Huasipungo

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.

Andrés Chiliquinga

Quito, the capital

The bargain

The story begins with a landowner cornered by debt in the city. To save himself he agrees to hand his mountain estate to a foreign company that wants the land, and to clear and drain it first with unpaid indigenous labour. Quito is the seat of the creditors, the Church and the officials who make the scheme possible while never leaving the capital.

Opening chapters

explicit The novel's landowner belongs to the world of the capital; sited at the historic centre of Quito, on the Plaza Grande.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