Guayaquil como símbolo de todo lo que se hizo mal, del desastre, de la pesadumbre mundial, del horror. De todos los horrores. —María Fernanda Ampuero, Visceral (2024)
In Visceral, a collection of short texts blurring the lines between autobiography, fiction, and essay, the Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero (Reference Ampuero2024, 45) presents a bleak picture of her birthplace: “Nací en Guayaquil, Ecuador, una ciudad sin sueños. Miento: una ciudad donde mueren y matan los sueños.” Ampuero’s reference to death and killing goes beyond a literary device when considered alongside the context she signals. Over the past decade, the port city of Guayaquil, traditionally acknowledged as Ecuador’s economic capital, has become a regional hot spot of urban violence. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (2023, 112), homicidal violence in Ecuador increased by roughly 407 percent between 2016 and 2022, and a surge of 94.7 percent from 2021 to 2022 has been linked to competition between rival drug trafficking gangs over cocaine routes, including in Guayaquil, home to one of the busiest ports in South America. In this setting, Guayaquil and its neighboring municipalities of Durán and Samborondón totaled 35 percent of the 8,004 violent deaths reported in Ecuador in 2023 (Observatorio Ecuatoriano de Crimen Organizado 2023, 9).
The surge in violence has had a significant impact on the lives of Guayaquil’s inhabitants, who coexist with daily reports of contract killings, kidnappings, and extortion, among other threats. These conditions have altered the city’s social and cultural life. In-person cultural activities have diminished, particularly at night, and some bookshops and cultural businesses have closed their doors after extortionists demanded so-called vacunas or nonaggression fees from their owners (García Reference García2023). Ecuadorian media have traced the impacts of violence on Guayaquil’s cultural field to people risking their safety by going out, as well as to the viability of small businesses in a high-risk urban environment. However, the extent to which the city’s cultural production has engaged with increased urban violence remains largely unexplored. Ampuero’s writing suggests that literature is emerging from and acknowledging the violent reality of everyday life in Guayaquil. Moreover, it suggests that literature is responding to its horrors.
This article discusses urban violence in Guayaquil alongside recent examples of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. I explore the intersections between the city’s backdrop and fiction emerging from Ecuador, which has attracted substantial international attention over the past decade, particularly due to the works of two authors born in Guayaquil: Mónica Ojeda (1988) and the aforementioned María Fernanda Ampuero (1976). In the context of a country that not long ago debated an “invisibility syndrome” as hindering the circulation of its literature (Medina Cordova Reference Medina Cordova2022, 144), Ojeda and Ampuero have spearheaded significant growth in Ecuadorian literature’s international reach. They are the center of a “history making” period, with increasing recognition, translation, and circulation of Ecuadorian female authors abroad (Carrión Reference Carrión2019). In 2018, for example, Ampuero was named in The New York Times’ annual list of the ten best fiction books in Spanish. Four years later, Ojeda became the first Ecuadorian to be a finalist in the National Book Awards in the US. Both authors’ novels and short stories are available in Spanish and in translation into several languages in commercial bookshops across Europe, the US, and the UK, where they have enjoyed favorable critical reception.
Ampuero and Ojeda create gothic horror fiction that resonates with violence in Guayaquil. In a 2021 interview, Ojeda explained that her writing was influenced by “the everyday violence of the city,” which—similar to many other women in Ecuador—led her to associate going out with “fear of being raped or killed … of not getting taxis for fear of being kidnapped” (Youkee Reference Youkee2021). The connection between city and fiction was further explored at the 2024 Guayaquil International Book Fair, where Ojeda and Ampuero participated in a panel titled “Gótico del manglar.” The panel strategically grouped the two authors, using the reference to Guayaquil’s extensive mangrove ecosystem—a familiar urban feature for Guayaquileños, and one often considered a symbol of local identity—to link a geographical location with the themes addressed in their fiction. At the same time, the title reminded local attendees that both writers share Guayaquil as their city of origin, even if they reside and publish abroad. During the discussion, the authors suggested that many of the fears expressed in their work are rooted in Guayaquil itself, as Ojeda put it: “El miedo nace del lugar de origen […] un sitio peligroso y a la vez acogedor” (Mundo Diners 2024).
In light of Ojeda’s and Ampuero’s reflections on their hometown, this article proposes the term mangrove gothic to discuss the ways these authors have appropriated gothic tropes to address the violent realities of Guayaquil’s context. This concept seeks to combine the image of the city’s mangrove with an internationally recognized literary tradition concerned with “the production of affects and emotions, often extreme and negative: fear, anxiety, terror, horror, disgust and revulsion” (Botting Reference Botting2014, 6). Mangrove gothic is, therefore, a term I deploy to identify Ecuador’s economic capital as the source of fear in Ampuero’s short-story collection Pelea de gallos (Reference Ampuero2018) and Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula (Reference Ojeda2018). Both titles map how violence entangles visible and hidden spaces in Guayaquil, depicting a city where kidnappings are daily occurrences, domestic violence is concealed behind closed doors, social hierarchies shape public and private realms, and the tropical environment blurs the boundary between inside and outside to remind inhabitants that enclosure does not guarantee safety. In short, the mangrove gothic encompasses the narrative strategies through which authors like Ojeda and Ampuero inscribe fear into the experience of living in—or having lived in—Guayaquil, where oppressive humidity and heat, social hierarchies, and violence haunt the urban space.
My understanding of the gothic is informed by recent theorizations arguing that, in the twenty-first century, it “no longer refers to a historically specific strand of ‘terrorist’ and/or romance writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Wester and Aldana Reyes Reference Wester, Aldana Reyes, Wester and Reyes2019, 1–2). Rather, it has become a broader term whose richness is not constrained by fixed settings, time, or characters and has freely materialized beyond the English-speaking world. Building on the work of scholars who have explored its resonance in Latin American cultural production, I approach the gothic as a critical lens for examining Ecuadorian literature for its capacity to respond both to localized sources of fear and globalization (Ajuria Ibarra Reference Ajuria Ibarra, Wester and Reyes2019, 264). On the one hand, I explore how Ampuero and Ojeda use gothic tropes to engage with social and cultural concerns in Guayaquil, in line with what Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz (Reference Casanova-Vizcaíno, Ordiz, Bloom and Macmillan2020, 33) identify as “one of the most recent directions that the gothic is taking in Latin America: the conscious appropriation of its global tropes to criticize and denounce local issues pertaining to past and present histories of political, social, and gendered violence.” On the other hand, I refer to the gothic to address the engagement of the two Ecuadorian writers analyzed with the globalized literary market in which contemporary Latin American literature develops. It is at this dynamic intersection of localized and globalized dimensions that the mangrove gothic takes root.
