explicit mechanisms of external oppression (Fanon 1970; Kincaid 1997; Memmi 1991).

As Williams (1977) and other scholars (Butler 1997b; Foucault 1980; Taussig 1992), note, cultural hegemony works in subtle yet powerful ways. Feelings, emotions, and sentiments as powerful cultural markers are interwoven into more structural constraints that define one's way of acting and, most important, of being. Silva, almost alone, carved out a particular semantic structure that expressed the different class, racial, and sexual inhibitions that he experienced in the early part of the twentieth century in Guayaquil. It has been argued that Silva's early suicide symbolizes the failure of his life, yet his iconic popularity and semantic power would seem to denote the contrary. Silva's inability to connect to his surroundings, his family, and, ultimately, himself has struck a "popular" chord in generations of Guayaquileans who have faced similar postcolonial forms of social restraint and repressive environment (see Kincaid [1997] and Fanon [1970] for similar discussions). Therefore, far from making him a failure, Silva's poetic license may have cost him dearly but still enabled him to enunciate the stark social identities that Guayaquileans have struggled with and against in the dynamic self-definition of their modern cultural identity.

It is not a coincidence that Silva's ambiguity and personal anguish, more so than that of any other cultural icon, marks the most realistic form of social identification for the country's largest metropolis. Through his life's work Silva crystallized structures of feeling that slowly became hegemonic and defined a dominant social formation which was only just beginning to emerge during his lifetime. As Williams (1977) claims, it is only now that this hegemonic social formation is locked into place, which is demonstrated by Guayaquileans being able to publicly weep for their love, their lost youth, or, ultimately, for all that these translate into: an identity of loss, in other words, an identity based on the rejection of oneself and constituted of what one does not have or is not. In essence, Silva's structures of feeling comprise a way of being constituted by the anguish and pain that come from not belonging, of not fitting in.

Today these sentiments are no longer preemergent, as they were in Silva's time, but are a way of being for most Guayaquileans, that is, of being Guayaquilean, which has been seductively hegemonized into position. It is this identity of postcolonial rejection, I argue, that makes Guayaquileans identify with Silva and that, at the same time, allows us, through Silva's writing, to start assessing the socially constitutive nature of these sentiments more fully.

This colonial-identity mode of rejection, translated into a postcolonial setting, is marked by its no longer exclusively, or even mostly, being sustained by official empirical constraints, since those have been triumphantly internalized into the subject's constitution. It is because of this postcolonial turn of events, in which the dominated dominate themselves, that Silva's writing and life are useful tools for assessing cultural hegemonic articulation. In a broad sense, understanding how the postcolonial subject is constituted as such and formulates its future as a free agent in which it subjects itself without a colonial empire to blame is also the essence of the postcolonial debate (see Butler 1997a, 1997b; McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat 1997).

Analyzing Silva as an Ecuadorian cultural icon enriches our understanding of hegemony and how it works at a much more daily, local level (see Martillo Monserrate 1999) without allowing us to lose sight of its influence on the larger, national scene. Hegemony's power lies not only in its grand ideological manipulation but also in its subtle forms of articulation in the daily sentiments of a community's history. Hegemony works not because it is monolithically sustained and advocated but, rather, because it relies on people's living contradictory lives, or what they on some conscious level know to be an outright denial of reality (Sayer 1994), what Taussig (1997: 114) refers to as "the duper being duped" (see also Nelson 2001; Zizek 1989). Hegemony, therefore, is articulated through the subtle classification of the chaos that is life into artificial categories and concepts (Foucault 1993; see also Baldwin 1984; Duras 1986; Lessing 1987). In similar fashion, Silva's ambivalent articulation of structures of feeling expresses how essentializing sentiments are formulated and classified into normative behavior. Ultimately, analysis of Silva's life and work contributes to the understanding of the hegemonic relationship between the development of popular icons/semantic figures, the officialization of memory, and the daily construction of people's livelihood.

The fact that a century after his death, Silva's writing is still a powerful cultural marker of Guayaquilean identity testifies to the underlining hegemonic agents with which he wrestled. Even though his poetry has been consistently portrayed as individualistic, melancholic, nostalgic, and sentimental (Cueva 1986), it has greatly echoed among the city's passing generations. It is Silva's popularity that makes one question an individualistic interpretation of his work; instead, it reflects the communal ramifications of these "individualistic" feelings, since they are shared by the majority of Guayaquileans. However, even though most Guayaquileans feel and understand what Silva is talking about, that is, an intimate anguish in the face of social upheaval and hierarchical constraints, these sentiments are still defined as individual feelings (which all know to be a lie) rather than as structures of feeling that are intimately tied to a normative and exploitative social hegemonic structure. This denial betrays the fact that an assessment of these particular structures of feeling, which began to emerge almost a century ago, would question not only the reigning moral order and the oligarchic stronghold of Guayaquil's wealthiest families but also the official representation of the city's past and reconstructed cultural identity (Benavides 2002; see also Kraniauskas in Monsiváis 1997).

