The communes of Quito as a collective inhabitation of territory

The Communes of Quito as a Collective Inhabitation of Territory Imagining self-governance tools for an emancipatory urban production

María Guadalupe Morales Mateo Fernández-Muro In collaboration with Pueblo Kitu Kara and the future Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí

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ABSTRACT There are officially 50 communes in Quito, political autonomous entities recognized by the 2008 Constitution and through the definition of Ecuador as a Plurinational State.

This provides them of self-determination collective rights founded on the communal character of its territories and on their own forms of direct democracy. However, to the eyes of the Municipality and the State, they appear as dots in the map without territorial definition, thus becoming invisible political subjects with no legal power, vulnerable to capital pressures and accelerated urban expansion processes, and devoid from their capacity to exert their collective rights. The recent reconstitution of Pueblo Kitu Kara as a Federation of Communes and Indigenous Communities emerges as a collective response to such situation, outlining an alternative to the crisis of capitalist system from a non-statecentric approach. Our project focuses on this fight and helps to build, framed under the politics of the commons, the planning and governance tools needed to political self-management, fostering economic democratization through cooperativism and laying on a biophysical and socioeconomic study of their communal territories. We consider it is specially from these invisible and marginalized spaces that urban space can be re-territorialized and reclaimed, in an autonomous and emancipatory way.

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It is especially from invisibl marginalized spaces that ur be re-territorialized and rec autonomous and emancipa

OUTLINE

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le and rban space can claimed in an atory way.

INTRODUCTION

SECTION 1 Towards a new territoriality

SECTION 2 Territory and migrant urban indigenous

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SECTION 3 Native urban indigenous: the communes in Quito

SECTION 4 Methodology and theoretical framework

SECTION 5 Project ‘En Común(a)’

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A nuetras familias, a mi padre, a mi madre, a mi querida María, a mi querido Juan Carlos, a nuestrxs classmates, a nuestrxs amigxs, a Helena, a Aurash, a Lucía, a Sebas y Carolina y a toda su familia por alojarnos, a Miguel Robles-Durán, a Miodrag Mitrasinovic, a Bill Morrish, a Lizzie y a Eric, a Héctor Grad, a David Harvey, a toda la Red de Saberes, a Luis, a Henar, a Lucas, a Pancho, a Verónica Morales, a Jeremy Rayner, a Carla Simbaña, a Patrick Hollstein, a Stalin Herrera, a Juan Carlos León, a Ana Rodríguez, a Nora Fernández, a Lenina Nadal, a Frank Morales, a Rob Robinson, a Pele y Beatriz, a Marco León, a Víctor Conchambay, a Juan Mera y a Wilmer Guachamín, a Fernando Cabascango, a Jaime Inty Paucar, a Darío Iza y a todxs los comunerxs del pueblo Kitu Kara, a Marco Carrera, a Lupita Panchi, a Kathrin Hopfgartner, a Alejandra Santillana, a Verónica Santillán, a Camilo Baroja, a las comunas de Quito y a todxs aquellxs que en desde Madrid, DF, Nueva York y Quito nos han ayudado en esta aventura. Seguimos!

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INTRODUCTION Regulated as legal entities under the 1937 Communes Law, yet always in a decreasing number, today there officially exist 49 active communes in the Metropolitan District of Quito. Our research, based both on field trips and recent academic literature, focuses on the legal framework, internal organization and property regimes either sustaining or threatening their existence.

These politically autonomous bodies with indigenous roots have been granted with territorial authority in the last Ecuadorian Constitution, approved in 2008. At a discursive level, the latter provides them of collective self-determination rights founded on the collective ownership of their territories, their own forms of internal direct democracy and the communal character of their social relationships. However, at a more material level, and due to a various number of incongruences, legal voids and contradictions between the different regulations protecting them, they have been rendered almost invisible to the eyes of the State and the Municipality. Officially appearing as single points in

the map, without a territorially defined footprint, they have been devoid from any legal power and any actual capacity to exert their collective rights, and have become weak fragmented entities vulnerable to capital pressures and accelerated urban expansion processes.

One of the most recent urban ordinances that has refused to recognize the territorial authority of the communes is the “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí”, approved by the municipality with speculative purposes but to allegedly protect the Ilaló hill. This latest violation of the communal rights has triggered both the restructuration of a strong indigenous ethno-genetic process, carried out by Pueblo Kitu Kara, and the arising of a political movement for the creation of the Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí. Both spring as a common, collective and pro-active resistance to such situation and aim to provide the communes involved with political power and territorial presence: that what formerly appeared as a unidimensional point to the eyes of the dominant powers, a commune has now the potential to turn into an Aleph for its inhabitants, acquiring a living thickness along a certain dimension that traditional systems of representation are unable to recognize: passive limitlessness can

Meeting in Casa del Pueblo Kitu Kara, February 4, 2016. From left to right: Sebastián Calero, Jeremy Rayner, Fernando Cabascango, Mateo Fernández-Muro, María Guadalupe Morales, Walter, Jaime Paucar Cabrera, Darío Iza, Byron Gallardo and Daniela Yesenia Salazar Villavicencio.

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become pro-active infiniteness. Through several visits to the communes and various online and in-person meetings with Kitu Kara leaders, our ongoing project works in direct collaboration with them and with the creation and ulterior thriving of the Federation of Communes as an objective, helping to envision those forms of political construction capable of activating and fostering the above mentioned shift.

Our first aim, therefore, becomes creating those planning instruments able to reimagine a notion of limit that, while having the real capacity to interfere and negotiate with State ownership regimes, is able to challenge the classical forms of representation defining them. Building upon previous research on communal delimitations and military geographic information, these tools will contribute not only in the geo-reference and ulterior official recognition of communal boundaries, but also in the recovery of the practices and memories that produce them: to that aim, we have developed an online platform which, besides allowing comuneros to work and debate over the different footprints of the communes, includes a register of land use and ownership and a communal census to identify the different collaborative activities within their territories, favoring the consolidation of an economic

structure based on their own resources and knowledges. This, we envision, will lead to the eventual creation of an always evolving internal counter-cadaster for territorial planning and communal zoning that will ultimately contribute to defining production purposes of land, enhancing environmental protection and constructing historical memory.

Beyond a quantitative biophysical and socioeconomic study of their communal territories, we aim above all to the generation of qualitative self-governance tools needed to translate a lifeless system of Cartesian representation into one that, rather than categorizing and “locking� into shape, is capable of harboring and fostering the repertoire of the multiple ancestral and contemporary forms-of-life and practices being deployed in the communes. We consider it is specially from these invisible and marginalized spaces that urban space can be re-territorialized and reclaimed in an autonomous and emancipatory way. In our project, therefore, the preservation and recovery of an indigenous past goes hand in hand with the revalorization of a marginalized rural-urban present in a conjoined effort to reimagine and resignify a collective future for the city of Quito.

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SECTION 1

Towards a new territoriality 1.1. Introduction According to the researcher Valarezo, the link between territory and life constitutes the key element of cosmovision about territoriality shared by indigenous people in the Amazon.

Territory as a life space represents “a system in which every element is a living form, independent from the dynamic of the different parts. A living scenario, where life is produced and reproduced under its own logic, where indigenous men and women are part of that space rather than external and foreign entities”.1 Far away from the Amazon, settled on the outskirts of the city of Quito, native urban indigenous populations inhabit their territories making out of such cosmovision their major form of resistance against neoliberal urban expansion. As such, the notion of territoriality constitutes a cultural construction with philosophical values and principles. That is why territoriality transcends the concept of land as a physical and tangible space and as an ensemble of usable things out of which one can make profit,2 for it includes not only natural components but also -and particularly- historical, cultural and identitarian elements: since the right to use, control and manage every resource coming from land is also entailed in this notion of territoriality, the latter arises therefore as the perfect space from which to formulate a politics of autonomous development. Territory as source of life then becomes the space in which there unravel living cultures, forms of social organization and social subjects with the potential for self-determination. Under this conception, territory ends up entailing both a physical and a spiritual dimension without which we cannot understand the way communal lands are both inhabited and claimed.3 In what follows, we will try to bring some light on the scope of territoriality and its implications on a daily basis in the periurban communes of Quito, as part of a broader discussion that is intimately linked to the political strategies that are put in play as much by indigenous people as by the Ecuadorian State itself.4 1 Valarezo, Galo Ramón, Sara Báez Rivera, and Pablo Ospina Peralta. Una breve historia del espacio ecuatoriano. Work Document, Quito: IEE, Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos / Consorcio CAMAREN, 2004, 208 2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

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1.2. Everyday forms-of-life are political “Those with shitty relationships can only have a shitty politics”.5 Historians like Raúl Zibechi have showed us that forces operating in andean countries towards the transformation of political regimes have always come from indigenous movements, constituted all along the 1980s as a relevant political actor.6 Their claimings, around the recognition and inclusion of their institutions, rights and forms of government within the old national States guided their efforts, from the very beginning, towards the constitutional reform.7 As such, the strong institutional crisis in Ecuador, starting in the late nineties, was resolved (as it first happened in Venezuela and then Bolivia) in a constituent process that partially democratized the State apparatus and rendered constitutional a new welfare model. The latter, appearing in the Ecuadorian Constitution from 2008 with the kichwa term of Sumak Kawsay -or ‘good living’ in English-, is perhaps the most ambitious social project all throughout Latin America.

Approved after eight months of work by the new constituent assembly called by the newly elected President Rafael Correa, the new Ecuadorian Constitution does not recognize itself in the classical liberal division between civil, political and social rights. At its very core, at least at a theoretical level, we find the regime of the “good living”, the Sumak Kawsay, which forces the State to implement a wide series of measures and guarantees, among which we can find mechanisms of direct participation such as People Legal Initiatives. This notion means distilling the management of knowledge and work practices of a whole society according to the values of an Andean idealized cosmovision. Sumak Kawsay would then mean that the internal production of the country would be led under the precepts of collectives’ ancestral knowledges, potentiated through scientific research and technology. In the current political scenario, this term is used under a holistic frame with the aim of rendering visible the cultural diversity and heritage enjoyed by Ecuadorian population.8 Also discursively, the Constitution explicitly forbids 5 The Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015, 165 6 Zibechi, Raúl. Dispersar el poder: los movimientos como poderes antiestatales. Barcelona: Virus, 2007 7 Rodríguez López, Emmanuel. Hipótesis Democracia. Quince tesis para la revolución anunciada. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2013, 306 8 Durango Cordero, Miguel Felipe. “Esos Otros Saberes”: El Conocimeinto Ecológico Local En La Producción Agrícola Campesina: Un Estudio de Caso En La Comuna Indígena La Tola Chica En Tumbaco,

the nationalization of private debt by the State and regulates the framework of an explicitly anti-neoliberal economic policy.9 However, no practical strategy is envisioned to execute what this new inclusive form of State organization implies.10 The paradox emerging from the constituent process in Ecuador and especially from the government of Correa is that both happened at the very time when social movements were showing increasing exhaustion and weakness. The president has thus become the head of a political project that adjusts itself to popular claims and necessities yet cannot find an autonomous form of articulation of its own, capable of being independent from the State. As the spanish political theorist Emmanuel Rodríguez noticed in 2013, “the limitations of a “good government” are symmetrical to the weakness of a real democracy in motion”. The current lack of the latter has actualized Rodríguez’s predictions: merely trusting institutional architecture and by the sole means of State apparatuses, the “revolución ciudadana” promoted by Alianza País has become dependent to and limited by its main figure, Rafael Correa, which has led to disastrous consequences.

Correa government and its “inevitable” implementation of neoliberal policies -at the cost of social and indigenous movements that put him in power- has been the perfect proof of that maxim from the French collective The Invisible Committee: “one can throw oneself on to the state apparatus, but if the terrain that’s won is not immediately filled with a new life, government will end up taking it back”.11 And that new life is what is needed. Fully reinhabiting one’s territory, according to the French collective, is all that can be set against the paradigm of government, and that’s what Emmanuel Rodríguez refers to when talking about “democracy in motion”. The indigenous notion of territoriality reemerges here under a new light. “What gives insurrections their punch, and their ability to damage the adversary’s infrastructure in a sustained way”, affirm the French thinkers, “is precisely their level of self-organization of communal life”.12 Resistance to the neoliberal State exerted by the communes in DMQ, especially those under the Pueblo Kitu Kara identity as we will see later on, are an evidence of the intuitive link between self-organization and blockage that the Invisible Committee is suggesting.

Referring to the Aymara insurrection in Bolivia in 2003, Raúl Zibechi, writes: “In these movements, organization is not separate from daily life. In insurrectionary action it is daily life itself that is deployed.” And such is the case of the communes Ecuador. Tesis Para Obtener El Título De Maestría En Estudios Socioambientales . Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2014, 5 9 Rodríguez 2013, 309 10 Durango Cordero 2014, 5 11 The Invisible Committee 2015, 164 12 Ibid., 89

in Quito, where daily life, territory and resistance have become a whole unity after decades and even centuries of struggle.

“Actions of this magnitude cannot be consummated without the existence of a dense network of relationships between persons— relationships that are also forms of organization”, affirms Zibechi. “The problem is that we are unwilling to consider that in everyday life the relationships between neighbors, between friends, between comrades, or between family, are as important as those of the union, the party, or even the state itself”.13 The Communes in Quito do not seem to have this problem. They have understood, as The Invisible Committee would say, that “(t)here’s not on one hand a pre-political, unreflected, “spontaneous” sphere of existence and on the other a political, rational, organized sphere”. Their proactive resistance starts “from their own presence, from the places they inhabit, the territories they’re familiar with, the ties that link them to what is going on around them”.14 Through their alliance of knowledgespowers-capacities they inhabit and create the world.15 They have understood, in short, that each and every form of life they deploy within their territories is a firm and blunt political stance against the neoliberal project enclosing them.

1.3. Territory and power In this chapter we prove that power of land has not only as an asset that provides resources but a tool of empowerment in a social context. So, we explore how the land can be a mechanism to potentiate or encourage three types of power: “the power for”, “the power with” and “the power inside” that refer to the collective organization and decision making. Therefore, the increment of the power of one is equal to the increase of total power available or for everyone.

We believe that the collective or communal land can detonate and foster the three positive powers. “The power for” serves to channel the change when a person or leader of a group motivates and directs the actions of others. It is a generator power that opens the possibilities and action without trying to dominate them.16 “The power for” is related with “the power with” that 13 Zibechi 2007 as quoted in The Invisible Committee 2015, 164 14 The Invisible Committee 2015, 164 15 Fernández-Savater, Amador. “Reabrir la cuestión revolucionaria (lectura del Comité Invisible).” Interferencias, eldiario.es. January 23, 2015. http://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/comite_invisiblerevolucion_6_348975119.html (accessed November 2015); FernándezSavater, Amador. “Del paradigma del gobierno al paradigma del habitar: por un cambio de cultura política.” Interferencias, eldiario.es. March 11, 2016. http://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/paradigma-gobiernohabitar_6_491060895.html (accessed March 2016) 16 León, Magdalena, and Carmen Deere. Género, propiedad y

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allows to share the power which is manifested when a group generates a collective solution for a common problem. These two powers also allowed that all the potentialities are expressed in the construction of a group agenda that is also assumed individually.17 Then “the power inside” is based in the generation of force from the inside of individuals and related with the selfesteem It is manifested in the ability to resist the power of others by rejecting demands not desired.18 We consider the communes’ organization toward the defense of their collective land as a clear example of these three powers, since it allows equality and inclusion between their members.

This is possible through the asset that joins them which is their communal land that has allowed them to resist several external and internal pressures as well as provide them with a tool for negotiation.19 As the researcher Verónica Santillán states, the socio-territorial character of peasant communities has not been established in advance nor is it something fixed in time, but it is rather the result of a constant struggle for the rights over communal lands. This struggle can be translated into a search for those territorial limits wherein production activities and cultural-territorial identity may be exerted. The presence of the community as a social entity therefore transcends the mere legal ordinance, the nexus to any State institution or even the presence of ethnic groups.20 The creation of the legal figure of the “commune” in the 1930’s and 1940’s constitutes an important step for the consolidation of the various social and political movements in Ecuador. By legal definition, the communes are cooperative associations that allow to hold usufruct rights over the land, but they lack of any political power; nonetheless, the internal organization put in place among the different members of the commune for its own proper functioning provides the latter with political strength vis-á-vis the management of their territory and their resources. This internal political organization has allowed the communes to slowly gain representation and respect before local governments who, according to the Ecuadorian empoderamiento: tierra, Estado y mercado en América Latina. Ciudad de México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2000 17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 The commune is, among other things, a form of social organization that, articulated to a legal subject recognized by the State, allowed indigenous peasants to own a title which provided them with access and usufruct to a collective land.

20 Ibarra, Hernán. La otra cultura. Imaginarios, mestizaje y modernización. Quito: Abya-Yala / Marka, 1998, 186 as quoted in Santillán Sarmiento, Verónica Natalie. Presión Urbana sobre Áreas Rurales. Transformación Territorial en la Parroquia de Tumbaco 20012010. Caso de Estudio de las Comunas Leopoldo N. Chávez y Tola Chica.

Tesis para Obtener el T. de Maestría en CCSS con Mención en Desarrollo Local y Territorial. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2014, 28-29

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Constitution, are now supposed to consult the communes about any intervention to be performed within their limits.

However, for many reasons that we will explain later on, this is hardly the truth. In fact, communes are far from being considered in municipal interventions, which is affecting their territorial organization as well as producing important levels of segregation among different groups of inhabitants. Nonetheless, communes have found the way to overcome huge territorial shifts going on all around them, developing different strategies to strengthen and maintain their organization with the aim of avoiding their disappearance.21 Later in this chapter we will delve in the political organization, communal activities and social practices in the communes that will help us to analyze the renovated resistance against the forces of capital and the State they have been recently exerting.

1.3.1. Social bonds produce territorial boundaries After years -even centuries- of struggles against these forces, it seems the communes have decided, using here the language from the French collective The Invisible Committee, to take on the secession that capital already practices, but in their own way.

“Seceding is not carving a part of the territory out of the national whole, it’s not isolating oneself, cutting off communications with all the rest—that would be certain death. Seceding is not using the scraps of this world to assemble counter-clusters where alternative communities would bask in their imaginary autonomy vis-à-vis the metropolis.” On the contrary, for the communes in Quito, seceding has meant inhabiting a territory, “assuming their situated configuration of the world, their way of dwelling there, the form(s) of life and the truths that sustain them, and from there entering into conflict or complicity”.

The challenge now -already accepted by the communes and starting to materialize under the form of a potential Federation of Communes- is to “link up strategically with other zones of dissidence, intensifying their circulations with friendly regions, regardless of borders”. The fact that the communes lack of a defined territorial delimitation, as we will explain later on, has rendered this task undoubtedly easier: communes have understood that “to secede is to break not with the national territory but with the existing geography itself. It’s to trace out a different, discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form of an archipelago”.22 It is for tracing and structuring this constellated form that we will offer our collaboration since it will 21 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 52 22 The Invisible Committee 2015, 185

be in this process where the Federation of Communes will find the power for its stemming and the force of its expansion.

In order to achieve that, we could not forget that an important part of such constellation will be those groups of indigenous peasants that, dispossessed of their land and due to the increasing lack of resources in the rural areas of Ecuador, have found themselves in the need to migrate to the urban areas in order to find proper means of living. In this process, they have suffered discrimination, exploitation and eventual relegation to a marginal condition. Once in the city, and similarly to the indigenous peri-urban communes, these indigenous populations have suffered from displacement due to aggressive neoliberal policies favoring the construction of big urban renewal projects and a fierce speculation on land. As a response, but above all as a mechanism of survival in the city, they have developed an invisible infrastructure of mutual support and help that not only reproduces the social relations they used to have back in their rural communities but also produces new complementary socioeconomic bonds with equally affected populations.

However weak and powerless this mutual-aid network among indigenous migrants might still be, we see in it an enormous potential to be part of the seceded geography that the communes are tracing against capital and State forces.

Our project aims therefore to identify its weaknesses and contradictions but above all to highlight these potentialities so as to be able to foster them and turn them into an organic form of resistance to neoliberal urbanization. We consider it is specially from these invisible and marginalized spaces that urban space can be re-territorialized and reclaimed in an autonomous and emancipatory way.

1.3.2. Fight for Empowerment, Empowerment with Territory, Territory through Fight “It’s in the open offensive against this world that the commune will find the allies that its growth demands. The growth of communes is the real crisis of economy, and is the only serious degrowth”.23 The term empowerment and power in the social context could seem incompatible since by experience it has been a source of oppression by its abuse but it can also be a source of emancipation by its use.24 The power relationships can mean 23 The Invisible Committee 2015, 216 24 León & Deere 2000

either domination or resistance. In the case of resistance refers to the existent power sources or as a mechanism to obtain the power over them.25 It is important to differentiate four different types of power while promoting the empowerment concept related to the land ownership. So, in the first place we have, “the power over” which refers to the increase of power of one is the decrease of power for other. This is the only type of power that has a negative connotation toward a social context. On the other hand, we have “the power for”, “the power with” and “the power inside” which have an accumulative and positive connotation for the social context since the increment of one represent the increase of total power available or for everyone.26 While land has the potentiality to encourage one or all of these types of power. We have seen that “the power over” land has been the one that has dominated the land ownership. If the ownership of a land is controlled by the State whose decisions are based in the market economy and investors interests the population is situated in a vulnerable and disadvantaged position. If the land is attractive in some way for the private sector or the State then it can be taken away without the proper economic and more important social recognition of its value. So, it is also implicit that “the power for”, “the power with” and “the power inside” are not foster by the State since they could represent the obstacle to developing their projects.

They are also not foster because of a lack of interest or equality in opportunities in various sectors. Therefore, if their land is not expropriated then they are not incentivized with services, infrastructure, knowledge or technology as other sectors in order to grow in capacities and abilities.

In Latin America, the right to the land and the control of how to use it, as well as of the purpose and the benefits obtained through it, are directly associated with the empowerment of the individuals or communities owning that land. In fact, the right to the land is constructed historically and socially through time and because of its importance to provide different types of opportunities and possibilities, its recognition has been very contested and conflictive. In the case of Ecuador, for instance, the indigenous have been fight for centuries for the collective ownership and autonomy of their territories.

We know the access to property plays an important role in the definition of alternative opportunities to generate revenues, and it has become crucial for disenfranchised communities to respond to necessity and adversity27: the possibility of having a property gives social security by allowing the development of different activities that generate income. In this sense, the land ownership is an economic asset that brings wellness to the individuals, as it reduces their vulnerability by providing 25 26 27

León & Deere 2000 León & Deere 2000 León & Deere 2000

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them with the means and sources to live by selling, renting or producing the land. Therefore, this kind of welfare refers to the control and management over the distribution of the benefits provided by the ownership of a property.

