In the previous chapter I argued that Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo illustrates a deep entanglement between economic phenomena and literary production. It is a novel influenced by the modernisation project of early twentieth-century liberalism in Ecuador, but it also contributed to its fulfilment by promoting a vision of the Ecuadorian nation that was beneficial to the liberal enterprise. Moreover, Huasipungo also sheds light on the connections between literary discourse and the economic sphere by interacting with and mirroring transnational relations, despite its author’s tendency towards arguing in favour of national singularity and authenticity. In this sense, Icaza’s novel enables a critical reflection on how literature reimagines the nation by engaging with and responding to disruptive economic events. This is especially relevant in the Latin American context, where – as I propose in this chapter – exploring the relationship between economics and literature offers an often-ignored path to interrogate nation-building processes.

From a Marxist perspective, Ericka Beckman argues that there is an understudied correlation between economic life and Latin American literary production between 1870 and 1930, in what she calls the ‘Export Age’, the period in which the former colonies of the region began to integrate into global commercial associations as both exporters of commodities and importers of manufactured goods. Her argument is that, while critics such as Fredric Jameson have seen the intertwining of cultural and financial worlds as symptomatic of late capitalism, economic tropes were already producing ‘capital fictions’ in Latin America in the nineteenth century. That is to say, long before global-scale business organisations or computers and automation took hold of Latin American countries, their economic processes were already influencing and being influenced by literature, in an exchange whose roots could be traced back to the colonial era.

Colonial relationships and dependencies took a different shape after the ‘independence period, when nascent nations accorded their first loans with British bankers’ because – for critics such as Beckman – the political independence the new nations gained ‘was accompanied from the start by a condition of non-independence in the sphere of global market relations’. Richard Rosa, whose work on finance and narrative proposes that the development of Latin American literary culture is closely related to the development of a financial culture, names the relationship between the newly independent Latin American nations and Europe, that is, between borrowers and creditors, a ‘neo-colonial relationship’ that was grounded on the ‘devaluation’ of Spanish American populations since the conquest.