In the remaining sections of this introductory chapter, I focus on both the theoretical framework of the book and the complex and subtle autobiographical approaches Silva used. I argue that Silva's life was afforded such a degree of hegemonic positionality that a century later his approaches are part of the main tenets of Guayaquil's and Ecuador's national cultural vitality, precisely because they reflect the physical and emotional impossibility of his life. To this end, I use Silva's writing to assess the consolidation of sentiments as "pure" feelings and culturally neutral acts at the turn of the twentieth century in Ecuador.

There is no question that Silva's life and sentiments have achieved a hegemonic position in the city's reified historical imagery. It is a remarkable form of revenge that it was Silva, one of the city's most economically oppressed, racially discriminated against, and sexually ambivalent inhabitants, who expressed what feeling and being from Guayaquil is all about. When Silva says (N.d.: 88),

Madre: la vida enferma y triste que me has dado
no vale los dolores que ha costado;
no vale tu sufrir intenso, madre mía,
ese brote de llanto y de melancolía,

Guayaquileans know exactly what he is talking about, and cultural hegemony is seductively locked into position.

Structures of Feeling and Cultural Hegemony

Since the 1980s, hegemony, and particularly cultural hegemony, has become a focus of scholarly concern (Joseph and Nugent 1994; Mallon 1995; Popular Memory Group 1982; Scott 1985; Sider and Smith 1997; Silverblatt 1988). Gramsci's (1971) original proposal, written, significantly, from a prison cell to explain communities' self-imposed domination has been continually revisited by Marxist thinkers wishing to analyze the articulation of political domination and power (see Crehan 2002). Two of the most original contributions to the reassessment of Gramsci's concept of hegemony have been offered by Louis Althusser (1971) and Michel Foucault (1988, 1990, 1994, 1995). Althusser's widely influential analysis of political domination freed the discussion of power from both the economic and the dialectical determination of traditional Marxist class analyses. He placed the formative elements of ideological power in the cultural production of material processes that constrain and define political domination. His examples of state education and religious indoctrination furthered the exploration of ideology not as a mere epiphenomenon of economic production but as a quasi-independent element of cultural interaction. Despite struggling to maintain a more orthodox Marxist perspective, and significantly distancing himself from his own problematic conclusions, Althusser opened the way for assessing the independent productive power of domination instead of assessing it only in negative and repressive terms (see also Merleau-Ponty 1963).

This is precisely where Michel Foucault's work is most enlightening. Some of his main contributions are located within his studies of social institutions—prisons, asylums, hospitals—as normalizing agents as well as the elaboration of social discourse as a useful analytical tool. For Foucault, hegemony works not because it is actively operationalized from the outside but, quite the opposite, because domination is actually connected to our own center, making us the most active imposers of our own constraints:

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980: 119)

***

In thinking of the mechanism of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. (Foucault 1980:39)

In a similar vein, Raymond Williams was also actively concerned with the articulation of hegemony and cultural production. In his influential Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams develops elements that, according to him, serve to assess hegemony and offer a better understanding of how it is deployed. "Structures of feeling" are such an element and, according to Williams, help bridge the gap between a static understanding of class formation lodged in its own formative institutions and corresponding ideology and the daily life of individuals and the production of popular culture. Williams proposes his structures of feeling as a "cultural hypothesis" for understanding the relationship between structural constraints and the dynamic elements of everyday life (1977: 132): "[Structures of feeling are] concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs. A social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic and even isolating but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies."

Far from abandoning a formal class analysis, Williams is interested in thinking through the problem of class formation. He is aware that social analysis is incredibly adept at defining class formation in static periodizations of historical production but has a much harder time assessing societies' dynamic and constant class reproduction. In other words, social analysis is equipped to assess society in descriptive historical terms but is almost incapable of addressing historical life in its daily possibilities and impossibilities.

A similar theoretical constraint has become central in the debates of contemporary historiography, particularly in postcolonial contexts (see McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat 1997; Mignolo 2000; Spivak 1999). These postcolonial texts critique social analyses that are content to describe discrete periods of cultural and social reproduction but seem unable to describe societies' dynamic cultural life. It would seem that these moments of social analysis always translate into the death of the social subject, and that the subject's death is essential to making the subject known, or "real," and vice versa (see Butler 1997a, 1997b; McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat 1997; Murray 1997; Salecl and Zizek 1996).

A varied number of writers, from Herman Hesse (1994) to Marcela Serrano (1997), have expressed the personal and political depth of this problematic: that the written representation implies the subject's death; and that only a dynamic nonrepresentational approach could actually provide a way of assessing life in its multiple incongruencies. This humanistic debate, unfortunately trivialized by many social scientists, not only is essential to our understanding of cultural behavior but also has slowly become an intricate part of the debates over human rights and native communities' struggle. For example, it is precisely this point that is at the heart of 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú's final account of her struggle for indigenous rights in Guatemala (1985: 247): "Nevertheless, I'm still keeping my Indian identity a secret. I'm still keeping secret what I think no-one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets." This "secret" (and the ravaging controversy over Menchú's historical accuracy—see Arias 2001; Nelson 2001; and Stoll 1999) is what seems to be at the heart of all these scholars' and writers' concern. Ana Castillo has captured this historical disjuncture, complete with the engendered problematic also critically articulated in Gayatri Spivak's (1999) writing (1996: 119; my emphasis): "One had to be convinced that there was merit in recording history since that was the purpose of writing, after all. It might be history that everyone agreed with or history that got you hanged for writing it but for which your name was revered in the future and then read to revise history. But it was all history and it was all myth, since history is myth. Starting with one's own story. More specifically, her story, which was a myth which she resisted to make into history."

