Al ciclo de conmemoraciones bicentenaristas que se inició en 2010, la Universidad del Rosario se vinculó con un fuerte programa editorial. Inicialmente publicó el libro Historia que no cesa: la independencia de Colombia, dedicado al análisis de los eventos y las circunstancias que condujeron a la ruptura del virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada con España. Después, en 2016, editó la obra titulada 1816: El terror y la sangre sublime, que se ocupa del estudio y la explicación de la mal llamada “Patria Boba” y de la reconquista militar española. El libro que ahora se presenta al público versa sobre La República, la entidad que nace en 1819 y se extiende hasta 1880, en los preámbulos de la Regeneración.

The Vulgarity of Democracy explores key aesthetics and affective aspects of democracy via a visual ethnographic exploration of political pornography and the public uses of machismo to construct agendas for popular redemption in Guayaquil, Ecuador, during the 1980s. This period was the beginning of a highly conflictive social process resulting from the imposition of neoliberal policies. Its focus is on the life and work of Pancho Jaime (1946-1989), the most controversial and widely known rock promoter and independent journalist in Ecuador. Between 1984 and his assassination in 1989, Jaime’s underground publications used in-depth investigation as well as gossip, pornographic cartoons, and obscene language to comment on democracy and the corruption of political elites. Jaime’s strategy was to denounce the conduct of powerful figures in public office, and caricaturize their deformed bodies as indexes of their supposedly “deviant” sexuality. The cultural materials that compose this censored archive are studied as part of a politics of masculinity historically linked to the hippy legacy, everyday life performances, and populist traditions. Following contemporary and comparative discussions on the political economy of images, and the materiality of image-objects, X. Andrade analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of Pancho Jaime’s political magazines, audience responses to grotesque visual and aggressive textual discourses, and the effects of revealing public secrets about popular understandings of politics. Ethnographic findings are discussed in relation to concepts of vulgarity, defacement, the performance of masculinity in the public sphere, intimacy, and carnivalesque inversions of power. Going beyond plain understandings of “the popular,” this is a critical contribution to current debates on the anthropology of the media, visual economies, fake news, populism, machismo, and the social life of images in contemporary societies.

This chapter discusses ways in which public uses of the concept of culture contributed to regional tensions in Ecuador during the last two decades of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the central place acquired by racialized discourses about masculinity within popular and elite conceptualizations of political power. Considering these discourses as elements selected to represent “culture” for public broadcasting, I discuss how diversely situated actors employed them to serve opposing aims.

This essay explores the uses of dominant notions of masculinity for constructing representations of political power in Ecuador. This is a case study of the work and audience of Pancho Jaime (1946-89), the prominent and controversial political journalist in Ecuador during the 1980s. Jaime’s mastery of selective elements of popular culture made him legendary in Guayaquil, the country’s largest city and a place renowned in popular imagination for its machismo and flamboyant politicians. Between 1984 and his death at the hands of unknown political enemies in 1989, Jaime illegally produced magazines sold through underground distribution networks. These magazines totaled nearly one thousand pages and included hundreds of caricatures. Jaime’s writing style followed local patterns of speech and embellished sexual stereotypes, insults, gossip, and rumors about public figures. Although his articles were generally well documented, one o f his main strategies was to reveal the corruption of politicians by making connections between their conduct in public office and their supposedly "deviant” sexuality.

El presente artículo revisa el análisis sociológico en Ecuador con relación a temas tales como regionalismo, cultura política, populismo y machismo. Sin proponérselo, en los últimos lustros los exámenes sobre estas cuestiones, quizá por no prever a fondo sus instrumentos teóricos, han propuesto interpretaciones que apuntan a reproducir los prejuicios culturales y políticos de las elites costeña y serrana. Fijados en la idea de una transacción mimética entre líder y masa, estos análisis no profundizan acerca de los verdaderos y diversos valores populares tejidos alrededor de cuestiones como, por ejemplo, clase, pueblo y poder.

Esta pieza etnográfica discute la construcción de “sujetos regenerados”, una forma de subjetividad política que forma parte del proceso de renovación urbana implantado por la administración local de Guayaquil desde hace algo más de un lustro. El objeto de estudio es un curso del programa municipal de aprendizaje a distancia (“Aprendamos: una oportunidad para superarnos”) destinado a fomentar conceptos de “ciudadanía para todos”. Al enmarcarse como un dispositivo complementario a los cambios promovidos por la renovación urbana, dicho programa constituye un mecanismo para promover una ideología de la participación ciudadana cuya principal agenda es despolitizar a los sujetos mediante el disciplinamiento de su mirada sobre la ciudad en términos de ámbitos de acción, conflicto y cambio claramente delimitados alrededor de la persona, la familia y el barrio. La investigación de campo fue realizada entre junio, agosto y septiembre de 2006.