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  • Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare
  • Alexandra Lamiña (bio)
Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare Lexington Books, 2020

the indigeneity as force in this work emerges when we understand Andean urban Indigenous lives from the multiple experiences, histories, and places that Kathleen Fine-Dare has traversed. Urban Mountain Beings is a compelling ethnohistorical work that condenses complex topics of urban geography, archaeology, and colonial history using a longitudinal ethnographic approach, archival research, and the author's lived experiences. This work draws on a decolonial praxis that combines Indigenous pedagogies and feminist geographic research to understand why urban Indigenous peoples are seen as "out of time-space" (8, 188). Fine-Dare argues that the force of the runa (person) embodies and performs histories, knowledges, practices, and experiences to shape people's sense of place and to create urban life. As evidence, she explores the Yumbada, an ancestral dance performance from Cotocollao, a neighborhood in Quito, and the social actions of Casa Kinde (Hummingbird House), a community-based cultural organization in Cotocollao. Fine-Dare's study contributes to Andean urban studies, comparative Indigeneity scholarship, and anthropological ethnographic perspectives regarding life in urban areas.

In the preface and introduction, Fine-Dare begins by sharing her deep experiences lived in Quito, whose geography of mountains guided her academic anxieties and community-based collaborative goals. In chapters 1 through 3, Fine-Dare takes us through a historical and geographical journey to get us closer to the urban ancestral legacies in Cotocollao: landscapes, socialities, systems of encomienda, hacienda life, and agrarian reforms. Her analysis illuminates the city as a "gradual rural-urban continuum" (59) where the Indigenous peoples have a powerful role in the process of "ethno-genesis" (68), a continual re-creation of ethnic cultures that is part of "complex processes of ethnic mixture (mestizaje) and cultural whitening (blanqueamiento)" (102). In chapter 4, Fine-Dare stresses the symbolic, social, and historical meanings of the Yumbada by analyzing how gender is part of the performance. She points out that the dancers perform the Yumbada "to [End Page 187] express historical and essential aspects of identity … and to bring power to their people" (119). In chapter 5, she describes the Casa Kinde's social actions and Indigenous-based pedagogies in favor of gender equality, spirituality, social relations, and Indigeneity framed according to an Andean urban vision of sumak kawsay (good living). In chapter 6, the author closes by revealing that Indigenous Andean urbanites and Native Americans in the United States experience similar challenges: sociocultural and historical processes marked by colonization, racism, discrimination, and political maneuvering.

Urban Mountain Beings is a strong expression of the "geographies of pacha (space-time)" that spatializes historicity with sociopolitical reality, Indigenous praxis with feminist methods, and academic concepts with Indigenous toponymy. Fine-Dare calls us to reconsider an Andean Indigenous urban geography drawing on Indigeneity, gender power, and Indigenous pedagogies. Her urban ethnographic proposal can and should be applied in other contexts, although it would benefit from two additional interventions. The first would be to deconstruct some authorial assumptions about urban geography, such as urbanism, rights to the city, food sovereignty, unplanned city, and public space, which are colonial/Western-based notions. Although the study offers key evidence to problematize some of these notions, Indigenous knowledges are not foregrounded in the embodied-visceral ways in which people daily vindicate their own cultural understandings of place/space-making in the cityscape. For example, various photographs (xii, 113, 159, 182, 185) evocatively situate the ethnographic findings around gender power. However, a more nuanced analysis of these ethnographic-spatial snapshots could have also shown us how gender defies colonial/Western urban myths of neutrality, durability, and futurity in space-time by revealing how peoples on the move bring to life transitory infrastructures while they reproduce affective relationships through urban materialities. Urban geography and mobility, guided by the Indigenous gender power, can disempower canons of urban planning and rhetorics produced around the right to city and public space.

Second, a richer picture might have emerged had Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies of...

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