Inside the Bubble: Educating Ecuador's Elite Thea Johnson World Policy Journal, Volume 28, Number 2, Summer 2011, pp. 41-48 (Article) Published by World Policy Institute DOI: 10.1353/wpj.2011.0005 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wpj/summary/v028/28.2.johnson.html Access Provided by Stanford University at 07/24/12 4:39PM GMT HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? Inside the Bubble EDucatiNG ecuaDOR’S ELITE THEA JOHNSON UITO—It is springtime in the capital of Ecuador, and that means everyone is celebrating Carnival, as are people all Qover Latin America. In the halls of the Fundación Colegio Americano—the American School—in the neighborhood of Carcelén, students are gearing up for the annual election of the school’s “princess.” This is no suburban prom queen selection. The election takes a beauty contest and transforms it into a grand display of wealth. One candidate is chosen from each of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Even in a school for the ultra-wealthy, filled with unusually attractive children, these girls stand out as the true beauties. As the three candidates campaign, six-foot photos of each hang in the school’s main foyer, greeting those who enter with a hint of cleavage and the come-hither expressions of fashion models. In Quito, the wealthy stay north of their watchful Virgin. SUMMER 2011 41 HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? Three days of Carnival festivities have She is beautiful. Her skin is tan, but not led now to the climax—a school-wide dark. Her layered, dusky blonde hair falls dance where the princess will be named. over her shoulders. Her figure is flawless. At this grand finale, each class is charged As the glass ball descends slowly, ma- with the responsibility of creating an jestically, few look past it to the ceiling. elaborate dance routine before its candidate There, all but invisible to the wealthy for princess is “revealed” to the audience. throng below, dark-skinned men in blue The routines involve elaborately uniforms are balancing from the raf- choreographed theatrical numbers— ters. They are the school’s janitors and intricate matching outfits, dancers moving grounds keepers. Standing precariously in a harmonized bridge—in anticipation on the beams, without any safety net or of the arrival of the entrant. Along with belts, easily 30 feet off the ground, they my fellow teachers, I sit watching the are holding the rope attached to the glass performance. The audience fills with ball and its cargo. The men brace them- parents, relatives, siblings and friends, selves against the beams as they lower the as camera flashes create a circle of light ball as slowly and gracefully as possible. around the stage. They are sweating, straining with all their As the music builds, the mass of danc- might. The candidate smiles and waves ing teenagers reaches a crescendo of move- inside the glass. Finally, mercifully, the ment. Then, with a wave, all the students ball lands and the men relax their muscles. point skyward with one grand gesture. On the floor, the door to the ball opens and The audience follows the movement with the girl emerges. The crowd erupts. their eyes, craning their necks. And sud- denly, above, there appears a giant glass LIMITED MOBILITY ball. Eyes take a moment to adjust, but Many outsiders would find this scene soon we can all see the first candidate, strange, if not downright troubling. But encased in the immense transparent ball, to the participants, and to most of the on- dangling dramatically from the ceiling. lookers, it seems perfectly normal—and not She is wearing a white dress with a cor- just because it happens every year. The girls set bodice and a full skirt—quite likely who vie to become princesses already are purchased from Miami, or hand-made by royalty of a sort, living out their entire lives a member of the small group of women in a glass bubble of tremendous wealth, in Quito who earn a living outfitting the a lifestyle of prosperity made possible by rich. This year the candidates are limited a permanent underclass that toils without to spending $500 on the gown. Before the benefit of a basic safety net. In a coun- the school imposed the price cap, these try where it is not uncommon to see child young women could spend $1,000 or “fire-eaters” earning pennies performing on more on the chosen dress. street corners, this three-day extravaganza The first would-be princess waves at cost each of the students’ families and the her audience, who cheer raucously below. school several thousand dollars. To them, Thea Johnson spent two years teaching at the American School of Quito. She is now a writer and a public