This book is an ethnographic exploration of the politics of sentiment at the turn of the twentieth century in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I have used two theoretical constructs-Raymond Williams' (1977) notion of "structures of feeling" and Jacques Lacan's (1977) use of the nature of the Real-to assess the hegemonic ambiguity that develops within historically specifi c postcolonial contexts such as Guayaquilean identity in Ecuador. The book is quite ambitious in scope, dealing as it does with issues of

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... dentity, politics, sentiment, history, and hegemony. In this sense, it is, above all, a study of the nature of hegemonic production and domination in Ecuador but always maintains a Latin American comparative perspective. The book is thus also a logical extension of my fi rst book, which deals with the role of history in the hegemonic domination of the Latin American nation-state, again using Ecuador as a specifi c case study. My main objective here is to assess the role of sentiment in its historical production as essential to normative domination in which cultural production is implied and constantly operationalized. Williams ' (1977) structures of feeling are perfectly positioned to assess the political nature of the production of feeling. Like Williams, I am very much preoccupied with how hegemony works at the level of the particular, not because national hegemonic forms are unimportant but because we know less about how hegemony gets reproduced on a local, day-today scale. At the same time, even national discourse depends on localized production of culture, since, without daily cultural acts, there would be no ideological or material discourses through which to build political projects. The book thus asks how it is that hegemony is operationalized in people's lives. How is it that personal concerns of livelihood, survival, or simply existence are tied to larger historical discursive constraints and