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f i v e Cement Things Imagining Infrastructure, Community, and Progress Buildings. Easily visible from the side of the road, buildings are among the most obvious signs of development and institutional religion in the modern Ecuadorian landscape. On the highway from Guaranda to San Marcos, a nursery complex sponsored by a Catholic development organization dominates a hectare with raised seedbeds, cinder block storage sheds, and multiple greenhouses. Not far down the road, a small metal sign announces the turnoff for a new Pentecostal church, its walls just discernible in the distance.Off the highway,the Plan International office occupies a large, three-story white structure next to a school in Guaranda , the logo on its roof competing for visual space with the Catholic spire in the central town square. In San Marcos, the slaughterhouse and a community center, both covered with the emblems of their sponsoring state and nongovernmental organizations, are clear symbols of the presence of development enterprises and the role of government in local projects. The town’s several churches attest to longer and changing histories of religious identities and affiliations. This chapter explores the role of buildings in development and community life, fleshing out the ways in which what Ecuadorians call “cement things”—large infrastructure projects such as bridges, buildings , and roads—act as public points of connection, exchange, and negotiation between religion and development ideals. Like the kitchens 137 and bedrooms of the previous chapter, buildings are focal points where religious and development ideals are produced and enacted. Be they community centers, water stations, commercial-grade animal pens, churches, or houses of government, buildings provide telltale evidence of community as a physical and ideological entity.They are monuments to the many interactions between Marqueños and larger discourses, and to the interpretations and productions of reality that these discourses foster. Buildings are public commodities, spaces where overtly communal conceptions of religion and development are produced and codified. These processes of production enacted through the imagination , construction, and maintenance of buildings serve to create spaces where Marqueños negotiate religion, development, and ideas of prog ress in the context of the communities in which they live. Bricks, Blocks, and Buildings: Infrastructure in Ecuadorian Life Much of development’s history is tied up in what Ecuadorians have come to identify as cosas de cemento, the“cement things”that were the focus of early religious and development efforts in the country.As discussed in chapter 2, San Marcos sprang up in the late eighteenth century as a colonial town formed around the original Catholic church building. The physical structure of the church, as well as the religious, social, and economic communities institutional Catholicism created, served as a center for a new kind of community life, one that tied San Marcos to Rome and to the Spanish state. In a similar manner, bridges, roads, dams, and buildings—the stuff of basic infrastructure—were and are the building blocks upon which development progress has been constructed and defined. The Ecuadorian Ministry of Public Works, for example, calls this kind of infrastructure “the motor of increasing progress in all of the regions and provinces of the country.”1 Cement things create community horizons and give form, function, and meaning to progress and modern life. Beyond this, cement things such as the cinder blocks commonly used in Ecuadorian construction projects serve as tangible evidence of institutional success. World Vision, Plan International, and other de138 Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories velopment organizations often use building supplies as a quantifiable marker of program execution, carefully counting the number of cinder blocks and bags of cement they have delivered to the communities they serve.Religious groups,developmentally oriented or not,also measure their effectiveness in structural terms. Every new church a community erects is a victory for the sponsoring denomination, physical evidence of metaphysical gain. The real advantage of focusing on buildings and construction materials , however, comes from the opportunity to examine the way that these entities, as nonhuman actors introduced by religious and development organizations,come to interact with and affect the most human of constructions: communities. As physical enclosures, buildings and other structures give the communities that religion and development create identifiable form. Cooperative members working in the Santa Anita cheese factory are walled off from the rest of San Marcos, their membership clearly marked and enacted, when they gather in the space the group has created.Working in the nursery in Sinche, UMATA creates new markers of community...

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