Guayaquil de mis horrores: The Mangrove Gothic and Contemporary Literature in Ecuador’s Fear Capital

This article explores the relationship between violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic capital, and two recent works of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. I introduce the term Mangrove Gothic to analyse how María Fernanda Ampuero’s short story collection Pelea de gallos (2018) and Mónica Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula (2018) appropriate Gothic tropes to depict the violent realities of twenty-first-century Guayaquil. The Mangrove Gothic encompasses the narrative strategies through which these authors inscribe fear into the experience of living in —or having lived in— Guayaquil, where oppressive humid heat, social hierarchies and violence haunt the urban space. At the same time, the term offers geographic, social and cultural specificity to the broader category of the New Latin American Female Gothic. In doing so, it counters the risk of homogenising Latin American literature under a single transnational trend tailored for global consumption