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In 1942, the Ecuadorian critic Benjamín Carrión urged his compatriots to reject the “moral shrinking” that plagued their country after its recent massive loss of territory to Peru. Admitting that they could not restore that territory, he argued for a new national future, writing, “in our providential tropic, rich in humus but also rich in fevers and pests, it is possible to build a patria, a ‘small great patria’, with the human material we have.” For Carrión, the key to that new national greatness—a greatness of spirit, not size—lay in Ecuador’s particular national vocations for liberty and for the arts. His argument invoked great figures of Ecuadorian political history alongside a long artistic history extending from the pre-Colombian era. Continuing along a path paved with the work of freedom-loving politicians and artists, Carrión asserted, would take his people out of their current moment of loss and allow them to fulfill their destiny for national greatness.
