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c h a p t e r 7 Return of the Yumbo The Caminata from Amazonia to Andean Quito norman e. whitten, jr., dorothea scott whitten, and alfonso chango “We are . . . in Quito; . . . all nations are here.” On April 24, 1992, the phone rang in the Whittens’ home in Urbana, Illinois. “¿Causanguichu gumba?” (Are you living, compadre?), asked Marcelo Santi Simbaña, our longtime indigenous associate in Amazonian Ecuador. He went on to say, “We are here in Quito; we, the forest people, have arrived here. We walked here and we have arrived. We are many; all our brothers are here. All nations are here: Pastaza Runa, Salasaca Runa, Chimborazo Runa, Cotopaxi Runa; Yana Runa are also here, compadre; all nations have come to be within Quito.” Marcelo, his wife, Faviola Vargas, and many of their relatives had just completed a peaceful protest march undertaken by indigenous people from their Amazonian homelands to Quito, the capital city of Ecuador . They had walked for thirteen days. In this chapter, we draw attention to the unfolding dramatic structure of this event (the Caminata de Pastaza a Quito, later called the March for Land and Life) and to the symbolic processes of its enactment. By so doing, we contribute to an ethnology of practical activity and symbolic efficacy. We seek to portray, understand, and explicate aspects of the suasive cultural forces that created an aura of power that energized the pragmatic success of one of the most dramatic indigenous events in Ecuador’s turbulent history.1 We begin by placing the caminata in the context of recent indigenous protest movements. We then present a chronicle of events as a composite description drawn from firsthand accounts by participants and other observers. These descriptions have been collected over several years from marchers themselves and from accounts in the national media. We then move to the symbolic affinity of this pragmatic march with a north Andean ritual festival, the yumbada. This festival enacts the story of a group of Amazonian people, collectively known as Yumbo, coming to Quito. Through the course of this chapter, the multivocality of the concept of the Yumbo as “shamanic healer from the forest” unfolds. The public narrative of the yumbada, as it was re184 ported in the national media, was important because the marchers became increasingly aware of the mass audience reaction to their moving theater of power and because they commented specifically on the perceptions of their march by others after the caminata itself had ended. Finally, we discuss the political aftermath of the indigenous movement in Ecuador through June 1996. “1492–1992” Recent Symbol and Protest in Ecuador Ecuador contains a number of nationalities (nacionalidades) (CONAIE 1989), long called naciones in the vernacular of indigenous peoples. Since 1990, representatives of some of these nationalities have accomplished feats of political persuasion unprecedented in Ecuador’s colonial, republican, or modern history. The public displays of force, unity, and peaceful tactics contradicted a number of assumptions and beliefs held by many Ecuadorian nonindigenous people and significantly affected the nationalist discourse about the structure of the nation-state itself. The prevailing mood in Ecuador from about 1989 through mid 1992 was one of desire for radical change in the republic as a whole and for its nationalities in particular. For indigenous people in the Andes and Amazonia, the rallying cry was “¡Después de quinientos años de dominación, autodeterminaci ón indígena en 1992!” (After five hundred years of domination, indigenous self-determination in 1992!). The year 1992 was chosen as the symbol of a cultural, political, and economic uprising, a choice made to highlight their opposition to the elitist rhetoric of the quincentennial celebration planned for the same year: the commemoration of the European “discovery” or “encounter,” the conquest of ancient indigenous territory, and the eventual establishment of nation-state hegemony over indigenous people. Indigenous efforts to gain self-determination occurred in various regions of the country at different times. In early May 1989, indigenous people and national representatives held a confrontational meeting in Amazonia, which produced the highly controversial Acuerdo de Sarayacu (Agreement of Sarayacu ). This was followed by a sit-in and threats of a hunger strike by Andean people in the Santo Domingo “temple” in Quito in June 1990. The Levantamiento Indígena (indigenous uprising) of 1990 was, without question, the greatest mobilization of people in Ecuadorian history, and it publicly established an indigenous power source that could not be denied. Over the...

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