Ecuador's "Glorious May Revolution" of 1944 seemed to offer a promise of breaking down exclusionary barriers that prevented women, poor urban workers, peasants, and Indians from participating as equals in society. Led by a leftist coalition, a subsequent national assembly hammered out a progressive constitution which intended to codify many of the advances that popular movements were making through protests on the streets and in organizational meetings in convention halls. These advances seemed

more »

... to promise to break down exclusionary barriers that prevented Indians from participating as equals in the process of state formation in Ecuador. Even as delegates debated extending citizenship rights to Indians and making Quichua an official language, conservative elite reactions threatened to roll back these advances. A year after finishing their work, populist president José María Velasco Ibarra abrogated the new constitution and re-entrenched an exclusionary system. Based on an examination of debates within the 1944-1945 constituent assembly and popular actions in the streets, this essay analyzes competing interests which divided sympathetic leftist and antagonistic conservative views on state formation, and the subalterns who were caught between the two.