In its localized dimension, the mangrove gothic designates the ways fiction identifies Guayaquil as the source of a type of fear shaped by everyday violence. The term offers a contextually nuanced alternative to “Andean gothic,” which has also been used to describe the work of Ojeda. Juan G. Ramos (Reference Ramos2023) defines gótico andino as the use of Andean mythology and symbology in narratives addressing different manifestations of violence. Ramos (Reference Ramos2023, 292) uses the term for stories that “toman elementos del género gótico —paisajes urbanos o rurales, espacios domésticos, fantasmas, espectros— para situarlos dentro de las especificidades culturales y geográficas de la región andina.” Although I agree with the claim that contemporary Ecuadorian writers give their fiction cultural and geographical specificity, I question the applicability of “Andean” as a unifying framework for texts set in Guayaquil, a coastal city located hours away from the Andes Mountains. Ramos (Reference Ramos2023, 306) acknowledges the spatial mismatch when he notes that “lo andino sirve como concepto unificador y metafórico para un país como Ecuador […] que desde sus orígenes ha sido atomizado por divisiones geográficas y culturales.” Yet rather than relying on a synecdochical logic associating the entirety of the country with its Andean region, I propose a metaphor rooted in Guayaquil’s mangrove ecosystem as a more fitting way to trace the localized fears in Mandíbula and Pelea de gallos. As I elaborate in the analysis that follows, the horror in these texts does not originate in supernatural elements from Andean mythology, but it is grounded in the social and material realities of the city.
In its globalized dimension, the mangrove gothic situates the discussion of Ojeda’s and Ampuero’s rendering of Guayaquil in broader theoretical and literary contexts. Regarding theory, by moving from the Andean highlands to a coastal framework, this article enters into dialogue with scholarship that examines how the gothic manifests in tropical locales across the postcolonial world. Daniel Serravalle de Sá (Reference Serravalle de Sá2010, 22) refers to a “gótico tropical” to reconcile the apparent opposition of solar and gloom in a single term, an oxymoron that reconfigures the shadows and cold of the English gothic within bright and humid environments in Brazilian literature. The idea of a tropical gothic has expanded to explore similar forms of eeriness in Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Australia, understanding the tropics not only as geography but also as an imaginary where global anxieties materialize locally. Its specificity lies in “the continuing legacies of colonialism, war and violence and their ripple on effects to globalisation and neoliberal capitalism,” which, in turn, “impact race and gender relations, and the environmental crisis” (Lundberg et al. Reference Lundberg, Ancuta and Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska2019, 10). In Latin America, studies of the tropical gothic have been extensively developed in Colombian literature and cinema—particularly around the city of Cali—where critics link the gothic to “local questions of past and present colonialism, violence, or social inequality” (Gómez Reference Gómez2019, 52). By foregrounding Guayaquil’s mangrove as a metaphor for the urban environment where contemporary fears emerge, the mangrove gothic extends the tropical gothic, situating it in the environmental and social specificities of Ecuador’s coastal cityscape.
The mangrove gothic’s globalized dimension also allows for positioning Ampuero and Ojeda within the broader literary context of the new Latin American female gothic, an internationally celebrated trend branded by the media as a new vanguard of gothic horror and fantasy led by women. Ilse Logie (Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023) explains this label as identifying common concerns in the narrative strategies of a group of Latin American female authors born in or after 1970. Writers frequently associated include Mariana Enríquez (Argentina), Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Fernanda Melchor (Mexico), Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), María Fernanda Ampuero (Ecuador), Lina Meruane (Chile), and Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia). The common concerns constitute a proclivity for horror narratives that reject “romanticized and ahistorical accounts of Latin American experience” (Logie Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023, 279). But more than a label referring to a set of literary features, the new Latin American female gothic is also a marketing effort seeking to facilitate the international circulation of these authors’ work under a unifying regional label. As Logie (Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023, 80) notes, publishers and critics benefit from promoting recognizable patterns in published books: “It is a way to enthuse readers and students who are geographically far removed from the cultural area in which the work was originally published.” Her point is that umbrella terms help sell books by providing a major denominator for international readers to follow. Yet by the same token, they also risk obscuring the nuances of individual oeuvres. The mangrove gothic reintroduces the social and cultural realities of 2020s Guayaquil into the broader conversation on a regional phenomenon, underscoring how local experiences of violence and fear shape literary responses in context.
To explore how literature engages with localized violence while navigating globalized literary circuits, this article is divided into three sections. The first two offer readings of Pelea de gallos and Mandíbula, respectively, analyzing how each text employs gothic tropes to represent violence within the specific urban geography of Guayaquil. These sections trace the emergence of what I term the mangrove gothic, showing how fear becomes an emotional inscription upon the city’s physical and social landscapes. The final section considers the implications of this concept for the expanding scholarship on the new Latin American female gothic, particularly in light of the tensions involved in grouping a diverse body of writing under a single label and the so-called new boom femenino in the region. I argue for the critical value of tracing Guayaquil’s imprint in the work of two authors whose fiction—though often positioned within a literary trend that seeks to brand Latin American writing—remains deeply haunted by the Ecuadorian coastal city of their upbringing.
