The Villagers by Jorge Icaza

That year was a dreadful one. Hunger, cunning and merciless, punished the people of the houses, of the huts, and those on the huasipungos. It wasn't the hunger of rebels who starve themselves to death for a cause. It was the hunger of slaves who let themselves be killed while savoring the bitterness of their impotence. It wasn't the hunger of the idle, out of work. It was the hunger that curses with exhausting work. It wasn't a hunger with the rosy, future prospects of a miser. It was a generous hunger which fattened the granaries of the highlands. Yes. A hunger which obstinately scraped a tune on the ribs of the children and dogs, a tune half complaint, half weeping.

Jorge Icaza's book Huasipungo is named for the small allotment of land an Ecuadorian patron would grant an Indian laborer in exchange for labor on his estate. The English title--The Villagers--hardly seems to capture what Icaza captures in this novel, which is that the state of the huasipunguero is a brutal one, something between the states of sharecropper and bona fide chattel slave. It begins when Don Pereira, an upper-class profligate in Quito, has his debts called in. His uncle suggests that, to pay the debts, Pereira should snatch up and develop tracts of land of Ecuadorian mountain forests, building roads, cutting timber, and extracting oil. Pereira's hacienda is remote from the pleasures of Quito, but when he and his family arrive, they are entering a world in which their word is law, and there is no one to prevent them from working their Indian peones to death. From the very moment of their arrival, they perpetuate cruelty: unable to move through the swampy bottomland on horeseback, they ride the backs of the huasipungueros.

Boy, this is a bleak book. Icaza's book, as I understand it, is the first volley of a genre called indigenismo, which uses social realism to reflect the plight of indigenous South Americans. As such, there's no satire or humor here, no moments of levity or farce; there is only the brutal regime of Don Pereira. After his daughter gives birth, he commands an Indian woman to serve as her wet nurse, banishing the woman's own infant child to the care of strangers, where it suffers and dies. The huasipungueros are enlisted into the hard collective labor called mingas, building a road across the swamps and the high mountain plains of; some of them die swallowed by the muck from which it is impossible to be rescued. Traditionally, the payment for such labor is considered a yearly gift from the don to the laborers, but Pereira refuses; daily wages are eaten up by exploitative company accounts and the exorbitant costs of masses imposed by Pereira's accomplice, the village priest. The trapped huasipungueros, who fall victim to malaria, floods, and hunger, all artificially imposed by the don's neglect.

At the center of the novel is Andres, a huasipunguero whose wife Chunsi is forced to serve as the mistress Pereira's subsequent wet nurse. A worried and angry Andres drives a gardening tool into his foot and is permanently crippled; still he must work. Later in the novel, he is driven to steal the meat of a spoiled cow's carcass to relieve his family's hunger, but the sickness that results kills Chunsi. Andres' bitter life sharply illustrates the trap in which most of the Indians find themselves, in which the only choice that exists before them is how to die: starvation? Sickness? Flood? Or to take one's fate into one's own hand, and rebel against the don? The failure of the short-lived rebellion that Andres leads against Pereira is as inevitable as its existence; the Indians live lives of pure contingency, while the don gets fat off the land. To the rich, the Indians are another resource to be extracted, used up.

The Villagers is exceptionally grim. It reminds me of those old commercials that would beg you to help end hunger by donating now, the ones that present the boy with the swollen stomach and the flies on his face. The pillaging and despoliation of the Ecuadorian Indians is certainly well-drawn--and the novel works best when it focuses more narrowly on Andres and Chunsi--but it made me yearn for the wider array of tools developed social protest novels Icaza wrote it in 1934. Turning the last page, I felt lucky to have the kind of opportunity not afforded to the huasipungueroes: to think about something else for a while.

With the addition of Ecuador, my "countries read" list is now up to 58.