Without a doubt, Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934) is one of the most famous Ecuadorian novels of all time. It is, in fact, one of the few recognisable examples of Ecuadorian writing that has transcended the limits of national and regional circulation, reaching not only Spanish-speaking audiences but also readers beyond the Hispanic world: it has been translated into and published in several languages, including English, French and Japanese. Proof of the widespread reach of the novel is the multiple reeditions it has undergone since its original publication in 1934, not to mention that it has also been adapted for theatre and into children’s literature.

The national and international attention that Icaza’s novel has managed to attract makes it a unique case study for Ecuadorian literature. Not only because it is an early example of literary success from a country that is often invisible in terms of literary recognition and circulation, but also because of the effects of this success on the development of Ecuadorian literature and – more broadly – its impact on the ways in which the Ecuadorian nation is imagined in narrative. In this chapter, I argue that to discuss how the Ecuadorian nation is thought of in contemporary fiction, it is first necessary to revisit Huasipungo in order to challenge some supposedly solved questions raised by Icaza’s seminal work. To do so, I revise the critical attention received by Huasipungo, attention that helped it in its positioning as the non plus ultra of Ecuadorian writing and the national novel of Ecuador. My argument is that, from a normative position in the cultural field, attained thanks to a consecrated status granted by institutions including literary criticism and the education system, Icaza and other writers from his generation established a national model that conditioned further developments of Ecuadorian literature and limited the frameworks under which we understand what the Ecuadorian nation is.

The national model I identify in Huasipungo frames the Ecuadorian nation in connection to a sense of ‘uniqueness’ to be found in history and territory. That is to say, it imagines Ecuador in connection to place and time, an essentialist approach that – rather than being the product of an accurate representation of reality – is a construct outlined by Icaza’s views.