Ampuero’s Pelea de gallos
María Fernanda Ampuero’s Pelea de gallos was released in 2018 by the Spanish independent publisher Páginas de Espuma to a generally positive critical and commercial reception. In 2020, the title became Ampuero’s English-language debut after the US-based Feminist Press published its English translation, Cockfight. The thirteen short stories featured in the collection are traversed by violence against women and intrafamily violence. The author has explained in interviews that she sees her work as a horror title, as she considers horror the most fitting genre to narrate the fears that fester in family households: “Me parece que hay una cosa monstruosa en la relación entre padres e hijos” (Massis Reference Massis2019). Ampuero’s interest in foregrounding the monstrosities hidden within familial relationships has been reflected in the analyses of her work, which commonly stress how her horror manifests in the home, particularly affecting women and children. Cristina Sánchez Mejía (Reference Sánchez Mejía2023) argues that Ampuero’s narrative openly criticizes the institution of the family, portraying the domestic sphere as a claustrophobic space where all kinds of humiliations occur. Miguel Ángel Galindo (Reference Galindo2021) adds that the stories in Pelea de gallos explore intimate spaces where there is something wrong that remains silenced to the outside world. Traumatic events, from physical and emotional abuse to sexual violence, are the experiences hidden behind the closed doors that Ampuero’s literature slams open.
My discussion of Pelea de gallos shifts the focus to the exteriors in the stories “Subasta” and “Ali” to discuss how Ampuero inscribes fears into the urban space of Guayaquil, thereby activating the mangrove gothic. I draw from the gothic’s long-standing attention to the city, where characters are often “left to the devices of the harsh, dangerous, and potentially morbid urban surroundings entrapping them” (Parezanović and Lukić Reference Parezanović, Lukić and Bloom2020, 80). As a modern alternative to the wild and mountainous settings of eighteenth-century fiction, cities provide gothic narratives with an industrial, gloomy, and labyrinthine “locus of horror, violence and corruption” (Botting Reference Botting2014, 105). Latin American cities have proved productive for such dark fantasies, including, for example, Mexico City in the films of Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Michel Grau, and Cali in the work of the Colombian directors Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, as well as the writer Andrés Caicedo. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez (Reference Eljaiek-Rodríguez, Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz2018, 96) argues that these artists have “tropicalized” the gothic, adapting and transforming its tropes to local contexts as a means “to represent the otherwise unspeakable, including incest, violence, social inequality, and the abject.”
Ampuero brings the gothic to the Ecuadorian coastal context, placing an emphasis on the ways in which fictional violence can be traced to real fears to be encountered in Guayaquil. “Subasta” follows a first-person female narrator who recounts her experience of being kidnapped and taken to a human auction to be sold to a bidding audience of robbers, murderers, and rapists. The story frames a recognizable urban setting by clarifying that the narrator is abducted during a taxi ride:
Lo primero que pensé cuando me subí al taxi esa noche fue por fin. Apoyé mi cabeza en el asiento y cerré los ojos […] Creo que me quedé dormida un momento y, de repente, al abrir los ojos, estaba en una ciudad desconocida. Un polígono. Vacío. Oscuridad. La alerta que hace hervir el cerebro: se te acaba de joder la vida.
El taxista sacó una pistola, me miró a los ojos, dijo con amabilidad ridícula:
—Llegamos a su destino, señorita. (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 14)
Darkness makes the protagonist unsure of her actual location, yet Ampuero’s writing foregrounds that “Subasta” is firmly placed in Ecuador’s economic capital, and the violence experienced by its characters is not entirely detached from what the city’s inhabitants could experience. Kidnappings in taxis have long been a common threat in the city, particularly at night. By September 2024, Guayaquil registered an average of 2.5 kidnappings per day, almost three times as high as in the same period in 2023; in addition, local media have also warned about increasingly “sadistic” behaviors from the abductors (Primicias 2024). Victims are often released in peripheral areas of the city, as happens to the protagonist of Ampuero’s story, who is abandoned in “la Vía Perimetral” by the end of the story (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 18). “La Perimetral,” a long motorway running along the city’s north-south perimeter, is commonly acknowledged in local media as a dump site for bodies and a hot spot for robberies and accidents (El Universo 2022). The residential areas connected by this motorway are among the most violent zones in the city, showing the highest concentration of homicides in the 2022 statistics (Mantilla et al. Reference Mantilla, Andrade and Fe Vallejo2023).
“Subasta” presents Guayaquil as a dangerous, fear-inducing urban environment, aligning with an urban gothic tradition in which metropoles evoke “the horrors of human violence and corruption, terrifying enough without necessarily needing a supernatural edge” (Wasson Reference Wasson2010, 3). In the story, terrifying human violence is ever present. The auctioneer, described as a fat, bald, and dirty man, uses intimidation to control his victims. This grotesque figure not only wields the immediate threat of violence but also reminds his captives that Guayaquil inflicts violence on its inhabitants daily, signaling how social class segregation in the city creates spaces inaccessible except for wealthy inhabitants like Ricardo, the first person to be auctioned in the story:
Empiezan a pujar por Ricardo. Uno ofrece trescientos, otro ochocientos. El gordo añade que Ricardo vive en una urbanización privada en las afueras de la ciudad: Vistas del Río.
—Allá donde no podemos ni asomarnos los pobres. Allá vive el amigo Riqui. Sí le puedo decir Riqui, ¿no? Como Riqui Ricón.
Una voz aterradora dice cinco mil. La voz aterradora se lleva a Ricardo. Los otros aplauden. (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 16)
By highlighting that poorer inhabitants are unwelcome in the city’s affluent enclaves, the fat man suggests that the socioeconomic divisions of Guayaquil act as a boundary that punishes those who transgress them. Structural violence is thus embedded in the city’s fabric, encoded into its geography and social order. As Cecilia Menjívar (Reference Menjívar2008) argues in her study of women’s lives in contexts of systemic inequality in Latin America, the effects of neoliberal capitalism are not limited to economic deprivation. Rather, they generate broader social suffering by producing precariousness, fueling criminal activity, and cultivating a culture of terror that targets the most vulnerable. In Guayaquil, these dynamics become gendered: Women are especially at risk when navigating the city’s fragmented and hierarchical spaces, where their transgressions are met with sexual violence.
The risk of sexual violence is clearly illustrated in Ampuero’s story. The narrator’s spatial dislocation, heightened by a blindfold, renders her particularly vulnerable. In this darkness, she becomes acutely aware of the persistent threat of sexual violence when another captive is raped in front of the bidders: “A Nancy el gordo la desnuda. Escuchamos que abre su cinturón y que abre los botones y que le arranca la ropa interior, aunque ella dice por favor tantas veces y con tanto miedo que todos mojamos nuestros trapos inmundos con lágrimas” (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 16). The fat man and the anonymous audience who participate in the abuse remain unpunished, protected by the opacity of the setting. In this context, as Wasson (Reference Wasson2010, 3) notes in her study of urban gothic narratives, the anonymity afforded by the modern city “enables sexual and criminal transgression.” Guayaquil, as presented in “Subasta,” is not merely a backdrop to violence but rather a space that conditions and enables it.