In this problematic context, Williams' structures of feeling provide a sophisticated manner in which, if not to solve, then at least to broach the specific disjuncture between historical and cultural representation. This is evident in the fact that he refers to "thought as felt and feeling as thought (1977: 132): practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating community." As Williams states, he is interested in the actual, lived-in relationship of people in their daily life and not simply in a model or abstraction of their social processes (1977: 130): "in relationships that are more than systematic exchanges between fixed units." For Williams (1977: 131), "it [structure of feeling] is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange."

Williams also distances himself from orthodox Marxist thought and explicitly states that "structures of feeling" are not mere "epiphenomena of changed institutions, formations and beliefs, or merely secondary evidence of changed social and economic relations between and within classes." However, in this same regard, he is quite careful to not equate all artistic expressions with "structures of feeling" (1977: 131). He believes that there always will be, and that even the majority of artistic ventures are, a direct manifestation of dominant or residual social formations. Meanwhile, structures of feeling do not respond to either kind of social formation but, rather, represent and express an emerging social formation still unidentifiable in an explicit manner (1977: 134):

It is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact minority) generation; this often, in turn, the generation that substantially connects to its successors. It is thus a specific structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms, particular deep starting-point and conclusions.

Because of their unique internal dynamic, structures of feeling are very much a "cultural hypothesis" that always needs to be reassessed. Strongly within a Marxist tradition, Williams proposes structures of feeling as both an empirical historical and cultural question of "detailed substantiation" (1977: 135). Because of the nature of social life in general, it is impossible (beyond a mere informed guessing game) to define structures of feeling in the present. Rather, all we are capable of doing is concretely informed historiographical work to understand how particular structures of feeling, undetectable at their time of origin, managed to contribute to the solidification of a contemporary dominant social formation. Far from falling into the trap of present-day cultural representations (see Rosaldo 1989, for a similar critique), Williams is acutely aware of the need for a critical historiography. Unlike many social scientists, he is not interested in describing or analyzing contemporary social life as much as in assessing how contemporary social life came into existence and achieved its hegemonic stance (1977: 132): "These [structures of feeling] are often more recognizable at a later stage, once they have been formalized, classified, built into institutions and formations. By that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present."

Taking into account Williams' contribution, I question the representation of sentiments as neutral, personal, and individual elements precisely because they are so closely tied to the social milieu in which they are produced. By questioning their neutral representation, I also see the articulation of sentiments as a cultural manifestation of power dynamics, since it is exactly this assumed neutrality that makes sentiments essential in the enabling of any reformulation of power (see Butler 1997a; Foucault 1993; Stoler 1996; Taussig 1992).

Silva's literary and historical figure within the mythical representation of Guayaquil Antiguo (see next section) clearly provides a valuable opportunity for assessing Williams' structures of feeling as a cultural hypothesis and their relationship to the normalizing of social life and the enabling of hegemonic articulation. Silva expresses an effusive level of sentiment (structures of feeling) that resonated within a wider cultural context of social power and normative agents throughout the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, his work traditionally has been seen as private, subjective, and individualistic (Cueva 1981, 1986) instead of as offering an opportunity to assess social experience in the making, within its specific formulations of power and set hierarchies. My main objective is understanding the particular process by which his poetry and life, and their sentiments, achieved a hegemonic stance (Alonso 1995).Ultimately, Silva allows us to assess the formative hegemonic construction of sentiments that were normalized racially, sexually, and in terms of class initially almost a century ago in Guayaquil. Today these define what being from Guayaquil is all about. It is also at this crossroads that the use of structures of feeling proves quite advantageous in defining the contours of the production of a vibrant Guayaquilean past (Guayaquil Antiguo) and popular national cultural heritage.

Guayaquil Antiguo: Guayaquil at the Turn of the Century (1895-1930)

The images of Guayaquil at the turn of the twentieth century have forever been captured in etchings and photographs (Figures 1-4). These turn-of-the-century drawings and pictures have provided the city with the reification of its past commonly referred to as Guayaquil Antiguo. Like all reconstructions, this one is an artifice for rebuilding a past we wish might have been (Abu-El Haj 2001; Alonso 1988; Castañeda 1995, 1996; Handler and Gable 1997; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Patterson and Schmidt 1995; Trouillot 1995). The name Guayaquil Antiguo itself offers antiquity and, through it, authority and authenticity tied to a past that is less than a century old. But more important, the black-and-white representations of grand wooden houses, lumberyards, and empty central avenues depict a setting devoid of the class conflict, racial tension, and sexual repression which permeated the city at the turn of the century. These idealized representations of Guayaquil also provided a romantic fantasy of peace and tranquillity for the largely white and white/mestizo landholding elite. The lack of evidence for the urban chaos in these pictures speaks volumes about the representation of two of the city's largest social movements (the Liberal Revolution and the workers' movement) and about the city's worst modern massacre, which occurred during this period.

