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211 Postscript In 1935, a minor bureaucrat named Alfonso García Muñoz began publishing a column in the Quito daily El Comercio titled “Estampas de mi ciudad.” These affectionate chronicles featured a wily figure known as Don Evaristo Corral y Chancleta. Don Evaristo was a chulla, or prototypical urban mestizo, who combined the detachment and critical gaze of a Baudelarian flâneur with the tragicomic sensibility of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Over the next nine years, García Muñoz collaborated with comic actor Ernesto Albán on dramatic adaptations of the estampas, until the Glorious Revolution of 1944 sent him into exile along with several other members of the Arroyo del Rio administration. García Muñoz resided in Bogotá the rest of his life, even refusing to return to Quito in 1994 for a municipal festival celebrating his unique cultural importance.1 Albán, however, continued to perform the skits that made him famous and even scripted a few estampas of his own. Others adopted the popular form—by 1949, only eight of the thirty-six estampas Albán performed were García Muñoz originals.2 The repertoire expanded in the second half of the century to include films and television specials, until Albán’s death in 1984. Ten years later, the city government made a mascot of Don Evaristo, using a cartoon likeness with his trademark 212 \ Postscript bowler hat and bushy mustache to advertise programs such as litter collection and cultural events. Today, the Teatro Variedades has been renamed in honor of the comic actor, and revivals of his classic performances occur regularly. His daughter has even established a YouTube channel dedicated to his work.3 The popularity of this artful chulla stems from his ethos: a picaresque rogue traipsing through the public square. This figure had, in fact, a unique chronotopical gaze defined by his breezy ambivalence to the trappings of modern life. In his study of the chronotope, Bakhtin reminds us that the figure of the rogue, fool, or clown originated within the carnivalesque entertainments of the classical and medieval worlds. Besides subverting the monotony of everyday life, these characters “create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope,” which inverts and interrogates the conventions of polite society through carnivalesque inversion. As such, rogues can critique a culture through laughter and irony and in the process bare its peculiarities, foibles, and hierarchies.4 Don Evaristo serves this function precisely as he turns the tables on the figures of his contemporary city, from chapitas (police officers), to traperos (street vendors) to Alameda Park’s statue of Simón Bolívar, whom Evaristo imagines must be eternally bored because he can never dismount his steed (brioso corcel). A favorite victim of Evaristo, especially of his skills as an amateur pickpocket, is an obtuse gringo who foolishly employs him as a tour guide and receives in return a flurry of misinformation amid a series of hijinks. El Gringo ends up in scrapes like a Carnival water fight, from which the two emerge drenched but victorious after successfully storming a townhouse. These satirical portraits are rich in detail and interwoven with the sites, traditions, and encounters common to García Muñoz’s modernizing city. And yet they seem to escape the staid conventions of both positivist and nostalgic discourses. The plucky Don Evaristo acknowledges the dialogical nature of the surveyed city, where hypocrisy and contradiction abound and life is at once modern and traditional, formal and burlesque. This playful approach to time and space and to social markers gives the estampas their particular flavor. For example, upon passing beneath the sixteenth-century Arco de la Reina, Don Evaristo muses, “I would have liked to contemplate this Arch in earlier times, before the arrival of electric light. I figure it would have been a special place for romantic liaisons, gangster ambushes, and stabs in the back. Today, civilization, with its powerful ‘osrams,’ deflowers the dark, impeding the shadows to cover love, theft, and murder.”5 This ironic view of electric lighting—as hindrance to romance, robbery, and murder—undercuts the glow of modernization as manifested by powerful Osram-brand lightbulbs. Yet Evaristo is not sentimental . His contemplation of the arch during its heyday inspires a self-consciously anachronistic portrait in which contemporary characters, such as the gangsters of American cinema, have intruded on the age of the cloak and dagger. Fusing Quito’s contemporary existence with its past embeds his tale within a...

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