The city turns into a place of imprisonment through claustrophobic imagery framing the narrator’s account. She begins her story in a posture that evokes submission and embodied entrapment: “de rodillas, con la cabeza gacha y cubierta con un trapo inmundo” (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 11). This emphasis on confinement draws from a gothic tradition in which physical captivity manifests as psychological entrapment, allowing past traumas to resurface and haunt the present. This dynamic becomes explicit when the narrator is taken to the auction site and recognizes the familiar stench of a nearby cockfighting ring: “El olor de mi vida, el olor de mi padre. Huele a sangre, a hombre, a caca, a licor barato, a sudor agrio y a grasa industrial” (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 12). The olfactory image transports her—and the narrative—back to a traumatic past marked by her father’s abuse. The story’s gothic tone intensifies through the narrator’s recollection of recurring nightmares in which she was devoured by “gallos gigantes, vampiros” (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 11). The figure of the vampire invokes the gothic motif of a past that refuses to die. As Mabel Moraña (Reference Moraña2017, 149) explains, “La alusión al vampiro […] contribuye a fortalecer la idea de una continuidad histórica que llega hasta el presente cargada con legados simbólicos, prácticas político-económicas residuales y referencias a estadios culturales del pasado que, como muertos-vivos, habitan la contemporaneidad.”
The narrator’s past and present, however, are not connected by supernatural bloodsucking creatures but by violent men. In “Subasta,” sexual violence perpetrated by men marks the historical continuity referenced by Moraña, as the narrator recalls being abused by galleros during childhood. Paradoxically, it is this memory that ultimately saves her from being sold. She remembers realizing that covering herself with the feces and viscera of dead birds would deter sexual harassment. Her childhood experience “funge como una educación contrahegemónica que le permite reapropiarse de su cuerpo a través de la potencia de afectar del asco” (Rodal Linares Reference Rodal Linares2024, 45). When her turn arrives in the auction, the protagonist reverts to this strategy: She soils herself in front of the bidders, then throws herself to the floor and smears her excrement, thereby repelling potential buyers. Sánchez Mejía (Reference Sánchez Mejía2023) interprets this as the narrator embodying monstrosity, using abjection as a means of survival. Yet this gruesome display also underscores, as Carpenter-Cosand (Reference Carpenter-Cosand2024, 161) suggests, “the extent to which women must act in a society where they are often underestimated and alone.” Given local context, it reflects the extent to which women live in fear in Guayaquil, the city where Ampuero’s horror takes root.
The stories that follow “Subasta” in Pelea de gallos emphasize home as “el lugar del cautiverio” (Rodal Linares Reference Rodal Linares2024, 51). Despite the predominant portrayal of dangers within, “Ali” demonstrates that outside risks continue to influence the characters’ lives when they remain indoors. Fear is presented as an inescapable part of living in Guayaquil; like the roots of a mangrove, it spreads above and beneath visible surfaces, connecting dangers both inside and outside the domestic sphere. The story is narrated from the perspective of the maids working in the household of the main character, Ali, whose generosity contrasts with the behaviors of family members and friends of the upper-class circle she inhabits. As the narration progresses, Ali deteriorates mentally and physically. Intrafamily violence is implied when she starts having nightmares, becomes severely afraid of men and stops taking care of herself and her children to remain secluded. The story concludes with Ali committing suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of a shopping mall and her family denying self-harm by arguing that the death was accidental.
“Ali” foregrounds uneven power relationships institutionalized within domestic spaces, where separated social classes—the family and the service—are forced into a proximity that remains “ambigua e indeseada” (Jossa Reference Jossa2023, 57). The narrative introduces these interactions as two poles of a historically abusive relationship deeply rooted in Ecuadorian society: “Los abuelos de ellas no pagaban a las muchachas, eran como quien dice los dueños. Se las traían de los campos” (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 84). This master-servant dynamic not only resonates with the gothic trope of corrupted aristocrats attended by subjugated staff but also with class divisions in contemporary Guayaquil, a city where, despite an overall decline in poverty in recent decades, inequality continues to intensify (Moser Reference Moser2021). The relationship between wealthy employers and impoverished domestic workers is shaped by intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity, as domestic work across Latin America is primarily carried out by women from ethnic and racial minorities who serve white and mestizo urban households (Blofield Reference Blofield2009). In this sense, “Ali” exposes how social inequalities in Guayaquil structure the domestic spaces where fear develops, connecting external realities with horrors within. Ali’s character reflects this entanglement through an obsessive fixation with locking doors, a feature that literalizes the intrusion of societal horrors into the intimate space of the home:
Niña Ali, ¿qué le pasa? ¿Qué le pasa? ¿Qué le pasó?, le preguntábamos las primeras veces, cuando le empezaron los ataques y ella a veces no sabía de qué le hablábamos y a veces decía cierren, cierren su puerta, no se duerman con la puerta sin seguro, cierren a mi hija, ciérrenla bien, que nadie tenga la llave de mi hija, enciérrenla, y se ponía a probar cien veces el seguro de la puerta de su cuarto. (Ampuero Reference Ampuero2018, 88)
Ali’s compulsive insistence on keeping doors secured signals a desperate attempt to impose a boundary between inside and outside, where the latter represents a source of horror from which she seeks to protect herself and her daughter. As Anne Williams (Reference Williams1995, 16) observes, anxieties about boundaries and their transgressions are central to gothic literature, which often explores the instability of perceived separations between safety and threat. In Ampuero’s story, these anxieties materialize through the revelation that, despite the locked doors, Ali has already suffered the violence she seeks to keep out. Her fear is not only triggered by visions of men entering her hiding spaces—suggesting she is already a victim of abuse and that her trauma haunts her present—but also by the exposure of her resistance as ultimately futile: “En las pesadillas ella ponía seguro a todas las puertas. En las pesadillas había siempre un adulto con un juego de llaves” (Ampuero, Reference Ampuero2018, 91). The image of the adult who can unlock any door gives form to a horror that cannot be excluded; it returns, nightmarish, with its own means of access. In this sense, the division between inside and outside is not simply porous but illusory, as the locked door becomes a false threshold within a continuum of violence.
