UC San Diego

My dissertation focuses on Quito, Ecuador’s unprecedented urban expansion and reorganization in the late twentieth century, following the petroleum boom of the 1960s. I frame this period of geopolitical transformation in relation to sixteenth century events, arguing that the foundation of the Royal Audience of Quito in 1534 by Spanish conquistadores establishes a colonial logic that is based on racial, gender, and sexual control and which continues to function well into the present day. Consequently, I consider the reorganization of the city in the 1970s as (neo)colonial in the sense that it operates within the legacy of colonization, shaping the sprawling city through Eurocentric and colonial ideas of bounded space. In other words, I write a critical urban analysis of Quito that highlights how colonial edicts of social order as well as racial, gender, and sexual control are spatiotemporally recreated and legitimized as colonial fantasies. I am interested in how the unprecedented urban expansion of the 1970s created an ongoing urban problem for city officials, who became preoccupied with “ordering” the city and “controlling” urban growth. In order to understand the discursive strategies used by government officials and justify accruing large sums of foreign debt for urban projects, I examine the colonial history of the city, a rich history of conflict, urban reorganization, and racial and gender control. I focus on how the geological formations around the city, specifically El Panecillo, were and continue to be essential to understanding pre-Colombian, colonial, and contemporary forms of urban organization and control. My dissertation investigates the relationship between discursive and visual articulations of modern urban and national development as these relate to legal and social discourses of public order, “proper” development, and race, gender, and sexual control. Additionally, my dissertation connects the ideological tools that justified the construction of certain development projects to colonial technologies of urban control in order to argue how contemporary preoccupations with urban sprawl are intimately tied to ongoing colonial processes of differentiation.