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INDIGENOUS ECONOMIES AND PERIPHERIES OF QUITO, ECUADOR
LYDIA ROWEN
Lydia Rowen is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies Environmental Science and Geographic Information Sciences. Since her first year at Carolina, Lydia has volunteered as a mechanic and community organizer at the ReCYCLEry NC, a bicycle cooperative in Carrboro. After graduating, Lydia hopes to work in the public transportation planning space.
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the innovative and tactical ways in which Indigenous peoples navigate urban economies and peripheries of Quito, Ecuador. I rely on external literature, as well as observational information from my time living in Quito (Spring of 2023). Spanish colonial rule and neoliberal policy agendas have resulted in high levels of poverty amongst Ecuador’s Indigenous population. Within the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ), Indigenous peoples have carved out livings for themselves through avenues such as begging, vending, and shoe shining—occupations which are being threatened by modernization discourse. In addition to economic livelihoods, this paper explores the peripheries that Indigenous peoples occupy in and around the DMQ. Some of these peripheries can be defined as semi-autonomous communities that often practice communal property rights and collective labor. This work intends to shed light on the innovative and tactical ways Indigenous peoples negotiate their existences in the face of ongoing state oppression.
INTRODUCTION
This article investigates the innovative and tactical ways in which Indigenous peoples navigate urban economies and peripheries of Quito, Ecuador through a mixed-methods approach. The analysis relies on existing literature as well as personal observations from my time spent in the city in the Spring of 2023. Before we evaluate these channels, we must understand the complex social and historical environment that influences Indigenous life.
Ecuador has fourteen Indigenous nationalities, amounting to approximately one million people. These indigenous populations span across the country, with 68.2% residing in the Sierra (Andean region), 24.06% in the Amazon, and 7.56% along the coast. In the 2010 Census, residents could self-identify with the following Indigenous nationalities: Tsáchila, Chachi, Epera, Awa, Kichwas, Shuar, Achuar, Shiwiar, Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Zápara, Andoa, and Waorani (Jaouen 2023).
There are permanent and temporary Indigenous residents of the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ, referring to the Spanish acronym), with the former primarily belonging to ancestral communities within the DMQ, and the latter to ancestral homelands outside of the DMQ. This paper will discuss both populations and attempt to situate each within the themes of urban labor and living. Inspecting the foundational Spanish colonial systems of exploitation and the compounding agendas of neoliberal policies can shed light on the economic situations of many Indigenous Ecuadorians.
The Spanish colonial economy was “based on the forced labor and debt bondage of the Indigenous population,” where people between the ages of eighteen and fifty were subjugated (Middleton 2003). In fact, church finances heavily relied on this source of labor in agricultural and textile industries in order to accumulate mass amounts of wealth. Fast forward to the 20th century: Ecuador’s government agrees to Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) amidst an economic crisis in order to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Oswaldo Hortado’s administration (1981-1984) signed the first Letter of Intent to the IMF and in doing so, “committed itself to the implementation of further adjustment measures” (SAPRI 2001). Similar to the implementation of many SAPs, the negative impacts disproportionately burdened Indigenous peoples. In the first rounds of the program, “there [was] a focus on large scale, export-based agriculture, and [had] left the small-scale rural agriculturalists in the dust” (Swanson 2007). Consequently, many rural Indigenous peoples chose to leave their ancestral lands to pursue non-agricultural activities—such as shoe shining in the urban informal sector. Since the 1980s, many administrations have pursued this orthodox agenda, which has wrought major economic and social consequences. This agenda includes the elimination of subsidies, inflation, and the increased costs of inputs, transportation, and fuel. Perhaps most significantly, this type of agenda “has had a direct impact on further deterioration and poverty” in Indigenous and agricultural communities (Jaouen 2023).
The history alongside these policies has left the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador in a majorly disadvantaged state. Many have been forced to leave their homelands due to declining agricultural income, or in extreme cases, have faced intimidation by groups seeking illegal mining and oil extraction (Jaouen 2023). Ecuador is a resource-rich country, with poor regulation and oversight of legal and illegal extraction operations. Indigenous peoples have suffered continued impoverished conditions due to this composition of displacement and governmental neglect. 60% of Ecuadorians live in poverty, “while this figure rises to almost 90% among Indigenous peoples” (Swanson 2007).
Indigenous communities have not been silent in the face of these injustices. Ecuador is known for having one of the strongest Indigenous political movements in Latin America, with the main organizing body being the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE, referring to the Spanish acronym). Contesting neoliberalism is foundational to the group’s existence. Indigenous nationalities organize independently and collectively, depending on the scope of their grievance. During the spring of 2023, my friend’s college class visited Yasuní National Park in the Amazon, which is the ancestral homelands of the Waorani Nation. On their way back to Quito, they were traveling the roads built by oil companies and were impeded by a blockade of Waorani people. These blockades are commonplace on Amazonian oil roads, and most often the people blocking the road require fuel in exchange for removing their barrier.