The story’s conclusion brings together the external and internal dimensions of fear to reveal that, in Guayaquil, they are inseparable parts of the same unsettling geography. As Ali walks through the corridors of the shopping mall where she commits suicide, the narrator observes: “Salvo una pequeña cojera y la gordura tan enorme, nadie hubiera dicho que a esa mujer le pasaba algo extraño […] Uno ve gente y no sabe lo que ha pasado detrás de la puerta de su casa” (Ampuero, Reference Ampuero2018, 93). The story references the boundary between inside and outside to destabilize it by placing the characters in an urban space that challenges such separations. The mall, in this case, functions as a liminal space that bridges public and private spaces in the city, revealing the intersections of hidden and visible horrors. Shopping malls have long been associated with gothic sites where latent fears are made visible through monstrous figures. In George Romero’s classic 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, for instance, the terrifying mindlessness and hunger of consumerist capitalism become explicit in the mall as shoppers become zombies that continue haunting the retail space even after death. Similarly, Ali’s suicide in this public setting, her broken body displayed on the mall floor, exposes the intimate suffering of a female protagonist in full public view, collapsing once again the boundary between interior and exterior.
The interplay of external and internal threats in “Ali” and the dangers of traversing Guayaquil’s urban landscape in “Subasta” portray a city that offers no refuge: violence dominates both the streets and the home. The risks of the outdoors and the indoors are shown as entangled, bleeding into and feeding one another, illustrating Menjívar’s (Reference Menjívar2011) argument that the enduring reality of violence—be that structural, physical, or gendered—crosses multiple spaces and spheres of life, but its different incarnations are mutually constituted. The question of which form of violence is more dangerous—the taxi ride to a human trafficking compound in “Subasta” or the hidden abuse in “Ali”—becomes moot when we consider that “they are all related to one another” (Menjívar Reference Menjívar2011, 28). Pelea de gallos thus maps Guayaquil as a space where multiple threats converge to produce an urban geography of fear. Ampuero (Reference Ampuero2024, 54) suggests that survival is a daily triumph in a city where fear is omnipresent: “En Guayaquil nos reímos en la cara del diablo: te gané, pendejo, hoy día te gané.” The mangrove gothic encapsulates this vision of the city, revealing the entangled spread of violence above and below the surface of everyday life. Like mangrove roots that both anchor and entrap, violence in Guayaquil is embedded throughout urban existence, making fear a constitutive element of the city’s lived experience.
Ojeda’s Mandíbula
Similar to Ampuero’s Pelea de gallos, Mónica Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula—published in Spain by Candaya in 2018—received a favorable reception upon release. Its English translation, Jawbone, followed in 2022 through Coffee House Press and became a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US. The novel follows a group of teenage girls attending an elite high school in Guayaquil, where they meet Clara, a recently appointed literature teacher with a history of suffering abuse in her previous job. The story explores the girls’ fascination with horror and their invented pagan rituals while simultaneously depicting Clara’s mental breakdown; she kidnaps and tortures Fernanda, one of the group’s leaders, to teach her a lesson in womanly behavior and, thereby, fulfill her role as an educator. In line with academic readings on Ampuero’s work, Ojeda’s narrative has been analyzed primarily from perspectives focused on the intimate dimensions of violence in the family space. Pascua Canelo (Reference Pascua Canelo, Ramírez and Rozotto2022, 24) argues that recent examples of Ecuadorian narrative, including works by Ojeda and Ampuero, shift thematic interest from the country’s sociopolitical upheaval to “las repercusiones que la violencia generalizada ha tenido en los individuos y en los entornos más privados.” Family, and particularly the mother-daughter relationship, is identified as the central nerve of fear in Ojeda’s fiction.
Shifting to the urban setting of Mandíbula, Guayaquil emerges as the environment inhabited by Fernanda, Annelise, and the other girls in their social circle. All are students at the prestigious Colegio Bilingüe Delta, a private high school for girls. The mangrove gothic begins to take shape in this reference, as the narrative deliberately locates itself within the real geography of Guayaquil and traces its social hierarchies. “El Delta”—that is, the Unidad Educativa Bilingüe Delta—exists in Samborondón, a neighboring municipality where many of Ecuador’s wealthiest gated communities are clustered.Footnote 1 As in the novel, the school is known for educating the daughters of the local elite within a framework inspired by Opus Dei’s Catholic teachings. By embedding its fictional world within recognizable urban coordinates, Mandíbula outlines a cartography of classed spaces and the power relations within them. Guayaquil becomes not just a backdrop but a haunted and haunting urban geography where inequality enables violence and fear to erupt in enclosed settings like the school. There, characters from different socioeconomic backgrounds are brought into fraught proximity, revealing structural tensions in which fear does not arise from supernatural sources but from everyday encounters across class lines. These moments echo gothic motifs of imbalance and entrapment within institutions that promise discipline and progress. In this sense, Ojeda reworks gothic tropes through the specific lens of Guayaquil’s urban and social landscape, grounding horror in lived inequality.
When Clara visits “el Delta” to interview for the position of literature teacher, she immediately registers the setting’s opulence: “Los padres de las chicas de ese colegio pagaban una pensión mensual que duplicaba su sueldo anterior y que se hacía evidente en cada detalle del mobiliario, en la infraestructura, en los bellísimos uniformes y en las pequeñas cámaras de seguridad” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 44). The narrative’s focus on the pristine uniforms, polished infrastructure, and discreet surveillance technology—in stark contrast to Clara’s modest professional background in public education—underscores her outsider status in a space of privilege. As Robert Mighall (Reference Mighall2007, 55) notes, urban gothic fiction often stages the dangers that emerge from the proximity of two distinct worlds: old and new, poor and rich, powerful and powerless. Mandíbula reinforces this tension through Clara’s sensory experiences of the school’s environment as simultaneously seductive and unsettling. The narrative voice deploys sensory imagery to suggest an artificial tranquility that conceals the surrounding mangrove’s oppressive heat and humidity and, symbolically, Guayaquil’s underlying social inequalities:
Había algo seductor en el perfume floral de las plantas de interior, el sonido de los tacones, las voces en bajos decibles, dóciles, y la frescura del aire acondicionado que le hacía olvidarse que estaba rodeada de manglares.
