City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito

4. Governance and the Sovereign Cabildo

85 Chapter 4 Governance and the Sovereign Cabildo In September 1895, the day after his victorious entry into Quito, the new president , Eloy Alfaro, penned a letter to Carlos Freile, the newly appointed governor of Pichincha, bemoaning the capital’s lack of basic services. Bristling at the city’s underdevelopment, he declared his immediate intention to authorize up to fifty thousand sucres for the construction of a central market. The Viejo Luchador also pledged future funding for other badly needed public works, arguing that “this capital has been quite badly maintained.”1 The bluster of this communiqu é, intended to discredit the Progressive governments of the previous decade, obscured Alfaro’s equally important commitment to building an alliance with the municipal council. Each promised reform had been requested yearly by the city council during the previous decade only to be refused by a state bereft of funds. In offering to support the realization of these reforms, Alfaro hoped to establish a loyal following among members of the local government of a city long known as a conservative bastion. The cabildo benefited from the patronage of the Liberal state, but this alliance did not last. The pressures and potential profits occasioned by the capital’s growing population, expanding real estate market, and developing sociospatial 86 \ Governance and the Sovereign Cabildo segregation instead led the Concejo Municipal de Quito to play a lone hand as it attempted to safeguard its autonomy over urban planning. This prerogative had been guaranteed under the Spanish Crown but slowly eroded during the nineteenth century as part of state centralization efforts. In attempting to restore its previous privileges, the city government sought to develop a narrative recasting local governance as a quintessential value of national identity and universal progress. This chronotope engaged international debates regarding urban form and planning that were reconsidered and revised to conform with and respond to local political, economic, and racial conflicts. The quest for autonomy achieved its zenith under the auspices of revamped Conservative leadership during the 1930s. During a moment of national political and economic chaos, leaders like Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño and Gustavo Mortensen successfully engineered Quito’s emergence as an autonomous regional center. Their program offered both a reconsidered vision of the municipality ’s historic role as caretaker of national fortune as well as sustained paternalist engagement with the pressures of emerging class conflict. Their resulting clout allowed not only for the achievement of long-sought municipal autonomy but also the crystallization of a hierarchical sociospatial order harkening to the racial and class segregation of the colonial era. Their crowning achievement, the 1942 Plan Regulador de Quito drafted by Uruguayan architect Guillermo Jones Odriozola, provided a blueprint for the city’s future development along these lines. Quito’s planning process has long been understood as a political struggle. Most of the studies that have appeared since 1980 have built upon Manuel Castells ’s contention that urban planning systematically operated as elites colluded to limit subaltern access and opportunity in the modern city. Lucas Achig and Fernando Carrión, for example, maintain that real estate speculation in the city during the 1930s successfully enabled elite incursions into the northern environs and set the stage for racial segregation across the city.2 Eduardo Kingman follows sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to charge that the creation of an internationally legible constitution of an urban habitus bolstered by considerations of hygiene and beautification diminished public consideration of indigenous and subaltern contributions to Quito’s social milieu in the early twentieth century. Like Achig and Carrión, he considers the municipality a natural ally with elite developers and the national state in this endeavor.3 Demarcating shifting power arrangements —in which the city government regularly clashed with its supposed collaborators —demonstrates that the municipality followed an institutional logic that transcended partisan affiliations in which the search for autonomous control over planning was paramount. The success of this effort depended on articulating a specific vision of both history and modernity that placed the municipality at the center of a broader metanarrative of global import. Quito’s displacement by Guayaquil as the dominant political and economic center of the country complicated this task, as it ne- 87 / Governance and the Sovereign Cabildo cessitated the negotiation of an identity and politics commensurate with Quito’s simultaneous status as “capital” and “second city.” In this regard, Quito ought to be considered a relatively unique specimen among Latin...