A colonial city in decay: perspectives of urban ecocriticism on Ramón Meza’s Latin American narrative

Abstract

Grounded in Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (1992) and urban ecocriticism (Bennett & Teague, 1999; Gandy, 2014), this article examines how the Cuban novel Mi tío el empleado (1887) by Ramón Meza maps colonial decay that foreshadows neocolonial patterns in contemporary Latin-American metropolises. The corpus was divided into five thematic units to explore the façade/ruin dialectic, the systemic ecology of corruption, the fabrication of complicit subjectivities and the unequal temporalities that govern colonial bureaucracy. The study combines micro-textual reading of metaphors, bureaucratic genres and lexico-grammatical choices with an ecosystemic interpretation of settings such as the harbour, labyrinthine offices and unhealthy boarding houses. Findings point out that “galano” documents, inflated technical reports and cosmetic architectural reforms turn the city into an autopoietic organism that metabolises public resources into private profit, while ruins and fungi act as material traces of persistent coloniality. Meza’s satire therefore offers a critical lens for understanding continuities between nineteenth-century corruption and present-day gentrification, state capture and socio-spatial exclusion in Latin America.