Novel
Baldomera
Not translated into English
Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco · 1938
Synopsis
Guayaquil in the twenties, in the Boca del Pozo district. Baldomera, a sturdy, combative Afro-Ecuadorian woman, supports her family with a stall of fritters and empanadas. One drunken evening, she brawls in a bar and the police take her away. The narrative then goes back in time: Lamparita, a cattle thief come to the city whom she married, her sons Inocente and Polibio, and the whole city, up to the November day in 1922 when the workers take to the streets.
Context
The novel was written in Guayaquil between December 1935 and February 1936, based on a real woman whom the author had heard about from his mother-in-law, Delfina Concha: a loud, popular zamba of the old city at the beginning of the century, killed in the massacre of 1922. The book appeared in 1938 in Santiago, Chile, from Ercilla, with the subtitle “tragedy of the American cholo”. An omniscient narrator opens the story in the middle of the action, then goes back to give each character's past. Edmundo Ribadeneira produced an annotated edition of it in 1990 from Libresa, in Quito.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French or English translation. The workers' massacre of 15 November 1922 in Guayaquil, which forms its backdrop, runs through several Ecuadorian novels of that generation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's major work; Ángel Felicísimo Rojas hailed it as early as 1948, and Leonardo Barriga López saw in it in 1980 one of the liveliest novels in the Americas.