Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Huasipungo and the Chains of Indigenous Serfdom

[Erick Guapizaca Jiménez is an S.J.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Law School, a lecturer at the Universidad Internacional del Ecuador, and an Assistant Editor with Opinio Juris] 

Jorge Icaza, a twentieth-century Ecuadorian author, shocks readers with his raw novel Huasipungo. In this Indigenist work, he portrays the daily life of Indigenous individuals trapped in a system of a form of modern slavery called serfdom. The story centers on Andrés Chiliquinga and his partner Cunshi, who live under the huasipungo system, working for a landowner, Alfonso Pereira. Throughout the story, everything they have, including their family, home, and even life, is taken from them.

The indigenist narrative begins from the “problem of the Indigenous person as a being segregated and exploited by dominant groups, and for this reason, it constitutes a form of social, economic, and political protest”. In this post, I show that Huasipungo shows how capitalism depends on the modern slavery of Indigenous people and is kept in place by the combined power of investors, the church, and the state. To explain this, I look at three main arcs in the story: (i) labor exploitation, (ii) religious control, and (iii) physical violence.

A preliminary caveat: All the emotions and reflections evoked by Huasipungo cannot be fully understood without reading the novel itself. This post is therefore an invitation to engage with Icaza’s work while reflecting on concepts such as modern slavery, capitalism, and the collateral consequences of so-called economic development.

The Huasipungo System in the Novel

In the labor dimension of huasipungo, Indigenous people live in small houses within a larger hacienda and work parcels of land for the landowner’s benefit, without pay, social security, or legal protection. 

This structure traps them in permanent servitude, forcing them into heavy agricultural and construction work. Women face sexual exploitation and are confined to domestic service, caregiving, and childrearing, which extend domination both inside and outside the home. The novel opens within this oppressive order, where Andrés is bound to obey every command from Pereira and his overseers, with no real possibility of resistance. 

In the novel, the huasipungo system functions as a stable, if brutal, status quo until a new economic venture disrupts it. Alfonso Pereira, the landowner, facing financial ruin, launches a timber exploitation project to recover his fortune by selling the wood from his hacienda to a foreign investor. The timber was destined both for export and for use in Ecuador’s main national project at the time, the construction of the railway. The project requires the construction of a road, a monumental task in early twentieth-century Ecuador that depends on forced Indigenous labor and costs countless lives. A second phase of the project required removing the Indigenous families from the huasipungos along the riverbanks to build administrative offices.

During the project, Pereira and his business partner, an US citizen called Mr. Chapy, treat Indigenous workers as expendable tools. Andrés and other Indigenous individuals are forced to work from sunrise to sunset, without rest or water, and are kept apart from their families, which break them both physically and emotionally. In a moment of rage and despair, Andrés wounds his own foot, leaving himself crippled. Deprived of medical care, he cannot recover and is eventually cast aside, yet still compelled to work.  

Women are also trapped within this system. They are seen as caregivers not only for their own children but also for the children of their masters, and as objects of sexual exploitation. Cunshi is assaulted by Andrés, who channels his own humiliation and rage from years of abuse at the hands of his employers. Later, she is raped by Alfonso Pereira, unable to report the crime for fear of retaliation wherever she turns. 

Even more disturbing is how Indigenous women are used as wet nurses to feed the landowner’s grandchild after his daughter loses her milk. They are chosen based on their physical appearance, with those deemed strong and clean considered suitable. One of the most striking moments in the novel occurs when a wet nurse is forced to abandon her own baby to breastfeed the landowner’s grandson. Her child dies, and her grief drives her to disappear. Later, Cunshi is assigned the same task, showing how easily Indigenous women are treated as replaceable. The novel also reveals how these women are led to compete with one another under the false belief that life on the hacienda will offer them better living conditions.

As the project advances, even more destructive consequences unfold. First, a dangerous task, clearing the swamp, causes many Indigenous deaths and sparks growing indignation among them. Then, the flooding of the river where the Indigenous community settle their huasipungo kills many and triggers a famine that leaves survivors in desperate conditions. Andrés and his partner, Cunshi, are reduced to eating the meat of a decayed animal, which leads to her death. None of this affects Pereira’s conscience, whose only concern is the safety of his capital. In the end, the system collapses into a nightmare that destroys every Indigenous character, completing Icaza’s portrait of a world where profit prevails over life.

Connecting this to human rights, the situation depicted in Huasipungo aligns with the elements of serfdom as defined in the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956). The Convention defines serfdom as “the condition or status of a tenant who is by law, custom or agreement bound to live and labor on land belonging to another person and to render some determinate service to such other person, whether for reward or not, and is not free to change his status.” The huasipungo system squares this definition precisely, as Indigenous families are bound by custom to live and work on land owned by others, perform unpaid labor, and remain trapped in a condition from which they cannot escape.

