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t w o La Lucha Negotiating Desire, Community, Religion, and Progress in San Marcos On a dark night in September 2002,we were headed to one of the places on the edge of the map, but we were having difficulty reaching it. Dust and the low clearance of our four-door sedan prevented easy passage to our destination. High-centered and spinning our wheels, we could not make the climb from San Marcos to Juan’s house outside of town with all eight passengers aboard. In an effort to lighten the load, Angel and I crawled out of the car and pushed, sending the vehicle on its way before climbing the steep slope under our own power, aided by the dim beam of my flashlight. We were en route to the fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration of Juan and Antonieta Garces. Family had come from all over Ecuador for the party, gathering in San Marcos for a private Mass and then traveling to Juan and Antonieta’s farm to dance, eat, drink, and honor the couple. Lucía, the eldest of Antonieta and Juan’s children, invited me to the Mass and party so I could get to know the family and they could get to know me. Brian would soon be joining me in a small cement house that Juan and Antonieta had built in San Marcos for their retirement. We would pay rent for the use of the building, but the common dirt courtyard between Lucía’s home and ours meant that we would live as extended family, sharing water, garden, and laundry facilities, and also the care of the guinea pigs caged next to our toilet and shower. 37 Angel asked how I came to know Lucía as we ascended the hill, working to find footholds in the slippery layers of dust and in our new relationship. I explained that Sam Martin, a Peace Corps volunteer who had done agricultural work in San Marcos in the mid-1990s,was a friend and colleague of mine. He had recommended that I contact Lucía, Angel’s sister, when I arrived in town to do fieldwork.“Sam Martin,” puffed Angel, out of breath from the exercise at 2,400 meters. “He’s good people. Very Catholic.”1 Angel’s description of Sam is indicative of the daily,intertwined positions religion and development maintain in San Marcos life. Sam, a professional farmer in the United States, spent most of his two years in the San Marcos area in local fields, helping to grow and market experimental vegetable crops and to develop small fish farms. By all accounts, Sam was one of the most technically skilled extensionists—Ecuadorian or foreign—that the town has ever seen.Yet he is remembered first and foremost not for his prowess with agricultural matters but for his regular attendance at Mass.For Marqueños,at least for Catholic Marqueños, Sam’s religious identity and practices were as important as his professional activities. There was no talking about Sam as an extensionist without talking about Sam as a Catholic. San Marcos is a place where such talk is common. The mingling of Sam’s identity as a Catholic with his role as an extensionist is indicative of the negotiations that the confluence of religious and development discourses spark in the course of daily existence. San Marcos has long been a place where religion and development overlap: in pre-Columbian social structures, in state development programs, and more recently, in the reinvention of development as a moral duty of Christian churches. Understanding San Marcos as a place where people negotiate these overlaps requires a working familiarity with these histories and with the ideals people use as they make sense of them in daily life. Throughout this chapter, we will examine these ideals, particularly as they manifest in three sites of negotiation where Marqueños encounter , contest, and reproduce religious and development discourses: community , desire, and the tension between infrastructure and social progress as development modes.While none of these are fixed physical sites, they are ideological locations that are contested, coveted, and represented in the documents, practices, and ideals religion and develop38 Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories ment generate. They are the places that breed the collisions of networks Bruno Latour argues characterize modernity, places where the negotiation of modernity is required.2 Such sites are multiple and are as mundane as city council meetings and casual conversations or as elevated as...

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