The Crafting of Historia Patria in an Andean Nation. Historical Scholarship, Public Commemorations and National Identity in Ecuador (1870 - 1950).

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural and intellectual analysis of the ways in which the past was elaborated and remembered in Ecuador from 1870 to 1940. The analysis focuses on both the formation of an intellectual field of historical writing and the emergence of an era of civic rituals aimed at embodying a specific memory of the nation. The study stresses the intersections of history and memory, and the contexts of power and subordination in which they were developed. The dissertation explores the definition, imposition and negotiation of a set of ideas, meanings and metaphors that informed the corpus of "historia patria," and how this construct was put forward as an interpretation of the true origins of the nation. The primary goal of the dissertation is to track a set of analytical operations, rhetorics and heuristics that structured historical writing, from the grand historical accounts developed in the nineteenth century to the institutionalization of historical knowledge, that occurred with the creation of the National Academy of History (1909/1920) and the vast research program that its members launched. Special attention is focused on the formulation and consolidation of the concept of a “Hispanic legacy” as the explanatory axis of the trajectory of the Ecuadorian nation, a construct which radically understated the historical agency of the native population. Closely linked to this process was a parallel development in the valorization of documents from the period of Spanish domination, leading to the conversion of the colonial archive into a national archive, with significant political and heuristic consequences. The dissertation also explores the public commemorations dedicated to exalting the memory of the "Fathers of the Nation," the anniversary of the first centennial of independence, and the fourth centenary of the foundation of Quito by the Spaniards. These civic rituals were articulated by the active involvement of state and local power in addition to a mosaic of actors and institutions from civil society. The commemorations were a cultural and official framework for incarnating the nation. These rituals effectively embedded within mass culture a vision of the past developed in the discourse of "historia patria."