More Than Just a Patriotic Idea: Nationalist Desires as Part of Frontier Experience in Ecuador, 1940–69

Traditionally, historians have viewed the Ecuadorian Amazon in the context of natural resource extraction. The region blinks in and out of existence for the Ecuadorian nation and state according to the “booms” of rubber in the early twentieth century and of oil in the late 1960s. This paper challenges that view by examining the experiences of colonists in the Amazon during the decades before the oil boom. By the 1940s, the Amazon existed for both statemakers and poor colonists as a discursive tool; it was a national object of desire that could be invoked to justify public policy as well as add patriotic weight to one’s position in conflict over land and resources in the upper Amazon basin. Decades of popular publications had constructed the Amazon as a vital component of Ecuadorian national identity. The imperatives for settlement and development of the region did not remain purely theoretical prior to oil discovery. On the contrary, Ecuadorian citizens and public officials who colonized the Amazon carried these notions with them; they self-consciously played the role of “Sentinel of the Homeland” while facing isolation, lack of resources, and widespread corruption in the process of frontier state formation. Decades’ worth of Ecuadorian discourse about the Amazon’s indigenous peoples similarly did not remain a phenomenon of print only. Colonists brought these notions to bear during conflict over land; Indians countered by deploying arguments that show an awareness of their role within Ecuadorian national discourse and the importance of the region in which they lived as a national object of desire. This paper demonstrates that frontier state formation took place not only at the scale of localized conflict and development but also at the national level in the publications and public policies that set the agenda for the Amazon’s incorporation into the national state.