page_title: Ecuadorians
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Ecuadorians / Culture / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Español: Fotografía del escritor ecuatoriano Juan Montalvo (fallecido en 1889). Estudio de Van Bosch, París (La fotografía original está expuesta en el museo "Casa de Montalvo") English: Photograph of Ecuadorian writer Juan Montalvo (deceased in 1889). Van Bosch studio, Paris. (The original photograph is exposed at the museum "Casa de Montalvo")
context_page_description: Ecuadorians are people identified with Ecuador, a country in South America, its citizens or their descendants abroad who identify with the Ecuadorian culture and descent. Ecuador was once the second empire of the Incas. Pre-Columbian Ecuador included numerous indigenous cultures, who thrived for thousands of years before the ascent of the Incan Empire. Las Vegas culture of coastal Ecuador is one of the oldest cultures in the Americas. The Valdivia culture in the Pacific coast region is a well-known early Ecuadorian culture. The Europeans who arrived over five centuries ago, and ultimately the sub-Saharan Africans who were imported to New Spain as slaves during the same period. Europeans mixed with the Indians in Ecuador creating the Mestizos and some Europeans also mixed with the black slaves.
  Mestizos, an ethnic group of mixed European and indigenous American ancestry, are by far the largest of all the ethnic groups and comprise around 71.9% of the current population. Whites are estimated at 6.1% and consist largely of those of unmixed or predominantly European descent. Most white Ecuadorians are of colonial-era Spanish origin, also known as criollos
context_section_description: Early literature in colonial Ecuador, as in the rest of Spanish America, was influenced by the Spanish Golden Age. One of the earliest examples is Jacinto Collahuazo, an indigenous chief of a northern village in today's Ibarra, born in the late 1600s. Despite the early repression and discrimination of the native people by the Spanish, Collahuazo learned to read and write in Castilian, but his work was written in Quechua. The use of the Quipu was banned by the Spanish, and in order to preserve their work, many Inca poets had to resort to the use of the Latin alphabet to write in their native Quechua language. The history behind the Inca drama "Ollantay", the oldest literary piece in existence for any indigenous language in America, shares some similarities with the work of Collahuazo. Collahuazo was imprisoned, and all of his work burned. The existence of his literary work came to light many centuries later, when a crew of masons was restoring the walls of a colonial church in Quito, and found a hidden manuscript. The salvaged fragment is a Spanish translation from Quechua of the "Elegy to the Dead of Atahualpa", a poem written by Collahuazo, which describes the sadness and impotence of the Inca people of having lost their king Atahualpa.
  Other early Ecuadorian writers include the Jesuits Juan Bautista Aguirre, born in Daule in 1725, and Father Juan de Velasco, born in Riobamba in 1727. De Velasco wrote about the nations and chiefdoms that had existed in the Kingdom of Quito (today Ecuador) before the arrival of the Spanish. His historical accounts are nationalistic, featuring a romantic perspective of precolonial history.
  Famous authors from the late colonial and early republic period include: Eugenio Espejo a printer and main author of the first newspaper in Ecuadorian colonial times; Jose Joaquin de Olmedo (born in Guayaquil), famous for his ode to Simón Bolívar titled La Victoria de Junin; Juan Montalvo, a prominent essayist and novelist; Juan Leon Mera, famous for his work "Cumanda" or "Tragedy among Savages" and the Ecuadorian National Anthem; Luis A. Martínez with A la Costa, Dolores Veintimilla, and others.
  Contemporary Ecuadorian writers include the novelist Jorge Enrique Adoum; the poet Jorge Carrera Andrade; the essayist Benjamín Carrión; the poets Medardo Angel Silva, Jorge Carrera Andrade; the novelist Enrique Gil Gilbert; the novelist Jorge Icaza (author of the novel Huasipungo, translated to many languages); the short story author Pablo Palacio; the novelist Alicia Yanez Cossio.
caption: Juan Montalvo
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