Mapped
Don Goyo
Demetrio Aguilera Malta
On the mangrove islands of the Guayas river delta near Guayaquil, the mixed-race cholo fishermen and woodcutters live in near-mystical communion with the swamps and their ancient patriarch, Don Goyo, a figure old as the mangroves themselves. Aguilera Malta, a pioneer of Latin American magical realism, roots it in the real estuary: the island villages, the mangrove swamps the cholos harvest, the river and its canoes, and the distant city of Guayaquil whose market and traders press them to cut the forest down.
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Huasipungo
Jorge Icaza
Icaza's Ecuador is the Andean sierra above and around Quito, where a landowner in debt turns his highland estate over to a foreign oil company and drives the Quechua families tied to it to build a road through mountain and swamp. The map runs from the capital out into the highland countryside toward the eastern cordillera, the range that falls away to the Amazon.
6 places →