City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito

7. Santa Clara de San Millán: The Politics of Indigenous Genealogy

179 Chapter 7 Santa Clara de San Millán The Politics of Indigenous Genealogy In July 1940, a group of indigenous comuneros from the town of Santa Clara de San Millán on Quito’s outskirts petitioned Ecuador’s minister of social welfare to form an alternate cabildo. This communiqué criticized the current leadership , charging that the body constituted an elite oligarchy, or gamonal, a term usually reserved for landed and agroexport oligarchy. The petition claimed further that the cabildo members had grown wealthy through their manipulation of the community’s common lands. Of particular concern to the petitioners were urban properties that lay in the town’s northern environs, which they charged the cabildo had distributed among themselves. In conclusion, the comuneros alleged that those who were unable to gain the favor of the cabildo for access, such as the elderly or the deaf, were forced to beg in order to survive.1 Pedro Pablo Tumipamba and Francisco Tumipamba, scions of a leading clan, presented the petition. These two brothers had long hoped to join the cabildo ’s membership, only to be thwarted by their father, long-standing legal representative José Federico Tumipamba, who claimed they were still too young. Earlier attempts to appeal his decision, both to the cabildo and the ministry, had ended in failure, precipitating this new strategy of petitioning with sup- 180 \ Santa Clara de San Millán port from the marginalized factions, a tactic that sought to exploit fissures in the comuna.2 For the impoverished and elderly, the pastures and plots of the traditional communal lands represented sustainability for ancestral practices besieged by the expanding city. For local entrepreneur Feliciano Simbaña, on the other hand, common lands provided a resource for the growing network of rental properties; he was thus trading on the very forces of change that threatened his fellow community members. National politics also played a part. As Pedro Pablo and Francisco Tumipamba would have well known, the Ministry of Social Welfare was dominated by socialist intellectuals inclined to support a crusade against a gamonal.3 Whereas his sons had adopted the language of class exploitation in their bid to form an alternate cabildo, José Federico Tumipamba issued a response that deployed decades of experience crafting land histories and local genealogies. In his response, he defended a set of statutes drafted in 1910 that guaranteed the community’s autonomy despite the official prohibition of collective landholdings in the mid-nineteenth century. These thirty-year-old codes afforded the elder Tumipamba a means of challenging the alternate cabildo’s legitimacy, particularly after his brother-in-law, José Gabriel Collahuaso, joined its ranks. Because Collahuaso had been born in the town of Sangolquí in Quito’s southeastern environs, Tumipamba could claim that his participation in the body contradicted a requirement that cabildo membership be hereditary. This argument not only conveniently disregarded Collahuaso’s longtime role as cabildo president but also inherently challenged the juridical primacy of the 1937 Ley de Comunas, which carried no such genealogical requirements for membership. Such a stipulation, however, did exist in Santa Clara’s earlier regulations and had also been debated at the congressional level on various occasions during the 1920s and 1930s.4 Tumipamba’s manipulation of parallel legal codes, along with a second argument he made regarding procedural irregularities in the constitution of the alternate cabildo, ultimately prevailed. Soon after, however, he reached an arrangement with his sons, who finally achieved their desire to join the traditional governing council, having aptly demonstrated precocious political power.5 The 1940 conflict in Santa Clara demarcates several political forces at play within this indigenous community during the early twentieth century. These include generational clashes, economic opportunism, and the manipulation of local histories and genealogies when dealing with both state and internal conflicts . Each of these phenomena lay intertwined within three historical threads. The first thread concerns the critical contestation between the state, the landowning elite, and indigenous communities over control of autonomous ejidos (common pastures) in the town’s environs. The origins of this strife lay in the colonial era but intensified periodically during the nineteenth century. Santa Clara offered consistent challenges to these machinations, often using a strategy 181 / Santa Clara de San Millán common among indigenous populations: underscoring their historic ties to the region and defending colonial land titles. This defensive tactic, however, existed in dynamic tension with the interdependent economic relations the...