La Gran Linea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (review)
succeed in bringing the margins to the center. Lane fills in areas that so many of Ecuador’s major historians have avoided and narrates the scattered, marginal, and disparate parts of Quito’s history, rather than the central, interconnected, and coherent. As he states in his epilogue, this shows the colony to be as much an “enigma, an organic cryptogram,” as a consistently articulated “colonial society” (p. 234).