2024 Statement

The house is passed on through generations, holding as much memory as oral history built in its structure. Latin American authors like Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar (to name a few) have commonly referred to the house as a motif or character because of its cultural significance. In Ecuador 17th Century streets, houses and churches are the setting for many of the popular myths such as Cantuña, Maria Angula, Padre Almeida and others, holding significant historical and social importance to our culture. These houses have been passed down through generations and hold much generational sentimental value for their residents. Regardless of its importance in Ecuadorian culture, historical homes are inevitably in states of degradation because of the cost of renovation and the natural expansion of the city. These houses dating back to 1600-1800ths, are left to succumb to the termites, humidity, degraded infrastructure, and filth. Tearing down houses in the historical district is not permitted in Ecuador. Many times, when the owners want to sell the land, they will leave the house abandoned until it naturally collapses. Still, many families live in these homes, these ruins, that have been passed down to them, and suffer the consequences of their old infrastructure and damage. 

 During my most recent visit to Ecuador, I documented damaged walls, covered in years of layers of paint, yet still pealing. I also documented the rusting metallic handrails, the cracking concrete and road holes. I documented the graffitied walls and scraped surfaces. I had not noticed the poor state of Quito until I started documenting what felt like every single wall in the city. Traveling to the Coast, to Manta, the degradation of homes became even more evident. There was not a single wall that was not damaged by natural causes, or the damage left after the 2016 earthquake. While taking the Alóag road that connects the Sierra with the Coast, you go through tens of towns and cities. I had never noticed how damaged everything is in Ecuador, and how little government or community effort there is to reconstruct or fix these problems. Small colorful homes decorate Santo Domingo and its neighboring towns. Colorful yet damaged and unfinished homes. Huge cracks travel every wall in varying lengths and look as though threatening to collapse any second.  

In Jan of 2024, the narco conflict in Ecuador, which we had been battling since a few years back, worsened. We had never seen the extent to which it had infected Ecuador until the Bandas kidnapped a news channel crew on live Tv, invaded and took a hospital, the murder of a prosecutor, bomb threats, and a nationwide revolt in Ecuador’s prisons where the Banda’s took the police officers as hostages after one of the heads of the Choneros Banda escaped prison. The newly elected president Noboa re-installed a curfew and declared Ecuador in an internal armed conflict, increasing military surveillance as an attempt to control the growing war. The Coast is the most affected area because of its strategically convenient ports in Manta and Guayaquil, less economically developed communities, and the banana industry that serves as the perfect business to smuggle cocaine to the United States and Europe. The places on the Coast where I grew up have been taken over by humidity, termites and Narcos. The Bandas, mostly coming from Mexico and Colombia, recruit young boys from the poorest towns in the coast that do not have access to adequate education and are offered large sums of money, which they need for their families. This strategy had drowned the Ecuadorian coastal towns in a wave of inescapable violence, that targets innocents in their Banda disputes. Threats, car bombs, and shootings have become the everyday reality of so many people and mark the walls of their homes as a reminder of this historical wave of violence. Their makeshift wall repairs and constructions are then destroyed by floods and El Niño, exposing these houses naked and vulnerable once again. 

The similarities between the physical degradation of Ecuador, and the sociopolitical and economic crisis we are suffering are astounding. It felt as though the falling walls were a metaphor for the country’s decay. Violence, corruption, poverty, and hopelessness were manifesting themselves as bullet holes, mold, rust, and fallen walls. Given the significance of the house in Latin American literature, this metaphor also felt applicable to the destruction of the historical district’s homes. Although not as directly affected by the wave of violence, Quito’s historical homes are degrading in other ways, yet still a form of violence: lack of funds to maintain and repair these homes because of a corrupt system. Think for a second about the living body: a failing organ causes a variety of symptoms in the outside of the body, its skin, bark, nails, leaves, teeth, eyes, ability. The house, as a living body, physically reacts to its internal situation through its decay. Ecuador’s infrastructure gives in as the social state of Ecuador continues to worsen.  Its political and social organs are rotting, and the intensity and severity of this rot is shown through its skin: its streets and buildings. Its people, in this case its blood, is pouring through its open wounds and leaving the body. The ones who stay, who cannot (or will not) leave their homes, survive in constant fear and uncertainty. To leave is to drain and kill the body, and to stay is to rot with it. Many have no choice, but those that chose to stay understand that their home, this body, is something that has been passed down to them, and its history, its natural beauty and its paradisiac richness outweighs its structural damage.