Story Without Words

A woman sat silently on her raft in the river; the water made only the faintest lapping sound. She looked out at the city of Guayaquil and listened to the music and laughter, the yells and scuffling. During the chaos of the recent wars for independence, a small floating city had come to be anchored next to this big port town. A network of creeks and streams ran into the River Guayas, and then the river ran its course down to the Pacific. People came and went along these watery highways, depending on where the current war trouble was. Some built up little houses on their rafts; a few operated temporary taverns. They were proud of the fact that the foundations of their structures, unlike those of the city folk, never rotted away in the rainy season. Whenever the police chased them away, they came back a few weeks or months later (Terry, 1834: 81; Stanley, 1850: 70). The woman certainly spoke sometimes to people on neighboring crafts. She might have told them where she had come from or where she was going. But neither she nor they ever wrote down anything she said-or, if they did, they destroyed the paper not long after. And yet this ordinary woman, with little or no property to her name, was regularly scrutinized, judged, and criticized by people who wrote long and often. Elite city officials mentioned her in their newspapers, their court cases, their church records, and their letters to each other. Thus, although we do not know much of what she said, we do know much of what she did. Her actions are themselves testimony to her life. In studying them, we can come to terms with at least part of her life's significance-with the impact that she and her contemporaries had on their society and its future. Without their words, we can still try to tell their story and articulate its relevance to others.