Producing and Circulating Kichwa Community in Intercultural Ecuador

PRODUCING AND CIRCULATING KICHWA COMMUNITY IN INTERCULTURAL ECUADOR John Stolle-McAllister University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Over the past thirty years, Ecuador’s Indigenous movement has made remarkable advances in winning rights and recognition for Indigenous peoples, and positioning themselves as important players in national politics . Mobilizing discourses of community, as both ideological and organizational strategies, has been a key to that success. While historically community has been connected to well-defined geographic territories and cultural practices, in recent years those seemingly immutable entities have faced serious challenges. Economic, political and cultural changes from the outside world coupled with the movement’s success in bringing uneven social mobility and increased public participation with the country’s majority White-Mestizo population have contributed to substantial restructuring of what it means to be a community. In this article, I argue that Kichwa1 activists and community members in the northern highland areas of Otavalo, Cotacachi and Cayambe produce their communities, by constructing political, economic, educational and communicational relationships that incorporate the drastically changing social and economic structures in which they find themselves. Community is not a predetermined social fact, nor is it an ideal abstraction, but rather it is a continuous process of discursive production and circulation. Kichwa political actors and organizations have opted for different community strategies that reflect reflect the material realities and the political possibilities of each organization and each project. Each in its own way, however, represents attempts to connect past and future, that is to build on ancestral practices and knowledge, while at the same time enacting a community that accounts for demographic changes, class differentiation and national and global integration. The production of community becomes increasingly complicated as political leaders and activists often deploy an essentialized notion of community to promote a unified front in confrontations with the state and dominant white-mestizo society. The reality of community is, and always has been, much more complicated. In everyday interactions, community often still refers to rural, geographic locations in which extended networks of families live and work, but as the Indigenous movement creates more spaces for participation and has increased the physical and economic mobility of some of its members, community takes on a more abstract, idealized meaning as well. These articulations of community are increasingly intercultural endeavors in that although they C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 29 The Latin Americanist, September 2013 are distinctly Kichwa, they are developing in explicit relationships with multiple other cultural groups. The four examples that I examine in this essay represent different attemptstodefineandconstruct communityincontemporarycircumstances, as well as the pitfalls to the notion of community itself that many organizations encounter. The municipalities of Otavalo and Cotacachi, for example , have elected Kichwa mayors and Indigenous organizations are highly influential in municipal politics. From positions controlling the formal institutions of power, they have enacted inclusive policies that build on the municipality’s intercultural makeup. At the same time, however, political conflicts between Indigenous organizations highlight the difficulty of actually speaking for a community. In Cotacachi, the Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi (Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cotacachi–UNORCAC), has a long history of fostering local, integrated development that seeks to find economic support for local communities by building on ethnic knowledge and practices, while seeking economic sustainability. The Confederation of the Kayambi People (Confederación del Pueblo Kayambi), works to help its member communities strengthen their identities and work toward economic development in particular through an education project designed to allow young Kayambi adults to find productive work without abandoning their local relationships and practices . The last project I examine is the website, otavalosonline.com, which represents a different type of community building corresponding to the transnational dispersion of many Otavalos. While the notion of belonging to a group with historic continuity is clearly an important part of the community discourse being circulated by these media activists, they are also producing a community that is not completely dependent on that past by posing the question of what it means to be a member of the Otavalo “community,” when one does not physically live within the physical confines of the community. In all of these cases...