The Citizens’ Revolution, Sex Work, and Exclusion in Quito’s Historic Center

• In Event: The Citizens’ Revolution in the City: Governing Subaltern Subjects in Quito’s Historic Center

Abstract

This paper argues that state and municipal governments’ efforts to transform Quito’s historic center into a premiere destination for heritage tourism has had dire consequences for marginalized populations like sex workers. Paradoxically, as members of the lower class, sex workers represent the very demographic around which the Citizens’ Revolution was created. As Quito’s Historic Center has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site, sex workers now that pose a threat to multimillion dollar investments. This fact means that these individuals find themselves excluded from President Rafael Correa’s ideals of “Buen Vivir” which promises all Ecuadorians a life of dignity and well-being through the expansion of the welfare state and civil liberties. This paper has two parts. First, I show how national-level assemblymen and municipal government officials have yet to pass the appropriate legislature to ban sex workers from the public sphere. Next, I examine the dynamics of how the municipal government depends on police authorities to manage and control their movement. As pressure mounts, with the gentrification of the historic district at a peak, sex workers’ civil rights are increasingly repressed as police target them for arbitrary arrest and mistreatment in efforts to deter them from working. This paper, then, shows how national-level policies attempt to mask, and frustrate, subaltern individuals, especially single mothers working on the streets to feed their children. The paradoxes across scales of government illustrate the inherent contradictions of the flow of capital and the development of social programs.

Author

• Anna V Wilking, New York University