Particularly telling in this regard is how Silva's life, tumultuous and tragic as it was, is continually described as denying his coexistence with either of these two social revolutions. Even Silva's main biographer, Abel Romero Castillo (1970), ignores both of these events in his detailed narrative of Silva's life. Considering Silva's emerging literary and journalistic importance; his attendance at Guayaquil's most important schools, La Filantrópica and Vicente Rocafuerte; and the known participation of students in street skirmishes and social uprisings, this absence becomes quite significant.

There is no doubt, however, that this absence is not exclusively a construction of Silva's biographer or of later analyses of Silva's work. Silva himself carved out a unique isolation from these two major social movements, both of which would dramatically affect the political and artistic scene of Ecuador's then-emerging national identity. In his singular way, Silva seems to have been working against the grain in creating a fantasy world of escape, love, and death that successfully and systematically blocked out the major social concerns that preoccupied the majority of his contemporaries.

Because of the depth of the social transformations that these revolutions afforded in terms of shifting class relationships, consolidating new social formations, restructuring old ethnic and racial categorizations, establishing new forms of economic alliances, and realigning global alliances and cultural identifications, it seems highly improbable that Silva was unaware of the movements or of their national implications. On the contrary, it is most likely that he made conscious choices to efface himself from his social-political surroundings, all the while managing to produce a rich body of work in which he placed himself and his feelings, and not the social setting, as the central and exclusive protagonist. It is also through this process of essential and internalized consumption that he was able subtly to erase any supposed impact of the social surroundings on his work. This was also partly carried out by allowing himself to be celebrated by the city's cultural elite and integrating himself into the country's modernist literary movement, of which he would be the only member not from the upper class.

It is this particular form of "antisocial" writing that strongly contributed to Silva's image as a morose poet in battle against the world and devoid of any major political agenda. At the same time, this representation of an apolitical Silva seems to contradict his increasing popularity over time. His poetic contribution continues to capture the imagination of Guayaquileans generations after the greatest representatives of the Liberal and Socialist revolutions have lost their central importance. A visible sign in this respect is that the Liberal and Socialist parties have both lost any significant electoral support in Guayaquil and the coast (and the whole country, for that matter), with the possible exception of the northern province of Esmeraldas, which, tellingly, has the country's highest concentration of Afro-Ecuadorians.

It is this ambivalent identification that affords Guayaquileans such a powerful icon in Silva, what Williams refers to as a "semantic figure," a mirror of their own ambiguous identity. It would make more sense to see Silva actively invested in protecting himself and his work from the seemingly dangerous social maelstrom throughout his life than to consider him immune to his social surroundings. Once again, this is not an unimaginable scenario for the situation in which Guayaquil's impoverished population finds itself today. But perhaps most significant is that writing against the backdrop of his social setting must have taken an enormous amount of effort and energy—strenuous effort belied by the fact that it is barely visible in any of his work or even in posthumous biographical attempts.

Toni Morrison (1993) addresses a similar issue in her analysis of U.S. literature. According to her, a repeated effort to deny an African presence within the United States' literary borders requires much more work, emotional drive, and energy than is humanly possible to maintain. This is an interesting strategy, since, according to Morrison, it would have been more economical to accept the complex social and racial reality than to deny it (see Butler 1997b for a similar analysis). Therefore, one could ask, What was the price Silva paid (his life?) in his denial of his society's ventures? And is this perhaps the "price of the ticket" (see James Baldwin in Leeming 1994), which still captures Silva's city dwellers' imagination as they continue to invest in the production of similar forms of cultural survival and denial?

First, we must analyze how both the Liberal and the Socialist revolutions were invested in social and cultural transformations quite central to Silva's work. Although both revolutions primarily targeted economic relationships, each of them imbued different sections of the struggling population with transformative types of cultural identity and political empowerment. The Liberal Revolution, even though most clearly demarcating new regional and productive economic relationships, transformed the traditional racial/ethnic hierarchy of the nation. With support from the newly emancipated Afro-Ecuadorian population, including the first officially recognized black generals, the Liberal Revolution empowered this traditionally oppressed and exploited coastal community. The placing of Afro-Ecuadorians at the forefront of social revolt provided an escape valve for this group's oppressive reality but, in many ways, also reinstated many of the fears of mainstream white and white/mestizo Ecuadorian society. Silva's outward conflict with his own blackness makes his ambivalent reaction to the Liberal Revolution's social and racial/ethnic transformations that much more understandable. It is not unrealistic to recognize his probable fear of the black population's uprising and its negative portrayal of him, as expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to a friend:

I despair in poverty and I am offended by blackness. It is curious: I am a man of pure white race. My grandfather was Spanish. It is useless to explain a freak phenomenon of nature. But you must know that in me harbors a pure Iberian heritage. However, I look like a black Moor. And this physical reality, in my country, is a source of shame. But I would not mind as much being the black member of my family, if, in addition I also were not poor. This is what is most horrible. To have been born to be a sojourner in a fatuous palace, and to be obligated to have nothing to eat in a hole of misery. (In Romero Castillo 1970: 323)

In this fashion, his constant need to redefine himself in normative (i.e., white/Spanish and upper-class) terms could have only suffered as he watched the national order being overturned around him by "low-class" Afro-Ecuadorian and former Indians turned mestizos and cholos at the vanguard of the Liberal political scene (see Chapter 2). Because of the period's dramatic impact on Silva, rather than ignore his larger social surroundings, it seems useful and even essential to look at the cultural impact of the Liberal and Social revolutions.

