Juan León Mera Martínez (June 28, 1832, Ambato—December 13, 1894) was an Ecuadorian poet, novelist, journalist, critic, politician and satirist.

Mera is known as the father of Ecuadorian literature, principally for being the author of Cumandá (1879). This is a novel about the clandestine love affair between a young woman from an Amazonian tribe, and the son of a Spanish Dominican friar. Their relationship is doubly doomed: not only because it is opposed by the girl's father, but also because it is ultimately revealed that the pair are in fact brother and sister. Yet the moral of the story is that people can change: the indigenous father, who turns out to have kidnapped the girl as a child as he also killed her lover's mother, is converted to Christianity in what are (literally) his dying breaths. Mera therefore (ostensibly) argues for the peaceful assimilation of indigenous people within the national project, by means of the twin virtues of religion and love. The novel is widely taught in Ecuadoran primary and secondary schools and is considered to be among the most important achievements of nineteenth-century Latin American literature.

Don Juan (Spanish, or "Don Giovanni" in Italian) is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630. Evidence suggests it is the first written version of the Don Juan legend. Among the best known works about this character today are Molière's play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1821), José de Espronceda's poem El estudiante de Salamanca (1840) and José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Along with Zorrilla's work (still performed every year on November 2nd throughout the Spanish-speaking world), arguably the best known version is Don Giovanni, an opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787 (with Giacomo Casanova probably in the audience) and itself the source of inspiration for works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Søren Kierkegaard, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Camus.