From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: The Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century (review)

In June 1990, an indigenous uprising paralyzed the Ecuadorian highlands, heralding the arrival of the Indian movement on the national political scene. Pallares' book has the virtue of taking 1990 as her end point, rather than as her starting point. She examines the prior changes that made those events possible, exploring the 1970s and 1980s as processes of negotiation, conflict, and coalition building involving, in different combinations, peasant unions, highland and lowland indigenous rights movements, the left, political parties, and many different instances of the Ecuadorian state.

As the title suggests, a primary focus is how a peasantist discourse was displaced by and transformed into the Indianist discourse that now dominates Indian political activism in the Ecuadorian highlands. Pallares argues that despite the (admittedly limited) economic redistribution associated with agrarian reform, Indians continue to be marginalized as the ongoing levels of poverty and illiteracy in indigenous zones demonstrate. Indeed, the very dissolution of the traditional hacienda following agrarian reform removed a buffer between indigenous peasants and mestizo townspeople, so that racism and the exclusion of Indians became even more evident as agrarian reform progressed. One of the results was that Indians increasingly mobilized around ethnicity—the basis of their exclusion—rather than simply as peasants.

Another strong thread running through her analysis is the shifting ground of relations between highland Indians and the Ecuadorian state (in its many different manifestations) through the last third of the twentieth century, which provides fascinating reading. In many ways, the heart of Pallares' book is found in chapters four and five, where she examines two different ways that Indians in specific areas began to mobilize politically. In the Cotacachi area (Imbabura province), Indians began to contest municipal elections in the 1970s. They did so through electoral alliances with existing political parties and the adoption of a peasantist rhetoric that emphasized the problems of the rural poor rather than of Indians as such. Indians themselves have been directly represented in the municipal council continuously since 1979, and it was here that Ecuador's first Indian mayor was elected. In contrast, in Cacha (Chimborazo province), a rather different political goal was pursued: full administrative autonomy from the local mestizo town. This process involved a prior struggle to free Indians from exploitation by local mestizo merchants and moneylenders, exercised through the fiesta system. Political autonomy was achieved in 1980 when Cacha was declared an independent parroquia and an indigenous teniente político was named, who took on local policing and civil registry duties, as well as promoting community forms of justice.

In these chapters Pallares richly demonstrates the range of strategies that have been used by Ecuadorian Indians at the local level to access political power, and the rather different problems that these strategies both addressed and encountered. This analysis is an important addition to the more familiar narratives that detail the emergence of regional and national Indian organizations and, later, the political party Pachakutik. Another highlight of Pallares' book is her discussion of agrarian reform in chapter three, where she shows how the notion that land should have a "social function" was appropriated by large landowners as they identified themselves as the real producers and Indians as a drag on national development. Here, the racialization of the agrarian debate is emphasized, showing again how race has come to the forefront as both an analytical concept and political problem in Ecuador.

My main criticism of this book is really one of the press: the book is marred by a lack of effective copy-editing that can be quite distracting. Overall, however, this book is an important contribution to understanding the background that made the 1990 and subsequent indigenous mobilizations not only possible, but necessary. It will be of interest to Ecuadorianists and to scholars studying social movements elsewhere, and...