The “jíbaro” image in two travelers of 19th and 20th centurie

Abstract

The jíbaro was one of the three identities of the Amazonian Indian that were built at during the 19th century and they served to justify their integration into the national project. Of uncertain etymology, the term was initially used as ethnonym and it passed to Ecuadorian Spanish in the matrix of a colonial discourse with racist roots. Its dissemination since the mid-nineteenth century reached different literary genres, including travel literature. After examining its uses from a lexicographic and historical perspective, this contribution analyzes the discursive construction of the jíbaro in the stories of two travelers, the German Wilhelm Reiss and the North-American H. Anthony, whose visits were separated by a period of fifty years (1870-1920), in order to identify the rhetorical strategies that they use to build the image of the Amazonian Indians and justify their colonization.