The Lack of Representation of Ecuadorian Migrants in the Today’s Spanish Novel

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the invisibility of Ecuadorian migrants in the contemporary Spanish novel. In order to do so, as an introduction, it addresses the economic crisis that hit Ecuadorian society in 1999, which generated the greatest migration flow of the recent history in Ecuador. Even though Spain became one of the main countries of destination for these migrants (it roughly reached 500.000 Ecuadorians), the Spanish literature hardly ever depicted their personal lives and collective tragedies. So as to explain this erasure, the paper firstly explores the general invisibility of the working class in the Spanish contemporary novel and the displacement
of political and social conflicts through other issues acceptable by the dominant ideology. Secondly, it studies the failure of the Spanish society as a recipient culture and its inability to integrate migrants as a political subject, as well as the necessity of migrants to build locality outside of the recipient society when the integration process has failed. These circumstances make the necessary dialogue and encounter between cultures impossible, a meeting that could have produced a type of literature that described the complex difficulties of the migrant subject, further than the neutralized narratives that compose our corpus. Thirdly, the paper examines how migrants have felt the need to look for other channels of expression that pursue horizontality and allow them to make themselves heard, specially since literature appears as a vertical and colonial device that neutralizes the political potential implied in telling one’s own story.