But what we are exploring here is a rather different issue: our interest is focused on that kind of empowerment provided by land that goes beyond the material benefits and turns into a mechanism of negotiation, resistance and unity. It is relevant in this sense to highlight the bond between land and community existing within peasant and indigenous people who own communal land. Both community and land, in fact, can be considered as a whole, inasmuch the history of the peasant communities and the communes in Quito is that of the fight for ancestral territories. This bond can be seen, then, as a formal force resisting the State.28 The Invisible Committee proposes a beautiful image that we will remix here to help understand such bond: a simple statement like “the E35 highway or La Ruta Viva will never cross my commune” can make comuneros’ organize their own lives so as to prove this statement true. “On the basis of this quite particular point on which there is no question of yielding, the whole world reconfigures itself”. The struggle in the communes and indigenous communities, then, “concerns the whole world, not because it is defending the ‘common good’ in general, but because a certain idea of what is good is commonly thought in the struggle”.29 Here then lies the importance of the recognition of their collective rights over the land, which explains the fight for both a formal and a real equality that communes and indigenous communities have been holding for years. While the formal equality refers to the rights granted by the 2008 Constitution, as we will see, the real refers to the materialization of such rights.30 This differentiation arise due to the fact that many of the rights granted at a theoretical and discursive level are not enacted and actualized in favor of the citizens, especially when these rights are territorially-based. Thus many of the groups owning land in a collective or individual manner are fighting for this real equality and for their rights to be actually complied. The opportunity, therefore, to create or develop their own social, economic, political and cultural force, is embedded in the achievement of that goal. Only by having this autonomy of decision and management, will they obtain empowerment through their land.

We shouldn’t overlook the fact, nevertheless, that this struggle is not only reactive or resistive, but mainly proactive and constructive, as we will study later. Furthermore, the very fight for empowerment over the territory is already creating empowerment. And not only: in an ulterior tour-de-force, we can 28 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 29 29 The Invisible Committee 2015, 185 30 León & Deere 2000

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say these struggles are meanwhile producing territory. So this is not just about people defending a ‘territory’ in the conditions they found themselves in, but about people inhabiting it “with thoughts of what it could become”. They are making this

territory exist, constructing it, giving it a consistency.31 Indeed, as the french collective evoke, “the ways of living that are being invented or rediscovered in the very course of the conflict” -and 31 The Invisible Committee 2015, 186

which we are humbly contributing to foster through our project-, rather than “the fact of being faced with the same capitalist restructuring” and State oppression, is that what will be capable of linking the various different struggles over the territory.

On top of Cerro del Ilaló. Limit between communes of Tola Chica, San Francisco de Tola Grande and Leopoldo Chávez. February 6, 2016

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SECTION 2

Territory and migrant urban indigenous 2.1. Introduction The process by which indigenous communities have been incorporated to the cities is a recurrent topic in Latin American geographical studies in the last years, and it has been presented under two different approaches, according to the researcher Víctor Jácome: on one hand, as we have seen, we find those indigenous populations that have arrived to the city due to internal migration and, after gathering and associating themselves with members of their same community, have led to the creation of neighborhoods where they can maintain their cultural practices and rebuild their identities according to that new territory. On the other hand, conversely, we find those indigenous communities and communes that throughout the centuries -before, during and after Spanish colonization- have been occupying territories around the city -some of them already absorbed- either as free indigenous or as working force in the haciendas.1 These two different groups have been defined as “urban indigenous”, a term that allows us to address in a different manner the historical association of the indigenous with the “rural” as well as their characterization as mestizos for the mere fact of being part of the city. Jácome claims, in fact, that conceiving indigenous people as strictly rural, traditional, primitive, ancestral or underdeveloped -just entering a whitening process when moving to the city- has less and less relevance since their presence in the city and the maintenance of a culture and identity of their own is an undeniable situation.2 In this first chapter, we will first place our focus in the first group mentioned above, the migrant urban indigenous. By studying the systemic reasons why they have been dispossessed of land, displaced and forced to migrate to the cities, we will then analyse the discrimination, exploitation and marginal situation they experience in the urban areas. To understand that, we will focus on the neoliberal reforms applied in Ecuador in the last decades and how these affected communal land ownership, collective production and social safety that those two provided. In the last part of the chapter we will address the structure of mutual 1 Jácome Calvache, Víctor Julio. Economía Política e Identidades en las Comunas Peri-Urbanas de Quito. Tesis para Obtener el Título de Maestría en Antropología. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2011, 16 2 Ibid.

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aid and support they have been able to create in order to survive and even progress. From it, we will extract those weaknesses and potentialities that we consider improving and fostering respectively through our project.

2.2. Neoliberal Reforms In this chapter we explore the neoliberal reforms and practices related to the land ownership in Ecuador and some of their consequences. Some of the consequences were directly related to the ownership of that land like the agrarian land reforms and colonization that tried to respond to the social pressure of land necessity and to incentivize the economic development through the oil production and industrial agriculture.

These actions had as consequences deforestation which was even propitiated by the government for the colonization of forest lands.

In other cases, the forest or green areas were deforested in order to cultivate on it and demonstrate the land was being used and that it had a “social purpose”. The land had to produce a specific amount of products in order to comply with the social purpose or otherwise it was expropriated. This provoked the overexploitation of the land additionally to the enforcement of modern practices that damaged the land by eroding it and leaving it infertile.

Migration is one of the biggest consequences of the neoliberal reforms which reflects in the search of land to have means of living in the case of the colonization or to urban areas in search of jobs to sustain themselves since in the rural areas the land was eroded, too small to produce enough to sell or the population was being displaced by the affectation or expropriation of their land. In these cases, the immigrants belong to the sector without land which situation put them in a vulnerable situation in the city. On the other hand, we have the ones that have resisted many of the neoliberal reforms like some indigenous communities and communes. In both cases what gives them this power of resistance is the possession of land that is recognized by the State.

2.2.1. Agrarian Land Reform The colonization and the agrarian land reform were two strategies of the same politics that worked together to achieve the government goals. On one hand, they wanted to integrate the marginal sector of peasants to the active society and on the other they wanted to incorporate extensive “vacant’ areas to the productive territory. Therefore, the argument used was that they were lands with a lot of population while they were other “vacant” (not really because were indigenous communities

Payment Facilities

State Owned Land

Church Owned Land

properties) so they needed to be colonized. The agrarian land reform had to achieve social and economic objectives of solving the precarious work and generating more revenues from their agriculture sector. It is important to emphasize the difference between the distribution of land through the agrarian land reform which was sold with payment and economics facilities and the colonization which was the allowance to occupy the “vacant” land for production purposes.

From 1964, the military government of Ecuador recognized the necessity of an agrarian land reform to change the structure of the agriculture and that needed to be articulated through the colonization if the country wanted to achieve the industrialization. By that time, 0.4% of the big owners or “hacendados” occupied 45% of the productive land while 90% of the small properties or “latifundios” were too small to support a family. They were attempts before to change this situation by older governments but landowners refused the abolition of the precarious work. However, in the last period of governance of Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, some modifications to the reform were implemented by enacting “The Law of Agriculture Precarious Work Abolition” and the pushing colonization programs.

Since the land of the “hacendados” was private it couldn’t be distributed, Therefore, the land or “haciendas” of the State

“Social Purpose”

and the Church were the ones distributed while the private were limited just to their extensions. The agrarian land reform distribution consisted that the land was sold with several economic and payment facilities. In this first agrarian land reform, the only success achieved was the colonization through the relocation of families in “vacant” land in the west coast and in the south of the Amazons and the legalization of their ownership.

Some indigenous communities abandoned their traditional economy when their lands were occupied and colonized through the government incentive. They also fragmented their communal land in lots to make them farms for cattle raising in order to be certified and protected of being colonized as happened in the province of Pastaza. In this sense, the State promoted the division of land and transformation of communal land in private in order to adjust the law. There is an estimation that the distribution of land and the abolition of precarious work was equivalent to the 61% but in the next agrarian land reform the reversion and expropriation of land were equivalent to 68% and the reduction of the precarious work was of 16%. For this reason, the consequences of the agrarian land reform and the incapacity to pay for the land was seen in the next reform period.

In the second agrarian land reform was enacted when the military government took over again from 1973-

VACANT

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Payment Facilities

State Owned Land

Church Owned Land

“Social Purpose”

VACANT

1979. By this time the “hacendados” have sold a significant portion of their properties but they still preserve a third of their best and more productive lands. Therefore, the 70% of the rural families tried to survive with less than 8% of the agriculture lands so the production of food become stagnant. The second agrarian land reform was seen as a necessity for the economic development. The big owners were against it since the limits imposed by the first agrarian land reform for the private land enable them to make more profit. So, they got in an agreement which took the limitations of the properties as long as the land had a social function: the efficient agriculture production.

The social efficient production meant that according to their geographic, ecological and infrastructure conditions they should be exploited no less than 80% of their capacity in order to not be expropriated. Additionally, this law reform also contemplated that the existence of precarious work without wage or the demographic pressure were valid reasons for expropriation which in fact accelerated the distribution of land. In this sense, a movement toward the grant of land arose where the peasants organized in communes, workers association or pre-cooperatives relied on the reform for claiming land.3 This law benefited the big owners and left millions of 3 Chiriboga, Manuel. Transformaciones Agrarias del Ecuador.

Quito: IGM deI Ecuador, 1988

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peasants’ families that lived as itinerant workers without land in the city or coast plantations. The colonization became the alternative to the agrarian land reform like for example when the “Quito-Lago Agrario” highway was finished and the government declared that the northeast part of the oil development was open to becoming an area for migration and expansion. The government offered a land of 50 acres with the condition that the residents cut half of the forest in five years to demonstrate an effective use. The immigrants arrive from the highlands and the Pacific coast to claim the vacant lands according to the new colonization laws. Although, the colonization brought consequences and loss of land to other groups since the State defined the land for colonization the ones owner according to them and without considering the rights of the native indigenous population. This action toward the indigenous communities represented a direct confrontation of them from the State by ignoring their land rights, history and citizens status. In 1980, a committee formed by government officials and indigenous communities that were dispossessed of their land reached an agreement about the colonization land. In the confrontation, Urban the developers sustained that 50 acres were enough for the Expansion indigenous communities while the experts sustained that the native economies needed larger pieces of land. At the end, they only accepted some modest concessions toward the indigenous communities.

Urban Expansion

Speculation

Urban Expansion

Land

Land

In this period also big acres of land where collective adjudicated by legalized land to indigenous groups so the right of the indigenous communities is formalized and their territory is recognized. The confrontation of colonists and indigenous groups started as the indigenous started their initiatives in defense of their older territories and the first organizations with the purpose of defending their land were created. This was the first resistance that born from their identity of being a community. In this sense, the indigenous groups had to acquire the status of colonists to access the land ownership that was granted as communal lands.

Additionally, later on, the colonists of the land also failed to retain the land since they were incapable of paying the annual fees or credits granted to occupy it. Besides that, they couldn’t access credits for modernization or machinery or simply couldn’t produce enough food. This originated that the colonist left their land for a small amount of their actual value and the big landowners bought their land and enlarged their territory. There were credits available for the agriculture sector to foster the industrialization because of the Ecuador revenues through the oil exploitation. But the only ones able to access these credits where the big producers which only help them to consolidate their status and position over the small producers. The colonization happened in any place where highways were constructed and land was “available”. In consequences, this provoked deforestation and dispossession of land from the indigenous for whom happened immediately because they couldn’t maintain the production. The

oil administration conducted to other problems like the massive public debt by mortgaging the future oil production, devaluation, and political instability. This show contradictory development State politics which actions were performed on propose to develop the capitalist production in the agriculture sector.

Finally, the last agrarian reform of 1994 strengthens private ownership over the land, since it eliminated the restrictions on the properties transfer. The expropriations were limited and established that the transfer of land should be done through money payment only. The money payment was an obstacle to many indigenous and peasants’ families who didn’t have the resources to buy their properties. Additionally, the prices increase since the administration costs to title the land and to legalized it had to be absorbed by the owners. Also, the law authorized the division of communal lands in private and individual ones through voting which was prohibited in past reforms. If the voting two-thirds of the members of the community wanted the division, then the communal land became private. This division affected the communal lands and decreased them and fostered the creation of pieces of land so small to be enough to exploit.

In this reform, the land ownership discussion was translated instead to the mechanism to impulse the agriculture development through the market economy. The law established a strategy for the capitalist accumulation in the agriculture sector through the agrarian rent and land rent that were sought to be integrated into the financial market. The law focus in the modernization through

VACANT

Urban Expansion

Urban Expansion

Speculation

Urban Expansion

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the business administration model that allowed the access of the financial sector to the land and agriculture products.

The law was basically the consolidation of the privatization of the communal land where many indigenous families changed their lands to private. The dynamics of the land as a resource was transferred to the families instead of being of the commune.

Many authors pointed this as the rupture of the deterritorialization of the rural that marked a rupture between agriculture, land and alimentation. The agriculture lost inherence in the organization and distribution of the local territory and passed to be subject to the transnational companies’ interests as a consequence of the globalization and neoliberal

2.2.2. Oil Extraction and Change of the Matrix Production As stated before the agrarian land reform was directly related to the colonization which was meant to response to the socioeconomic pressures of the population growth and to the crisis of the agriculture sector. It was necessary to explore other investment and ways of development that ended in being capitalist measures that originated massive colonization of the areas with oil, especially in the Amazon region. The areas where the State discovered oil were also the areas where the highways were constructed as part of the agriculture colonization program.

In a lot of these areas, a lot of deforestation and indigenous displacement happened. The construction of the highways facilitated the access to the Amazons which was and still is the primary forest where there is oil. From this moment, the population of the region was defined by the distribution of land granted to the colonist that were located at the margins of the highways and commercial activities that demanded employees.

The process of colonization in this area was a starting point of the overexploitation of natural resources and the enlargement of the agriculture frontier that restricted the production.

From 1960 to 1994 one fifth of the west forest of the country disappeared at the same time the indigenous communities only retained a small fraction of their original lands. It was not until 1972 that the oil production started when the “Quito-Lago Agrario� highway allowed to access the production when it was finished. The government demanded the oil companies construct the highways and bridges necessary for the oil extraction. These national politics have damaged the Amazon territory that has been subject to migration flows where colonization was used as an alternative to the need of land and as a business.

Since 1980, the oil income became an important money source for the country that brought more than half of the total

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annual fiscal earnings and with it the land affection also continues happening. A current example is the National Park of Yasuni and the Huaorani Territory that were divided into plots and given in concession to oil companies for extraction. This also has opened the doors to other industries to occupy the area such as mining, tourism, wood, etc. This has harmed the native communities that lived there since even though they have presented resistance they also have learned to cohabitate with the oil industry and its implications or consequences, especially in their culture. Even though the park has been considered the protected area, since 1979, the Huaroni community continue to be displaced and in the better of the cases, their land has been ecologically damaged.

2.2.3. Deforestation The deforestation was one of the consequences of colonization in which colonists that were granted with “vacant� land arrived at the forest areas. In this process, a fifth of the east forest was lost because of the agriculture activities and indigenous properties were also expropriated and taken away from them. The base of expropriation of land, in this case, is also the economy and the propitiation of the agriculture by allowing the use of the forest land and by expanding the established limits for the agriculture practices called the agriculture frontier. In some cases, the expansion of the agriculture in the forests was related to the highways construction when these one connected or gave access to the market. These new highways created a market for the land that also created demand and speculation toward it. It is important to emphasize that the deforestation occurs because of the products and services that land in the forests can offer which also defined the responses and the internal regional and local processes of the land use. It is estimated that the land affected by deforestation in the last decades was caused by the increase in the agricultural sector where forests were transformed in areas for crops and pasture.

At the beginning it was originated by the industry of cacao and bananas, then by the migration of peasant in search of land to live and work, later the construction of highways detonated another peak in the deforestation and which also generated economical local hubs that demanded services, products and food that can be obtained in the forest. The occupation of forest areas was significant in the colonization where the distribution of land was granted to farmers that were able to demonstrate they were using the land were occupying. The insecurity of the land ownership and the necessity to demonstrate the land was being used provoked the deforestation in order to cultivate and demonstrate it was having a use. In the same period, the

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credits and subsidies of the government favored the cattle raising producers especially to the ones with big production.

These credits helped them to mechanize their production and from which they left unemployed many persons. Therefore, the government opened more fiscal subsidies between 1970 and 1980 for the biggest palm oil producers and cattle raisers if they worked the periphery land of the Amazons basin. This caused the acceleration of the geographic expansion of agriculture in the lower areas of the forest. But there was small support for the improvement of the agriculture procedures which resulted in low returns in the agriculture and cattle production. Nowadays the deforestation that happens is more connected with the immigrant flows in search for land which was and still is an intermittent process.

2.2.4. Erosion The agriculture processes foster by the State to overexploit the land had other consequences like the erosion of the soil.

The erosion is also connected with the lack of investment and guidance in the agriculture production from the State. It is also one of the effects of deforestation as the consequence of the land that has been deforested. The bad practices in agriculture such as the burning of the soil, the agriculture production in the hillsides and the water irrigation management between others are some of the human practices responsible for the erosion of the land in Ecuador. It is believed that around 50% of the territory of Ecuador is eroded and continues advancing. Many peasants when their land gets affected and it becomes unproductive and is not useful anymore, they abandon it and the erosion continues to underground soil layers. It is important to mention that erosion happens not just because agriculture practices but also because of natural processes like the water runoff and the wind. The human factors exacerbate the natural ones by making more vulnerable the land; In the agriculture practices, the natural vegetation is replaced with mulched that protects less the soil. Additionally, the agriculture practices exacerbate the discrepancy between the “production market objective and the ideal conservationist production”.

The steep lands are favorable for the erosion although it doesn’t originate it but is where erosion find a favorable environment to continue and expand. Ecuador is a territory characterized by the large and steep slopes because of the mountains ranges which make it prone to erosion. It is a process that continues and is aggravating because the peasants don’t relate their practices with the phenomenon and they haven’t been informative campaigns of how to stop it or reduce it in the agricultural sector by the State. The erosion is one of the causes

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from the neoliberal structure affected the land since it is produced by the actions to incentivize the economy and the production not just for the local demand but for the external. In this sense in order to satisfy this demand, it was necessary to overexploit the land, industrialize the production and utilize the natural resources without care for their preservation. The peasant voluntarily abandoned their land and migrate to the urban areas in search of opportunities. The passed from having land from which they can live from it to have to leave in order to find means of living in the cities. They became part of the marginal and segregated sector which have other difficulties for them in the urban areas.

2.3. Migration to the city The consequences of the neoliberal reforms can be seen very easily in one of the processes that Ecuador has suffered the last years related to their population which is the migration caused by the search for opportunities and better life conditions. The flows of people moving from rural to urban areas have always existed but have reached a considerable amount of people moving to the city the last years in Ecuador especially after the adoption of neoliberal reforms and its consequences. At the beginning the migration was internal but after 90’s it became mostly international to countries like Spain, Unites States, Italy, Chile, and Venezuela. But what originated this increase of migration in

the country?

The migration in general terms is directly connected with the economy of the country and this increase or decrease the migration does with it. The internal migration originated between 1950 and 1970 because of the need of the population to find new land for agriculture and cattle raising. The mountains area experienced an expansion and increase of population caused by the migration flows. But the big migration flows happened first in the 80’s when the oil prices collapsed and the most affected sector where the ones related to the agriculture. In the 90’s and still in the 00’s the country suffered and impoverishment of their population which at the moment was the one with more acceleration in Latin America. The percentage of poor people went from 34% to 71% in addition with the detriment of the welfare and social security. The second wave of migration in the 90’s happened because of the continuance of the low oil prices and weather conditions that affected the production.

The economic situation affected the most the population in Ecuador because of the inequalities that prevailed. The wealth was concentrated in a small sector that with the crisis situation increase. The distribution of resources and land was unequal and this situation aggravated the already economy crisis happening in all Latin America but some countries and its population were more vulnerable like in the case of Ecuador.

In the cities as Quito, this created urban popular layers from an indigenous population with a country origin but that

The migration in general terms is directly connected with the economy of the country and this increase or decrease the migration does with it.

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Even if migration flows have always existed in Ecuador, they have increased in the last decades due to the adoption of neoliberal reforms and the consequences derived from them. have been already urbanized. The population of this new layer suffers from racism and precarity. In order to overcome it, they have developed their proper strategies of incorporation to the city through networks and relationship that has their origins back in their communities. The immigrants became itinerant entities without land that provides them with house or means for production. Therefore, it is an example of the importance that land acquires for the people and why it also becomes a mean of desire for the industry and for speculation that at the end also is a tool for control and power.

2.3.1. Rural/Urban dynamics The relation of the city with rural areas is strongly affected by the flows of rural population, especially of indigenous communities, and their incorporation into urban areas. Such incorporation is nothing but the most recent version of a long historical process of displacement that has been taking place from the sixteenth century on, with different intensities, in the main cities in Ecuador. It is the same process -explained later in this research- that ultimately led into the assimilation of periurban indigenous communes to the urban area of Quito, radically modifying their social, economic and cultural relations as a result of the production of new urban spaces. Similarly to what happens today, the incorporation of broad layers of indigenous population in the city did not imply, however, the loss of its culture and identity, but rather a means to produce, reproduce and transform them. Let’s take a closer look to such reality in what follows.

Even if migration flows have always existed in Ecuador, they have increased in the last decades due to the adoption of neoliberal reforms and the consequences derived from them, as seen earlier. From the 1990s, neoliberal policies worsened the material conditions of access both to production resources and employment in rural areas, a situation that led into a consolidation and increase of migration to the city.4 Yet conditions for which indigenous population were headed in these peri-urban areas 4 Kingman, Eduardo. “San Roque y los estudios sociales urbanos.”

In San Roque: indígenas urbanos, seguridad y patrimonio, by Eduardo Kingman, 7-20. Quito: FLACSO / HEIFER International, 2012

were not much better than those they were eluding in their rural communities. During almost twenty years of neoliberal dominance in the country, two economic subsystems were generated: the modern and the informal.5 Both went on defining the economic and territorial dynamics of the city. A clear evidence of such phenomenon is the increasing rise of real estate values, the accelerated impoverishment of low income -and to a great extent also middle class- families, the growing unemployment and underemployment and the conformation of sacrifice and control zones which derived in an increasing privatization of public spaces.

In the dominant narrative, therefore, urban indigenous population form part of the informal subsystem, and as such they have been suffering from racism and precarity uninterruptedly.

