Costume and History in Highland Ecuador

Chapter 5. Carchi Province (Ecuador) and the Department of Nariño (Colombia) (Joanne Rappaport)

CHAPTER 5 Carchi Province (Ecuador) and the Department of Nariño (Colombia) joanne rappaport The high plateau straddling the international boundary that separates Ecuador from Colombia is dotted by numerous small towns and dispersed farmsteads , and blanketed by a patchwork of tiny cultivated fields bearing wheat or barley, potatoes, and sometimes maize, depending on altitude. The inhabitants of this territory, the Pastos, no longer wear distinctive costume and lost their aboriginal language a century and a half ago. In spite of the fact that the farmers of Carchi Province, Ecuador, and their Colombian neighbors of the department of Nariño share a common culture, however, they do not claim a common identity: these northern Ecuadorian peasants do not consider themselves to be indigenous at all, whereas their cousins in Nariño aggressively and passionately assert their native identity. Two Distinct Communities The Pastos inhabited the northernmost boundaries of the Inca Empire. Supporting a large population of agriculturalists who tilled and terraced the high mountains, and who traded in the tropical lowlands for salt, gold, coca, and other valuable commodities, the Pasto Province before the Inca arrival was characterized by independent local chiefdoms that were never united through an overarching form of regional political organization.1 Split in two segments by Inca occupation a decade or so before the Spaniards arrived in 1536, the Pastos of what is today Ecuador retained a thin Inca cultural overlay during the colonial period, most evident in the use of Quichua by chiefly families and the maintenance of several forms of Inca material culture, including weav- 120 Costume and History in Highland Ecuador ings. The significantly more numerous aboriginal communities of southern Colombia, in contrast, demonstrated no trappings of Inca domination. The northern and southern Pastos were also subject to different jurisdictions during the colonial period that extended from 1536 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. The people of what is today northern Ecuador reported to the administrative centers of Ibarra and Otavalo, to the south, while the northerners found themselves under the colonial administration of Pasto and Popayán.2 This administrative breach influenced the destinies of the two groups of communities, since the policies of the two jurisdictions were somewhat distinct. For instance, the city of Ibarra was constructed by corvée labor provided by the southern Pasto communities, who turned their sights toward Ibarra and Otavalo, thus precipitating a significant Pasto migration into what would become Imbabura Province; in fact, many of the surnames in contemporary Otavalo are Pasto in origin. The Pastos of the district of Popayán, in contrast, were segregated into resguardos, communal indigenous landholding entities. This colonial institution, intended as a vehicle for isolating indigenous laborers from the broader society and for freeing up land for European occupation, ultimately proved to be a valuable weapon in the maintenance of indigenous territorial and political autonomy.3 Protected by the resguardo system , the aboriginal populations of Nariño could not easily be persuaded to reject their indigenous identity. Once independence came to Colombia and to Ecuador in the early nineteenth century, the paths of the two border provinces continued to diverge. While the Pastos of Nariño successfully fought off the liquidation of their resguardos, thus partially braking the growth of large cattle ranches, the indigenous populations of northern Ecuador, deprived of the protection of pro-indigenous legislation, were divested of their properties as haciendas and middle-sized holdings expanded onto aboriginal lands. The dominant Hispanic culture made substantial inroads into all Pasto communities, however: by the early nineteenth century, the Pasto language, a member of the macroChibchan family, had died out entirely, leaving a large speech community with its own characteristic, regional variety of Spanish; by the period of independence , most Pasto witnesses to legal proceedings no longer required the services of interpreters, so it is difficult to gauge the use of Quichua among the chiefly families in the southern region. In the 1960s, after a successful agrarian reform and the growth of cooperatives , potato production soared in Carchi, where middle-sized farms employed a rural proletariat year-round. Under such conditions, the formerly indigenous population relinquished its indigenous identity, despite the fact that it continued to adhere to traditional cultural values, including distinctive Carchi Province (Ecuador) and the Department of Nariño (Colombia) 121 forms of speech and narrative, Andean modes of labor exchange, a dispersed settlement pattern, and characteristic forms of material culture...