These Indigenous communities are situated in one of the most oil-richgeographies, yet struggle to afford fuel. This is due to more than just ownership over the oil companies: it reflects the multiple dimensions of harm that communities must endure at the hands of the state.
Indigenous communities face discrimination and harm inside Quito’s boundaries, as well. For many of the current Indigenous residents of the DMQ, begging, vending, and shoe shining are their primary occupations in the informal economy. However, these occupations are precariously positioned in the face of government-sponsored modernization. Ecuador, much like other developing countries, aspires to become an international tourist destination. Ecuador seeks to modernize its cities to match the attraction of its incredible natural environments. Quito’s modernization discourse often conflates cleanliness and hygiene with progress. Cities such as New York and Miami are models of modern urban form for the governments of Quito and Guayaquil (the most populous city in Ecuador). In 2002, the city of Guayaquil contracted former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton to “help shape the city’s urban regeneration strategy” (Swanson 2007). In this proposed strategy, it is apparent that Indigenous street vendors and beggars do not conform to the global city ideal.
The DMQ strives for this global city ideal by utilizing policy, planning, and the police force in order to regulate—or more often, remove—Indigenous street workers. There is a perception amongst the planners and city officials that those street workers who support local exchange systems “are a barrier to the modernisation of the historic city center and to its economic regeneration” (Middleton 2003). However, many non-Indigenous residents of the city, such as my host mother, Marti, view these people in a different light. These workers are situated in heavy transportation corridors (sidewalks and streets), so they can offer convenient goods and services to people at low prices. Sitting at an intersection, you have a variety of options, such as having your windshield cleaned or purchasing cheap produce. The DMQ does not want these workers to tarnish the perceived image of Quito as a modern city, so it has implemented tactics to formalize this type of labor. By May of 2003, the municipality had removed 6,900 informal workers from the streets of the city’s historical center. Many were relocated to ten alternative municipal markets, “most of which were far removed from the city center and, consequently, the tourist’s gaze” (Swanson 2007).
In tandem with disrupting their sources of income, the state employs police power against Quito’s street workers. One informal vendor has said “[t]hey hit or throw gas at us men and they call women daughters of [whores]... We have to hide like we’re thieves” (Swanson 2007). When walking around the historic district on a typical day, there are men in uniform with large guns and dogs (as seen in Figure 1). Policing the street vendors is not their sole purpose in these spaces, but they seemingly keep a keen eye out for the informal workers.
In contrast to the recent work of Indigenous peoples selling goods and services in the city, there is documented history of state sanitation and infrastructure workers being people indigenous to the DMQ. These communities have played a crucial role in the construction, maintenance, and sanitation of Quito during the first half of the twentieth century. As Quito expanded its boundaries, these communities were absorbed into the political-legal fabric and were subsequently overlooked in the public sphere. These Indigenous communities “represent a significant contingent of indigenous labor that built public works and provided the conditions necessary for the urban space to exist” (Turiano 2023). Indigenous peoples helped build the city that government officials now deem too beautiful to be touched by their hands. A hygienic racism that “pathologizes indigenous bodies as sick, contaminated, and dirty” continues to inform urban neoliberal revitalization strategies (Swanson 2007). This brand of racism is evident in former Ecuadorian President General Rodríguez Lara’s speech in 1972: “There is no more Indian Problem. We all become white when we accept the goals of national culture” (Swanson 2007). Here, the goals of national culture are to become a white, westernized, and global nation far removed from its Indigenous identity.
Stepping outside of the urban economies of Quito, I am interested in how Indigenous people engage with urban peripheries. There are various forms of informal settlements, many of which are defined as barrios ilegales (illegal neighborhoods) by the municipality. This status means they do not have official approval or urbanization licenses. Since these barrios exist outside of the law, they receive few to no public works services, such as roads and telecommunication lines. It is important to note that these poor, illegal neighborhoods are comprised of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, impoverished mestizos (descendents of Europeans and Indigenous Americans), and other disadvantaged groups.
In addition to these settlement forms, there are Indigenous comunas (communes) within and around the DMQ. The comunas “refer to pre-Columbian settlements and to what later became known as colonial reductions” (Turiano 2023). The reductions were part of a socio-spatial reorganization promoted by the Spanish authorities in 1549. From the ‘urbanize to civilize’ logic, the reorganization consisted of concentrating and relocating Indigenous populations. Eventually, the city “ended up incorporating the communes that were settled in the central and peripheral areas of Quito” (Turiano 2023).In 1937, the Law on Commune Organization and Regime was passed, which gave rise to the legal incorporation of civil society organizations. These were regularly linked to Indigenous and peasant communities, under the label of comunas. There are an estimated forty-six rural and three urban comunas in the DMQ. As stated earlier, these comunas provided the raw source of labor for the city’s growth and development. Residents worked as masons, brick layers, domestic servants, and day laborers.