In the case of Quito, the incursion of indigenous people -coming mostly from Chimborazo, Cotopaxi and Imbaburawas accompanied by huge tension and hostility from local population,6 since the latter was not willing to accept the way indigenous speak, dress and express themselves. As a response, they have developed their own strategies of incorporation to the city through relational networks whose origins needs to be found back in their communities.7 Consequently, sometimes, for indigenous migrants, reaching the city and setting themselves in might not represent a breakdown with those rural lands they left, since their reproduce their communal past in the new social relationships developed in the urban realm.8 Indigenous migration, then, affects the city as much as it affects the communities of origin, especially when urban 5 Hiernaux, Daniel, and François Tomas. Cambios económicos y la periferia de las grandes ciudades. Xochimilco: UAM-Xochimilco / Instituto Francés de América Latina, 199412-13 in Ávila Sánchez, Héctor.

Lo Urbano-Rural, ¿Nuevas Expresiones Territoriales? Cuernavaca: UNAM, Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, 2005, 22 6 Maldonado, Gina. “Matices y texturas de la identidad cultural étnica en contextos urbanos. En el caso de los kichwas de Chimborazo.”

In San Roque: indígenas urbanos, seguridad y patrimonio , by Eduardo Kingman, 37-78. Quito: FLACSO / HEIFER International, 2012 7 Kingman, 2012 8 Espin, Maria Augusta. “Los indigenas y el espacio citadino. Los lugares de vivienda.” In San Roque: indígenas urbanos, seguridad y patrimonio , by Eduardo Kingman, 101-134. Quito: FLACSO / HEIFER International, 2012

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indigenous maintain a strong relationship with their relatives living there. When such is the case, migrant indigenous travel back and forth to their communities, especially during relevant festivities such as Carnival, therefore shortening the gap and creating a continuity between urban and rural areas. This gap is also bridged when urban indigenous send products or money to their families in the communities.9 This way, a dialectic relationship, in the form of a two-way circuit of material and symbolic -real and imaginary- goods, is generated between the city and the country.10

A new rurality?

This process of increasing spatial mobility has not only occurred between rural areas in the sierra and the city, as seen above, but also -and at a great extent- between the urban areas and the surrounding indigenous communes. As Jácome explains, the new popular economies in Ecuador, and especially in Quito, have been generating stronger bonds among the urban and the rural areas leading to a symbiosis of daily habits and ways of life between peripheral and urban populations. This phenomenon has gained strength with the appearance and increase of new means communication such as telephone, roads, transport cooperatives and cellphones and internet most recently.

These two rural-urban flows, therefore, similar in character but different in geographical range, have brought with them an increasing transfer of cultural elements, cosmovisions and rural-urban experiences that have been adjusting, shaping and reinventing themselves in the last few decades, finally leading into the stemming of what some researchers have been calling the “new rurality” approach.11 But most importantly, this 9 Cuminao, Clorinda. “Construcción de identidades de las vendedoras Kichwas y mestizas y los juegos de poder el mercado de San Roque.” In San Roque: indígenas urbanos, seguridad y patrimonio, by Eduardo Kingman, 79-100. Quito: FLACSO / HEIFER International, 2012 10 Cuminao, 2012 11 Martínez, Luciano. “La nueva ruralidad en el Ecuador.” Edited

by FLACSO - Sede Ecuador. Íconos, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, nro.

8 Junio, 1999: 12-19; Camus, Manuela. Comunidades en movimiento:

continuous dynamic of affective, economic and social links between the communities and the city12 does not allow us to look at indigenous identity as exclusively attached to the rural imaginary as it was traditionally characterized,13 and prevents us from studying the city of Quito under the dominant rural/urban dichotomy anymore.

This phenomenon may have a dark side, though, especially when it comes to focus on urban indigenous migrants. These indeed may end up becoming an itinerant population that belongs neither to the rural land nor to the city: they sometimes cannot find the means for a living or sustain their families in the former and they struggle to develop a life in the latter. We will take a closer look at this phenomenon in what follows.

2.3.2. Disadvantages, Marginal Conditions and Exploitation Between the different economic activities that most of the immigrants are engaged, especially from Chimborazo, are the wholesale trading of consumable products, street vending retail, clothes trading, owners of small food restaurants, tailoring, shoemaking, domestic services, loaders or grains peelers.14 As it can be seen the commerce is a very important activity for indigenous since most of them work on it. The distinction between traders is evident in the size of their stand and the amount of products they offer which make a distinction between power, wealth and ethnic origin.15 Usually, when indigenous arrive at the city the work they can aspire to do is men as loaders and women as peelers. The ones that developed these jobs belong to the most marginal sector in the markets and their income of one day is barely enough to have one or two meals in the la migración internacional en el norte de Huehuetenango. Antigua Guatemala: Manuela Camus / INCEDES / CEDFOG, 2007 as quoted in Jácome 2011, 49 12 Espin 2012 13 Cuminao 2012 14 Maldonado 2012 15 Ibid.

The city is a place where indigenous immigrants struggle continuously, where they have to learn to navigate and as time passes is more difficult to survive because of their disadvantaged position of being indigenous.

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day. But they are also the sector that is more connected to their communities. The city is a place where indigenous immigrants struggle continuously, where they have to learn to navigate and as time passes is more difficult to survive because of their disadvantaged position of being indigenous.

The situation in which the social economy of indigenous in Quito is characterized by social insensibility. Therefore, the abuse toward the most disadvantaged sectors such as the loaders and peelers respond to a structure condition rather than to something specific in the markets. So, the work divisions respond to social, ethnic and gender aspects. But they cannot work freely in the markets since most of the times they have to belong to an organization. The organizations charge fees, fines if they are caught working without permission and they are beaten and forced to work in cleaning the ones that don’t have enough money to pay.16 In Quito as in many other cities, these menial jobs with less cost are the ones which the formal and informal production benefit from.17 An example is the supermarkets that obtain the peeling food from the peelers at a very low cost that gives a minimal wage for living to the ones that develop that work. Their housing conditions of indigenous immigrants have preserved since they started arriving which is the rent of rooms is colonial houses. The houses characterized by their big sizes with many rooms which house several families in one room. It is common that families or people from the same communities share the rooms or live in the same house.18 So, the characteristic that prevails of the indigenous houses in Quito is the sharing of space between families or community members. Around half of the houses have potable water, most of them don’t have telephone service and most of them have gas and electricity.19 These spaces also function as spaces of exclusion and as a physical and symbolic barrier between the other that are not indigenous where the meaning of integration is redefined and was immigrants can reproduce their community life.20 The indigenous find every time more difficult to go back to their communities because of the difficulties in the city since the situation is always less favorable in the country and as a consequence they also travel less to their communities. However, indigenous continue having contact with their communities by traveling to them for festivals, community parties or special 16 Herrera, Lucía. La ciudad del migrante: la representación de Quito en relatos de migrantes indígenas. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar - Sede Ecuador, 2002 17 Kingman 2012 18 Espin 2012 19 Espin, 2012 20 Azogue, Abraham. «El barrio de San Roque… Lugar de acogida.» In San Roque: indígenas urbanos, seguridad y patrimonio, by Eduardo Kingman, 21-36. Quito: FLACSO / HEIFER International, 2012

events of their communities.

The city is a place where indigenous immigrants have to fight and struggle continuously, where they learn to navigate and as time passes is more difficult to survive since danger threatens and they found themselves in a disadvantaged position because of the indigenous condition. Since they represent the exploited workforce that strengthens and allows the accumulation of capital of the big industries or sectors. Therefore, they benefit from the labor and because of that are not interested in recognizing their real value and becomes extremely difficult to progress and go out of that cycle. For this reason, they found very difficult to acquire a property and, at least, have a fixed placed to leave. They

Abuses

Cargadores

Marginal Sector

Desgranadoras

have put in a vulnerable position where they can hardly present resistance or fight for their rights and recognition.

2.3.3. Displacement in the City: Social Violence In the city, the indigenous immigrants not only lack land but it is also challenging to search a space for living or work.

So, they also suffer from violence through displacement in the places they use to live or work. This can be clearly seen in the urban renewal projects from the municipality over the places that indigenous immigrants occupy since those areas are generally charged with a dangerous and bad connotation. The perception of the popular neighborhoods in Quito as dangerous is relatively new especially for the south area where many immigrants are

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establishing and other specific areas where they also located.

These areas passed to be stigmatized by the police because of the abandon of the State, the neglection in supplying the services for their basic needs and because of a high presence of mafias where the arbitrariness rules over everything.21 The bad conception of these spaces is potentialized by the media with the purpose to foster the municipality intervention and social cleanliness.22 Therefore, the process of criminalization of the poorest and of their spaces as dangerous has been in part constructed by the media with especial attention in the borders that are next to renewal areas like San Roque or other areas object of desire such as the valleys.23 From the public policies exist a strong tendency to see the different elements that organize the operation of the city in order to control them. The security is a tool used for this purpose considering it is conceived from the top down policies as a way of the government to organize the population through the economy, surveillance, control and deterrence actions.24 But also, security is highly connected with the flows and organization of spaces. In 2005, the municipality in charge of mayor Pablo Moncayo took measures for the street vending prohibition in the Historic Center. He used 350 policemen to surveil the area 24hrs which focused in the areas characterized by having street vending. This action extended to other parts of the city where street vending was also found. They seizure the products of the street vendors that were not perishable and return after the fine was paid.

From the perspective of some residents as well as from the municipality the repression of street vending is a normal procedure for the ordering of the city.25 But for the indigenous represent a violence act that affects their lives since the commerce is their principal or only way of living in the city which is being restricted every time more and more. The actions taken by the municipality are generally developed by external consultants or “experts” that hired but that don’t understand the social problematic that they faced, so they don’t address the problems from their roots. They have tried to reach negotiations or consensus but at the end, their actions are taken beforehand in a unidirectional way from the “experts”.26 So, the actions for reordering the urban space are conceived in terms of safeness and sociological cleanliness with the criteria of refurbishment, public space control, and eradication of street vending and carriers. According to Harvey, some deteriorated areas subject

to patrimonial intervention forced the displacement of their residents because they concentrate and accumulates resources for speculation.27 So, residents are subjected to the mechanism of expulsion sometimes legitimized and foster by the State.28 Securitization is relatively a new way of ordering flows and spaces with the goal of manage or control them. These flows can be economical, socials, of the population or virtual but all of them are subject to calculations of probabilities and random actions in urbanistic, financial, productive or social terms for intervention. The security as it is conceived in the common urban terms is a way of consolidation of the capitalism. So, the urbanization consequences are related with the densification, exacerbation of inequalities, overcrowding, decentralization, chaos and social violence. The intervention in the city is presented as techniques of architectonic or urbanistic organization. However, the urbanization produced changes in the organization of the infrastructure as well as changes in the economy, the social distribution of the spaces and the quotidian relationships. In which the residents’ opinions are not taken on account or, at least, the opinion of the counter public for the interventions.29 In the case of the immigrants they cannot support them and their families in their communities anymore and in the city, they are continuously displaced with speculation purposes or because of the stigmatization of the areas where they live so the displacement can be justified.

So this type of urban interventions is conceived from state policies over popular areas with the excuse of rehabilitation, securitization and incorporation of touristic attractions30 like San Roque market because of its privileged location close to the historic center. The historic center is the best example of this since it became a space of innovation and real estate speculation to transform it in a touristic attraction. The importance of San Roque market for the indigenous immigrants as for other groups can help to understand the social urban life as a process that happened between different forces that concentrate the different spaces.31 In consequence, the urbanistic actions shouldn’t have only a technical approach since they are subject to social and political situations because all the things that depend on or develop in a place.

21 Kingman 2012 22 Kingman 2012 23 Kingman 2012 24 Kingman 2012 25 Bedón, Erika. «Tácticas de vida y resistencia de niños y niñas indígenas migrantes en el espacio urbano.» In Kingman 2012 26 Kingman 2012

27 Harvey, David. La condición de la posmodernidad: investigación sobre los orígenes del cambio cultural. Buenos Aires: Amorrorty Editores, 1998 in Kingman 2012 28 Kingman 2012 29 Kingman 2012 30 Kingman 2012 31 Kingman 2012

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2.3.4. Irregular urbanization New territorial realities in Latin America, such as the formation of mega-cities, the rural-urban migration or the

La Libertad Neighborhood, that grew in an irregular way

increase of population in urban centers, are the consequence of the new globalizing order, which is generally associated with the unequal distribution of wealth and with the economic, cultural and social problems derived from it. In this globalizing context, specifically vis-á-vis urban expansion, an uneven territorial development is taking place, due to the excessive concentration of population and its activities. All throughout the continent, urban territories are mostly fragmented and segregated, presenting sharp social and economic differences. The limits of the city extend beyond what has been planned, generating a residential and commercial peripheral growing. Quito is a good proof for that: in the last decades, the city has been transformed by municipal planning interventions, land commercialization and speculation and a low control over urban limits. As a result, the city has consolidated and has acquired a highly segregated poly-nuclear and elongated shape, causing an expansive periurbanization and suburbanization process.

Quito registers an urban and demographic expansion to the northwest and south of the city. Through the census is possible

to see that the areas with more population growth are Calderon to the northwest and Quitumbe to the south.32 In both cases the expansion was through irregular subdivisions and directly connected with the migration from the country and hence the immigrants are settled mostly in these areas.33 Additionally, the population of the irregular settlements responded in the census interviews of 2010 to be immigrants.

As seen before, the city growth and the demographic increase is mainly due to internal migration from rural areas to the city, and often takes the shape of irregular settlements inhabited by newly arrived vulnerable populations. Illegal subdivisions of urban land constitute in fact the main destination of those vulnerable people, such as indigenous migrants, that cannot have access to credit or formal jobs.34 These irregular 32 Moscoso, Raúl. Dinámicas socio-espaciales urbanas. Una exploración desde las lotizadores irregulares de Quito, negociantes de la pobreza. Quito: Cuadernos de Vivienda y Urbanismo, 2013 33 Moscoso 2013 34 Moscoso 2013

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and precarious sellings, embedded in the most informal logics, constitute therefore the only alternative for the poorest population to acquire land and have access to their own house in the city.

There are cases in which sellers staged a scam to pretend that the land subdivision and sale were legally approved by the municipality; yet the buyers, once they had paid for their land and had constructed on them, never received their property titles, realizing, then, that the sale was illegal. As a consequence, the municipality does not provide basic services like water, light, sewage and pavement.35 Conventional and legal processes are still out of their reach. Neither the municipal nor the national government -not to mention the private sector- have offered any legal alternative for these populations. Having guarantors, a stable job and social security -totally unachievable for the most vulnerable sectorsare still the requirements to have access to credit. In 2011, nevertheless, the municipality implemented a strategy to legalize the irregular settlements in order to enhance the quality of life of their inhabitants. The principal mechanism for this regularization strategy is the Organic Code for Territorial Organization, Autonomy and Decentralization (COOTAD). This code is a political and legal tool for land use planning nation-wide and provides the local governments the faculties to control and plan the territory.36 A big percentage of the irregular settlements absorbed by the urban expansion have been regularized through a legal figure known as “rights and actions” included in the code. However, this code also allows the expropriation of any human settlement with potential “public utility purposes”, which has created huge conflicts between the municipality and those communes around the city fighting for territorial sovereignty, as we will study in the next chapter. Violation of the rights of indigenous populations, both migrant and native, has therefore become a norm of the disorganized expansion of the city.

Despite all of the above mentioned, and in spite of the registered and proven direct relation between situations of vulnerability and the acquisition of land through irregular methodologies, desire for land keeps being a constant in the imaginary of migrant urban indigenous. Most of the newcomers still aspire to acquire a property as the first thing once they arrive to the city. It can be said that such is considered their maximum achievement for success. Although the new land in the city will not have the same function than rural land back in their communities -since it does not provide all the means for survival- indigenous migrants see the owning of urban land not only as a means to gain the right to receive social facilities and services, but also as a way to have tranquility and safety. Besides, 35 36

34

Moscoso 2013 Moscoso 2013

since any construction on irregular plots is often developed through self-construction techniques -thus requiring help and collaboration from other members of the community, usually under the form of “mingas”- a plot of urban land must not be seen only as a space to obtain economic profit by renting it or by opening a store or a workshop in it, but mainly as a space for coexistence and reproduction of collective practices.

In a nutshell, irregular settlements have become the only way to have access to urban land for many vulnerable sectors, especially indigenous migrants, since they are often excluded by formal procedures.37 However, these difficulties do not prevent these sectors from searching and acquiring a space for living that allows for the reproduction of life in every dimension.38 Legalization of some of the ever expanding urban settlements through the COOTAD can be understood as the only satisfactory way adopted by the government to recognize housing needs of migrant urban indigenous. Nevertheless, the code has been used as an excuse to regulate over communal territories around Quito, thus violating native urban indigenous rights approved in the Constitution. We will go deep into this issue later, as it has been one of the main triggers for our project.

2.4. United we respond 2.4.1. The base of invisible infrastructures of support and help Even though most of the indigenous immigrants don’t own a property or land in the city it still has an important function in a social and moral sense despite they have lost a direct relationship with their land in the physical sense. So, the land they use to share back in the country influence the behavior of indigenous immigrants and connects them in the city. Therefore, the process of arriving at the city and establishing on it doesn’t represent a breakdown of their communities but instead their social relationships in the city are based on their past relationships they develop in their communities toward a land property and its ownership. As a consequence, the temporal and remoteness of the country and the community reflect in the memories of the immigrants and the creation of their new spaces in the city.39 Once in the city, the indigenous create strategies to survive as asking for example for borrow products to sell and pay them 37 Castello Starkoff, Paula, and Cueva Ortíz, Sonia. «Lotización irregular en Quito: impunidad y conflictividad social.» In Dimensiones del hábitat popular latinoamericano, by Teolinda Bolívar and Jaime Erazo Espinosa, 465-482. Quito, Ecuador: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2012 38 Castello Starkoff & Cueva Ortíz 2012 39 Herrera 2002

The indigenous use their relationships to access housing, jobs, education, medical services and even money in order to survive in the city. They have created a system of support and help between them. Thus, they have also created an invisible infrastructure for survival and even to progress. later after sold. Also, they appropriate spaces in the city which is a tough experience but is important to start breaking a path through the city and this happens in marginal conditions.40 The immigrants found themselves in a peculiar situation where they constantly talk about their communities but when they are back they feel as foreigners. Since their jobs in the city had put them new temporalities and dynamics that hardly adapt to the ones they left in their communities.41 The indigenous use their relationships to access housing, jobs, education, medical services and even money in order to survive in the city. They have created a system of support and help between them. Thus, they have also created an invisible infrastructure for survival and even to progress. These social structures worked as exchange networks between families, neighbors and friends in the city of Quito. The urban indigenous are replacing the lack of social security with mutual help based in reciprocity.42 The newcomers always find the support of others when they arrive in Quito from established immigrants no matter the poor or precarious their condition or situation they are in. Perhaps the most important part of their structure is the ability to transfer knowledge and experiences that help others to learn and adapt more easily. The indigenous shape this invisible infrastructure constantly according to their needs and considering the context and conditions of the moment.

In this networks of help and support, all the members of a family are involved from grandparents to children. The kids start working a very small aged and help in the family income and subsistence. These networks of exchange and care between family represent a socioeconomically mechanism that replaces the lack of social security.43 The kids are pushed to mature early because of this situation since they have to assume responsibilities and sometimes the economic activities replace 40 41 42 43

Cuminao 2012 Herrera 2002 Espin 2012 Bedón 2010

the school.44 In San Roque market, for example, the kids sometimes help their parents preparing the products for selling before classes. According to Gabriel Salazar in “Ferias libres: espacio residual de soberanía ciudadana”, the reason that boost this strategy between indigenous is poverty. But not understood as a deficit of necessities or shortages but as a permanent social initiative of creation and of residual sovereignty potentiated to its maximum.45 It is important to point out that these relationships are not only practices of equality and reciprocity since they also embedded in practices of control, power, exploitation and surveillance in its different levels as explained before because of their disadvantage conditions and marginal position.46 But at the end, these complex mechanisms of relations of power put to work elements that assure the survival of the indigenous immigrants in the city and which allows the social reciprocity and community life.47 The appropriation of spaces like San Roque market and the surroundings of it are the ones that articulate articulates a survival project that are needed in the city48 by indigenous to sustain themselves and their families. They have created an infrastructure from another one which is the market and created social and collective relationships different from trading which has transformed them active agents of the market and city’s change. In the case of San Roque, the indigenous infrastructure has its foundation in the market, but they have extended it to other areas of the city and even to their indigenous communities, as we saw earlier. The spaces exceed the individual limits to transform into collective ones where is mandatory to receive the newcomers as a moral norm.49 This relationship between the new immigrants and the already established immigrants helps 44 Bedón 2010 45 Cuminao 2012 46 Espin 2012 47 Espin 2012 48 Salazar, Gabriel. Ferias libres: espacio residual de soberanía ciudadana. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Sur, 2003 49 Azogue 2012

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to create new networks of support between them50 no matter the poor or precarious their condition or situation is.

Occasionally, indigenous have been able to buy a house in the city individually, as a family or collectively through many families’ participation like the House of Gulalag Quillopungo community. The house occupies almost a whole block and almost all the community live there.51 They transferred the dynamics of their community to the city and they generated an exclusive space for them where they have developed a sense of belonging, safety and comfort.52 This shows a high level of organization and agreement between indigenous since in order to buy collectively a house requires commitment and participation of all their members. The Gulalag Quillopungo community started to organize because of the problems that faced the first immigrants that arrived to the city in their daily life like language issues, difficulties to rent housing and to find jobs.53 These situations force the immigrants to find solutions between “equals” and the necessity to remain as a community. This necessity is what motivated them to buy a house in the historic center for the immigrants’ families in Quito as well as for the ones that remain in their communities.54 In this house exists multifamily blocks of construction that go from 1 to 4 stores, a day care, a space for laundry, a communal store and offices. They feel safe within the house since outside they are subjects of robbery and discrimination. These spaces also have similarities that resemble their communities.55 The space shouldn’t be understood as a reproduction of the old country community relationships or as a process of disidentification with the city but as a way of social and ethnic aggregation of the indigenous to the urban context.56 Another example of indigenous influencing the city in a bigger scale can be seen in the neighborhood La Libertad that is next to the market where many immigrants started to buy their houses there. It is located on the slopes of the Pichincha mountains. The neighborhood resembles the communities in the country since by being at the periphery of the city it is not crowded with cars and people. The neighborhood has a great view of the city although the residents when they describe the neighborhood don’t refer to it but instead to the peacefulness, the possibility to live with other indigenous that come from the same community and even between relatives. The neighborhood has a symbolic value since it helps to unify the community and create stronger ties between them.

This invisible infrastructure of the indigenous is a 50 Azogue 2012 51 Espin 2012 52 Espin 2012 53 Azogue 2012 54 Azogue 2012 55 Azogue 2012 56 Kingman 2012

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sociocultural system that has many aspects involved, but its importance relies on the possibilities it provides to the subsistence of a marginal sector. From this last analysis, it can be seen how the levels cross between each other every time is more and more frequently. This infrastructure is created from a micro level of individuals that have organized and have formed

San Roque market’s surroundings

a network. But through time these networks have gotten stronger and extended through the city and the indigenous communities.

