Novel
Las cruces sobre el agua
Not translated into English
Joaquín Gallegos Lara · 1946
Opening lines
La calle herbosa, de pocas casas y covachas, y de solares vacíos, no era casi más que un entrante de la sabana. Alfredo Baldeón corría, rodando un zuncho. El sol se ocultaba tras los cerros de Chongón.
The grassy street, with few houses and hovels and with empty lots, was hardly more than a tongue of the savannah. Alfredo Baldeón was running, rolling a hoop. The sun was setting behind the hills of Chongón.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Guayaquil, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the poor neighbourhood of La Artillería. Alfredo Baldeón, a mulatto and the son of a baker, leaves young to fight in Esmeraldas, returns, works in a workshop and then in a bakery, gradually becomes aware of his class and marries Leonor, a cigar worker. His childhood friend Alfonso Cortés, who is white and comes from a well-off family in decline, abandons his studies for music. And the city's workers march towards the general strike.
Context
The title refers to the crosses that the workers of Guayaquil place on the Guayas in memory of the strikers killed in November 1922. Alfredo Baldeón existed: a striker, he was killed by the police after a scuffle in a bakery that refused to join the movement, and the book, dedicated to the city's bakers' society, invents a life for him. An omniscient narrator devotes four fifths of it to life in the working-class suburbs. Begun in 1940, the novel only appeared in 1946; the historian Efrén Avilés Pino has reproached it with covering the memory of the massacre with fiction.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French or English translation. It is best to know that the general strike of 15 November 1922 in Guayaquil ended in bloodshed, the baptism of the Ecuadorian labour movement.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a classic of Ecuadorian literature and as one of the books that brought the city into the national narrative.
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