Religious Control and Physical Violence

Beyond labor exploitation, the system also depends on religious control. Religion functions as a mechanism for shaping and suppressing Indigenous consciousness. In Huasipungo, there are no allies who truly see Indigenous people as human beings, not even the village priest. The priest is, in fact, an intellectual companion and accomplice to Don Alfonso, whom he considers a peer for political discussion and collaboration on the timber project.

The priest holds both moral and political authority, and his words are accepted without question. As a result, Indigenous people lose their independent voice and act according to his commands. He demonizes dissent and teaches that disobedience will bring suffering or punishment in purgatory. One of his demands is that the Indigenous people contribute to the construction through minga, a form of communal labor, for Pereira’s personal benefit. This requirement emerges from a perverse agreement among the priest, a local politician, and Alfonso Pereira. The priest’s role is to promise development and to convince the Indigenous people that this is their divine mission.

A scene that captures the extent of his influence occurs when the workers protest against being forced to pay a fee for the mass celebrating the end of the road. Soon after, heavy rains and flooding begin. The priest seizes the moment to claim that the disaster is divine punishment, reinforcing his authority through fear.

In Huasipungo, Fear becomes the instrument of subjugation, preventing the workers from making autonomous decisions or seeing beyond their imposed role as servants.  But the pain inflicted by oppression awakens something deeply human that no manipulative creed can suppress, the power of indignation and the consequential rebellion.  

A Failed Rebellion and the Resulting Physical Violence

Physical violence against Indigenous people, including whipping for even the slightest act of disobedience, is evident throughout the novel. For example, when Chiliquinga is assigned to work on the construction project but escapes to visit his partner and child, Policarpio, the overseer, punishes him by brutally whipping him. Yet it is only at the end that the rebellion leads to the deployment of police forces, who act with even less mercy. Later in the novel, the violence becomes even more painful to witness when Andrés is physically punished for his desperate act of stealing and selling a cow to afford his wife’s burial.

The reader hardly expects that things could become worse, yet they do! As the road project finishes, the landowners plan to wipe the huasipungos and expel the very people who built the road. They know this will inevitably provoke resistance, yet they proceed anyway. Here Pereira acts with other accomplices, public and private forces, who expel the few Indigenous survivors left after the famine and floods.

Chiliquinga gathers the remaining Indigenous people to resist with what little they have left and to defend their huasipungos. In this first uprising, two of Don Alfonso’s senior employees, including the overseer, are killed. The group then marches to the hacienda and frees other workers enslaved by Don Alfonso. Meanwhile, Alfonso himself escapes to the capital. In response, more armed men arrive to crush the Indigenous rebellion, leaving hundreds of Indigenous people dead, including women and children. Chiliquinga flees with a few survivors to his huasipungo, which soon bursts into flames and is shot at by the soldiers. Andrés’s last emotions are described with intensity and despair: 

“At dawn, among the ruined huts, among the rubble, among the ashes, among the still-warm corpses, there rose, as in a dream, fields of thin arms like barley stalks that, as they let themselves be brushed by the cold winds of the Andean highlands, murmured in a piercing, howling voice:
¡Ñucanchic huasipungo! Ñucanchic huasipungo! (Our huasipungo! Our huasipungo!)”

This is where the novel ends.

Conclusion

The only ones who benefit from the project are the antagonists themselves: Pereira, the priest, and Mr. Chapy. None of the profits reach the Indigenous people, who built it for free and paid for it with their blood. Even newspapers in Quito, the capital, report that Alfonso Pereira is an example of progress, without mentioning the human suffering behind it. This distorted image of success reveals how systems built on serfdom can appear prosperous from the outside while being rotten within.

To be clear, the problem isn’t economic development; it’s the kind of development we choose to pursue. When people live and work in inhumane conditions, when lives are lost, and when the wealth created never reaches the communities that bear the damage, something is deeply wrong. If progress leaves behind poverty, exploitation, and silence, then it is not progress at all.

Huasipungo remains a powerful resource for understanding the struggles of Indigenous peoples and other racialized communities, both in history and today. The novel brings to life the realities of modern slavery and the marginalization of Indigenous communities in global markets, where they are treated as instruments of work rather than as human beings. Huasipungo invites readers to feel both empathy and discomfort with the status quo, reminding us that what Icaza described is not distant fiction but a living reality, and that life often imitates art.