It starts as a network of support and help where indigenous collaborate between them to help each but it has become an invisible infrastructure that support a system inside and outside the market and which is also influencing in the city. Finally, this

invisible infrastructure is possible to exist thanks to a visible one that unifies its members and allows them to connect in the city which is the relationships they develop in their communities toward a land property and its ownership. We can see how important the land is not just as resource provider but as a social connector that unifies them everywhere.

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SECTION 3

Native urban indigenous: the communes in Quito 3.1. Introduction So far in this text we have been focusing on migrant urban indigenous, especially due to the abundant anthropological and sociological literature fostered by this social group in Latin America. However, as Jácome claims, very little has been said about native urban indigenous,1 about their processes of identity construction, their economic dynamics, their culture, their integration to the city and the problems derived they have been forced to face.

Located in both the surroundings and the inner areas of the city, the presence of these peoples is not a consequence of migration from other regions. Rather, they occupied these territories before and during the Spanish colonization, either as free indigenous or as working force for the haciendas. For it was the city who controlled and managed these populations,2 they have created tighter relations with urban areas, thus acquiring some urban lifestyles that nevertheless have not implied the total disappearance of their value structure or their communal and collective principles, such as their social relations, festivities, habits, etc.

Most of the studies about native urban indigenous are focused on the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ), for the inhabitants that have been dwelling within or around the city since before the colonization period have availed themselves of the legal form of “commune”. Most of these populations, generally, do not speak kichwa as mother tongue; find themselves stuck in land legalization processes; have subsistence- and market-based economies; are currently redefining their identities; and face a series of problems caused by their absorption by urbanization processes.3 DMQ, indeed, is persistently being defined and organized by urbanistic perspectives of territorial planning that often -if not systematically- conceal the relevant impact that indigenous populations -particularly those organized in communes- have 1 The researcher Víctor Jácome explains that he uses the term “native” (originario in spanish) following Álvaro Gómez considerations in this regard: “actually, speaking about native populations is just a formality, a creator milestone in order to reclaim a sense of belonging to a past that has never been recognized in official history, that reclaims its space in history and in the destinies of the city of the twenty first century” (Goméz Murillo, Alváro Ricardo. Indígenas urbanos en Quito: el proceso de etnogénesis del pueblo Kitukara. Quito, 2008, 10).

2 (Kingman, Eduardo. La ciudad y los otros. Quito 1860 - 1940.

Higienismo, ornato y policía. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2008, 39) in (Jácome Calvache, Víctor Julio. Economía Política e Identidades en las Comunas Peri-Urbanas de Quito. Tesis para Obtener el Título de Maestría en Antropología. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2011) 3 (Jácome Calvache 2011, 11)

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on the city. In fact, these communes play a central role in recognizing those particular forms that outline and define the city of Quito and urban-rural relations, as Jácome admits. The current situation of the DMQ allows us to understand that, although there still exists a great amount of territories registered as communes, they have had little importance not only in municipal management but also in researches and studies regarding the city of Quito.

In what follows, we will analyze potentials and contradictions found in the legal framework, territorial definition and land ownership defining the communes in DMQ. Later, by looking closely at the historical and recent urban pressures, we will understand the general structure they have adopted in response and under which principles and guidelines their strategies of resistance work.

3.1.1. A brief long history of struggles The historical framework of urbanization in Ecuador has two historical moments. The first of them corresponds to the urban conformation, as a response to the pre-capitalist logic of socio-territorial organization, and the second one refers to the process of urbanization, which shows the hegemonic mode of production in the social formation as a whole.4 The city of Quito, re-founded in 1534, had some difficulties for its expansion during the colonization period. Social structure at the moment made white population to settle in the city while in peripheral areas were settled some semi-rural and rural parroquias characterized by a higher number of indigenous inhabitants.5 A very noticeable social structure plus a natural environment hard to dominate forced the different neighborhoods in Quito to be separated from each other long since the origin of the city. In fact, beyond rural parroquias, which ended up being absorbed by the city after the colony, there were other farther communities holding direct commercial relations with the city.

As such, urban areas constituted the control center for these peripheral populations, specifically for their economic activities.6 Many of these communities, nevertheless, got to disappear in the following centuries, mainly due to the reduction of those lands used for shepherding, previously divided among different haciendas developing an intensive agriculture.7 But there were other indigenous populations living even farther who maintained a continuous exchange with the city.

These populations, up until the beginning of the twentieth century, presented strictly rural spaces and were the opposite 4 (Carrión, Fernando. Quito, crisis política y urbana. Quito: El Conejo – CIUDAD Centro de investigaciones, 1987, 29) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 5 (Jácome Calvache 2011, 19) 6 (Minchom, Martin. El pueblo de Quito 1690-1810: demografía, dinámica sociorracial y protesta popular. Quito: FONSAL, 2007, 37) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 7 Ibid.

example of beautification, prestige and comfort symbolized by the center of Quito.8 During the colony, nevertheless, Quito showed as being a hardly commercial city and its food and workforce necessities were satisfied by indigenous populations living in the peripheral areas.9 At the end of nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, particularly from the 1930s,10 Quito started a process of a north-south longitudinal urban growing,11 which meant the first step for the eventual permanent absorption of peripheral indigenous populations by urban expansion during the whole twentieth century. This process, no doubt, was far from being exempt from conflicts. Such was the case that a great number of rural lands occupied by these populations saw themselves threatened particularly by the construction of neighborhoods allocated for newcomers who, attracted by new sources of employment, started to establish themselves in the city. Wealthy and powerful groups from the city showed no respect either for these lands or for the communities inhabiting them.

This is clearly seen in the different city plans for territorial organization developed from 1940 to 2000. In them, indigenous peripheral lands were totally ignored despite the “Law for the Organization and Regime of the Communes” from 1937 -whose alleged goal was that of incorporating these populated annexes to the national territorial division- already recognized them under the legal figure of the “commune”. In all of these plans, specially those previous to 1989, expansion forecasts for the city were aggressively appropriating communal territories through land market and declarations of “potential urban land”.

In the Masterplan for Consolidation of the Metropolitan District of Quito (1989-1993), “urban and rural communes” were taken into account for the first time within the territorial organization of the city. This plan, at least at a theoretical level, considered their participation in the city economy and the cultural, social and economical effects that urbanization was causing in their territories. This plan also established the role to be played by the city government and the communal cabildos. However, and despite finally recognizing the existence of diverse groups within the DMQ, an inclusive public policy was -and still is- far from being achieved.12 Conversely, it is during the openly neoliberal phase of the 1990s and the first five years of the twenty first century when the city suffers its greater urbanization process, as much in number of inhabitants as in spatial extension. It is precisely from those years 8 (Kingman 2008, 42) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 9 (Peyronnie, Karine, and de Maximy, René. Quito inesperado: de la memoria a la mirada crítica. Quito: Abya Yala, 2002, 43) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 10 (Lozano, Alfredo. Quito, ciudad milenaria. Ecuador. Quito: Abya Yala – CIUDAD Centro de Investigaciones, 1991, 187) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 11 (Peyronnie y de Maximy 2002, 29) in (Jácome Calvache 2011) 12 (Gómez Murillo, Álvaro Ricardo. Pueblos originarios, comunas, migrantes y procesos de etnogénesis del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito: Nuevas representaciones sobre indígenas urbanos en América Latina. Tesis presentada para la ontención del grado de Maestría. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2009)

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Extracted from Plan Metropolitano de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial de Quito, Vol.II, 2015

on when the territory, now freed from topographical and social obstacles, becomes the basic element for production of capital13 through the integration of new territorial fields, the reconstitution of urban land for housing and concentration and fragmentation of territorial property.

Despite continuous conflicts and struggles, the eventual absorption of communal territories into the urban stain has always appeared as inevitable as natural, specially to the eyes of the institutional powers. Possibly, this inevitability has been caused by the fact that these communal lands have never counted on defined footprints capable of prove to the State and the Municipality their actual territorial extension. This lack of definition has also rendered any conflict more complex to solve, not only for the different institutions but particularly for the communes themselves: converting each of them into a single dot and rendering them invisible as political subjects, this territorial vagueness has allowed for the expropriation process 13 Harvey, David. Ciudades Rebeldes. Madrid: Akal, 2007, 45 in Bayón, Manuel. “Los Grandes Proyectos Urbanos como expansores de la urbanización difusa: el caso del Valle de Tumbaco de Quito.” La Ciudad Viva. November 10, 2013. http://www.laciudadviva.org/blogs/?p=19596 (accessed November 2015)

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to go on and on indiscriminately and for many rural areas formerly used to cultivate and cattling to be urbanized without any difficulty. In what follows we will analyze closely the causes and consequences, but also some possible potentials, of such territorial boundlessness.

3.2. The communes of the DMQ According to the information provided by the Secretary of Territory and Participation, there exist 75 communes in the city of Quito, always in a decreasing number. Only 49 of these are still active. Among these, 3 are considered urban and the other 46 are seen as rural (Boletín estadístico, Instituto de la Ciudad). Our project, however, puts this categorization in question, as we will see later on. The communes are distributed through all the zonal administrations in the city, and are estimated to be inhabited by 80,000 to 100,000 people.

Also, the map showing the official location of the nodes that represent the communes to the eyes of the Municipality, renders visible a strong concentration of such dots close to the Ilaló hill and within the valleys of Tumbaco and Los Chillos. Besides, in

the central part of the Quito valley, there are located the only three communes seen as urban by the Municipality: Santa Clara de San Millán, Miraflores and Chilibulo - Marco Pamba - La Raya.

Our research, based both on field trips and recent academic literature, focuses on the a) legal framework, b) territorial definition, c) land property regimes and d) internal organization either sustaining or threatening their existence.

3.2.1. Legal Framework The process of establishing a legal framework over communes and communities in Ecuador has undergone a long historical evolution, going from the first phases of colonization taxes to the latest approval of the political Constitution in 2008 which, framed under international agreements, finally recognizes the collective rights of the different indigenous peoples and nations thanks to the shift from the historical consideration of Ecuador as a pluricultural state to a plurinational and multiethnic state proposed by Correa.14 Up until today, the legal base for communes and communities in Ecuador has been the Law for the Organization and Regime of the Communes approved on August 6th in 1937. This law establishes for the first time the legal notion of “commune”, defining as such “every populated area that has not the category of parroquia, that currently exists or that is to be established in the future, and that is known with the name of hamlet, annex, neighborhood, judicial district, community, faction or any other designation”15 (Art. 1). Among the requirements to acquire such legal form we consider convenient to mention the following: • • • •

No less than 50 inhabitants.

Inhabitants might own collective goods.

The official and representative organism for the commune is the cabildo, formed by five members.

They depend administratively from the MAGAP (Ministry of Agriculture, Cattle Industry, Aquiculture and Fishing).16

Due to the fact that this law does not refer to any ethnic characteristic, mestizo peasants enjoyed the same opportunity to establish communes than indigenous communities. That is 14 Santillán Sarmiento, Verónica Natalie. Presión Urbana sobre Áreas Rurales. Transformación Territorial en la Parroquia de Tumbaco 2001-2010. Caso de Estudio de las Comunas Leopoldo N. Chávez y Tola Chica. Tesis para Obtener el T. de Maestría en CCSS con Mención en Desarrollo Local y Territorial. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2014, 30 15 In original spanish: “todo centro poblado que no tenga la categoría de parroquia, que existiera en la actualidad o que se estableciere en lo futuro, y que fuere conocido con el nombre de caserío, anejo, barrio, partido, comunidad, parcialidad, o cualquiera otra designación”.

16 Formerly, the organ in charge of the communes was the Ministry of Social Provision.

why, despite the communes are the dominant organizational form in the rural areas of the sierra17, indigenous populations are not those who exclusively inhabit them and their number is higher in mestizo areas, as a recent study from the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE) shows.18 This is clearly proved in the communes of the DMQ, where a percentage as low as a 10% consider themselves as indigenous while a 00% seen themselves as mestizo.

Building upon the thesis of various historians such as Teodoro Bustamante, a recent study from the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN), developed by Jeremy Rayner, Verónica Morales and Carla Simbaña, sustains that, to grasp the ultimate goal of the 1937 law, it is fundamental to understand how the Ecuadorian State, trying to implement its cultural vision back in the 1930s, aimed at individualizing and homogenizing its citizens before the law and before public institutions in general, considering any communal form of organization as opposing individual freedom and private property.19 According to Morales, interviewed in one of our visits to Quito, the 1937 law was created, on the one hand, to deal with ‘the indigenous’ question -by getting rid of it- and on the other hand for the State to name administratively and bureaucratically all the populated areas that were not understood as rural, nor as urban nor as parroquias.20 As such, under the appearance of a positive integration of the communes into the organization model of the country, the 1937 law allowed to institutionalize -thus to control- the communes within the Nation-State, to whom rationality they were forced to submit.21 Besides, this law, by giving all the competences (education, health, justice…) to the Ministry of Social Security (Ministerio de Previsión Social) -what today is the MAGAP- allowed the State to stop assisting the communes with all of its capacities and all of its powers.22 The law, therefore, did not allow the communes to abandon their marginal condition, but rather it enhanced their exclusion from state and financial resources, for greater forms support in terms of organization or production were not provided.23 17 Percentage of organizational forms in Ecuadorian sierra in 1993: 54% communes; 24% cooperatives; 22% associations. (Zamosc, León.

Estadística de las áreas de predominio étnico en la sierra ecuatoriana.

Quito: Abya-Yala, 1995, 51) quoted in Martínez, Luciano. “Comunidades y Tierra en el Ecuador.” Ecuador Debate, N.45, Diciembre, 1998: 173188 18 Martínez 1998 as quoted in IEE, Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos. Memoria social y cultural en el Distrito Metropoliatno de Quito: Ruralidad y Comunas. Quito: IEE, 2014 19 Bustamante, Teodoro. “Las comunas en las ciudades ¿Tienen algún sentido?” In Quito. Comunas y Parroquias, 15-26. Quito: Dirección de Planificación, I. Municipio de Quito / Consejería de Obras Públicas y Transporte, Junta de Andalucía, 1992) as quoted in IEE 2014 20 Morales, Verónica, interview by Mateo Fernández-Muro; Morales, María Guadalupe et al. (October 22, 2015) 21 Bazurco Osorio, Martín. Yo soy más Indio que tú. Resignificando la Etnicidad. Exploración teórica e introducción al proceso de reconstrucción étnica en las Comunas de la Península de Santa Elena, Ecuador. Quito: Abya-Yala, 2006, 129 as quoted in IEE 2014, 18 22 Morales 2015 23 IEE 2014, 18

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Although the current situation has not improved consistently, it does exist a broad normative framework referring to how communities, peoples and nations have to be treated in Ecuador, thus opening a window of opportunity: already in the 1998 Constitution, for instance, the State was given the role of protecting indigenous people’s collective rights, additionally strengthen thanks to the adhesion of Ecuador to the 169th Agreement of the International Labor Organization (ILO).24 Today it is the 2008 Constitution the one that has established the legal framework under which a great number of norms and codes have been approved to guarantee their collective rights and under whose protection the communes have been able to claim selfdetermination vis-a-vis their justice system, their own territorial laws and their own production system independent from the State. Because of its relevance, but also due to its contradictions, the most important code in that sense is perhaps the Organic Code for Autonomy and Decentralization (COOTAD). It declares the communes as “special regimes of decentralized autonomous government, established by people’s free determination”,25 in which principles of interculturality and pluri-nationality in terms of uses, habits and collective rights must be applied.

However, despite -or due to- the wide range of such normative framework, there are conflicts and contradictions between the different norms that, as we will see in detail, promote rather than discourage practices and dynamics typical from the 1930s: since there are no proper tools to materialize and actualize the Plurinational State and the collective rights recognized in the Constitution, these guarantees turn into worthless pieces of paper, allowing for the communes to keep being ignored and rendered invisible and for their conflicts over land and their cultural diversity to still be unaccounted by the State.26

Normative Incongruencies As we mentioned earlier, two of the main motifs why the communes are still floating in a legal vacuum are the contradictions -either deliberate or involuntary- existing between certain state norms and the selfish use that the State and the Municipality of Quito make of such contradictions. The most flagrant among them need to be found between the 2010 COOTAD and both the 1937 Communes Law on one side and the 2008 Constitution on the other.

In the first place, according to the COOTAD, it is the Municipality of Quito who has territorial competences over the communes and therefore it is forced to provide them with basic 24 Jácome Calvache 2011, 30; Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 31 25 COOTAD. Código Orgánico de Organización Territorial Autonomía y Descentralización (COOTAD). Quito, 2010, 64 as quoted in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 32; in original spanish: “regímenes especiales de gobierno autónomo descentralizado, establecidos por libre determinación de los pueblos” 26 Kingman, Eduardo. “Comunas Quiteñas: El Derecho a la Diversidad.” In Quito. Comunas y Parroquias, 29-40. Quito: Dirección de Planificación, I. Municipio de Quito / Consejería de Obras Públicas y Transporte, Junta de Andalucía, 1992 in IEE 2014, 18

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services and public infrastructures. Nonetheless, similarly to what the State has been doing from 1937, the Municipality now makes use of the 1937 Communes Law to disregard the communes and delegate every competence over their territories to the MAGAP today and to the Ministry of Social Provision back in the day.

The COOTAD, therefore, ends up being totally ignored by the Municipality in this case.

Lately, however, the communes have been witnessing other cases in which the City attitude toward the COOTAD is the diametrical opposite, this time making use of it in order to regulate over communal territories and consequently ignoring the very 2008 Constitution. While the latter foresees compulsory pre-legislative enquiry to people potentially affected by any intervention or legislation change -especially to the communes-, either municipal or state regulations and interventions over the territory are being exerted without any consultation: territorial ordinances, highway constructions, sudden changes in land use, state infrastructure implementation, expropriation of human settlements with potential “public utility purposes”... all of the above are liquidating the collective rights granted to the communes by the current Constitution.

The COOTAD, therefore, is clearly not providing the communes with the practical means to materialize or make effective what the Constitution is stating: on one side, in practice, the COOTAD organizes the territory giving faculties and rights to the different levels of government, one of which specifically, according to the 1998 and the 2008 constitutions, is represented by the communes. Yet, surprisingly, the COOTAD never speaks of the communes as governments capable of managing the territory, thus delegating this role to the municipality. Given this flagrant contradiction and such a direct attack to their rights of territorial self-determination, the communes want this code to be changed.27 According to a comunero in Tola Chica,28 communes are not reclaiming to develop their own autonomous infrastructure, but rather to decide on how they want that infrastructure to be built. They want their own communal governments to decide how they self-govern, how they selforganize, and which should be the role of the State and the Municipality according to the necessities of the community.

This role, of course, is far from being clearly defined. The communes, no doubt, have not the means to build infrastructure or basic services in their territories, so they demand the Municipality to take care of them. Yet the latter, this time, makes use of the Constitution to claim that communes are autonomous governments and that provision of public services is not a municipal competence.29 Trying to put an immediate but temporary solution to this allegedly neverending story, some comuneros, indeed, have started paying taxes “voluntarily” to the City of Quito (despite being exempt to do so since 1992), so they can have some basic infrastructure provided, such as electricity, 27 Morales 2015 28 Herrera, Luis, interview by Fernández-Muro, Mateo; Morales, María Guadalupe, et al. (October 22, 2015).

29 Morales 2015

sewage, pavements or even drinkable water. However, this is not but just a patch to the general discrimination with which the State and the Municipality have been treating the communes for years and years. In what follows we will focus on what we consider both cause and consequence of such a shirking of responsibilities, and as such has guided our project from the beginning: we are referring to the lack of any legal delimitation of communal territories and the ambiguity derived from it.

Neighborhood with same name

Official location of the commune

Delimitation by participatory mapping

3.2.2. (Lack of) Territorial Delimitation Either they were recognized by the Ecuadorian State in 1937 or by the Spanish Crown in the fifteenth century, the communes do not possess well recognized legal limits for their territories.

Their inhabitants may be owners of their communal lands, yet there’s no territorial demarcation that allows to establish so in a legal way. To the eyes of the law -thus to the eyes of the State and the Municipality- communes in Quito appear as single points in the map, a constellation of unidimensional nodes spread throughout the territory. Their extension, then, is officially unknown. Of course, this lack of territorial definition has constantly turned the communes into invisible political subjects with no legal power, vulnerable to capital pressures and accelerated urban expansion processes, and devoid from any actual capacity to exert any of the collective rights guaranteed by the current Constitution.

Historically, every time Quito has grown and expanded, communal territories around the city have been a constant and

Extracted from Plan Metropolitano de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial de Quito, Vol.II, 2015, p.76

Delimitation by Verónica Santillán

easy target, since there was no legal title defining their limits that could act as a stem of such advance. Therefore, no matter how persistently the communes have responded to such expansion, they always depart from a position of disadvantage. In legal terms, in fact, comuneros are not the owners of any land because they don’t have any official title declaring so. Who owns the land, then, before the developer claims the property? No one ever knows with certainty. Conversely, the answer, when not ambiguous, has always been detrimental to the communes: until the 1937 Communes Law there was no unowned land, so that every piece of land had an owner and every territory was someone’s property, one way or another. But after the passing of the Law and the approval of a new Constitution in 1945, every land with no owner was declared a State property. Given the general individualistic and homogenizing spirit of the State during that period, as we have mentioned, it is not surprising what the State understood by ‘land with no owner’: no doubt, every indigenous land with no legal title.

Let’s not forget, as Verónica Morales claims, that a title is nothing but a legal fiction, one which supports a property by inscribing it in the territory. Yet only those with power can fictionally draw a new title in boundless state-owned land, and Communes are not amongst this privileged group. Conversely, only real-estate developers and builders happen to have the power and the money to go first to the public notary to claim their territory, then to the property registration office to have their title recognized and finally to the municipal cadaster to have the land

43

Tola Chica

registered. With these three easy steps, entire pieces of formerly communal land have ended up being legally owned by private actors, which according to some comuneros does not necessarily mean, as we will see later on, they ceasing being part of a commune. Anyhow, the other side of this same reality, though, implies that every piece of land that is not owned by anybody can be considered as communal territory and thus part of a commune.

This is one of the criteria, in fact, that some researchers and comuneros are starting to use, together with the topographical analysis of the land, when trying to define the limits of their territories. Their exact definition, nevertheless, whichever criteria is applied, keeps being one of the most controversial topics at hand.

Defining the boundaries. Whose job?