Aquí, pensó, no voy a sudar, y arrugó la nariz al ver cómo una mosca penetraba la selva capilar de una madre-de-familia que bostezaba con la boca cerrada. (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 44)
The intrusion of a fly in the scene—a small yet vivid reminder of rottenness crawling through the hair of one of the school’s patrons—disrupts the institution’s polished surface, hinting at the porous boundary between its cultivated order and the tropical urban environment that encloses it. Here, the mangrove gothic emerges in the temperature distinction that reflects Clara’s class-based dislocation. Her perspective casts the institution as a space of repressed tensions and illusion, one that attempts to conceal Guayaquil’s characteristic humid heat with its artificially chilled interiors. Clara’s internal reflection that, unlike in her previous job at a public school, she “will not sweat” in this elite space recalls Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s (Reference Eljaiek-Rodríguez2022, 34) reading of the gothic in Colombian cultural production, where he identifies a colonial legacy in which Latin American cold climates are associated with civilization and moral order, while hot regions are marked as unruly and violent. Mandíbula invokes this logic by presenting the air-conditioned comfort of “el Delta” as a refuge from the city’s sweltering streets; that is, a promise of controlled safety within a threatening urban space. Yet the novel swiftly dismantles this illusion. As the narrative progresses, Clara discovers that violence erupts naturally in the school, where students abuse their teachers. The apparent decorum of the institution conceals routinary humiliation: “Estas chicas… bueno, algunos grupos, están fuera de control. Nos tratan como sus empleados, no nos respetan. La humillación en ciertos casos ha llegado a niveles intolerables” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 80). The novel exposes elite education not as a refuge from violence but as a space that enables it.
Mandíbula’s Delta High School for Girls plays a central role in creating and sustaining Guayaquil’s class hierarchies and their urban spatialization. Teachers have to journey into the wealthy areas of Samborondón from other less prominent neighborhoods to engage with their pupils, a daily crossing that symbolically marks the transgression of a boundary within social relations “constructed and negotiated spatially” and “embedded in the spatial organization of places” (Duncan Reference Duncan and Duncan1996, 4). The city’s spatial organization as mapped in the novel suggests that the different social classes converging in Delta’s classrooms position students and staff at opposite sides of a border marked by class differentiation and limited social mobility. When they cross into the school space, teachers are expected to hold the authority to discipline. Yet it is the students—as an extension of their affluent families—who choose to abide by or disregard it. Class privilege legitimizes abuse and shields students from disciplinary consequences, imbuing the narrative with a sense of fear, as teachers are described to be afraid of their students. The story of Marta, Clara’s predecessor in the role of literature teacher, illustrates the vulnerability of the teaching staff. In this episode, a group of students stages the murder of the Clutter family in the classroom before a test on Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood:
Cuando esa tarde Marta Álvarez, de sesenta años, entró al aula, encontró a todas las alumnas con sus cuerpos lánguidos en las bancas y con almohadas ensangrentadas bajo sus cabezas. Dos estudiantes permanecieron de pie en el centro del salón, una de ellas con un revolver, y fue en ese momento cuando sucedió […] “La pobre no pudo ni siquiera gritar y se desplomó en el umbral de la puerta” […] Una de las dos estudiantes que fingió haber asesinado a sus compañeras había tomado, sin permiso, un revólver de la colección de su padre para que la broma fuera más realista. Incluso […] compraron sangre artificial. (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 79)
The narrative emphasizes the extent of the re-enactment: a real firearm and fake blood, a coordinated performance, and an explicit reference to a key scene of In Cold Blood, a novel that—though based on a true crime—is often “seen as a gothic story” (Voss Reference Voss2011, 46). In Capote’s account, the violence of the Clutter murders haunts readers with its intrusion into a seemingly safe, domestic world. Similarly, the students’ staging of the murders transforms the classroom—a space supposedly defined by order and discipline—into a site of terror. Marta’s reaction is visceral, as the fear she feels makes her collapse before fully crossing “el umbral de la puerta,” a boundary that becomes symbolic of her exit not just from the room, but from her profession. The scare provoked by the “practical joke” compels her early retirement, revealing the extent to which violence in “el Delta” operates with impunity, as the incident results only in a one-week suspension of the students involved. Puzzled by the mildness of the punishment, Clara is reminded of the social and economic structures at play: “Esto es un colegio, sí, pero también es una empresa. Hay niñas que vienen de familias importantes” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 80).
Mandíbula traces the power dynamics within the classroom back to Guayaquil, exposing violence and fear as all-encompassing features of the mangrove city. Clara’s mental deterioration is triggered by the belief that her student Fernanda has become a shadowy presence haunting her across the city. Her fear is rendered through sensory language: “esa sensación de asfixia que le llenaba el pecho de calores y de tentáculos” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 235). The metaphors of heat and tentacles evoke not only Guayaquil’s tropical climate but also the suffocating grip of social and spatial entrapment, materializing the mangrove gothic through the claustrophobic affect produced by an urban space saturated with power asymmetries and class violence. To escape, Clara removes Fernanda to a distant site of abduction surrounded by “un follaje exuberante y una montaña o un volcán de cima nevada” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 11). The highland imagery stands in opposition to Guayaquil’s oppressive heat, marking a rupture from the tropical urban setting and its class-bound relations. While the cold environment of a snowcapped mountain disconnects Fernanda from the symbolic power she wields in Guayaquil, for Clara, it represents a space to reassert her authority. The displacement into a non-coastal, high-altitude region reflects Mandíbula’s critical engagement with how urban space encode social hierarchies, entrapping characters within power structures that can be left behind only by renouncing the city.