The Liberal Revolution's greatest leader was Gen. Eloy Alfaro, who, in league with a contingency of rebel leaders, such as his brother Flavio Alfaro, and the coastal populace, represented a regional uprising against the conservative interests of the highland hacienda-holding elite. The Liberal Revolution brought into power a whole new coastal bourgeoisie that, unlike the traditional latifundistas (large landholders) and cattle ranchers, represented a new agro-export model that would return to power to neutralize the Liberal Revolution's most progressive objectives. The movement articulated the demise of feudal forms of labor production and introduced Ecuador to modern global capital relations of wage earning and transnational interests. While in power, Pres. Eloy Alfaro (1895-1901, 1906-1911) wrought drastic changes by constructing a national railroad system, secularizing education, and providing for separation of church and state. These secular policies, including the introduction of legal divorce and his Freemasonry, further contributed to a great animosity on the part of the highland Catholic population and political elite and contributed to his death by public lynching and the burning of his body in El Ejido Park, together with those of his closest allies, on January 28, 1912.

By the time of Alfaro's death, however, the Liberal movement had already created a whole new set of agents on the national scene, such as mestizos, cholos, and the black population, particularly from Esmeraldas, which, since emancipation in the late 1880s, had been largely ignored and continued to be discriminated against (Ayala Mora 1993, 1995).

Silva did not have to contend only with this Liberal transformation of class and racial/ethnic relations, however, but also with an emerging socialist movement, which had slowly increased its power and visibility in workers' unions and guilds throughout Guayaquil. If the Liberal turn of events had managed to affect the problematics of an oppressed black identity, the socialist movement only increased the rebellions against the traditional feudal/colonial class structure still prevalent in the country. Once again, Silva's constant preoccupation with social status, particularly that of the upper-class Spanish kind, could only have been significantly shaken and questioned at its core by this communal protest from the city's impoverished masses. For Silva it could no longer be simply an issue of obtaining greater status and wealth but of seeing his whole social structure being upturned in a chaos of mass protests and police/military repression precisely at the moment when he seemed to be gaining entrance to the elite circles and hierarchical structure under attack. This chaotic social situation must have created great angst in Silva, even though its most explicitly tragic resolution occurred three years after his death: the massacre of hundreds of workers in November of 1922 (see Maiguashca 1994; Quintero and Silva 1991).

The socialist-influenced workers' movement gained enormous momentum from the city's large migrant population. Like today, at the turn of the century, Guayaquil constituted the largest migratory center in the whole country. In many respects, the workers' movement was the natural progression of the Liberal ideals already abandoned by the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) in the 1920s, which had taken on a more conservative bent. The workers' movement and the creation of sindicatos (unions) represented a new understanding of the relationship between capital and labor that seriously subverted the traditionally racist colonial relations of hacienda production and latifundios that had survived the institution of the republic in 1830. This new economic organization transformed the traditionally racialized peasants into new urban workers and proletarians. At the same time, within this global economy, the drop in cacao prices, the First World War, and the Mexican and Soviet revolutions, in 1910 and 1917, respectively, contributed to the demand for better social conditions (Quintero and Silva 1991).

The movement (in which the bakers' guild played a key role) reached its tragic climax on November 15, 1922. The police and the army, with the approval of the national government, massacred over fifteen hundred persons for demonstrating in favor of union rights, better wages, and better working conditions and threw the victims' bodies into the Guayas River. This massacre would be immortalized by Joaquín Gallegos Lara in Las cruces sobre el agua (The Crosses on the River) [1980(1944)] and in other literary works such as the Afro-Ecuadorian Adalberto Ortiz' El espejo y la ventana (The Mirror and the Window) (1983) and would also contribute to the left-leaning military coup of July 9, 1925.

Both titles are quite meaningful. Las cruces sobre el agua refers to the practice of depositing floating wreaths on the Guayas River every year where the bodies of the massacred workers were discarded with official approval. El espejo y la ventana uses a dualistic literary technique in each chapter to describe the main character looking at himself in the mirror while watching the uprising, the massacre, and the official discarding (and denial) of the workers' bodies from his window. In many regards, the mirror and the window also seem to represent the two media that Silva had to contend with in his life.

The workers' movement would finally see part of its struggle realized in the creation of the Socialist Party (1926), the Communist Party (1929), and a new era of social consciousness marked by the publication of Lara's novel and the groundbreaking collection of short stories, Los que se van (Those Who Leave) (Gallegos Lara, Aguilera Malta, and Gil Gilbert 1973 [1933]). It is in this period of conflict that Medardo Ángel Silva lived his brief life and struggled to make sense of a national scene whose chaos was directly related to shifting international power. It is this world that most probably contributed to his premature death in 1919 and that would forever be denied in the successful historical representation of a Guayaquil Antiguo devoid of conflict, violence, and social unrest.