defender in New York. 42 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL INSIDE THE BUBBLE it is a small price to pay to demonstrate— the term used for those of mixed European mostly to themselves—their own affluence, and indigenous ancestry. In Ecuador, the and to reinforce their self-image as a class logic goes that the lighter one’s skin, the very much apart and above the rest. heavier his bank account. It’s difficult to They are not mistaken. Per capita know how many “white” Ecuadorians annual income in Ecuador is just under there are, because of the elastic nature of $4,000, qualifying it as a middle-income racial categories in this part of the world. economy, according to the World Bank’s Most estimates put the number at below classification system. But that income is 7 percent of the population. (Mestizos ac- distributed most unevenly. In Ecuador, count for about 60 to 65 percent of the the richest 10 percent control more than population, indigenous people about a third of all personal wealth. At the around 20 to 25 percent, and Afro-Ecua- other end of the spectrum, the bottom dorians around 5 percent.) If we assume 20 percent collect just 3.3 percent. this roughly 7 percent of the population Some 52 percent of Ecuadorians live on almost entirely overlaps with the wealthi- less than two dollars a day, and 20 percent est 10 percent of the population, we can get by on a dollar a day or less. estimate the tiny minority of white Ecua- Ecuador’s economy in the 20th cen- dorians controls close to a quarter of the tury was sustained by three major export country’s wealth. booms—cacao in the early part of the cen- This group and other wealthy Ecua- tury, bananas in the 1940s and 1950s, and dorians were largely spared the worst ef- finally oil, which was first discovered on a fects of the defining moment in modern grand scale in 1967 by a Texaco Gulf con- Ecuadorian economic history—the finan- sortium, and which has proved to be Ec- cial crisis of 1999-2000. The collapse of uador’s greatest blessing and curse. These 16 banks, among the 40 that existed at successive booms created a level of wealth the time, set off a period of rapid depre- sufficient to support a middle class, a mix ciation of the Ecuadorian sucre and a con- of intellectuals, businessmen, and gov- current increase in inflation. The crisis ernment employees. The oil years also al- also included a freeze on a huge number lowed some poor Ecuadorians to improve of bank accounts, containing money that their lot—partially on account of the rise would either never be seen again or would of labor unions—and join the ranks of be returned years later, greatly reduced. the middle class. But most of the boom Many wealthy Ecuadorians were saved from wealth accrued to the already-wealthy and the full consequences of this collapse be- those who controlled the major industries. cause at least some of their money was held Social mobility remained a phenomenon abroad in places like Miami. But for most of the lower economic tiers. In Ecuador, middle-class Ecuadorians—government it seems, the poor can become working- bureaucrats, teachers, professionals— or middle-class, but the middle class can the crisis wiped out all they had built. never become rich. In 2000, the Ecuadorian government What accounts for this? A major fac- made the American dollar the country’s tor, unsurprisingly, is race. Most of the official currency, providing a short-term wealthy in Ecuadorian society can be clas- solution to the problem, but ultimately sified as white or light-skinnedmestizos — putting Ecuador at a deep disadvantage SUMMER 2011 43 HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? to its neighbors and creating an infla- uct of massive migration from surround- tion crisis that undid much of the so- ing rural areas. The wealthy stay north of cial mobility that marked earlier booms. their watchful Virgin. The middle class simply began to dis- In 2005, I was invited to the home of solve, with the percentage of Ecuadorians a wealthy family for Passover—a holiday below the poverty line soaring from 35 few in the country know about, let alone percent to over 50 percent. Between 1998 celebrate. Though the small Jewish popula- and 2002, somewhere between 300,000 tion in Quito is of Eastern European, not and 500,000 Ecuadorians—many of Spanish, descent, their “whiteness” still al- them skilled workers and members of the lows them a presence in a closed world, to middle class—left the country, most for which many Jewish families have had access the United States or Spain. Today, in New since they arrived in Ecuador, mostly in the York City’s borough of Queens, the most 1940s, fleeing the Holocaust.