Guayaquil Group

The Guayaquil Group (Grupo de Guayaquil, "Cinco como un puño") was a literary group from the 1930s - mid 1940s, that emerged as a response to a chaotic social and political climate where the Ecuadorian "montubio" and mestizo were oppressed by the elite class, priests, and the police. It was composed of five main writers: Joaquín Gallegos Lara, Enrique Gil Gilbert, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, José de la Cuadra, and Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco. Their works aimed to portray "social realism" as a form of displaying the real Ecuadorian montubio and cholo. The group eventually disintegrates after the death of two of their writers, José de la Cuadra and Joaquín Gallegos Lara, the inactivity in literature by Enrique Gil Gilbert, and the long trips away from Ecuador by Demetrio Aguilera Malta and Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco in the mid 1940s.

Stemming from an economy impacted by the liberalization of markets, the exploitation of the lower class became a prominent consequence of the open market economy of the pre-1930s. Clashes between classes resulted in the formation of two groups, the conservatives and the liberals. For the Ecuadorian mestizo in northern Ecuador, a main concern was the declining textile industry severely affected by the British textile industry. Yet for the coast, especially in Guayaquil, the newly opened markets allowed for prosperity attributed to the increasing demand for cacao and the emergence of a new exporting class. As a result, the Ecuadorian economy found itself undergoing a "diversification of the regional production that came accompanied with a series of social changes that dislocated significantly the relationships between the dominant and the dominated, which was expressed in a series of regional social protests."

Upon the ending of the first World War, a decline in the price of cacao and a plague in plantations, commence a concern for Ecuadorians. Emphasized by the global crisis during this period, Ecuadorian officials respond with a depreciation of their currency in efforts to maintain competitiveness among their products in the global market. This thus led to increasing unemployment rates and repression that incited the discontent of the working class. With great discontent, the Ecuadorian working class found themselves participating in a general strike on November 15, 1922, which was violently repressed resulting in around 1,200 to 1,500 people dead.

For the principal writers of the Guayaquil Group, the violent repression of the strike struck a chord that remained with them until the 1930s. Their works served as a protest to the injustice carried out by those in power. In a speech, Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco discusses how the group came about:

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