Medardo Ángel Silva and the Hegemonic Power of an Ambivalent Representation

Silva's fantasy-filled poetic images, for many, evidence a lack of social concern (Cueva 1986; Handelsman 1987; "Medardo A. Silva" 1999; Romero Castillo 1970). However, a closer look reveals a much more problematic figure who was clearly concerned with social conventions and hierarchies. Silva (1898-1919) was deeply troubled by both the darkness of his skin and his quite limited socioeconomic standing. His concern about his race was so apparent that his own mother publicly acknowledged the "unfortunate" circumstance of his "blackness" (Romero Castillo 1970). Silva's poetic imagery, as this excerpt from "Aniversario" (Birthday) shows, is full of exquisite images, Middle Eastern symbolism, and sensual representations of whiteness (i.e., blondness and gold) that are contrary to his undervalued national, class, and racial identity (Silva N.d.: 107):

Pero, ¿quién atendía a las explicaciones? . . .
¡Hay tanto que observar en los negros rincones!
y, además, es mejor contemplar los gorriones
en los hilos; seguir el áureo derrotero
de un rayito de sol o el girar bullanguero
de un insecto vestido de seda rubia o una
mosca de vellos de oros y alas color de luna.

***

¡El sol es el amigo más bueno de la infancia!
¡Nos miente tantas cosas bellas la distancia!
¡Tiene un brillar tan lindo de onza nueva! ¡Reparte
tan bien su oro que nadie se queda sin su parte!
Y por él no atendíamos a las explicaciones;
ese brujo Aladino evocaba visiones
de las Mil y una Noches, de las Mil Maravillas
y beodas de sueños, nuestras almas sencillas
sin pensar, extendían las manos suplicantes
como quien busca a tientas puñados de brillantes.

Silva was born in Guayaquil in 1898 and died under mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty-one, while visiting his fifteen-year-old girlfriend in el centro (downtown). It is postulated that he was murdered because of a love triangle or that he committed suicide. Although both hypotheses satisfy the romantic ideal of his life, the second is given most credence, especially since he refers to his future suicide in many of his poems. His idealization of death and suicide is paramount, for example, in his pasillo "El alma en los labios." Death is so central that his sole biographer describes Silva as sitting at home on Avenida Quito enthralled at a very early age by funeral processions making their way to the cemetery (Romero Castillo 1970), processions that continue to this day.

Why is death so dominant in a poet who by the age of nineteen had already published his first poetry collection, El árbol del bien y del mal (The Tree of Good and Evil); had attended the most prestigious public high school of the time, Vicente Rocafuerte; and was already working as a journalist for the biggest national newspaper in the city, El Telégrafo? Contrary to what traditional scholars believe, Silva's fascination with death was probably deeply affected by the racial, sexual, and class expectations that both fueled and constrained him, that were an emblematic contradiction of his ambivalent racialized and spiritual identification with the city's elite families.

Silva was not alone in his obsession with death and race and class dynamics, but he was the only member of a group of writers known as the Generación Decapitada (Beheaded Generation) who came from the coast and was not a member of the elite. This group, representative of the modernist tradition in Ecuador, comprised Arturo Borja (1892-1912), Ernesto Noboa Caamaño (1889-1929), Humberto Fierro (1890-1929), and Silva got its name from the fact that all committed suicide. Only Silva represented the class contradictions of the disenfranchised who had been historically excluded from the cultural affairs of the nation. This characteristic also contributed to making his poetry the most immediate in popular terms and probably resulted from his having lived through one of the most dynamic periods of social unrest in Guayaquil's history.

In his writing, both poetry and journalistic pieces (I emphasize the latter in this section), Silva used at least two autobiographical approaches. The first was the use of a French pseudonym, Jean d'Agreve, to sign his literary work. The use of this pen name afforded Silva greater literary license than his social surroundings would have been willing to provide. Key is the leveling power of envy used by Guayaquilean (as a postcolonial) society to undermine his (or anybody's) impressive and ab(ove)-normal talent (see Kincaid 1997). It seems that, in many respects, his compatriots where unwilling to accept him, a poor, sexually ambivalent black men, as their cultural and intellectual equal or, worse, their superior.

Silva was acutely aware of his ambivalent positioning and the crushing power of his social environment when he publicly advised a "young writer" in the following manner (Calderón Chico 1999: 133-134):

The literary profession that you dream of as a road of glory is quite hard, my young friend.

At the beginning of your literary labor, the elders proven by the sacred anointment of time will call you: {hope of future glories}, but you must resign yourself to being an eternal hope: if they ever suspect that you might make their imperial thrones tremble, they will stone you . . .

To enjoy the favor of the public you will have to depersonalize yourself, become part of the herd, think in harmony with everybody else: nobody will forgive your irreverence in remaining standing when everybody else is crawling, and the victory, almost always, goes to those who have the least rigid backbones, spines: to obtain it, victory, that is, you must subscribe to the many clubs of mutual adulation where the literary prizes are raffled and awarded.

