Can you have your culture and Starbucks too?

Since I was teaching English in Quito 4 years ago, the city has become much more modern. This is what everyone in Quito was proudly telling me. What I gathered this meant is that more pueblos have shopping centers and there is a Juan Valdez in the city center. The shopping centers do create jobs, and when the children on the streets come up to you trying to sell chicle from carboard boxes, it is obvious the economy needs help. However, there is a cost to the modernization, which I didn’t hear regular people talking about.

Over maracuya drinks, my Ecuadorian friend who is in construction engineering and heads the teams which design and construct these shopping centers, told me that this is great, it is progress, and it helps the people because they now have things to do like go to the movies or eat in food courts instead of drinking or causing crime. With a skepitical look only a friend can give to a local telling you these things, I ask him if he honestly believes that the option to see Madagascar 3 and then eat at KFC afterwards prevents drinking and crime in Ecuador. He thinks about this for a while, and does admit this is probably not completely true, but it’s clear that most people he talks with are in line with his ideas that the shopping centers and modernization are positive signs of progress for the country.

I explain in my basic Spanish my ethical and philosophical problems with the modernization everyone has been talking to me about. I explain that I believe the mentality that you need to buy things to be happy is not good or healthy for a society.

I recognize it’s easier for me to say materialism is bad, because while I fight my small fight by buying mostly used clothing and frequenting the small guy coffee shops, I also enjoy the ability to choose to go see the Oscar nominated movies in the theatre and get an iced green tea latte at Starbucks. How can I say, I can have it, but you shouldn’t. How can I say, I think your traditional culture, clothes, pace of life, and family values are beautiful and valuable and I think that shopping centers in your pueblos will ruin these things. I would like to come to your country, enjoy and maybe take some of your culture and values back into my own life, but have my Starbucks too. I can’t.