To this regard, the commune of San José de Cocotog has been immersed for more than fifteen years in a conflict against the parroquia of Zámbiza for the definitive demarcation of its territory.30 Despite constant requests and claims for its comuneros, this bordering conflict finds no solution: the case is being permanently delegated to different institutions, starting 30

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Jácome Calvache 2011, 35

Leopoldo Chávez

from the MAGAP -current responsible for the communes- and ending, at the latter’s request, in the Ministry of Government, whose Special Committee for Internal Boundaries asked for a topographical survey of the communal territory due to the inexistence of any historical map.31 According to Jácome, who studied the case closely, this conflict is evidence for the strong sense of appropriation and revaluation that territory awakens in the commune inhabitants, who understand its spatial delimitation rather as an expression of identity and a feeling of ancestral belonging to their lands than as 31 The limits were finally established as follows: “Norte: Unión de la desembocadura de Chaquishca huayco, quebradilla de Rubianes y quebrada de Tantaleo aguas abajo hasta el tope del Río San Pedro / Sur: Puente de quebrada de Zámbiza hacia abajo y quebrada Nayón hacia abajo hasta el tope del río San Pedro. / Este: Río San Pedro / Oeste: Punto quebrada Zámbiza – Cocotog, hacia arriba, de ahí hacia la calle Paquisha en dirección sur-norte hasta calle Gran Colombia hacia abajo, de ahí calle sin nombre y una sola recta hasta tope de desembocadura de Chaquishca huayco y quebradilla Rubianes” (A.N.C.-M.A.G. Communes’ National Archive – Ministry of Agriculture and Cattling: Dossier for Comuna de San José de Cocotog. Ministerial Agreement 821: folders 135 and 63; Database: Communes of the Province of Pichincha, as quoted in Jácome Calvache 2011, 36)

Central

a mere legal demarcation.32 We will come back to this notion later on, since, not being exclusive to Cocotog but rather applicable to most of the communes, no doubt supports the thesis with which we start our investigation.

We cannot omit, meanwhile, the political implications derived from such conflict as well as the permanent neglect of duties and delegation of responsibilities practiced by institutions when it comes to solve it. The same way they do when it comes to provide with infrastructure and basic services, the Municipality and the MAGAP appeal now to recognition of the communes as autonomous communal governments in the 2008 Constitution to delegate in them the competence to create their own maps, trace their own limits and issue their own titles. By claiming that the communes are now a territorial authority, they do not even provide of the means, material or document to help them in such a task. The very same institutions approving national policies to promote deep changes in communal land use and foster intensive occupation of communal territories are now incapable of supporting or even contemplating the need for a territorial planning that alleviates the communes situation. 33 32 33

San José de Cocotog

Struggling against this lack of resources, some researchers from the IAEN who have been working on these issues admit they have been incapable of drawing even one single exact map of a commune, despite all their institutional and bureaucratic infrastructure. Communes themselves cannot do it on their own either. However, some comuneros and leaders of the cabildos, in collaboration with graduate students from FLACSO University and researchers from IEE (Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos) have been giving the first steps in the last few years: by means of participatory workshops, GPS technology on site, or even relying on the oral histories from comuneros, up to eighteen communes have been unofficially mapped so far. Our project builds upon the results from these investigations and in close collaboration with their authors, as we will explain later on.

Jácome Calvache 2011, 35 Morales 2015

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3.2.3. Land Ownership “Contemporary communes (...) immediately organize a shared form of life—that is, they develop a common relationship with what cannot be appropriated, beginning with the world”.34 1937 Law, as we have seen, recognizes communal property (as a collective asset for the commune) and its relevance for the socio-political organization of the commune. In the latter, not only the collective use and exploitation of land but also the collective management of its natural resources are guaranteed.

Furthermore, COOTAD affirms, vis-á-vis communal land and territory, that “indigenous communes, communities, peoples and nations are guaranteed and recognized with the imprescriptible property over their communal lands, which will be inalienable, unseizable and undividable, and exempt from taxes; it will be guaranteed as well the property over ancestral lands and territories, which will be allocated to them gratuitously”.35 As such, most of the communes -rather than having titles for individual property- developed the notion of usufruct (over a certain amount of land and according to the number of members in each family) as something that can be transmitted by inheritance within the same family.36 Family property lots resulting from this mechanism are worked by comuneros as if they were legal owners, even having property and sale titles. This is evidence for a land market that despite not having a clearly defined value in the communal statutes, is recognized within the communal organization, which plays the role of guarantor for these properties.37 34 The Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015, 208 35 COOTAD 2010, 67 as quoted in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 32 36 Iñiguez, Ismenia. «La Comuna de Santa Clara de San Millán: Elementos de Identidad.» In Identidades Urbanas. Serie de Antropología Aplicada No.11, by Sara Medina Romero, Patricio Guerrero, Ismenia Íñiguez y María Soledad Navas, 95-166. Quito: Abya-Yala, 1996; Instituto de la Ciudad; SIPAE. Sistemas Rurales – Urbanos en el DMQ. Quito: Distrito Metropolitano de Quito, 2013 as quoted in IEE 2014, 18 37 Burneo de la Rocha, Zulema. “Propiedad y tenencia de la tierra en comunidades campesinas.” In ¿Qué sabemos de las comunidades campesinas?, by Pedro Castillo, Alejandro Díez, Zulema Burneo, Jaime Urrutia and Pablo del Valle, 153-258. Lima: Allpa. Comunidades y Desar-

Nevertheless, a recent research from the IEE shows that, according to a recent survey from the Municipality, today there are only 24 communes within the DMQ that still maintain some form of communal property on some areas of their territories.38 Increasing fragmentation and smallholding practices over communal lands promoted by the mercantilist Agrarian Reform from 199439 -disobeying 1937 Communes Law and favoring both real estate sector and the stimulating role of the State regarding the disarticulation of the communes- have allowed selling these lands to the private sector and their integration into the financial system.

Due to demographic increase, lack of resources in the rural areas and the rise of real estate values in some areas where the communes are settled, purchase of communal lands by external citizens has grown importantly in the last few years, as we mentioned in the previous section. Pressure exerted by this market logic is forcing many comuneros to legalize their properties in order to obtain individual titles, without which they would not be able to make use of the land in a productive or lucrative manner (due to the lack of bank credits, for instance).40 The fact that selling these plots is illegal according to the 1937 Communes Law -which only allows for the usufruct right- has not been enough reason to stop this process: on the contrary, external migration to the communes has grown lately to an important extent, accelerating internal conflicts for land and provoking a strong pressure over communal identities.41 Understanding communal property possession as a determinant factor for the identification of a communes, therefore, does not seem to represent the reality in Quito, and such has been confirmed through our conversations with comuneros from Tola Chica, Santa Clara de San Millán and San José de Cocotog. In this sense, as Iñiguez highlights, “communal identity based on collective property over land is no longer a practice”,42 rollo, 2007, 161 as quoted in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 29 38 IEE 2014, 21 39 Before the 1994 law, in fact, it was necessary the unanimous decision of the inhabitants to change the regime of the communal land into private, but since the law was approved the conversion of the land is allowed with only two-thirds of the inhabitants in favor.

40 Carvajal, José, interview by Kathrin Hopfgartner. (2014); Iñiguez 1996 in IEE 2014, 26 41 IEE 2014, 26 42 Ibid.

Not only did the demand for urbanization increase both illegal and legal land market, but growing speculation over the valley fostered land fragmentation and forged a shift in its spatial and territorial configuration.

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Registered land Non-registered land within allegedly communal boundaries

Non-registered land

Registered land within allegedly communal boundaries

which has activated among some comuneros a tendency toward a “capitalist system commune”, as Jácome has noted, where individual interests prevail and where activities developed by its members are not necessarily for the collective good of the commune.43 There exist, consequently, an aggressive process of communal un-education and hybridation, mainly among many young comuneros who prefer to follow new consumption patterns coming from the city and therefore relate the communes with an indigenous rural past (mostly associated with their grandparents), even putting into question the commune itself as institution.44

Appropriation, not property Nonetheless, the fact that many common goods and assets have disappeared from the communes does not imply the latters are over. Quite the opposite. “The phenomenon is interesting”, affirmed Martínez back in 1998, “for while communal productive bases are being dismantled, their politico-organizational bases are consolidating”.45 Indeed, opposing the mercantilist approach, there is an increasing number of comuneros and comuneras who, aiming to bring safety to daily life, are willing to enhance the notion of the “commune as community”s opposed to that of mere “legal commune”, strongly tied to the definition provided 43 Jácome Calvache 2011, 47 44 Kingman, Comunas Quiteñas: El Derecho a la Diversidad 1992 as quoted in IEE 2014, 26 45 Martínez 1998, 185 as quoted in IEE 2014, 19

by the State and exclusively related to the possession and use of collective goods.46 For this reason, informal agreements and internal mechanisms are still being developed for the management of communal territories. Such strategies, despite the changes, transformations and conflicts going on in the communes, are allowing a great number of their inhabitants to still define themselves as comuneros, encouraging the continuity and enhancement of their different relations of kinship with family, friends and neighbors.

Thanks to such efforts, communal institutions are still in force and have regained energy in the last years. The recent ethnogenetic processes and political mobilization arisen in ancestral communities around Ilaló hill are clear proofs for that: among them it has sprung a strong discourse favoring the sense of indigenous belonging through the recovery of communal land and the rescue of a common ancestral memory around language and rituals, but above all by means of the self-identification as part of the Kitu Kara Native Nation47 and the self-organization of the communes under the political form of a Communal Federation.

Consequently, although communal property is no longer 46 “Ley de Organización y Régimen de Comunas.” Registro Oficial Nr.558. Quito, August 6, 1937, Art.6 47 Cabrera Montúfar, Ximena. “El proceso de reurbanización del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito y su incidencia en la comuna indígena San José de Cocotog.” Cuestiones Urbano Regionales, Vol.1, No.1, 2012: 173-195; Gómez Murillo 2009 as quoted in IEE 2014, 27

47

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Central

La Capilla

Lumbisí

Carcelén de Catequilla

El Guambi

Miraflores

Leopoldo Chávez

Comunidad Ancestral de La Toglla

Chilibulo Marcopamba La Raya

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Rumiloma

San Miguel del Común

Tola Chica

San Francisco de Oyacoto

San José de Cocotog

Santa Clara de San Millán

San Francisco de Tola Grande

Santa Anita

Oyambarillo

a practice, as Íñiguez highlighted back in 1996, communal “identity remain in the daily discourse”.48 This identity, as we have noted, is maintained in the sense of belonging to a territory (ancestral, most of the times) or to a nation (as the Kitu Kara), but even in the memory of a shared past and history that allows for the reproduction of kinship and reciprocity bonds among its members. But most importantly: communal identity is sustained above all in the socio-political organization of the commune which, under the form of open assemblies and “mingas” -among other gathering formulas-, reflects comuneros’ and comuneras’ traditional values and plays the role of “protective shell” against external pressures.49 We therefore consider fundamental, as Martínez suggests, to “demystify” the collective character of land property within the communes -a claim already sustained by many of them (as noticed in many of our conversations), particularly by those with scarcity of collectively owned land-, but not the collective character of the social, political and organizational forms deploying within their territories.50 As the researcher Verónica Santillán affirms in her work, it is extremely important to understand the communes not only as “rests” and remainders of ancestral/communal land, but rather as socio-organizational forms that have managed to survive in opposition to an expansive city by means of reproducing daily innovative strategies to face the future within a society where market logic prevails.51 It is precisely the juncture of the internal solidarity bonds with the “feeling of belonging to a common core”, as Kingman notes, what allows the communes to keep actively defending their territories.52 48 Iñiguez 1996, 123 49 Iñiguez 1996; Martínez 1998 in IEE 2014, 22 50 Ibid.

51 Santillán Sarmiento 2014; IEE 2014 52 Kingman, Comunas Quiteñas: El Derecho a la Diversidad 1992,

3.2.4. Communal Organization “Not everything is organized, everything

organizes itself. The difference is meaningful. One requires management, the other attention—dispositions that are incompatible in every respect”.53 Despite the diversity of ethnic groups coexisting in Ecuador, as Jácome explains in his work, communal governments around the country have a great number of similarities between them, and that is because the Communes Law from 1937 did not only assure the legitimization of their territories and the support from the government, but also stipulated the election of “cabildos” as the main government authority.54 With little differences, then, conformation statutes for the various communes declare the cabildo as their manager body.

The cabildo is generally formed by a president, a vice president, a secretary, a treasurer, some vocals and a trustee, and it is held accountable for organizing all the activities in the commune (such as communal work through mingas and celebrations) and communicating them to all its members. None of the members of the cabildo receive a salary or economical compensation, thus are forced to alternate their jobs in the city with these communal duties.55 33 in IEE 2014, 22 53 The Invisible Committee 2015, 88 54 Ley de Organización y Régimen de Comunas 1937, Art.8; Castañeda, María. Las prácticas de gobierno comunitario: el caso de las comunidades de la parroquia González Suárez. Tesis de Maestría. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2008, 28-29 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 38 55 Durango Cordero, Miguel Felipe. “Esos Otros Saberes”: El Conocimeinto Ecológico Local en la Producción Agrícola Campesina: Un Estudio de Caso en la Comuna Indígena La Tola Chica en Tumbaco,

Offcial images and communications material from communes of Santa Clara de San Millán, Tola Chica, La Toglla and Pueblo Kitu Kara.

Sources: https://www.facebook.com/Comuna-de-Santa-Clara-de-San-Mill%C3%A1n-702395189897793/ and https://www.facebook.com/LaToglla?fref=ts

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According to the 1937 Communes Law, cabildos must be elected every month of December through the General Assembly,56 which is the higher instance and authority for decision-taking in the commune.57 The cabildo is responsible for periodically calling this assembly, which congregates every active member of the commune and generates democratic and participatory positions toward the various situations presented.58 The cabildo is in charge of proposing the topics to be discussed and providing residents with enough information in advance so as to be able to take decisions around the issues treated.59 This way, the stance of the cabildo is balanced with communal participation. The will of the majority -visually confirmed with an organic process of voting based on rising hands- must know, analyze and resolve as much as possible everything concerning the evolution of the commune.60 In many occasions, as some communal leaders from Tola Chica and Santa Clara de San Millán explained to us, there are special and technical committees (finance, water supply, sport and culture, legal issues, infrastructure, urban planning, etc.), duly created and registered in the statutes, that make use of the capacities and skills of various comuneros to address different subjects and therefore respond to the demands presented by the rest of the members of the commune.61 Committee members are all volunteers, invited directly by the “cabildo” or through open Ecuador. Tesis Para Obtener el Título de Maestría en Estudios Socioambientales. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2014, 45 56 Ley de Organización y Régimen de Comunas 1937, Art.11 57 Durango Cordero 2014, 45 58 Conchambay, Víctor, interview by María Guadalupe Morales and Mateo Fernández-Muro. (January 29, 2016) 59 Ibid.

60 Durango Cordero 2014, 45 61 León, Marco, interview by María Guadalupe Morales and Mateo Fernández-Muro. (February 2, 2016); (Conchambay 2016)

calls during the assemblies. If someone is interested in being part of a committee but lacks of the knowledge around certain topics, it is the job of the “cabildo” to put them in contact with people expert enough to lead the process. Committees allow this way to further decentralize decisions regarding specific topics, where participation of professionals or experienced members turns out to be more efficient.62 This kind of communal government, however, was far from being a new proposal appeared in the 1937 Communes Law, for it had already been established, in fact, in all the Spanish colonies.

That is why some indigenous Latin American communities keep the system of cabildos, rescued and institutionalized by the different States back in the Republican period; such is the case, Jácome highlights, that the election of the cabildo through a general assembly can be found in the Aymara communities in Perú,63 in the community Muisca de Bosa in Colombia,64 or in Mapuche communities conforming the commune of Alto Biobio in Chile,65 among others. Both in rural and urban areas, communal organization within native people has been kept together with their territories until today, proving once more the tight bond relating territory and social forms of life that guides our whole project.

62 Durango Cordero 2014, 45 63 Jahuira, Faustino. Identidad Aymara: caso del Altiplano del Perú.

Tesis de Maestría. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2003 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 38 64 Panqueba, Jairzinho. El otro lado de Bogotá: memoria cotidiana e identificación histórica de la comunidad indígena de Bosa. Tesis de Maestría. Quito: FLACSO - Sede Ecuador, 2006 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 38 65 Norero, María. Municipio y Etnicidad: el caso de la comuna de Alto BíoBío. Tesis de Licenciatura. Santiago de Chile: Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 2007 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 38

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Communal internal organization

attendance to any of these activities are subject to fines whose amount depend on each cabildo. Another way the cabildos force the participation and collaboration in communal activities is by not providing official documents (such as possession certificates or permissions for electricity and water meter request, among others) to those residents who haven’t complied with their obligations.

Internal Pressures

50 min.

Another form of social relation characterizing life in the communes are the “mingas”. These are collaborative activities and efforts developed for the enhancement and benefit of the commune, and its purpose varies according to the needs of the moment. The goal of a collective practice as such goes beyond agriculture as it used to happen in the past, and nowadays they are organized, for instance, for the construction of communal buildings or for the reforestation of Ilaló hill, in the case of the communes settled there.66 Although mingas ultimately help to strengthen communal identity and solidarity among comuneros and comuneras, it has become an obligation for the members of the commune to participate in them. The minga of the cemetery of Cocotog, for example, is compulsory, as Jácome explains, and is carried out every month in each and every neighborhood of the commune: each comunero or comunera will have to attend six mingas per year to gain the right to bury his or her dead relatives there.67 The work done through mingas can be part of the projects voted in the assembly or assigned directly by the cabildo. They take care of specific problems related to the daily life of the communes and their inhabitants. Cabildos foster the community work by making compulsory the attendance to assemblies and mingas and the offering of communal contributions. The non66 67

52

Hopfgartner 2014, 13 Jácome Calvache 2011, 64

The fact that communal activities that were supposed to be voluntary have been turning compulsory in many communes is the result of increasingly low participation and interest in these practices, particularly due to young men and women are abandoning them as fast as their education process and their incorporation to new jobs in the city advance. There are comuneros, besides, who not only are in disagreement with work developed at mingas or with assisting to assemblies, but also, as we have seen, defend private over collective property and believe it would for the best interest of their commune to work for obtaining individual titles for the land.68 Scarcity of collectively owned land, as we mentioned, has also encouraged a higher dependence from the Municipality at the expense of the role of the cabildo, particularly vis-á-vis applying for building permissions, obtaining titles for privatized plots or paying property taxes with the aim of selling them.69 In the last few years, indeed, cabildos have lost many organizational power, mainly due to the lack of financial resources. According to the COOTAD, as we studied earlier, from 2010 every decision taken at a territorial level has to be approved

by Decentralized Autonomous Governments (GAD), which are not providing enough support neither to the communes nor to their cabildos.70 Victor Cochambay, President of the current cabildo of Santa Clara de San Millán, conceive of this as one of the most problematic issues faced by members of the cabildo: since theirs is a highly time-consuming and non-remunerated task, they are forced to combine it with their real jobs and accomplish it only in their free time, which constitutes a huge obstacle to make an exceptionally good job for the community.71 The fact that, according to the 1937 Communes Law, the cabildo has to be elected every year and is not allowed to hold the mandate for more than two years, does nothing but hindering the necessary stability to achieve relevant advances.

Although some members of the communes, as Cochambay explains, are aware of and understand such difficulties, it is precisely the scarcity of visible progress what increased the weakening of the cabildo in some communes like Cocotog.72 The lack of infrastructure works and basic services, due in reality to the legal ambiguities mentioned above and to the State’s 68 Chillagana, María Salomé, interview by María Guadalupe Morales and Mateo Fernández-Muro. (January 28, 2016) 69 Jácome Calvache 2011, 48 70 IEE 2014, 25 71 Conchambay 2016 72 Ibid.

and Municipality’s negligence, is nonetheless attributed to the cabildos, which in many cases ignore the constitutional rights they enjoy for the mere fact of being communes and accept being treated as one more marginal neighborhood.73 This has not led to the disappearance of the cabildo, but it has contributed to a gradual loss of its capacity to represent the communes and to the strengthening of other types of organization within them.

All of these factors allow consistently for the lack of legitimacy of communal institutions, particularly among young members, who have importantly reduced their participation in assemblies, mingas and other forms of communal life. We can’t deny, then, that communal spaces are suffering from a constant evolution mainly influenced by demographic increase, urban pressure and consumption patterns of the adjacent city, as we will analyze later on.74 There are other cases, however, in which the weakening of vernacular communal forms like the cabildo are substituted by new and more powerful strategies of communal government.

Such has been the case, for instance, of the formerly known as Comuna de La Toglla, whose inhabitants, exercising the rights conceded by the 1998 Constitution and the adhesion of Ecuador to the 169th Agreement of the ILO, took the decision back in 2005 to define themselves as “Ancestral Community” and register as such in the CODENPE, thus acquiring a different legal status.75 From that moment on, the community -now part of Kitu Kara people and kichwa nation, and therefore subject of collective rights- changed its form of representation: from having a cabildo like the other communes in the country, it started being represented by a Communal Government Council.

By including a higher number of leaders, not only does this Council enjoy more competences in issues related to territory, production development or use of natural resources, but also enjoys the right to apply indigenous justice in its territories.76 A milestone as such has allowed to solve complex internal land conflicts, for the community has succeeded in obtaining from the Municipality and the Government of Pichincha the competence to sentence trials and making ordinary justice system to respect such sentences.77 In fact, and in comparison with the MAGAP -the state entity responsible for the communes nowadays-, the CODENPE better guarantees the rights for indigenous people and nations specifically, and therefore it constitutes, to the eyes of the comuneros, a good “defense strategy” against urban pressure and municipal and State negligence.78

73 IEE 2014, 22 74 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 70 75 Hopfgartner 2014, 10 76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Interview to Comunero in La Toglla, in Hopfgartner 2014, 10

3.3. Urban pressures in Valle del Tumbaco A clear example of the urban growth in Quito is the role of urbanization in the valleys surrounding the city,79 particularly that of Tumbaco-Cumbayá, and the progressive incorporation of rural areas and villages settled there.80 Due to the accelerated urban growth, Valle del Tumbaco has turned into a microcentrality: the wide provision of services and basic infrastructure all along Vía Interoceánica (the main access highway to the East of the country) has generated the incorporation to the urban tissue of an increasing number of areas with agrarian vocation. Such incorporation arose as a response to the high demand of land by a 79 Carrión, Fernando. Quito, crisis política y urbana. Quito: El Conejo – CIUDAD Centro de investigaciones, 1987, 27 in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 20 80 Plan General de Desarrollo Territorial Distrito Metropolitano de Quito. Quito: Municipio del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito. Dirección Metropolitana de Territorio y Vivienda, 2000, 11 in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 10

Above: Ruta Viva in Valle del Tumbaco / Below: new Ruta Collas in Parroquia de Calderón connecting the New International Airport (NAIQ)

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Commercial value of land in the DMQ

growing population that started to need soil and services (such as water, sewage, light, etc) to inhabit it.