Silva's pen name allowed him to speak in the first person as Jean d'Agreve without explicitly signifying that it was he who was doing the writing or that he was referring to himself. In a piece entitled "La ciudad nocturna" (The Night City) the writer as Jean d'Agreve is able to dedicate the text (Calderón Chico 1999: 30): "To the hypocrisy of serious people, to the ignorance of the good, to the scruples of the Tartuffe, to the white lies of formal men: to all the false virtues and to all the masked vices, I dedicate this vile piece, sad as Vice and the Night." Jean d'Agreve ambiguously describes himself in the following manner (Calderón Chico 1999: 32): "The hat bent, the hair in disarray, the hands in his pocket 'like a poet out hunting for verses with a trap,' Jean d'Agreve walks his native city, which sleeps at night like a puppet broken by the intensity of the day, under the blinking of the electric lights; with the complicity of the roofs and beyond the hypocrisy of the windows, the fire of debauchery intensifies, its sensual flames egged on by the order of Our Lord the Devil."

Even the use of this pseudonym did not afford him a reprieve from his critics, however, and he soon defended his pen name in an explicit and ironic piece entitled "Malévola interpretación" (Vicious Interpretation) (Calderón Chico 1999: 201): "Those men should know: that Jean d'Agreve is the name of the protagonist of a novel, which goes by the same title of the well-known French writer Vicomte M. de Vogüe, an academic; that who writes these lines has used, for almost two years, this pseudonym; and that I, author of [the article entitled] 'Films,' in spite of my 'egocentrism'—as an improvised critic said—state that these small verses do not augment a little or a lot my literary prestige . . . Do you understand?" It is quite ironic that both Silva and his critics would so explicitly claim "egocentrism" as the author's main problem, since it is his willingness to transgress the hidden cultural scriptures for which Silva is most remembered today, and for which reason he probably had to kill himself.

Another autobiographical approach Silva used was to write about himself, even though he seemed to be writing about somebody else or an isolated cultural phenomenon. This approach is paramount in his literary criticism of two other young Ecuadorian poets, members of the modernist movement, Humberto Fierro and Arturo Borja, both of whom would also commit suicide in their early twenties (see Calderón Chico 1999). As we see in the following lines, the public advice freely given to the young emerging writers could as easily be seen as a more mature (and bitter) Silva reflecting on his own experience and advising himself (Calderón Chico 1999: 134-135): "On such a hard road you will leave bits and pieces of your soul, and when you reach the desired peak—if you ever get there—you will age prematurely with the laurels of your crown pricking your forehead as if they were needles. Meanwhile, if you desist from your objective, be assured, hopeless dreamer, possessed of a sacred frenzy, you will die with your eyes exalted by the light of your unreachable dreams, set upon the ideal peak where that divine dancer called Glory will look upon you with a smile."

Silva uses this particular approach many times to express sexually complicated and socially dangerous feelings that were not afforded poetic license. Another example comes from a piece titled "En la penumbra del cinema: Elogio del claroscuro amor, música y morfina" (In the Shadows of the Movies: Elegy to Somber Love, Music, and Morphine), quite prophetically written a mere month before his probable suicide (Calderón Chico 1999: 50-51):

Indifferent to all, he "butterflies" [mariposea] his vague glare as somebody who is about to see a vision.

He has black eyes, they are very black against his pale face: he does not pay attention to the screen, nor does he make love. I am getting quite attached to him. With his convalescent hands and soft touch, with his pose of uncertainty I am attracted to him. Perhaps he suffers from my sickness. He must be sad and also a platonic lover.

Perhaps this is one of those good boys, sick of readings, and perfectly useless; let him kill himself.

We also see this autobiographical element in another piece, entitled "El oso estaba triste: ¿Qué le pasaba al oso?" (The Bear Was Sad: What Was Wrong with the Bear?), in which Silva supposedly refers to a bear named Ursus that had escaped from the private cage of the leading Ecuadorian historian and archaeologist of his time, Don Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, and "bears" his soul even further. This piece is metaphorically rich because one could wonder if this is not how Silva really felt, encased in the elite's crystal showroom of which Jijón y Caamaño was one of the greatest representatives as governor of the capital and undisputed leader of the Conservative Party. Like the bear, Silva was kept and admired by the city's wealthiest families but only under the implicit assumption of their never acknowledging who he really was: a poor black man with plausible nonnormative sexual mores—in other words, a far superior literary talent born into the wrong class, race, gender, and, most probably, sexual desire. And as in Ursus' saga, you cannot but see Silva's own life drama played out, a life drama that would end with a bullet to his head (Calderón Chico 1999: 41-42; my emphasis):

Ursus was sad. Ursus got bored. In front of every naked rose-looking arm that sprang from behind the cage, every bronzed villainous body that came to grin its tongue (Have you ever seen such vile behavior: an imbecile mocking the hairy great lord of the Jungle!). Ursus growled, showed his claws, yawned like a Brit in front of this Beaf . . . and nothing happened.