In Ojeda’s novel, urban violence from the streets permeates interior spaces, which serve not as refuge but as extensions of the city’s oppressive outside. This spatial continuity is not only evident in enclosed institutional settings like the high school but also in the abandoned, partially ruined building appropriated by Annelise, Fernanda, and their group of friends. The girls turn the site into a secret hideout detached from the control of their families and the school, yet the space they claim is not free from Guayaquil’s grip. The building’s aesthetic is described in terms that oscillate between the sublime and the grotesque, highlighting its dual role as sanctuary and site of latent threat:
Su belleza descansaba, en palabras de Annelise, en sus horrores insinuados, en lo fácil que era desembocar en abismos o hallar culebras marrones, cadáveres de iguanas y cascarones rotos por el suelo […] Había tardes en las que el edificio parecía un templo bombardeado, otras, un jardín colgante, pero cuando la luz empezaba a menguar y las paredes se ensombrecían, la estructura adoptaba el aspecto de un calabozo infinito —o de un castillo gótico, según Analía— que las inquietaba y las enviaba de vuelta a sus casa. (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 17)
The narrative remarks that the building’s beauty is directly connected to its decay. Erica Durante (Reference Durante2023) has discussed the site’s depiction as a “gothic castle” to relate its decaying state with common motifs of gothic literature. She highlights that the girls’ cult to a made-up “Dios Blanco” mainly takes place inside the structure, which bestows the building with a haunting presence linked to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) through its reference to whiteness. Indeed, in Mandíbula’s epigraphs, Ojeda briefly quotes the Spanish translation of Melville’s masterpiece alongside quotations from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1918). The references place the novel against the backdrop of globally recognizable referents of gothic and horror fiction, in which—according to Durante’s analysis—the locus of fear tends to hide behind the façade of buildings like medieval castles or old houses. While I agree that the building in Mandíbula draws on gothic tropes to suggest how fear breeds indoors, I would also add that, in this case, the indoor spaces of the building are an extension of Guayaquil itself, turning it into a liminal place that blurs the boundaries between exterior and interior.
In the novel’s first chapters, when Annelise discovers the abandoned building, the structure is described as unfinished: “Las escaleras eran peligrosas, inexactas y torcidas, con depresiones inesperadas en los descansos, pero el último piso tenía una terraza con columnas y alambres en donde se podía ver la caída del sol” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 19). The openness of the structure, which lacks a roof and other physical borders to fully separate it from its surroundings, allows the city to move inward, creating a direct connection between the outside and the inside. Guayaquil’s tropical nature penetrates the building to convert it into a limb only apparently divided from the city’s main body: “Los pisos no tenían nada aparte de plantas trepadoras, polvo, insectos, caca de palomas gordas y grises […], pequeños lagartos que provenían del manglar y ladrillos” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 18–19). Guayaquil’s mangrove ecosystem, with its lizards and other urban fauna, becomes part of the girls’ refuge. In this sense, the city is not disconnected from their hiding place, as the building is a neglected corner of the urban geography instead of an alternative to it. The ambiguity between the interior and exterior, reflected in the lack of clearly defined borders, enables Annelise to spot, through the roots of Guayaquil’s mangrove, the crocodile that becomes an obsession for her and a new fear for her friends:
La aparición del cocodrilo, sin embargo, fue especial porque abrió una nueva obsesión para Annelise, quien pronto deseó verlo de frente y de cerca, y con eso superar cualquier reto jamás vencido por ninguna de sus amigas […] A Fiorella le asustaba la posibilidad de volverlo a ver o de que entrara al edificio igual que las serpientes, los murciélagos y las salamanquesas. “De eso se trata todo esto: de superar el miedo,” le dijo Anne mientras caminaba por el borde del tercer piso cuando el reto era simplemente no morir. (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 89)
The crocodile—an image that Ojeda deploys to signify a cannibal connection between mothers and daughters—becomes a major symbol in the novel. Its title, Mandíbula, is a reference to a crocodile’s jaws, which, in a dream, Fernanda sees penetrating her best friend: “Annelise abría las piernas y echaba la cabeza hacia atrás mientras el cocodrilo, como un hijo que retorna al charco de su origen, penetraba en ella hasta desaparecer” (Ojeda Reference Ojeda2018, 93). Pascua Canelo (Reference Pascua Canelo, Ramírez and Rozotto2022, 36) highlights that the reptile represents the vulnerability women face when they must survive in fear-inducing environments, alike to “las crías de cocodrilo que habitan en la mandíbula de sus madres y que podrían ser devoradas en cualquier momento.” I add that the reptile, which terrifies the other girls, can also be seen as a representation of Guayaquil’s exteriors filtering into their not-so-secluded private spaces, a metaphor for the urban violence that reaches supposedly safe places behind not-so-closed doors. Rather than perfectly divided realms, inside and outside are but mutually strengthening extensions of one another; they are interconnected strands of a feedback loop that engenders an ever-present sense of fear throughout the urban space. Guayaquil is thus the fear geography from which Ojeda enunciates her story, a city that, like a crocodile, can also clench its jaws to devour its inhabitants. Mandíbula ultimately stages the city not only as a site of socio-spatial violence but as a mangrove gothic metropolis where humidity and heat, social hierarchy, and fear collapse the divide between shelter and threat.
Mangrove gothic
This article has shown how Ampuero and Ojeda deploy what I call mangrove gothic to identify Guayaquil as a source of fear in Pelea de gallos and Mandíbula. In both works, fear becomes an emotional inscription placed upon the actual space of the city, which provides an enclosure from which characters struggle to escape. It arises from visible violence on Guayaquil’s streets as well as from violence behind closed doors, portrayed as different dimensions of the same phenomenon, like the tangled roots of a mangrove: sprawling above and below the surface, yet part of the same living structure. Considered against the backdrop of Ecuador’s surge in drug-related crime, my analysis suggests that contemporary Ecuadorian literature acknowledges violence as a phenomenon that has bred in Guayaquil well before the extreme public displays now making national and international headlines. For authors like Ampuero and Ojeda, violence is embedded in the city’s natural and social environment. Their insider perspective, shaped by growing up in Guayaquil, informs depictions of an urban space engulfed, governed, and conditioned by violence, where fear becomes part and parcel of everyday life, as inescapable as the city’s humid heat. In this sense, Pelea de gallos and Mandíbula not only alert readers to the long-standing dangers of Guayaquil but also position the city as a literary and urban geography reflective of Ecuador’s status as a hot spot for violence in Latin America.
