If “The Colored Horses” represent the aspirations of the Municipality of Guayaquil to reach the pantheon of “global cities,” “The Painted Donkeys” express the concerns of many Guayaquil residents about their place in the new order of a regenerated Guayaquil, of an aspirational Guayaquil. Guayaquil is not the first city to have benefited from a CowParade-style exhibition. In fact, such exhibitions of painted animals are currently part of a Municipal Enterprise model, which is characterized by an effort to market the “local” (that is, to convert Guayaquil culture into cultural capital) and compete with other cities in a global market for the attention of tourists and foreign investors.
Needless to say, the process of “city-marketing,” the process of (re)creating the image of a city, is selective and driven by the interests of a delimited and powerful group. The fact that the ruling class of Guayaquil has selected the “horse” as a symbol of the city is not simply an example of the delusions of grandeur of the Guayaquil elite, it is also part of an effort to reorganize the spatial hierarchy of the city and reinforce a certain image of the civic life of the city (inward and outward).
Although today the donkey is associated with marginality, this was not always the case. In the past, the donkey was one of the most visible domesticated animals in the city center, while the horse was an animal that occupied peripheral spaces, such as the famous Jockey Club at the beginning of the 20th century. After a municipal campaign that continues to this day, the metropolitans have made the humble beasts of burden disappear from the main streets of the city. Thus, the metropolitans were given the nickname, “donkey thief,” and thus the donkey became a marginal animal (in every sense) and a symbol of the supposed obstacles to progress, cleanliness, and order in the city.
The Donkeys of Guayaquil: Yesterday and Today
This temporal, moral, and aesthetic suture serves to ignore the periods of intermission in which the working class of Guayaquil and its cocoa farms became a class of lumpen. It also ignores the development of the populist political machine that transformed the marginal neighborhoods of Guayaquil into one of the most formidable electoral forces in the country. And it continues to ignore the chola, indigenous, montubio, and Afro roots of both famous figures (Julio Jaramillo, Jaime Hurtado, Guillermo Davis, and Medardo Ángel Silva) and the forgotten and forgettable people who have built this city (the shipyard workers, the railroad workers, the cocoa farms, the national brewery, the national cement workers, the informal workers, the cattle ranchers, and the fishermen). Such cultural diversity, like the donkey, is not seen as a resource or an advantage, but rather another obstacle to progress. It was not only the corruption and incompetence of the last populist mayors that created the state of anarchy and filth that brought the city to its knees, but also the effect of migration, settlement and the supposed cultural incoherence that they brought with them.
This is how we are, the people of Guayaquil
“…Before defining the peculiar characteristics of the people of Guayaquil, we must understand that throughout its history, this has been a city forged by the impulse of internal and external migrations. Here, citizens who came from all regions of the country converge and feel like Guayaquilians, looking at Guayaquil as the city of hope. That is why on any corner it is common to hear mountain and coastal accents, cholos, blacks, montubios, Indians, all amalgamated in a melting pot of Ecuadorianness… To be better citizens, we need to rescue some virtues that were once part of the Guayaquil identity. Among them: a) the fight for the common good rather than for the satisfaction of personal ambitions; b) the dedication to public service annulled today by a tremendous individualism and an excessive political careerism; c) moving from words to action (being less loudmouthed and more hard-working); d) to know and respect the laws and ordinances that for most people are a dead letter; and fundamentally to establish a commitment of sincere love for the city, to give it the honest fruit of our daily effort, honoring it with our best achievements and caring for it, not only in July and October.
—Jenny Estrada Ruiz, Historian (Diario Expreso, July 21, 2002)
To the extent that the municipality of Guayaquil has created a brand based on permanently overcoming the previous miserable and dirty state of the populist era, a donkey would not serve as a mascot for the city. According to the official narrative, the city's rebirth is due to a wealthy, Creole civic spirit, which has appropriated as its social model an aseptic version of the golden age of the 1920s. The semantic fusion of the great cocoa era with that of urban regeneration is an attempt to create a historical reference to a period in the history of the city in which Guayaquil had achieved international status as an avant-garde, liberal, dynamic, and cosmopolitan city. A semantic link that connects these eras is the thoroughbred horse, an animal that, due to its cost, avoids any association with urban popularism. For the people of Guayaquil, the horse is an animal that creates a continuity between the time of the centennial—in which the Jockey Club gave up part of its land for the construction of the first planned and exclusive citadel, the Centenario Neighborhood—and the mayoralty of León Febres-Cordero, the engineer of urban regeneration and a tireless fan of horse breeding and equestrian sports, being one of the illustrious regular spectators of the Buijo Hippodrome in Samborondón.
The Horses of Guayaquil: Yesterday and Today
Thus, the dress and behavior requirements in the regenerated areas do not merely reflect the desire of the municipality to superficially change the image of the city for tourist consumption, but rather represent an effort to harmonize from within the life and identification of all Guayaquil residents in order to create a civic identity oriented to the aspirations of the elite. Without this coherence, it is more difficult to market the city's neighborhood and ethnic micro-cultures. Therefore, the horses correspond to the aspiring and emerging civic identity. They are a part of the image that they want to convey to the global market of cities. The horses are concrete, valuable, untouchable, and dignified, while the donkeys are ephemeral, fleeting, clandestine, despicable, and heterogeneous. Their abrupt dismantling highlights the fact that the municipal campaign is not only about order and cleanliness, but also a symbolic struggle over urban space and what it means to be truly Guayaquil.
ANONYMOUS
Fountain: http://burrosdecolores.blogspot.com/
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