Río de sombras(2003), of Jorge Velasco Mackenzie

“We want to be saved”. So say the men who died on November 15, 1922

Abstract

Jorge Velasco Mackenzie repeatedly wrote about Guayaquil, his place of enunciation and imagination horizon. In Río de sombras, the author appeals to two powerful images: the city threatened by its own shadow and the dead men who walk, lost under the river's waters, with their bellies open like big mouths. These men are the dead of November 15, 1922, shot in the streets of downtown Guayaquil in the course of a brutally repressed workers' strike. Guayaquil is imagined in the novel as a "dying port" and is narrated in an apocalyptic tone. One that announces its ruin and upcoming devastation at the turn of the century, when a series of construction measures and urban growth policies built a city that turned its back on its own past. The river that floods the novel brings these men to our present, so that this slaughter will not stop happening because these men, who are our dead, still "live" and claim their rightful place in our memory.