In this neoliberal period there were achieved important agreements and planning projects that contemplated such expansive reality. One of the major milestones of that period was the declaration of the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ) in 1993, which assumed new functions and centralized many of the competences of the cantons conforming it. However, far from triggering a period of planning and regulation of economic growing, it activated a “corporativist” phase as Harvey would define it.81 Not only did the demand for urbanization increase both illegal and legal land market,82 but growing speculation over the valley fostered land fragmentation and forged a shift in its spatial and territorial configuration, provoking a greater and greater residential segregation in many sectors.83 In the first ten years of the twenty first century, Quito lived 81 Harvey 2007, 370 as quoted in Bayón 2013 82 In spite of the different ordinances regulating land use, these were mere responses to demands from corporate sectors in the city (for instance, for the increasing construction of shopping malls), and were not enough surveilled or controlled. All of this allowed for many urban expansions in Valle del Tumbaco to be legalized only years after being constructed. (Bayón 2013) 83 Bayón 2013

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a new process of urban growth, especially toward south east and north east of the city, which led into the elaboration of the General Plan for Territorial Development 2000-2020 by the Municipality.84 In the plan, however, urban expansion is once again based on giving the category of “potentially urban land” to peripheral territories, thus affecting many of the communes that are settled not only in Valle del Tumbaco and along the Ruta Viva -main access highway to the New International Airport (NAIQ)but also in Tababela and Calderón, adjacent to the airport.85 As Jácome concludes in his research, their accelerated and forced incorporation to the urban tissue compels us to look at these communes not exclusively from the dual approach of “the rural” or “the urban”, but rather from an integral perspective including both. Only then will we be able to understand the construction of their current identities, their process of ethnogenesis, the continuity of their cultural and organizational features, as well as the survival and recent enrichment of the commune as category, despite its unstoppable absorption in a growing metropolis like Quito.86

84 85 86

Jácome Calvache 2011, 28, 128 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 69 Jácome Calvache 2011, 127

3.3.1. Ordenanza AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí This process of urban expansion in Valle del Tumbaco directly affects those territories inhabited by mestizo-indigenous peri-urban communes, particularly those that still keep their communal structure, their identity and their collectively used resources. Although these communes are organized to manage their natural resources, protect the remainders of native vegetation and guarantee the access to land to comuneros, the latter are yielding little by little to urbanizing pressure, real estate speculation and personal interests, selling a great amount of their communal lands to foreign people seeking to make profit out of them.87 Our project focuses particularly on the communes settled in areas adjacent to the Ilaló hill, in the south side of Valle del Tumbaco, and on those with whom the latter have started weaving alliances due to the acknowledgment of shared problematics vis-á-vis the demarcation of their territories, processes of land legalization, lack of basic services, devastation of their agrarian lands and lack of water for irrigation.88 All of these conflicts, mostly related to the Municipality of Quito, have resulted in a process of ethno-genesis and the outbreak of a fight for demanding the compliance of indigenous peoples’ collective rights assisted by the Ecuadorian Political Constitution of the Sumak Kawsay (“Good Living” in English) approved in 2008 and by the International Law as expressed in the 169th Agreement of the ILO.89 The case that best illustrates these conflicts is the Project of 87 88 89

Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 13 Jácome Calvache 2011, 30 Jácome Calvache 2011, 30; Durango Cordero 2014, 5

Ordinance “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí”, approved by the Municipality of Quito in May 2015 with the alleged aim of protecting the Ilaló hill and its adjacent territories. The hill, located 8km northeast of the DMQ, is an extinct volcano part of the eastern Andes, and its origins go back to the cretacic period, 40 million years ago. Within its geographic range we find the rural parroquias of Tumbaco, Alangasí, La Merced, Guangopolo, as well as the communes of San Juan de Angamarca, San Pedro del Tingo, Alangasí, Sorialoma, La Toglla, Leopoldo N. Chávez, Tola Chica, Tola Grande, Central, Rumiloma, San Juan Bautista de Angamarca and Lumbisí. Ilaló hill has become an important milestone in the history of its surroundings and of the entire country, for the evidences of human settlements in these territories go back to more than 12,000 years ago.90 The ordinance project, according to the City, arises as an attempt to regulate the various problems existing within the Ilaló sector, such as real estate growing, gorges pollution, garbage dumps or forest fires. As a response to these, and after a supposed agreement with communes located on the hillslope of the volcano, the ordinance proposes to create buffering zones with the aim of regulating land use and occupation.91 Mostly known version is that Ilaló hill is an area of ecological protection, and both the municipal administration and mestizo-indigenous communes owning communal properties in this sector are working together in the recovery and maintenance of its natural characteristics.92 90 Pueblo Kitu-Kara. Nacionalidad Kichwa. Propuesta de las Comunas y Comunidades Kitu Milenario al Distrito Metropolitano de Quito para el Sumak Kawsay. Quito, 2015, 1 91 Ibid., 3 92 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 34

San Patricio, office and hotel private complex being built in Valle del Tumbaco, province of Cumbayá.

Source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1777313

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However, version coming from the communes and communities of Ilaló-Lumbisí, supported and confirmed by our conversations with communal leaders and with researchers like Verónica Morales from IAEN, is quite different: In the last year, a huge office and hotel private complex, known as San Patricio, is being built in Valle del Tumbaco, in the province of Cumbayá, right on the north side of the Ilaló. Surprisingly, the ordinance “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí” does not even mention this complex in its text, and thus it does not consider stopping its construction.

Conversely, the ordinance does forbid the communes to build in territories around the hill. According to Verónica Morales, what this regulation is really doing, therefore, is protecting real-estate capital by allowing the so-called “formal” construction from private investors while banning the “informal” growing of the communes, with the ultimate goal, allegedly, of protecting the views from elite clients staying and working in the complex.93 Yet, whatever the goal of the regulation might be, there is something clear: the “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí” municipal ordinance regulates a territory that shouldn’t be regulated by the municipality, according to territorial self-determination rights granted to the communes by the 2008 Constitution. The City of Quito, nevertheless, has ignored the Constitution once again by recurring in its own favor to the COOTAD, which in fact establishes any territorial competence in hands of the Municipality. The “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí”, therefore, has been approved without the consultation or agreement of the communes as territorial authorities, which gives us a good example of how pluri-nationality stated in the Constitution is actually exerted in Ecuador: if communal governments are ignored by the Municipality when it comes to approve an ordinance, much less will they be considered when allocating budgets, deciding participatory budgeting, defining zone management or assessing territorial administration.94

3.4. A new territory of resistance 3.4.1. Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí As a response to the above mentioned situation, in August 2015 there was celebrated the first “Meeting of Communes and Communities of Ilaló” to discuss the ordinance project. In such encounter there participated presidents and inhabitants of a high number of communes around the Ilaló and the Council of Government of Kitu Kara Nation, and the main demand was for “the State authorities to respect Communal Governments”.95 From that moment on, communes have been gathering in assemblies and debates in a permanent pace, getting even to elaborate a planning proposal, known as “Plan de Vida” (“Life Plan” in English)96 through which they have required 93 Morales 2015 94 Ibid.

95 Pueblo Kitu-Kara. Nacionalidad Kichwa 2015, 1 96 IEE 2014, 99, 103

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the Municipality to close the file on the current ordinance and to develop a new integral proposal in collaboration with the communes and communities.97 In this proposal, analyzed in detail in what follows, it is required the micro-zoning of each commune, it is highlighted the lack of information and participation of the communes in the elaboration of the current ordinance and it is demanded their recognition as territorial authorities.98 Fighting together against the territorial ordinance of “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí” has demonstrated the power of joining forces and knowledges with other communes, awakening in many of their inhabitants -particularly those self-identified as Kitu Kara- the idea and the willing to organize under the form of a Federation of Communes of Ilaló.99 Though still incipient, a comunero from Tola Chica, Marco León, believes the power of a federation as such relies on its capability to turn concrete daily problems, ignored so far by the State or the Municipality, into wider political issues to be properly demanded and fully claimed.

A Federation of Communes would therefore provide visibility and allow federated communes to make their demands heard and complied. Our project falls in line with this intention and works in collaboration with communes of Ilaló and with Kitu Kara leaders in the development of the necessary planning tools to help with the future Federation self-governance.

3.4.2. Ethnogenetic process from Kitu Kara People Despite the very little archaeological research carried out in Valle del Tumbaco,100 we can generally affirm that population living in the communes located on the Ilaló hill comprises mostly mestizo inhabitants and a minority of indigenous people who self-define as ancestral settlers and belonging to the Native Nation of the Kitu Kara under the Kicwha nationality.101 In prehispanic times, around 500 or 600 A.C., Kitu Kara culture was established in the area of Pichincha, Imbabura, Cotopaxi, and Tungurahua. The latter was a merging of the Kitu people, settled in the Sierra, and the Kara culture which arrived from the coast and conquer the Kitus.102 Through time, after suffering deep transformations by the arrival of the Incas and the conquest of the Spanish crown, these settlements would later become what we 97 Hopfgartner 2014, 12-13; OCARU, Observatorio del cambio rural. Tegantai. Agencia Ecologista de Información. October 4, 2015. http://www.agenciaecologista.info/sierra/897-qla-ordenanza-no-pasara-con-las-comunas-se-toparaq-la-propuesta-de-las-comunas-llama-al-dialogo-con-el-municipio-del-dmq- (accessed November 2015) 98 Pueblo Kitu-Kara. Nacionalidad Kichwa 2015 99 León 2016 100 Moscoso Cordero, Lucía. El Valle de Tumbaco: acercamiento a su historia, memoria y cultura. Quito: FONSAL, 2008 as quoted in Durango Cordero 2014, 33 101 Mejía Vallejo, Luis et al. Plan de Manejo del Cerro Ilaló. Plan, Quito: PSA-EMAAPQ, 2007, 185 in Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 36 102 Gómez Murillo 2009

In a combined effort to reimagine and re-territorialize a collective future, the act of preserving and recovering an indigenous past becomes mutually dependent on the action of renewing and putting into value a marginalized urban-rural present. know today as communes. After centuries, due to their increasing incorporation to Quito and to the cultural, political, economic, religious and social tight relations established with the city and with other ethnic groups settling in their territories, Kitu Kara people gradually moved away from their native identity.

However, in the last twenty years, the communities around Ilaló hill and in Valle del Tumbaco have been looking to create a bigger and stronger alliance by resorting to history, language and culture in order to ground themselves around a new hybrid urbanrural Kitu Kara identity. As Gómez noticed in 2009, this “strategy of cohesion aims to confront the advance of the city over the communes” and is thought to serve native urban indigenous people in Quito to “stand visible before a government that still has not found the proper way to include them in the different destinies of the city”.103 As a clear push against urban neoliberal policies, they have been offering resistance and developing strategies to legalize their territories against the opening of communal land to the financial market and external pressures caused by land speculation. Our project is precisely helping to design the necessary tools to foster that resistance and put those strategies in action in the following years, as we will see later.

This ethnogenetic process, therefore, has become from 2001 the main tool for political pressure aimed at propelling the organization and legalization of Kitu Kara people,104 in order for them to be capable to counteract the exclusion and urbanization processes weakening those models that make them differentiate from city inhabitants and other indigenous groups: considering themselves as native people of the DMQ,105 and because their legal regularization was necessary -but not required- to receive help from the government, in 2001 and 2002 Kitu Kara people started to meet with a number of representatives from ancestral parroquias and peri-urban communities, finally achieving in 2003 the recognition from the CODENPE (Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador) as part of the Kichwa Nationality of Ecuador.106 From 2009, some new periurban communes -not necessarily geographically related to Ilaló hill- have adhered to the project, such as San José de Cocotog

Assemblies, meetings and protests organized by Communes and Communities from Ilaló-Lumbisí in defense of their territories.

Source: http://kaosenlared.net/

103 Gómez Murillo 2009, 47 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 119 104 Goméz Murillo 2008, 108 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 30 105 Goméz Murillo 2008, 107 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 116 106 Jácome Calvache 2011, 120

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Pueblo Kitu Kara symbol

(between the parroquias of Calderón and Zámbiza) or Carcelén de Catequilla,107 and their members have started to recognize themselves as Nation rather than People.

Today, as for 2016, Kitu Kara Native Nation is one of those conforming the pluri nationality of Ecuador and is comprised not only by dozens of communes and communities of the DMQ but also by a large number of cooperatives, organizations, companies and social, educational and cultural entities. Among the approximately 80,000 inhabitants conforming it there are different ethnic groups such as kitus, carapungos and zámbizas.

It is important to mention, as Jácome reminds in his research, that 40% of their land has not been legalized, for it has been inherited generation after generation, and they find themselves, as we have seen, immersed in an ever evolving process of identity definition.108 Such ethnic awakening against subordination from which they have been victims, as well as against discrimination and violation of their rights exerted by the Municipality of Quito, has driven Kitu Kara Nation to reconstitute a series of cultural agents that are acting as a burden over conceptions society has of them.

This way they aim to overtake the way the State -and national indigenous organizations like CONAIE and ECUARUNARIunderstand “the indigenous” as something related to clothing, language or rural lands.109 Indeed, prejudices that state institutions and society in general hold over the communes are still deep and intense, and the latter are still associated to an outdated rurality, uncivilized and contrary to development.110 Therefore, opposing the idea of transforming the communes into parroquias, cooperatives or neighborhoods as a way to get over the communal “problematic” -which would allow an easier institutional management for the State and the City-, Kitu Kara organization suggests to understand native urban indigenous 107 Interview to J.GL., 2010 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 119 108 CODENPE. Consejo de Desarollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos de Ecuador. 2012. http://www.codenpe.gob.ec/index.php?%20 option=com_%20content%20&view=%20article&id=80&Itemid=117 as quoted in Jácome Calvache 2011, 30 109 Ibarra, Hernán. La otra cultura. Imaginarios, mestizaje y modernización. Quito: Abya-Yala / Marka, 1998, 72-73 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 31 110 Kingman, Comunas Quiteñas: El Derecho a la Diversidad 1992 in IEE 2014, 16

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communes as the most advanced form of peasant and indigenous political organization, praising their diverse way of structuring the territory and common resources.111 In this direction, many communes are recovering and strengthening those characteristics and symbols that define their identities in the urban areas where they are located or that constitute elements of resistance to urban growth in those territories soon to be absorbed. Among them it is worth mentioning mingas, kinship ties, the cabildo as an essential political entity, recognition of language rights, reciprocity and redistribution as economic strategy,112 culinary practices, agrarian and cattling production models -with which some communes still supply the city-113 or the annual cycle of social celebrations and cultural practices.114 To that end, for some years now, there are being recovered indigenous rituals and traditional festivities related to the agrarian cycle, such as the Inti Raymi, celebrated in gratitude to the taita (“hill” in kichwa) Ilaló.115 This process of recovering and putting in value the extensive repertoire of communal practices and indigenous cosmovisions does not only take place, however, in those communes affiliated to the Kitu Kara Nation. Moreover, as Jácome has studied, even within Kitu Kara communes such as Cocotog, there exist some other groups not-affiliated with the native nation that have nevertheless encouraged the respect for land, ancestral territories and collective rights in an independent manner.116 These groups, however, despite sharing goals with Kitu Kara neighbors, find themselves in a relatively disadvantaged position because they lack of the “indigenous” narrative as a powerful symbolic capital on which to hold.117 Our project, despite working hand in hand with Kitu Kara leaders and being aligned to their efforts, will need to have extreme care in that sense and therefore consider the identitarian heterogeneity and the organizational plurality existing in the communes of the DMQ. If we are willing to develop a wide horizontal array of communal governance tools available to as many comuneros and comuneras as possible we cannot risk to foster the already relevant disconnection -and mutual unawareness- between the different groups or even trigger new identitarian conflicts among them.

111 Bustamante 1992; Kingman, Comunas Quiteñas: El Derecho a la Diversidad 1992 in IEE 2014, 17 112 Goméz Murillo 2008, 110 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 31 113 IEE 2014, 33; Jácome Calvache 2011, 32 114 Such festivities, for example, are victims of constant aggressions by the Municipality of Quito, who ignores the symbolic meaning that such rituals have for comuneros and comuneras and therefore turn them into a mere tourist attraction and move them to certain periods of the year that have nothing to do with their origins (Jácome Calvache 2011, 31).

115 Santillán Sarmiento 2014, 66; Durango Cordero 2014, 11; Jácome Calvache 2011, 96 116 Jácome Calvache 2011, 34 117 Bazurco Osorio 2006, 152 in Jácome Calvache 2011, 120

3.4.3. Planes de Vida We have seen until now the two main forms of resistance most recently adopted by the communes against neoliberal urbanization. First, Kitu Kara Nation is a consolidated political body active from 2001 but recently reactivated as a response to an increasingly aggressive urban politics on the Municipality’s and the State’s part; and second, the so-called Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí, emerged as an objection to the homonymous municipal ordinance project and still conforming itself as official political subject -even if lately it has taken the shape of a series of meetings and assemblies extended to every member of every commune involved.118 Both initiatives are not exclusive but complementary and, as we have seen, they often feedback and participate from each other with the aim of highlighting, before the Municipality and the State, the weight of communal authorities in their own territories.119 As the researcher Kathrin Hopfgartner -involved in these processes from 2010- explains, communes’ most recent efforts, combined or isolated, might be structured under two main lines of work that clarify and materialize all of the above: on one hand, communes are willing to recover every kind of ancestral and communal practice as a way of life; on the other, they are looking forward to foster intra- and inter-communal economic and infrastructural development. Within the framework of communal struggle, both guidelines cannot be but intimately connected. Success or failure of the one depends on the success or failure of the other. A proof for such a symbiotic relation are the planning proposals that communes, from their own

convictions, cosmovisions, requirements and demands, have been developing in the last few years. These plans include, for instance, the reassessment of indigenous culture and justice, the recovery of health practices based on traditional knowledges, of bilingual intercultural education, of an adequate control of natural resources, of services improvement -such as transport and communication- and the diversification of their economic activities such as tourism and handicrafts.

With that goal in mind, in the last meetings held by the various communes from Ilaló-Lumbisí -and co-hosted by Pueblo Kitu Kara-, decision was made to elaborate, for each and every commune involved, a “Plan de Vida del Buen Vivir Comunitario” (“Life Plan of the Communal Good Living”) as the perfect planning framework for the development of those strategies.

The first commune in the DMQ to start elaborating this form of territorial planning was the Ancestral Community of La Toglla in 2010, whose Plan de Vida -being now in a more advanced stageis laying the foundation for the ones upcoming.120 In Ecuador, nonetheless, Development Plans like this have been long since a reality at the various institutional levels and geographical scales such as provinces, cantons and parroquias; however, communes have been always marginalized from this planning processes.

Planes de Vida are, above all, an alternative proposal to State planning, for they mainly rely on the open participation from comuneros and comuneras -rather than technicians- in their starting phase and on the incorporation, as seen above, of long since ignored topics that are fundamental for communal life such as historical memory, ancestral health or bilingual education among others.121 To put it shortly, Planes de Vida are a vision for

118 119

120 Ibid.

121 Hopfgartner 2014, 13

OCARU 2015 Hopfgartner 2014, 12-13

Meeting of Pueblo Kitu Kara. In the picture, Víctor Conchambay, Darío Iza and Fernando Cabascango among others.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/PuebloKituKara?fref=photo

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development from a perspective of territoriality in its broadest historical, cultural and political meaning.122 Giving the first steps to launch their own Plan de Vida, every commune is firmly advancing towards the internal strengthening of their organization. To that aim, bridging the generational gap between the cabildos and the new generations -thus avoiding loss of interest in communal life on their part- has appeared as an obvious first objective. With that in mind, and following once again the example of La Toglla, it has been set as an essential value to incorporate young people to the different communal governments.123 But it is not merely the age what is making a difference in some of the new cabildos in the last few years: many of the new communal leaderships are constituted by professionals who bring technical support to the elaboration of such Plans. With their help and the collaboration from external researchers (among which we self-identify) and social organizations, communal governments are proposing to carry out participatory diagnosis in their territories that allow to show the loss of communal forms of life on one hand and the continuity of ancestral knowledges in the community on the other.124 The development and implementation of these instruments (to whose elaboration our project is contributing, as we will see in the following section) will facilitate and allow many communes to carry out in an integral and collective manner -or at least to plan for the following years- some concrete and relevant initiatives that are already being implemented in a more individual fashion: preservation of natural assets (reforestation, recovery of ecological tracks) to undertake projects of communal tourism; opening of communal banks and thrifts; trade fairs for basic products for comuneros and comuneras; construction of training and educational rooms; implementation of garden centers for kids and youth; or the installation of centers for communal economy production.125 In a combined effort to reimagine and re-territorialize a collective future, the act of preserving and recovering an indigenous past become mutually dependent, therefore, on the action of renewing and putting into value a marginalized urbanrural present. The interconnected development of Planes de Vida from the different communes implies, in short, the generation of their own proposal of communal territorial development.

This will allow them to hold a better position before public authorities under a pro-active resistance framework where the different communal governments will be finally able to assume and materialize the competences and rights belonging to them for centuries.126 122 Valarezo, Galo Ramón, Sara Báez Rivera, and Pablo Ospina Peralta. Una breve historia del espacio ecuatoriano. Work Document, Quito: IEE, Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos / Consorcio CAMAREN, 2004, 213 123 Hopfgartner 2014, 12; Conchambay 2016; León 2016; Cabascango, Fernando, interview by María Guadalupe Morales and Mateo Fernández-Muro. (February 4, 2016) 124 Hopfgartner 2014, 11; León 2016 125 Hopfgartner 2014, 14 126 Hopfgartner 2014, 13; Valarezo, Báez Rivera and Ospina Peralta 2004; Pueblo Kitu-Kara. Nacionalidad Kichwa 2015

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View of Valle del Tumbaco from the top of the Ilalรณ hill in the commune of Tola Chica. February 6, 2016

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SECTION 4

Methodology and Theoretical Framework 4.1. Cooperatives as an Economic Strategy The communes need to construct local financial structures that provide them with a development axis for their economic sustainability and that foster a high level of participation in the community.

It is no necessary cooperative organizations but organizations of self-help, so the important is not to be named cooperative but that it has the principles and guidelines of cooperation, collaboration and mutual help. Also, it is important to acknowledge that there are no predefined recipes of how to create or managed an organization of this type since it depends on the products to be commercialized and the short-term and longterm objectives of the members.

One of the main purposes of the cooperatives is to strengthen the community through activities and the direct and active participation in the entire processes of the members in order to avoid the extern interventions.

From the beginning of the human history until now people have supported themselves with the purpose to satisfy their individual and/or collective subsistence needs and cover their deficits.1 Therefore, the practices of mutual help and solidarity have been part of the people practices along the time and over time, they have improved and institutionalized. In the actuality, these institutionalized organizations are known as cooperatives or partnerships.

