We arrived in Playas, Ecuador, in the evening of Tuesday August 3rd. It’s a beach town of about 30,000 people, about an hour from Guayaquil, the biggest city on Ecuador´s coast. It’s a fishing town and resort for working-class Ecuadoreans; few foreigners go there. Away from the beach, some parts are intensely poor–cinderblock houses with ill-fitting tin roofs, skinny stray dogs and cats wandering the dirt streets, chased by groups of kids.
We’re working with a local group called the Asociación Cultural Mullo, in the back of the city’s firehouse, the Cuerpo de Bomberos. Their goal is to build an economically sustainable, politically just, and environmentally friendly Playas, and sustain local cultural traditions. We’re here for solidarity with them, with the larger goal of using the arts to feed an international political movement to achieve those ends. So we’ve started three projects: a healing group for women, a mural to be painted by local teenagers and artists, and a children’s play of Rafael Landrón’s Beba en la Isla Nena.
Friday night we marched in an Ecuadorean second line, a parade behind a brass band celebrating el Divino Niño. Later on we went to a pasillo concert by the beach–pasillo is the distinctly Ecuadorean music genre, sort of like Latino Hank Williams–sad, waltz-time songs of broken and lost love, the requinto (small, high-pitched guitar) playing leads with the dolorous soul of a blues guitar, a klezmer violinist, Coleman Hawkins on ¨Body and Soul.”
Today we met with Hugo Vazquez, a veteran of the ‘60s revolutionary movement here who later became an official in Pachacutik, a political party that grew out of the indigenous people’s movement of the ‘90s. He’s now active in Alianza PAIS, a movement that came out of the 2006 elections that brought Rafael Correa to power.
