Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Sarance 44 (2020) Full Issue

Sarance Nº45   

Editorial

This publication contains a selection of thirty-five photographs by Jorge Landívar Ugarte, an Ecuadorian photographer who produced research and knowledge in the history, geography and border situation of Ecuador in the mid-twentieth century. These images, are the visual testimony of the trip to the province of Imbabura, in 1936, by two teachers - María Angélica Idrobo and Zoila Ugarte - with a group of boarding school students of the Fernández Madrid Institute from Quito, and gather the experience of the trip both portraying these women as well as recording scenarios, people, and activities from that time. In the photographs you can see reproductions of emblematic  places of the city of Otavalo such as the Central Park, symbolic place of local power, the great animal market, the scene of intense commercial exchanges, the Church of El Jordán with its priests and parishioners. At the same time, the photographs show the teachers and students from the Quito institution in several locations on the periphery of the city where the family home of one of the renowned teachers, María Angélica Idrobo,1 seems to have been located.

This article seeks to test the hypothesis, based on the Colombian case study, that an efficient implementation of public policies aimed at deepening and strengthening e-government helps improve the quality of life of the population. This analysis has been carried out under the theoretical umbrella of new institutionalism, new public management and governance, which in turn have decanted in the new millennium in the concepts of open government  and electronic government. For this, a review of the aforementioned conceptual framework has been made, which starts in the seventies with the discontent of society, on the one hand, and on the other with the inability on the part of governments to respond to the social demands that began to mutate and increase in complexity; then, in a second instance, a normative and programmatic account of e-government in Colombia is made, as well as the possible relation of it with the levels of happiness of its population, to finally, in the third part, analyze the case of Bogotá and, in light of the relationship between e-government / quality of life, compare it with other Colombian cities. The methodology used is expository analytics with analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, considering studying the rules of digital government from the end of the last century, passing through national quantitative data, until reaching city-level data regarding digital government and quality of life, having as a main limitation the different temporality of some numerical data. 

The present study addresses the social imaginary about Hispanic American criollos from several peninsular authors and writings, becoming a circumstance that would trigger a true ideological war of topics and stereotypes that emerged from the 16th century and consolidated throughout the eighteenth century. Consequently, that official, ecclesiastical, and profane literature of various Spanish authors has been taken as the primary source; of these authors, some resided in America and formed a heterogeneous image of the American nobles, while others, from the metropolis, imagined the criollos with certain biases and anthropological representations. Travelers, authorities, and enlightened people provide us with a rich image of other, his most similar other, the criollo, within a context in which the Bourbon reforms had created a new criollo feeling.

Within the research field based on the school of cultural studies, ethnomusicology applied to such endeavors supply us with a highly interesting and valuable vision when it comes to creating academic discourses. This is due to the focus not being solely on the musical product, but also in its relationship with the identity of a territory. Based on this idea, the following article’s intent is to establish a consideration of various concepts pertaining to identity present in a Latin America that, having experienced certain historical processes, provides us with a perfect canvas to contextualize such considerations. For this purpose, we will take, as a starting point, a few examples of popular songs that carry the everyday life and the idiosyncrasy of the population through to an artistic plane, allowing for the examination of the message as well as the medium. Thus, this research will show a sociocultural analysis of the lyrics of a series of musical pieces that will serve to delve into the explanation about the construction and the representation of identity-searching purposes. Following this same line, we will touch on subjects such as hegemonic identity, changes in its consideration depending on the historical moment, and the problems surrounding the representation of the “other individual”.

The jíbaro was one of the three identities of the Amazonian Indian that were built at during the 19th century and they served to justify their integration into the national project. Of uncertain etymology, the term was initially used as ethnonym and it passed to Ecuadorian Spanish in the matrix of a colonial discourse with racist roots. Its dissemination since the mid-nineteenth century reached different literary genres, including travel literature. After examining its uses from a lexicographic and historical perspective, this contribution analyzes the discursive construction of the jíbaro in the stories of two travelers, the German Wilhelm Reiss and the North-American H. Anthony, whose visits were separated by a period of fifty years (1870-1920), in order to identify the rhetorical strategies that they use to build the image of the Amazonian Indians and justify their colonization. 

In the last social uprising of October 2019 that paralyzed Ecuador, there was a massive participation of women and especially indigenous women. In this article, which reviews material from the “Uprisings” section of the National Archive, the participation of indigenous women in political uprisings in the colonial period and at the dawn of the republic is evident. It is worth remembering the role of Isabel Yarucpalla, ex-wife of Atahualpa and then of the conqueror Juan Lobato de Sosa, who denounced to the Spanish authorities the famous mutiny led by Alonso Ango, chieftain of Otavalo (Vargas, 1975). In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, indigenous uprisings were less abundant than between 1730 and 1803, a period in which the record of the participation of indigenous women in the uprisings is observed for the first time. An analysis of their role in these events is made from this.

In general, we are accustomed to discussing the problem of racism from an eminently moral perspective, that is, from the position that provokes the outrage or identification of an episode in which one or more individuals have committed a racist act on another individual or several individuals. In fact, this form of positioning isn’t completely disposable, however, it requires a panoramic enlargement for its real understanding, especially if what is required is to progress rapidly in order to abolish or reduce to a minimum expression the relations of racial discrimination, in short, racism. This article seeks to generate an evaluation of racism’s construction, and it will also attempt to reveal the hierarchical form of subjective relationship that occurred at a time in American history and how its specific materiality of domination and control contributed to the consolidation of racial differences as a mode of differentiating among people.