While drawing attention to a localized source of fear, reading Ampuero’s and Ojeda’s fiction through the lens of the mangrove gothic also invites reflection on their broader engagement with the new Latin American female gothic. Authors associated with this regional trend have been celebrated for pushing Latin American fiction beyond outdated or reductive frameworks—such as magical realism—through thematic and aesthetic choices drawing on gothic and horror (Moreno-García Reference Moreno-García2022). Yet the growing international circulation of their novels and stories also reflects a renewed effort to repackage Latin American literature under a fresh, marketable label. As Logie (Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023, 280) notes in her analysis of English translations, the grouping of Latin American female authors is “in a sense, unavoidable” to facilitate the transformation of their writing into globally circulating symbolic commodities. In a highly competitive publishing landscape, such umbrella terms enhance the visibility of individual titles. The gothic label, in this context, not only unifies a cohort of female Latin American writers exploring localized experiences of gender violence, drug-related crime, exclusion, and poverty in their fiction but also connects them to a globally familiar literary lineage.
However, while the international recognition of a new generation of female writers advancing feminist sensibilities in their fiction is certainly welcome, it also reopens long-standing concerns about how Latin American literature is bundled, marketed, and circulated within the global literary market. Put differently, one must ask to what extent the enthusiasm surrounding the new Latin American female gothic risks perpetuating generalizing perceptions about the region and its literary production. Sarah Pollack has already cautioned that globally circulating trends have, in the past, contributed to the commodification of Latin American writing for international audiences. In the US market, Pollack (Reference Pollack2013, 660) recalls that “through the synecdoche of literary commodification, García Márquez’s revolutionary Cien años de soledad […] and, specifically, the magic realism of his fictional Macondo came to stand in for the diverse literary projects of Latin American authors in the 1960s.” A comparable operation occurred in the early twenty-first century, when Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes (1998) and 2666 (2004) were translated into English. Bolaño quickly became a new transnational signifier of Latin American literature, with his fictionalized Santa Teresa—an allegory of Ciudad Juárez—becoming shorthand for “any number of Latin American cities” (Pollack Reference Pollack2013, 663). More than once, then, Latin American literature has been internationally projected through major trends that share a tendency for subsuming local and individual specificities beneath broad regional signifiers.
With the growing international interest in their work—and the accompanying drive to frame it within a recognizable literary trend—authors associated with the new Latin American female gothic, have openly rejected being grouped under the label of a new “boom femenino” in Latin American literature. Their resistance stems from concerns on the superficiality of such a label, which the media has used to link their recent success to the “glory years” of the 1960s and 1970s, when the international acclaim received by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes marked “the first time that Latin American literature was seen not just as the sum of its national literatures but as an entity in its own right” (Logie Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023, 282). Speaking about her rejection of the label, Ojeda explains that “al llamarnos ‘nuevo boom’ se fuerza las tuercas hacia un pasado ya superado y se hace desde una mirada eurocéntrica y exotizante, por eso se escoge solo a autoras latinoamericanas de un determinado rango de edad, mestizas y/o blancas publicadas en España” (Giménez Lorenzo Reference Giménez Lorenzo2021). Drawing on long-standing critiques of the original Latin American boom as a predominantly white, male marketing phenomenon shaped in Europe, Ojeda argues that the branding of their work as part of a “boom femenino” primarily reflects an externally imposed perspective.
The gothic label has encountered comparatively less resistance, with authors like Mariana Enriquez (Reference Enriquez2018) endorsing the gothic as a means of narrating the “everyday violence” permeating Latin American metropolises. Similarly, Ojeda has incorporated the “Andean gothic” as “an integral element” of her “self-promotion strategy on social media and in live and virtual events” (Logie Reference Logie, Cabrera and Kripper2023, 291). Despite this openness to the gothic, its adaptation into a broader regional category—such as the new Latin American female gothic—risks flattening the specificities not only of individual authors and their work but also of the distinct local contexts their fiction addresses. Attending to these local contexts is especially important if, rather than defaulting into a generic connection between violence and Latin America, we are to carefully consider what literature reveals about the localized manifestations of violence and fear in places like Guayaquil in the 2020s. As Justin Edwards and Sandra Vasconcelos (Reference Edwards, Vasconcelos, Edwards and Vasconcelos2016, 2) suggest, tracing how the gothic is reshaped by “the social, cultural, economic and geographical complexities” of Latin America can help illuminate local nuance.
The concept of the mangrove gothic responds to the critical need for contextual specificity in the analysis of contemporary Latin American literature. It offers a framework attuned to fiction that is not only set in Guayaquil but also deeply entangled with its social, spatial, and material realities. As this article has demonstrated, deploying the mangrove gothic enables a type of reading that foregrounds how authors like Ampuero and Ojeda narrativize lived experiences of fear, inequality, and violence in a particular Ecuadorian locale. Rather than relying on a broad regional grouping, the mangrove gothic draws attention to the specificity of place shaping fiction. In doing so, it addresses the risk of homogenizing Latin American literature under one overarching transnational category while insisting on the value of shedding light on the local textures of fear and violence. Through this lens, Guayaquil is not just a backdrop but an influential city whose mangrove terrain becomes both metaphor and material condition for contemporary Latin American gothic storytelling.
Alongside its Andean counterpart, and expanding the framework offered by the Tropical gothic, the mangrove gothic adds theoretical tools for reading contemporary Ecuadorian literature within its own context, with careful attention to how local differences are inscribed in fiction. This article has examined a limited corpus centered on one major city, but beyond the authors considered here, the mangrove gothic may also prove useful for considering the work of other Ecuadorian writers who explore violence and fear in coastal urban settings, including, for example, Solange Rodríguez Pappe, Daniela Alcívar Bellolio, Francisco Santana and Eduardo Varas. Moreover, it can serve as a reference point for other Latin American contexts where mangrove ecosystems span natural and cultural imaginaries. As Jerez Columbié (Reference Jerez Columbié2021) suggests, examining mangroves in cultural production can deepen our understanding of diverse forms of violence, particularly in connection to social and environmental struggles. In the case discussed here, because it enables us to see how the city is narrated as a locus of fear, the mangrove gothic illuminates the process through which “Guayaquil de mis amores”—a saying drawn from a popular song tied to the city—transforms into “Guayaquil de mis horrores” in the 2020s. Or better yet, how literature lays bare the city’s role as Ecuador’s capital of fear.
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