Decolonizing Benjamin in the Tropics: The long history of Guayaquil's arcades

This essay interrogates the long historical development of Guayaquil's arcades, or soportales, by analysing their historical development and relation to global commerce through littoral Ecuador's experience of cacao capitalism (1700–1925). I do so by employing and referencing Walter Benjamin's now paradigmatic texts concerning commodity culture and modernity in Paris' arcades. My work critically and synthetically examines archival and historical sources that catalogue Guayaquil's urban and architectural development in that tropical city‐region. I explore how environmental factors, indigenous architectural techniques, globalizing commercial culture, cacao exports, and liberal ideologies form historical constellations expressing the multi‐layered influences contributing to the growth and modification of Guayaquil's arcades. This transnational history of the particular attempts to recast understandings of urban space, architecture, and the tropical as dynamic edges of capitalist cultural modernity. This essay both deepens and decolonizes Benjamin's work by analysing the importance of the ‘coloniality of power’ on the formation of Guayaquil's arcades and their afterlives as aura. Whereas the arcades of Benjamin's Paris presented him with the primary form of capitalism's cultural modernity, I argue that Guayaquil's soportales serve as constellations for reading an alternative (tropical) modernity predicated on plantation agriculture, Eurocentrism, and cultural hybridization as an expression of political economy.