“La Revolución Ya Está Aquí:” Oil Territories of the Citizens’ Revolution in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

• In Event: Crude Entanglements: Experiences with Oil and the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador

Abstract

Drawing on the experience of the subnational electoral campaign of 2014, this paper examines the urban dynamics of oil in the city of Esmeraldas, home to Ecuador’s most important crude oil refinery. The paper traces how the national political economy of oil infuses the unfolding of the Citizens’ Revolution, enabling certain political transformations while bracketing its connection to others. Reflecting on how moments of creative destruction associated with the Revolution offer insights into a broader question of energy transitions in Latin America, I argue that the creative destruction taking place in Esmeraldas, in the name of the Citizens’ Revolution, expresses the spirit of state-making under oil-democracy during the “turn to the Left;” using oil rents, it systematically seeks to produce new spaces for political expression and transformation and contain others, in order to strengthen state-citizen relations that legitimize the revolutionary process. At the same time, it displaces more mundane processes pivotal to citizenship: how life is lived with oil.

Author

• Gabriela I Valdivia, University of North Carolina