The cooperativism is globally known and accepted in the different socioeconomic contexts, in which it has even influenced in some countries economic development. So, it has an active participation in the undermining poverty, marginality, unjust distribution of the wealth and it is an important tool for democracy.2 In Ecuador, the cooperativism prompted strongly at the beginning of the S.XX with the development of several cooperatives for savings and credit promoted by the State, religious institutions, employers and international institutions.3 Then with the impulse of the first agrarian land reform, the 1 Wilson, Miño. Historia del Cooperativismo en el Ecuador.

Quito: Editogran S.A., 2013 2 Wilson, 2013 3 Wilson, 2013

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Peelers working together in San Roque market.

Photo of Frente de Defensa y Modernización del Mercado San Roque

cooperatives of commercialization and production acquired importance. However, with the adoption of the neoliberalism, the cooperatives sector was damaged by the practices and principles of it which provoke aggressive competition between cooperatives to capture clients in addition to the lack of updates in the institutional structure that regulated them. 4 In the country, the cooperatives were fundamental for the progress and the adaptation to changes at a local level that were the product of the creativity, the search for social cohesion and a way for the population to assume the auto-control in their activities and not because of the intervention of the State.5 The cooperatvism allowed diverse types of association especially related to the savings, credit and transportation in the rural sector mostly. The services provide by the cooperatives were based on the knowledge and trust between the members and in the commitment of making them accessible to the low-income sectors. Therefore, it became a mechanism of socio-economic transformation and service provider that guaranteed the help to 4 5

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less favored sectors which constructed the basis of an assistance model.6 The interference of the State in the cooperativism matters and aspects was always seen with skepticism and concern. So through the years, the original objectives and the nature of the cooperation and collaboration in the cooperatives was detracting from its origins and for many experts, the State intervention was directly connected to this.7 In many cases, the labor cooperatives were different from the original cooperatives because they started to operate as an association of profit-seeking. In addition, Ecuador had an ambiguous and complex institutional relation with the cooperatives since they worked within the framework of 3 institutions which were the Ministry of Social Welfare, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and the Superintendence of Banks. So, this complex system between institutions and the lack of communication between them was responsible for the division and debilitation of the cooperatives as a financial organization in Ecuador.

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In the Constitution of 2008, it was incorporated the concept and meaning of popular and solidarity economy which can be seen as an acknowledgment of the State of their importance and as a way to impulse their development under a legal framework. Therefore, the legal and institutional mechanism for the cooperative activities had a change of meaning where the State recognized the importance of this organizations to fulfill the deficiencies and failures of the State toward some sectors. In 2011 the Organic Law of Popular and Solidarity Economy for the Popular and Solidarity Financial Sector was created. The law is important for the creation and regulation of these organizations and for their public and legal recognition.

Through our field visits and interviews in Quito, we noticed that it exists a great sense of collaboration between the inhabitants that is also part of the culture in Ecuador. The difficulties and struggles trigger this sense of collaboration based on reciprocity that is used sometimes to replace the lack of social security and other times to progress. In Ecuador, has been possible to construct a successful economic model from it besides the complexity and the upside-downs such as the intervention of

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the government. This model has been developed in a strategic sector of the citizens that has provided them with the possibilities of growing and strengthening for their economic development and social integration.

4.1.1. Brief History of Cooperatives in Ecuador We believe it is important to address the historical creation of the cooperativism in order to understand under which context was created their principles in Ecuador and how they have changed through time. During the first period of the S. XIX, the industrial capitalism had its intervention in Ecuador through the exploitation of the workers to gain economic benefits through their work which was developed in bad work conditions, with low salaries and long working hours. The dissolution of the communal land at that time in Europe caused the migration to the industrial cities that were being developed. However, the critical conditions cause many dissents that transformed in protests and rallies. It was during this period when the socialism born as an idea for a transformative social movement fostered by cooperation instead of competition by claiming equality that the capitalism had impaired. By that time, there were several attempts around the world of creating cooperative models or adopting collaborative or cooperation strategies starting

by Robert Owen known as the father of cooperativism who established better conditions for his workers in his companies by reducing the working hours, raising the salaries and prohibiting the kids work. Then we have William King that promoted the development of 300 cooperatives that at the end didn’t work because of lack of clarity and consolidation of the cooperatives guidelines.

The construction of very defined guidelines wasn’t possible until 1843 when a group of strikers created a cooperative store in Rochdale, England. Eventually, the cooperative was able to have mortgages credits, construction company and solve housing problems. In 1995 the guidelines of the cooperatives were updated by the International Cooperative Alliance in which we can stand out the volunteer incorporation, the democrat management and take of decisions of the members, economic participation of al members, autonomy, constant education of members, for the community’s interest and information distribution and collaboration between cooperatives.

In Ecuador, the cooperativism can be tracked back to the indigenous practices of cooperation for the construction

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of roads, housing and ditches between others. This was more obvious during the colonial period when indigenous possessed communal land and partially stopped the “haciendas” to an extent at the same time urban neighbors, handcrafts unions and diverse societies with social aims adapted and preserved the associative collaboration through time.8 During the first decades of S. XX, the Ecuadorian got to know the cooperativism though the labor leaders, intellectuals, politicians and union leaders. The model was adopted in two different perspectives. The one from Guayaquil that had a direct connection with Europe and the one from Quito that by being surrounded by the mountains it had less connection with foreign countries. In both cases, it was adopted under a legal framework for the economic benefit related to the corporations and for the creation of clients networking that was far from the social values of solving practical problems of the community members. So, the association objectives with social and solidarity purposes created in the principles and guidelines of the original European cooperatives weren’t really adopted.

So, the lack of assimilation of the of the international cooperatives principles like the educational services or the legal and institutional framework was the reason that didn’t allow the cooperatives in Ecuador to operate and grow. There was even a case in 1909 were a saving cooperative defrauded its members and from the this was the decisive point in which the State decided to intervene and take over the control, regulation and promotion of the cooperative model with Eloy Alfaro at the moment as president.

It was in 30’s when the collective rights of the indigenous communities started to be recognized as well as the social property. So, “The Law of Organization and Regime of Communes” and “The Law of Cooperative” were enacted in which this last law represented a development of a social alternative model that worked as a complement to the Communes’ Law. The law was adopted by the left movement as a way to transform the traditional structures. The 1937 law emphasize that: “Cooperative associations are considered the ones which structure, functioning and aim are limited by the Legal Status of Cooperation and therefore they tend to build solidarity and to improve economic and social conditions of its members, by working commonly.”

According to the law, the interference of the State in the cooperatives is through the Ministry of Social Welfare that examines and approves the status of the cooperatives to verify if they are based on the cooperativism principles. Then the cooperatives are register in the Cooperatives Department but the supervision of their work remains in the Ministry of Social 8

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The cooperatives system in Latin America are born from a deficient adaptation of the American model of credit unions whose goal was to use the cooperatives as a mechanism of development for specific purposes in order to undermine the social conflicts that were arising.

Welfare that should inspect them at least every 6 months. The cooperatives law considers important characteristics for the cooperatives to have equality rights between their partners, variability in the social capital, limitation in the interest rates, and that the distribution of surplus should be in proportion to the participation of the partners. The number of partners is not limited but it needs at least two legal persons or 15 individuals that should be legal adults to be members.9 The law classifies the cooperatives in four types: of production, of credit, of consumption and mixed. It also defines the internal structure and administration in which it establishes that they should have a General Assembly, Administration Commission, and a Management and Supervision Commission. The cooperatives are allowed to admit deposits of their partners, advance payments, grant loans, make payments and charge payments. They are basically allowed to do any “banking” operation needed for the credit cooperatives development. The interest rates, discounts and premiums are set by the Ministry of Social Welfare. The law contemplates state and municipal incentives to foster the creation of cooperatives that includes subsidies, taxes exemptions, raw materials provision, discounts, and any other necessary mean considered convenient for the cooperatives development.

So, the support for the cooperatives was extensive and considerable but this couldn’t concretize them as an economic alternative because of the brevity of the government that foster them that after political instability changed to a neoliberal one.

For this reason, in the next decades from the 40’s to the 50’s the State apparatus toward the cooperatives was weak and this distorted the principles of cooperativism in the cooperatives despite the growing number of them. Many of these cooperatives were formed by people of middle and upper classes that established cooperatives, not for conviction or to solve their common problems but because of profit seeking, to take over land and to take advantage of the legal benefits granted by the 9

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State.10 However, the increase in the number of cooperatives illustrates the need for a social sector that wanted to access the State recognition, land resources , and housing but that at the end was unable to consolidate an associative and solidarity scheme.

In the 60’s they were several actors that foster the cooperativism. In first place was the State that defined the cooperatives as the mechanism for the agrarian transformation and as a way to preserve the indigenous communities through the organization. In second place was the United States intervention through the program known as “Alianza Progreso” that tried to impulse agrarian the land reform by providing technic and financial support. Third was the church that assumed a humanistic commitment to the poor and marginal sector. And last was the peasant associations that joined to access land. A new law based on the one of 1937 was enacted and which guidelines were clarified and updated in comparison to the one of 1937 but it was valid until 2011. So, it is important to point out that the cooperatives system in Latin America born from a deficient adaptation of the American model of credit unions which purpose was to use the cooperatives as a mechanism of development for specific purposes in order to undermine the social conflicts that were arising. Therefore, the original objective of bringing efficient and effective financial services to the partners wasn’t practiced.

Over the years, the number of cooperatives increased and the agrarian land reforms were important for the proliferation of cooperatives of production that reached their maximum number in the 70’s although they couldn’t develop efficient structures.

So, the cooperative movement suffered a decrease when the institutional support and the USA funding disappear remaining only 25% of the ones created in the period. Despite the declining of cooperatives numbers, the 60’s and 70’s were a period in 10

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which the institutional bases were created from the groups that remained and consolidate. In the 80’s the consolidation process continued especially because of the financial expansion through the oil revenues. The cooperatives growth of deposits and credits match their number of clients with banking institutions which led to a strengthening in the participation of the cooperatives in the financial system. Also, there was a shift of the cooperatives from being mostly rural to be urban because of the migration flows and change of population concentration to urban areas.

But in 1984 during the government of the president, Leon Febres Cordero started a period of regulation of the financial activities of the cooperatives ignoring the cooperativism principles and valid legal framework at that time. The supervision and management of the cooperatives were changed to the Superintendence of Banks and Insurances. This represented a dominant control over the cooperatives from part of the State that wanted to homologate them with the banking system influenced by the neoliberal movement and distant from the social purposes which remained until 2012 when a new legal framework was developed.

In the 90’s Ecuador entered completely into a neoliberal model that changed the relationship between the State and the financial market by restricting its intervention in it. So, the State institutions that promoted the economy disappeared at the same time a new institutionalism focus in the private sector and in the external trade. This fragmented the cooperativism processes and promoted the growth of the banking system which put in doubt the credibility and solvency of the cooperatives. After struggling with the State government in 1995 a project to assist the remaining cooperatives was developed by the Federation of Saving and Credit Cooperatives (FECOAC), the Municipal Commission of Saving and Credit Cooperatives (WOCCU) and the Interamerican Agency of Development (AID). In the same way in 1996 the Andean Center of Popular Action (CAAP) started a project to strengthen the rural small cooperatives of savings and credits. So, there was again an increase in the cooperatives due the local initiatives that had a big sense of belonging and solidarity that connected directly the cooperatives development with the community development. By 1998 the cooperatives registered stability unlike the progressive falling of the banks that entered formally into crisis in 1999. After the crisis, the cooperatives came out strengthened.

The cooperatives organization suffered an institutional restricting when Rafael Correa’s government arrived and developed a new Constitution. The essence of the original objectives of a cooperative was lost and the model had distorted so the government tried to return the cooperatives to the original

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principles of them . The government proposed to constitute the cooperatives as a true socioeconomic alternative for the human development. Therefore, a new law that rules the cooperatives was created by the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion named the Organic Law of the People and Solidarity Economy and Financial Popular Sector and Solidarity. On the other hand, the Constitution established the importance of the cooperativism where in its article 283 it is established the importance of it in the plurality of the ways of production with the association of different actors such as cooperatives and communities. In the article 309, it is recognized the popular and solidarity economy autonomy to have their norms, specific and different entities of control. While in the article 311 established a preference treatment to them from the State. Both were created under the principle that the social economy of the cooperatives should prevail the solidarity work and the people welfare over the individual appropriation, profit, and capital accumulation.

4.2. Raiffeisen System of Cooperatives We like to focus in the cooperative credit system found it

by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen since we believe that it is one of the most successful that, despite the time it has existed, it has preserved the original principles of cooperativism that goes along with the communes organization and practices. Raiffeisen promoted the rural banking to achieve a welfare between the peasants which basis was the autonomy and mutual help.

Therefore, the banking members are joined through a solidarity linkage in which everyone responds with all their possessions for the credits or loans granted by the organization.

Raiffeisen elaborated the system around the idea of mutual help guided by Cristian purposes. He was mayor of a town named Flammersfeld in Germanys were he created the Association of Assistance of Flammersfeld whose purpose was to enhance the living conditions of peasants by buying cattle.

Then, he transformed the association into an organization for loans which was the foundation of the first cooperative for credits in Germany. According to Raiffeisen, the rural poverty needed money and knowledge to know how to invest it in the most useful way the gains where the knowledge can be acquired by training and the money through association. Raiffeisen found a problem in the individual economies the access credits especially in rural areas since the only way of accessing a loan or credit was through the usurers that abused from the necessity of the people. The associations proposed by him were based in the self-help since for him the money alone didn’t represent an enhancement in the

community. Therefore, it was more important to know how to employ in a useful way the financial means acquired through association. He focused his efforts on solving first the credit problem of the peasant population and break the monopolistic usurer interference. Later on, he focused on the association tasks of providing provision for production and then in the commercialization of the agriculture products.

Since the foundation of the first cooperative Raiffeisen always tried to joined all the cooperatives he was founding under a confederation so eventually, he was able to found the first federation of services of rural cooperatives. The he created the federation of the credit cooperatives and later one of commercialization.

Raiffeisen promoted the idea of free association with the purpose of self-helping without having to renounce to the individual economic gain. He recognized that the direct help damaged the population since the people get confident of waiting for the help in every situation. However, he argues that that the conditions and forces to help ourselves are given and the only thing missing is to put them to work without external help that either can stop the own community forces or distort them. In the cooperative system of Raiffeisen, the individuals are not dispossessed of the economic benefit incentives but instead they are responsible for competition conditions at the same time they can benefit from the advantages of cooperation in certain

activities that is more feasible and easily to do in collaboration than alone. The principle of the cooperativism is that any member or partner is out of the benefits of the association and the meaning of self-help is to foster or to secure the greatest possible development.

The communes’ organization and possible creation of the confederation can easily function under the main principles of Raiffeisen that push him to create the confederation of cooperatives which is that the division of works or the autonomous units should be integrated into an organization or association for economic support which he called the decentralization centralized. In this sense, the economist and Nobel prize James Buchaman also propose the “theory of decentralization” in which the economic activity should be decentralized as much as possible but in each part it should be as centralized as possible according to the economic and technic criteria.11 Raiffeisen integrated what the modern investigation identifies as an advantageous combination of centralism, the rationality of the decentralization and incentives of free decision.

In the individual cooperative in which the members and the 11 Maldonado Pólit, César. «Lo que o puede uno solo individualmente pueden varios juntos.» In Realidad y desafio de la economia solidaria, by Giuseppina Da Ros, 137. Quito, 2001

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autonomy of the organization constitute the decentralized element and the federation or confederation of cooperatives constitutes the integrational or centralized system many times known as “Raiffeisen System”.12 Therefore, the “Raiffeisen System” focus in those economic activities that the individual or cooperative cannot do by itself so the norm is “ the most centralized as possible and the most centralized as necessary”.13 Raiffeisen acknowledged that a decentralized organization will provide the cooperatives with the possibility to attend better the needs and interest of the members in relation to their location and specific needs but with the condition that each member is credit worthy.14 His cooperatives were guided by the criteria of the minimum size that is economically reasonable and needed to attend in a flexible and efficient way the members. So, there is not an established size of a number of members which depend on of the economic context and can be modified according to the macroeconomic conditions. Also, with this combination of sizes is possible the control of the communication and to manage problems more efficiently.15 In his system, he also created the collection centers which purpose was stocking up with the cooperatives products and enabled them in wholesale lots to take advantage of the commercialization for big buyers. The centers allowed the exchange between regions and work directly with the associated cooperatives but also with the other centers.

Through the solidarity responsibility of the members of a saving and credit cooperative, everyone can access to a credit in which the organization can measure the eligibility and development of the members when granting a credit which in a normal banking institution is more difficult and therefore restricted. According to Raiffeisen, the solidarity responsibility of the members has the purpose of not just provide the economic means needed but also to create awareness in the members whose obligation is to commit one for all and all for one.16 In addition, the members of a cooperative know the geographic space and the territorial specialization which facilitates the decision taken toward the activities and investments.

The determination of the procedures is democratic and go along with the principles of self-help, self-management, and self-reliance. So, through the internal democracy, the members participate in the decisions of the cooperative in which a vote is equal to one member which also helps to create the obligation and commitment sense of and for the members.

12 13 14 15 16

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Maldonado Pólit 2001 Maldonado Pólit 2001 Maldonado Pólit 2001 Maldonado Pólit 2001 Maldonado Pólit 2001

The overall objective of Raiffeisen was to make competitive the disadvantages classes or sectors not through the external help or reliance but by the internal potential and self-help through association. This system allows the organizations to compete with the market at the same time it reduces the power market as the number of participants increase. It works in two ways, the first is to cover a credit necessity and the second was to make competitive their associates.

Nowadays, the saving and credit system of Raiffeisen still exists in Germany with 3600 banks and 20,000 subsidiaries able to develop any financial transaction

4.2.1. Basic Principles In this part, we will describe the principles that should follow a cooperative organization in order to preserve the values of self-help, self-responsibility, equality, equity, democracy, and solidarity between their members and the organization. These principles are the ones used in the Raiffeisen System that has remained in their cooperatives and is still part of the guidelines that the organizations part of their system should follow.

Self-help

People in the same or similar situation join forces, raise the necessary finance for a joint cooperative undertaking themselves, and are prepared to mutually support each other. They expect that membership in the cooperative society will compensate for the lack of access to competitive markets and capital and improve one’s own position in the market and better satisfy their economic needs. They expect in the broadest sense both access to the marketplace and to capital.

Self-administration

The members organize the internal conditions of the cooperative societies themselves. Thereby they protect the cooperative society from external influences. This means that internally cooperative societies are not subject to any third party’s direction or orders. The members decide through internal bodies on the economic grupos de folk Epígrafes sugeridos: their circo/teatro, fiestas, recitales, activities.grafiti, This internal democracy is a vital blogs/redes element for a sociales, televisió activista, radios comunitarias, cooperative system. charlas/debates/pensamiento, talleres, editoriales independientes/f

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frutas, horticultor, familias horticultoras, jóvenes horticultores, traba cuidado de la naturaleza, aire libre.

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Self-responsibility The members themselves are responsible for establishment and upkeep of the cooperative and also answer for it to third parties. Mutual joint liability establishes confidence towards other organizations in economic life.

Voluntary Participation

Membership in a/ cooperative Prácticas culturales alternativas autogestión

Identity Principle

The cooperative society is at the same time an association of persons, an association of members and a business enterprise. The enterprise is jointly owned and used. There also exists a threefold connection between a member and a cooperative society. The member is a financial owner, the member holds decision-making powers and control functions and the member is a recipient of / cooperative huertasservices. comunitarias

society is voluntary; whoever decides to become a member does sogrupos by theirde folklore, The business relations between de members andbailes/danzas, the relations in arte Epígrafes sugeridos: circo/teatro, fiestas, recitales, bandas de rock, cantantes hip hop, activista, grafiti, radios comunitarias, blogs/redes sociales, televisiónthe comunitaria/documentales, alternativa, own choose.

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Everyone has the right to join

Linking-up Principle

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But as longbarriales, as A cooperative society joins compartimos y liberamos para uso deormovimientos sociales, agrupaciones trabajo colectivo en comunidades afectadas y proyectos similares.

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with it.

They do so because of their size, their decentralization and often because of Member’s Promotion their regional orientation. This enlarges Atribución-No Comercial-Compartir Obras Derivadas Igual 2.5 Argentina. Usted es libre de: copiar, distribuir, exhibir, y ejecutar la obra. Hacer obras derivadas. Usted debe The activities oflicenciante. a cooperative the transforma, principle of sobre self-help. atribuir la obra en la forma especificada por el autor o el Usted no puede usar esta obra con fines comerciales. Si usted altera, o crea esta obra,The linking-up sólo podrá distribuir la obra derivada resultante bajo una licencia idéntica a ésta. http://www.iconoclasistas.net/ iconoclasistas@gmail.com society focus on the member. The basic system increases the promotion capacity purpose of a cooperative society is of each cooperative belonging to the to offer the membership the services link-up system. The carrying out of neededcomunitarias by the members. This member tasks by enterprises engaged in the link-up system results both in ernativas / autogestión / huertas services orientation needs to stand ensuring that comprehensiveness is retained and on the other that at the forefront the cooperative’s competitiveness o, fiestas, recitales, grupos de folklore, bandas de rock,ofcantantes de hip hop, bailes/danzas, arte is increased. as, blogs/redes sociales, televisión comunitaria/documentales, educación alternativa, Link-up enterprises carry out only the tasks which cannot be purpose. eres, editoriales independientes/ferias degets libros, juegos, In educación hortelana, hortalizas, The member’s interest promoted. the long run, carriedflores, out by the local cooperatives themselves. The cooperative oras, jóvenes horticultores, trabajo compartido, comercio justo, ferias orgánicas, recolección urbana, the fulfillment of promoting the member’s interest can only be principle of subsidiarity is also the basis of collaboration within e. achieved if market share is kept and added to, growth is achieved the link-up system. and asset values and safeguarded.

Therefore, fueron pensadas como dinamizadores para solvency señalizar y are elaborar relatos en los talleres de the mapeo colectivo desde el 2013. Las mientos sociales, agrupaciones trabajo colectivo en comunidades y proyectos fulfilling ofbarriales, any socio-political interest, generalafectadas economic task or similares. Comprehensiveness –The Regionalism Principle a nuestro mail iconoclasistas@gmail.com even tasks assigned by the State can neither be the aim nor the It should be possible to task of a cooperative society. comprehend a cooperative’s geographical range of action. The Obras Derivadas Igual 2.5 Argentina. Usted es libre de:culturales copiar, distribuir, exhibir, y ejecutar la obra. Hacer obras derivadas./Usted debe Prácticas alternativas autogestión / huertas comunitarias Open Membership principle of decentralization is based cada por el autor o el licenciante. Usted no puede usar esta obra con fines comerciales. Si usted altera, transforma, o crea sobre esta obra, a resultante bajo una licencia idéntica a ésta. http://www.iconoclasistas.net/ iconoclasistas@gmail.com Everyone who wants to join a on the fact that smaller units guarantee Epígrafes sugeridos:cooperative circo/teatro, fiestas, recitales, rock, cantantes de and hip more hop, bailes/dan should have the possibilitygrupos de folklore, bandas ade high degree of flexibility activista, grafiti, radiostocomunitarias, educación alternativa, do so within theblogs/redes framework of sociales, televisión comunitaria/documentales, proximity to the market and members. charlas/debates/pensamiento, talleres, editoriales juegos, educación hortelana, hortalizas legal and statutory regulations.