In his cage he had the resignation and philosophical demeanor that are the virtues of his race.

Perhaps—and maybe not—he envies his colleague that jumps, in a public plaza, to the rhythm of the music, in front of a black-eyed and bronze-skinned gypsy.

Good-bye, jungle and honey and sweetness of home—Home Sweet Home!

The unhappy Bear has returned to seclusion and to entertain the grave eyes—expert in finding old Inca jars and reading historical archives—of Don Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, his good owner.

Ursus resides in the capital of the republic. Condemned to inactivity, he is destined to die of sadness or nostalgia.

I propose a Silva who did not live an individual life of sadness and telling nostalgia (see Mitchell 1988; Pratt 1992) but one that foreshadowed a whole generation of Guayaquileans' communal identity; a Silva who escaped the structural historical reading of his time to fully embody its emotional one. In this manner, Silva's work enabled generations of identification with a social life of death due to constricting, normalizing political and social norms that could only be individually experienced and shared (see Duras 1986, 1997). It is this individualized tension between social life and death that I engage in the following chapters.

Overview of Chapters

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the two major theoretical discourses that structure the book. In Chapter 1, I further develop the analysis of Medardo Ángel Silva's contribution, providing some of the major links between his memorialization and the contemporary production of Guayaquilean identity. Prime in this assessment is the use of the category of cholo to define and discriminate (in the violent meaning of the word) the poor and nonwhite majority Guayaquilean population. I also look to problematize the relationship between feelings and a postcolonial experience, thereby highlighting the central role of the mother and motherly love in the constitution of the Guayaquilean subject. The last section of the chapter assesses the role of transgressive love and sin in the ultimate alterity and social alienation of Guayaquileans as constitutive parts of the city's social experience.

Chapter 2 engages the other central metonymic device used by Guayaquileans over the last century, that of the romantic idealization of Guayaquil Antiguo. Particularly important in this chapter is the analysis of Guayaquil Antiguo as pregnant with romantic colonial and nostalgic legacies that have been repressed historically. The second section of the chapter looks to understand how the primarily migrant population has also espoused this romantic imaginary, even though it is continuously denied and erased by its powerful figuration. The last section of the chapter tries to bring together all the elements being elaborated on in both Chapters 1 and 2: sadness, drinking, nostalgic memory, and a problematic sense of belonging in the active production of Guayaquilean identity to this day. This section thus looks to understand the dynamic incorporation of the imaginary past into the daily lives of people in Guayaquil today.

The following three chapters (3, 4, and 5) are specific thematic and case studies of the particular manner in which the romantic notions of Silva's and Guayaquil Antiguo's imaginary have fueled the city's production of popular culture over the last century. Chapter 3 discusses the particular representational power of the musical genre of the pasillo in the identity of the city. By assessing the pasillo's powerful popular appeal and Julio Jaramillo's role as the city's greatest musical exponent, I review the levels of hegemonic ambiguity, cultural authenticity, and transnational elements that are impregnated in the genre. Another important element I discuss in this chapter is the gender sensibilities that are articulated in the genre's production and the ultimate centrality of gender ascriptions in a Guayaquilean identity.

Chapter 4 moves away from the national fold, in a matter of speaking. By analyzing three migrant life histories, one fictional and two ethnographic, I assess the transnational elements in the city's production of its identity. All three cases deal with the recent historical migration of Guayaquileans to the United States and therefore engage the problematic but dynamic reconfiguration of Guayaquilean identity and modernity through new/old global flows. Although all three case studies are significantly different (chosen deliberately for this reason), they provide new understanding not only of the manner in which Guayaquilean identity is produced but also, and more important, of the constant and central place of this foreign global element in its constitution.

Chapter 5 engages the racial dynamic, specifically, that of the black or Afro-Ecuadorian experience, inherent in the articulation of a Guayaquilean identity. The selections of two Afro-Ecuadorians as Miss Ecuador in the 1990s and the historical figure of a life-sized effigy of a black Christ in the coastal city of Daule problematize Silva's black racial identity. I therefore argue for a much more subtle articulation of blackness as essential in the city's self-defining project. Rather than highlight typical racial discrimination, I use these cases to argue that blackness, or Afro-Ecuadorianness, is subtly articulated to represent Guayaquil in specific and provocative ways, which further serves to support and reproduce the exploitative structure of the city against its black, Indian, mestizo, and cholo population.

Finally, the Conclusion reassesses the major themes of the book, providing a discussion of the major theoretical points highlighted by my research. I recap the book's contribution in terms of a more nuanced understanding of the role of sentiment and popular culture in the dynamic hegemonic domination of Latin America's population. By doing this, I look to further our understanding of Gramsci's proposal of hegemony and Raymond Williams' rearticulation of the concept. In many ways, the book is really a concrete ethnographic case study of Williams' cultural hypothesis of structures of feeling.

The success or not of my endeavor is not mine to claim, but I hope it will at least provoke questions about the specific operationalization of hegemony in concrete and local historical ways in daily life. Ultimately, the main concern of the book is to further question how hegemony works, not exclusively, or even mainly, in grand national narratives but, rather, contained within people's cultural reproduction and daily survival, that is, life.