The comunas of Ecuador are characterized, to varying degrees, by property relations featuring usufruct rights to unalienable lands, participatory democracy, shared Indigenous nationalities, collective practice of communal labor, and community celebrations. Comunas are contested spaces, both internally and externally, to the community itself. In external relations, the comunas are clearly “peripheral to the state project, which emphasizes the more ‘neo-structuralist,’ developmentalist goal of a robust, technically competent national state” (Rayner 2017). These semi-autonomous communities that often practice communal property rights and collective labor are in direct contradiction to the state whose neoliberal agenda pushes for greater privatization and individualism. Given this fact, the comunas face real pressures of dissolution from all levels of government. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were efforts to dissolve the comunas by presidential decree. Municipal planning often threatens comunas through projects, like the Mariscal Sucre Highway (as seen in Figure 2). Constructed in 1976, this busy highway divided the Santa Clara comunas into upper and lower sections and resulted in infrequent movement between the two sections due to dangerous conditions (Rayner 2017).
These communities not only contend with challenges from the outside, but must mediate their own residents’ conflicting desires for the land. As the city expands in its geographic extent, the main tensions in comunas evolve around property rights. Some residents wish to divide up the land into individual property rights and sell their parcels to wealthy developers. In contrast, there are community members who fight for traditional forms of property such as communal land rights.
Although the comunas face serious internal and external negative pressures, they also have several opportunities as a result of their unique legal and political-economic frameworks. The 1998 Ecuadorian Constitution included a clause on collective rights that declared communal lands to be “inalienable, immune from seizure, [and] indivisible,” which greatly strengthened the legal basis of communal property (Rayner 2017). Similar language was reiterated in the plurinational 2008 Constitution and included a list of rights to self-organization, the administration of justice, and consultation. Comunas have used these legal frameworks to protect their way of life. For instance, in 2016, a coalition of seven comunas put a halt to a municipal environmental ordinance which threatened their autonomy and long-term survival.
These newly-granted legal rights are powerful tools and will be increasingly vital as comunas fight to preserve their rights and identities. The leaders of comunas are also younger and more formally educated than past leaders, and can therefore navigate the municipal bureaucracies with greater ease. To me, the very existence of the comunas is a powerful act of resistance against neoliberal and neocolonial forces. The ways in which Indigenous peoples navigate urban economies and peripheries of Quito are innovative and tactical in the face of state oppression. In my research, I found the contradiction between hygienic racism and the historic Indigenous sanitation workers particularly frustrating. Indigenous workers from comunas were municipal employees working as street sweepers and garbage collectors, arbiters of fundamentally cleaner livelihoods, yet continue to be discriminated against on the basis of ‘uncleanliness.’
While reading on this topic, there were limited academic papers that specifically engaged with Indigenous labor and livelihood in Quito. Non-academic sources from the region allowed for deeper analysis, such as the work from Jaouen produced for The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Research in these critical spaces matter because it helps us recognize and support Indigenous ways of life. The forms of adaptation and resistance that we have observed in this paper carry important lessons for other marginalized groups threatened by their states.
WORKS CITED
Fernández, Ilyak & Gómez-García, Antonio. (2018). Evaluación de la vulnerabilidad sísmica de 97 edificaciones de la “Comuna Santa Clara de San Millán”, Quito. Eidos. DOI: 11. 10.29019/eidos.v0i11.417
Jaouen, Morgane. “El Mundo Indígena 2023: Ecuador.” IWGIA. https://www.iwgia.org/es/ecuador/5086-mi2023-ecuador.html
Middleton, Alan. Informal traders and planners in the regeneration of historic city centres: the case of Quito, Ecuador. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S0305900602000612
Rayner, Jeremy. The Struggle For Quito’s Communes: Negotiating Property And Citizenship In Plurinational, Post-Neoliberal Ecuador. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/45172862?seq=1
SAPRI. The Social Impact Of Basic Social Subsidies In Ecuador. University of Cuenca. http://www.saprin.org/ ecuador/research/ecu_soc_sub.pdf
Swanson, K. (2007), Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street Vendors in Ecuador. Antipode, 39: 708-728. DOI: 10.1111/j.14678330.2007.00548.x
Turiano, 2023. “The National Archive of Communes and the Issue of Urban Development in the City of Quito (19371973).” Archival City, https://archivalcity.hypotheses. org/4434
Turiano. “Quito’s Urban Development and Indigenous Labor Force: The Case of the Llano Grande Commune (First Half of the 20th Century).” Archival City, https:// archivalcity.hypotheses.org/5127
