An Uncomfortable Vicinity: Dolores Veintimilla and the Literature of Negotiation with Indigenous Alterity in the Andes of the Nineteenth Century

This article analizes the works and authorship of writer Dolores Veintimilla using feminist and postcolonial theories. The Ecuadorian literary canon minimized the value of her work so as to ignore some of her texts which tried to have an influence on thepublic sphere at the time of the conception of the Ecuadorian nation and its rules of coexistence. Veintimilla proposes, both in her poetry and her op-ed letters, a model of community which somehow tried to dignify the discriminated Indigenous subject in the northern Andean area. This article analyzes her proposal of subjective codependency and, finally, it explores how the violent response of the canon invalidated her idea of community by imposing a patriarchal state, in which women and Indigenous subjects had to accept their political and cultural invisibility.