Las 7 Familias Más Poderosas de Quito que lo Controlaban Todo en 1900 (Reconstrucción Histórica)

Summary

The documentary argues that Quito’s real power around 1900 did not rest with any one president or church leader. It lay in a tightly connected network of landowning families whose influence came from haciendas, businesses, marriages, church ties, and public offices. Political changes weakened the old conservative order but did not initially break the families’ control of land or the labor system that supported it.

Land, inheritance, and labor

• Since colonial times, much of the best land in the Andean highlands had been held by a small number of Spanish- and Creole-descended families. Independence changed the country’s government but did little to redistribute land.
• Marriage alliances helped preserve wealth and manage rivalries. Families such as the Jijón, Gangotena, Larrea, and Lazo were joined by repeated marriages and kinship, forming what the documentary describes as branches of a shared social network.
• The hacienda was both an economic enterprise and a system of social control. It included the landowner’s house and chapel, fields and pastures, and the Indigenous workers who labored there.
• Concertaje, the debt-based labor system, worked roughly as follows:
  • A landowner advanced a worker money or goods, sometimes to cover an urgent need or family expense.
  • The worker was expected to repay the advance through labor.
  • Low wages and deductions often made the debt difficult or impossible to clear. In some cases, debts passed from parents to children.
  • Workers who left could be pursued and imprisoned under the laws of the time.
  • In return for labor, a worker might receive a huasipungo—a small plot on the estate for a home and subsistence farming. Losing that plot could mean losing the worker’s only security.
• The documentary uses an imagined worker, Manuel, to illustrate how an inherited debt and lack of access to written accounts could keep a family bound to an estate.

The seven families highlighted

1. Jijón: Combined landholding and industry. The family had a textile factory at Peguche and moved machinery to the Santa Rosa de Chillo estate in the 1890s. Its products included wool and cotton fabrics. La Circasiana, built as a country residence, symbolized the family’s wealth and European-influenced tastes. The documentary says the family’s farms and factories employed more than 1,500 people.
2. Gangotena: Associated with the prominent house facing San Francisco Square. The family’s connections included Enrique Gangotena Jijón, a landowner and figure in the National Agricultural Society, who is credited in the subtitles with introducing tractors and a powdered-milk factory.
3. Larrea: Connected by marriage to other elite families. Modesto Larrea Jijón is described as a leading landowner, an early promoter of Holstein cattle, and an owner associated with the Tesalia Springs water company.
4. Fernández Salvador: Alfredo and Ricardo Fernández Salvador are identified as leaders in agricultural organizations. The documentary presents them as examples of landowners who adopted imported breeds and machinery while older labor arrangements persisted on their estates.
5. Lazo: The family bought the Zuleta estate in Imbabura in 1898. The documentary says that by around the 1920s, the family owned nine estates, most in the Cotopaxi area.
6. Ascásubi: A family with political and historical connections. Its members were linked by marriage to the Jijón, Gangotena, and Lazo families. Avelina Lazo Ascásubi is highlighted for her later political influence despite never holding public office.
7. Chiriboga: An old and widespread highland surname, associated with landowners around Tambillo and, in a later generation, with leadership of Quito’s municipal council.

The documentary notes that other surnames—including Ponce, Freire, Bustamante, and Borja—also appeared among landowning families. It says the available sources do not provide enough complete financial records to rank the families by wealth.

Church, regional conflict, and liberal reforms

• The Catholic Church was a major landholder and also controlled or influenced education, records of births and marriages, cemeteries, and charitable activity. For elite families, it was both an ally and a competitor.
• Quito’s highland landowners are contrasted with the coastal cocoa elite. The highlands are portrayed as conservative, agricultural, and closely tied to the Church; Guayaquil’s cocoa economy is portrayed as export-oriented, commercial, and increasingly liberal.
• In 1895, Eloy Alfaro’s Liberal Revolution brought coastal political power into Quito. The documentary describes the change as a threat to the city’s established conservative families.
• The documentary lists reforms that reduced Church authority:
  • 1897: Public instruction was placed under state control, paving the way for secular education.
  • 1900: A civil registry was established.
  • 1902: Civil marriage, including divorce, was introduced.
  • 1904: A law concerning religious worship affected Church properties.
  • 1908: The mortmain law transferred Church lands to public charity; estates were nationalized and leased.
• The documentary’s central qualification is that these reforms weakened the Church and conservative political power but did not amount to agrarian reform. Large landowners could benefit from leasing former Church estates, while hacienda labor conditions remained largely intact.

Social life and modernization

• Elite women were generally educated for domestic and religious roles rather than university study. Elite men were more likely to attend religious schools, study law or medicine, and, if the family could afford it, travel to Europe.
• European travel and imported goods reinforced the aristocracy’s status. Mansions such as La Circasiana displayed European artistic influences while remaining part of a society dependent on hacienda labor.
• The arrival of the railway in Quito in 1908 shortened the journey from Guayaquil from one or two weeks to about two days. It made it easier to move hacienda products to the coast and brought imported goods and ideas more quickly.
• The railway did not erase the old order. It helped some landowners modernize livestock production and transport while leaving the underlying concentration of land largely intact.
• In 1913, highland landowners founded the National Agricultural Society, which the documentary describes as influential in agricultural policy and public life.

Political change without a full transfer of economic power

• Alfaro was murdered in 1912 after a mob dragged him from prison. His body and those of his companions were dragged through Quito and burned in the Ejido.
• A fire damaged the Gangotena mansion in 1914. The subtitles say the family later rebuilt it in a European style, between 1917 and 1922, but give no cause for the fire.
• The documentary emphasizes that the liberal revolution changed laws and political leadership more than it changed ownership of land. The abolition of imprisonment for debt was approved in 1918, but dependency continued in practice, and huasipungo persisted until agrarian reform in 1964.
• The concluding example is the marriage of Liberal president Leonidas Plaza Gutiérrez to Avelina Lazo Ascásubi, linking the revolutionary political elite to traditional highland landowning families. Their son, Galo Plaza Lasso, later became president and inherited the Zuleta estate.
• The final lesson is that power lay in a durable network of land, kinship, businesses, religious and social institutions, and public office—not in a single officeholder. Political revolutions could displace a governing group, but, in the period described, they did not take away the land that underpinned its wealth.

Speakers and sources featured

• Speaker: One documentary narrator. The subtitles do not identify a second speaker or include interview voices. Manuel, Mercedes, and Luis are imagined figures used to illustrate different experiences; they are not identified as real speakers.
• Sources cited or mentioned in the narration:
  • A study from the Andean University Simón Bolívar on the Jijón family’s textile operations.
  • El Comercio, cited for family history and information about Ecuador’s cocoa exports.
  • Sociologist Carlos Arcos, cited for research on landowners, the National Agricultural Society, and Church landholdings.
  • The history of the Gangotena house, now a hotel.
  • The history of the Zuleta estate.
  • Other unnamed historical studies and sources mentioned in connection with concertaje, family histories, and the 1914 fire.