A independientes/ferias de libros, Therefore, they have a strategic s, masa crítica, asambleas, frutas, horticultor, familias horticultoras, jóvenes horticultores, trabajo compartido,competitive comercioadvantage. justo, ferias orgánicas, recole cooperative society is not based on a In this way, a unidad en la diversidad, cuidado de la naturaleza, aire libre. restricted number of members so that cooperative can both fulfill the needs and satisfy the interests of s/ferias, tecnologías libres, the cooperative’s existence does not its members. oductivos, toma de tierras.

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shorter decision-making period. This closeness helps to enhance personal relationships and social control, preserves member proximity, even if this locality principle is exceeded in a narrow geographical sense.

Principle of The Independence of Cooperatives from The State

A cooperative society belongs to their members and is committed to them. They are independent of the State.

A cooperative society is not instrumented to realize social, socio-political or economic policy objectives of the State.

They cannot and do not want to replace governmental action. A cooperative society expectations of the State are that it guarantees equal chances, no competitive distortion and a clear political and legal framework.

Cooperatives fulfill social functions only indirectly. They contribute to the strengthening of their members through spreading wealth and asset ownership. They embody democratic principles, they strengthen the self-responsible action of free citizens, they affirm free competition, and they put the individual and their performance at the center of their work. Cooperatives demand solidarity but they deny collectivism.

They do not realize common weal objectives and have no public assignment, they only promote the economy and the income of their members. They are denominationally and politically independent.

Lastly, the principles of self-help, self-responsibility, and self-administration are as valid as ever. Only the forms of how these principles have been put into practice have changed.

So, concentration, industrialization, structural changes and globalization of many economic activities force cooperatives the

same as all other enterprises to adapt their own organizational structures in order to be able to face competition, to best their promotion task in favor of the members.

Therefore, the cooperatives from Raiffeisen’s period cannot be compared with the ones existing today but what is important is that the Raiffeisen’s principles influence today’s cooperatives principles and guidelines. However, regarding the practical way of pursuing economic affairs, these principles have to be steadily adapted to current conditions, societies, and national economies so that cooperative organizations are also able in the future to serve the people they are bound with or in other words their members.

4.3. Cooperatives and Communes, a future together In this part, we would like to emphasize the similarities of this guidelines we the actual ones of the communes’ organization and for this reason is that we see a potentiality on them to identify and strengthen their practices to consolidate a structure like this. Therefore, it is connected with an economic autonomy and welfare.

The community foundation it’s based on the rescue and revalorization of the ancestral practices by retaking the autonomy and the active participation of the society. The collaborative organizations can help to construct the social tissue of the popular classes that have remain subordinated. So, in the response to the lack of commitment and responsibility of the State to attend basic needs the collectiveness, the cooperativism represents a feasible alternative of substance, against social and environment degradation.17 In the communes can be constructed a solidarity economy that can truly be an alternative to the market economy and its capitalist logic. The can help revalorize the local commerce, its potentialities, the space where the activities are developed and 17 Da Ros, Giuseppina. «Ensayo Introductorio.» In Realidad y desafios de la economia solidaria, by Giuseppina Da Ros. Quito.

Ecuador: Abya-Yala, 2001

In the communes it can be constructed a solidarity economy that can truly be an alternative to the market economy and its capitalist logic.

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The communes already have instilled the principles and guidelines in their organizations and practices needed for a cooperative be successful such as the equality between members, respect, and preservation of their natural resources, the collaborative decision making and the autonomy of their organization.

AUTONOMOUS

COMMUNES

COOPERATIVES

decision taking

COLLABORATIVELY

principles

ASSEMBLIES participation

DIRECT DEMOCRACY management

WITHOUT REMUNERATION to encourage the ancestral values. The economy strategy needs to be a sustainable and progressive process that guarantees the immediate reproduction of benefits for the members engaged and propitiate major opportunities to the community realization.

The challenge consists in taking advantage of the structures and possibilities offered by the financial system for the consolidation of the collaborative initiatives and the multiplication of reciprocity linkages. Probably at the beginning will be necessary to rely on one of the supports offered by the

State but the goal is to look for the emancipation by creating their own capital.

The benefit of the community commercialization besides promoting the social sustainability of the base organization, in this case, the communes by empowering and straightening the participant groups in the collective behavior is that they foster solidarity and stick to the cause or purpose envisioned by their members.

The communes already have instilled the principles and guidelines in their organizations and practices needed

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The solidarity organization of a cooperative at a communes’ level aim is to mobilize the productive and creative capacities of the disadvantaged groups by providing them appropriate responses to the different necessities. It is also a mechanism of inclusion since it is a possession with the potential of bringing economic resources, housing, food supplies and even money to the members. The communes can influence the thinking in the markets by creating a nexus in different levels such as education, health, housing, culture and the relationship with the communes Self-help will be different.

The Confederation of communes can also help to establish and operate the cooperatives of cooperatives as a strategic alliance and reinforce the activities through the existent networks that are guided by the commitment to the communes’ community and ensure the continuity in the community development socially, Self-help economically and culturally.

In Quito, there are a lot of groups or families that work as cooperatives even though they don’t have the structure or are not legalize as such. In many cases, the groups are immigrants that obtain works and bring their friends or relatives to complete the works. For example, in the construction exist families of masons Self-help that once they get a job between all of them do all the work. If organizing they will be benefited since they can participate in bigger and more complex works. The lack of organization is because of ignorance in the sense that they behave as this type of organization.

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Self-help

C O O P E RA T I V E S

for a cooperative be successful such as the equality between members, respect, and preservation of their natural resources, the collaborative decision making and the autonomy of their organization. The confederation of communes has the potentiality to make competitive the smaller cooperatives or sellers that individually cannot compete and therefore negotiate prices and conditions. In the same way, the confederation of cooperatives in the communes that will be managed by the confederation of communes can manage the aspects that cannot be administrated by each commune or cooperative alone related to the quality of cost in services or products.

The communes can create the commissions that can be in charges of the cooperatives in the communes that favor the local development processes and take care of the financial system in their location that allows them to save, pay less interest on their savings, promote productive initiatives and make the revenues circulate locally in order to have the ability to create projects which gains are reinvested in an associative way. The commissions can also validate the products by certifying them and creating new strategies of commercialization in which the quality is assured.

Self-responsibility

Self-administration

Autonomous

Democratic

COMMUNES In Quito, there are a lot of groups or families that work as cooperatives even though they don’t have the structure or are not legalize as such. In many cases, the groups are immigrants that obtain works and bring their friends or relatives to complete the works.

The solidarity organization of a cooperative at a communes’ level aim is to mobilize the productive and creative capacities of the disadvantaged groups by providing them appropriate responses to the different necessities. It is also a mechanism of inclusion since it is a possession with the potential of bringing economic resources, housing , food supplies and even money to the members.

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The reason of creating a cooperative structure from these activities is that the organization and principles of them are similar to the ones the communes already have and exercise. So, in order to understand how the tool can help the communes, it is important to understand the communes’ organization structure of grades.

The second grade is the Federation that is an organization of communes which aim is the articulation of a structure that deals with common aspects that share the communes that form the federation. The only federation that exists so far is the Ilalo Lumbisi which creation was triggered by the COOTAD ordinance in order to organize against it, but the idea is to encourage other communes also to join in groups. The federation, as well as the cabildo, have different commissions.

The first grade of the organization in the communes are the assemblies which are the highest authority in the communes, so all the decisions are taken collaboratively and have to get through the assembly for approval. All the residents can attend to the assemblies and they are also responsible for the selection of the administration group that will execute everything that is decided in the assembly which is called “cabildo”. The “cabildo” is responsible to called for the assemblies, execute the decisions taken and designate commissions. So, the “cabildo” is in charge of the aspects or situations related more with the daily life of the residents.

COMMUNES 1ST GRADE: ASSEMBLIES

ASSEMBLIES: Take decisions and select the cabildo

ADMINISTRATION: Take decisions over aspects that have in common

President

“y”

Secretary

Trustree

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic

Planning

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Economics

ADMINISTRATION: Take decisions over aspects that interest all

President President: “x” President: “w” President:

CABILDO: Execute the decisions taken in the assemblies and designate commission

Vice-President

The three grades designate commissions for the aspects they want to address and that can differ from commune to commune depending on their necessities, some examples of commissions

COMMUNES COMMUNES 2ND GRADE: FEDERATIONS 3RD GRADE: CONFEDERATION

All communes inhabitants: comuneros

Treasurer

The third grade of the organization is the “Pueblo Kitukara” that represents all the communes as well as the federations. As mentioned before the “Pueblo Kitukara” is responsible for the institutional relationship of the communes with the municipality and institutions. Their functions are more political and it deals with aspects that are of the interest of all the communes in Quito , and they also designate commissions.

Water Supply

“z”

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic

Planning

Economics

Water Supply

All communes presidents

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic

Planning

Economics

Water Supply

are for finance, education, and urban planning.

So, the communes can create commissions in each of their levels to be in charge of the activities union at to represent them at their respective level. In the first grade, the work of the commissions at a communes level as part of the “cabildos” structure is to join small sellers production and commercialize them as well as to help with their improvement of quality and quantity. In the second grade, the work of commissions at a federation level is to create collection centers or join cooperatives between communes of same or related products in order to commercialize wholesale lots to bigger buyers at better prices. In the third grade the work of the commissions in the confederation of cooperatives is to join the cooperatives of similar or related products that all the communes and create the superintendence of cooperatives that manage and control the activities in general but also provides assistance and support to the cooperatives which also supervise the good administration as a regulatory body. It also functions a representative of them and their interest at an institutional level.

COMMUNES 1ST GRADE: ASSEMBLIES

ASSEMBLIES: Take decisions and select the cabildo

COMMUNES COMMUNES 2ND GRADE: FEDERATIONS 3RD GRADE: CONFEDERATION

ADMINISTRATION: Take decisions over aspects that have in common

“y”

CABILDO: Execute the decisions taken in the assemblies and designate commission

President

Vice-President

ADMINISTRATION: Take decisions over aspects that interest all

President President: “x” President: “w” President:

All communes inhabitants: comuneros

Treasurer

One of the most important characteristics of the communes’ structure is that the persons that work either in the “cabildos”, federation or commissions do it for free because they believe in the collaborative and cooperation dynamics to serve the community without expecting financial benefits. Also, they exercise a direct democracy that fosters the participation and takes in account all the residents for the decision making.

Similarly, the cooperatives are autonomous organizations of self-help that are based on the principles of cooperation, collaboration and mutual help. The aim of this kind of organizations is to fortify the community through their activities and allow the direct participation of the members in the entire process, and in the management of the resources ,so the decisions in the cooperatives are also taken through assemblies in a democratic process. The individuals are not disposed of the economic benefits, but instead, they are provided with benefits from the advantages of cooperation in certain activities that are more feasible and easier to do in collaboration. The principle of the cooperative is that none of the members or partners are excluded from the benefits of the association.

Secretary

“z”

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic

Planning

Economics

Water Supply

All communes presidents

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic

Planning

Economics

Water Supply

Trustree

COMMISSIONS: Manage a specific aspect or topic Cooperative

Cooperative

Planning

Economics

Cooperative

Water Supply

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THEORY OF DECENTRALIZATION Economy should be centralized as much as possible and the most decentralized as necessary.

Ideally, the structure of the cooperatives works by creating cooperatives in defined areas and then joined them in federations that fortify the activities. This is known as the theory of decentralization that refers that the economy should be centralized as much as possible and the most decentralized as necessary. This is basically the linking-up system that increases the promotion capacity, products to be sold, and competitiveness of each cooperative. The link-up system carries out only the tasks which cannot be carried out by the local cooperatives themselves.

The cooperative principle of subsidiarity is also the basis of collaboration within the link-up system.

So, for example, a commune can create a cooperative that joins the activities of production of crops so they can sell them at better prices and directly to the buyers but in order to compete with big sellers and sell bigger amounts at better prices they need to join their production with the another cooperative of production of other commune or of other communes which will basically form a federation of cooperatives.

So, they have a centralized system within the commune in which producers are directly connected in the decision making

and they have a decentralized system when they join with other communes and create a federation in which decisions rely on the ones designated to represent the federation and not directly into the members.

So by identifying the activities that have the capacities and potential to be joined they can create a cooperative and eliminate or reduce expenses, in the case of production activities they can be more competitive by offering wholesale lots and take advantage of the commercialization for bigger buyers.

So as we can see the cooperative and communes organization have similarities in the way of organization, principles, and guidelines. So, they can be incorporated into the existing communes organization by creating commissions on each level that are in charge of the cooperatives, the development process,the promotion of the activity or initiative at their correspondent level and make the revenues circulate within their members. Therefore, the cooperatives creation can be adopted as an economic strategy that can fortify their activities of the communes and provide them with a financial structure. intermediary

intermediary individual producer

Individual Commercialization

individual producer

Cooperative Commercialization

cooperative of production

cooperative of production 76

big buyers

big buyers

4.4. Mapping methodology 4.4.1. Territorial delimitation In 2013, researcher Verónica Santillán developed a mapping analysis of four communes in Valle del Tumbaco for her Master thesis in FLACSO. She based her research on geographical data obtained both through fieldwork with GPS instruments and from the Military Geographical Institute (IGM), and she added insightful information from onsite visits, meeting with communes members and oral testimonies from the population. The researcher achieved this way to outline an unofficial delimitation for the communes of Leopoldo Chávez, Central, Tola Chica and San Francisco de Tola Grande.188 With a similar method, the former president of the cabildo in San José de Cocotog, Wilmer Guachamín, was able to obtain during his mandate an unofficial territorial footprint of the commune, of which the communal leaders have been making use lately in order to defend their territories.

In parallel to such mapping processes, and under the frame of a wider investigation financed by ‘Fundación Museos de la Ciudad de Quito’, in 2014 researchers from the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE) Kathrin Hopfgartner and Alejandra Santillana, with help from the geographer Camilo Baroja from Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB), developed a participatory mapping workshop with different communal leaders aiming to obtain a general outline of 18 communes in the DMQ. The workshop counted with the presence of Fernando Cabascango, (President of Pueblo Kitu Kara), Jaime Inty Paucar (Preseident of the Consejo Comunal in the Ancestral Community of La Toglla), Nancy Chalco (Secretary of the Consejo Comunal in La Toglla), Victor Morocho (Secretary of the cabildo in Santa Clara de San Millán) and Floresmilo Simbaña (former leader in Tola Chica). For this workshop it was used a large scale map where participating comuneros traced the boundaries for the following communes: 18 In the case of Comuna de Tola Chica, communal leaders provided her with a jpg file with the limits they usually work with. With such file she was able to trace the communal boundaries.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Carcelén de Catequilla Central Chilibulo Marcopamba La Raya El Guambi La Capilla La Toglla Leopoldo Chávez Lumbisí Miraflores Oyacoto Oyambarillo Rumiloma San José de Cocotog San Miguel del Comun Santa Anita Santa Clara de San Millan Tola Chica San Francisco de Tola Grande

The three sessions conforming the workshop were useful for participants to trace a first draft of their communal limits using their knowledge over the territory. To that aim, according to Camilo Baroja and a comunero from Tola Chica, Marco León, they made use of a big format map with spatial data extracted from INEC (National Institute for Statistics and Census) together with an aerial photography obtained from Google Earth.

Only five out of the eighteen communes mapped in these workshops find their homologous in the territorial delimitation research carried out by Verónica Santillán. Despite this low number, we can already enact a comparison exercise between both methods, which will give us interesting clues not only about the different technical means utilized -which will deeply affect the results of the mapping surveys- but also about the different criteria upon which communal limits have been decided.

If we first take a closer look at the technical means used for each of the mapping surveys, we will see that the participatory workshop organized by IEE lacked of territorial onsite research, according to Marco León, therefore its results depended from the knowledge, memory and capacity of spatial and territorial

We are willing an open and deeply engaged debate around the notion of limit and its relation with the different dynamics of inhabiting the territory to ignite from legal and territorial contradictions.

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Map showing communal delimitations obtained in participatory workshop organized

by IEE in 2014.

Single dots are indicating official location of the communes according to the Municipalty.

Hydrological network and contour lines are also visible in the map.

Source: own ellaboration.

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abstraction put in action by comuneros participating in it. The subjective factor has in consequence a big weight on the final result of this particular mapping exercise, so that the communal limits tend to cover much wider portions of territory than those traced by Santillán and Guachamín, who counted on cuttingedge GIS technology, higher knowledge and deeper territorial fieldwork. Their results, consequently, seem to be more restrictive and precise.

But as we mentioned before, we found there is another important factor when it comes to define the communes footprints, and that is the criteria followed in the process. In the case of the four communes mapped by Santillán, the criteria utilized seems to have been that of land ownership regime. At a first glance, as we just said, the limits appear as much more precise than those mapped in the participatory workshop, and seem to depend at a great extent on topography and geographical features in the territory. It is through a second analysis, after overlapping such limits with the cadastral plan of registered (and therefore owner-defined) plots, when we clearly observe that the boundaries outlined through Santillán’s research are

leaving individually owned plots off the communes. To put it differently, communal limits seem to include exclusively (forgive the paradox) those portions of territory that have not been privatized, legalized or registered and therefore keep being considered collective property. The size of the communes mapped under this criteria ends up being much smaller for, as we previously explained, areas of collectively owned territory have been decreasing importantly in the last few years. We don’t know, nevertheless, whether Santillán counted at all with the official cadastral plan -which we obtained in unofficial and nearly clandestine ways-, but however it is the case, it seems more than evident that the criteria used by her and the correspondent interviewed communal members tended not to recognize plotted and registered land as communal.

Conversely, results emerged from the participatory mapping survey are much more generous in that sense. Since collective character of land is not considered as the main criteria to define communal boundaries, these -no matter how approximate they are- extend over the territory even including portions of publicly or privately owned both urban and rural land. We once more

Maps showing different criteria of communal delimitation according to ownership regimes. Left: San josé de Cocotog / Right: Tola Chica

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ignore whether this criteria is fruit of their willing or their lack of knowledge, but we are inclined towards the latter since we know for sure that the workshops did not count with an official cadastral map as a reference either. We must therefore understand that the comuneros and comuneras participating in those mapping sessions did not mind conceiving of as communal those territories that once were so but that today have been fragmented in individually owned plots. The case of Santa Clara de San Millán or Tola Chica clearly show this tendency: their inhabitants have included within their limits those neighborhoods that historically were communes and yet today only maintain the commune name.

This criteria, consequently, understands the notion of commune as something detached from land property regime and rather linked to the social relations, communal practices or collective dynamics deployed within their territories. It will be a commune, then, each and every territory produced in a communal way. A commune will be that which functions communally.

We consider an essential part of our project to visibilize these contradictions and underscore the differences and disagreements arising when it comes to delimit communal territories. We will an open and deeply engaged debate around the notion of limit and its relation with the different dynamics of inhabiting the territory to ignite from such contradictions. To that aim we have created the necessary tools that facilitate the access to geographical and territorial information available and that allow to visualize the relation of the latter with the different communal delimitations. Observing how tightly related are these limits with fragmentation and privatization of territory as well as with its topography is an important feature of the online platform and the interactive mapping tool we have developed. With all the information at their disposal, comuneros and comuneras will be able to use the application to georeference and modify the boundaries of their commune in an individual or collective manner. Each new tracing will be registered in the platform and the eventual juxtaposition of all of them will result in a spatial approximation to what comuneros and comuneras conceive of as their commune.

We are aware, attending to what Kathrin Hopfgartner noticed in her research on communes as well as in the explanatory memory from the participatory workshops, of the difficulties that some elderly communal members find to understand professional and technical language used by some of the new cabildos and leaders, which sometimes confuses them.19 However, as seen in the Ancestral Community of La Toglla, the great majority of its inhabitants agrees with the new projects being developed and has faith in the new leaders trying to incorporate a wide range of people both within the cabildo (and its various committees) and within the assemblies and

communal activities. We therefore propose a series of workshops, in collaboration with Pueblo Kitu Kara and the Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí, aiming not only to help in the usage of the tools created -despite their interface is thought to be user-friendly- but rather to put all the above mentioned topics on the table and trigger a collective debate and conversation around them.

19

20

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IEE 2014, 99

4.4.2. Communal census and counter-cadaster Being the criteria used in the participatory workshops aligned with the notion of territoriality that we defend in our research, and being the one with which the higher number of communes in the DMQ has been mapped, we decided to take the results from the mapping survey as the starting point upon which to build the communal census discussed with Pueblo Kitu Kara.

The 18 footprints obtained in the workshops were useful to start developing an analysis of the biological and physical conditions of the delimited territories. Following a similar process to the one carried out for the IEE by Hopfgartner and Santillana with the aim to identify socio-demographic features for each commune,20 the first phase of our work was focused on obtaining and collecting as much geographical information as possible from different open source platforms provided by the Ecuadorian Government. As such, we were able to identify the following data regarding the Ecuadorian range soil: • • • • • • • • • •

Agrological system Suitability for Forest Use Land Usage Conflict Main Cultivation Soil Ecological Type Current Erosion Terrain Slope Production System Soil Taxonomy Soil Texture

We then proceeded to isolate those data exclusively referred to already delimited communal territories. As the maps -specifically created for this investigation- here reproduced are showing, it is possible to identify certain patterns and similarities among the communes vis-à-vis each of the features listed above.

We think these common characteristics have the potential to trigger and structure different collective strategies for production and land use that will ease the implementation of a more Ibid.

SYSTEMS OF PRODUCTION within the limits of the 18 communes mapped by IEE in 2014.

Sources: Instituto Geogrรกfico Militar (IGM) and http://sni.gob.ec/web/inicio/descargapdyot

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Ecosystems

Predominant cultivation

Agrological value of land

Agricultural suitability

Terrain slope

Terrain texture

Soil taxonomy

Land use conflicts

Susceptibility to erosion

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equitable and complex integral urban production.

With the aim to obtain a first solid foundation for the construction of the communal census, the next step we took was centered on associating all the geographical information found to each and every registered lot in which communes have been increasingly fragmented (later on, we will exert the same operation with those communal lots of collective ownership that today are lacking of any defined boundaries). Each of these plots has been identified with a specific code made up expressly for this research, which consists on a four digit number followed by the initials of the canton and the parroquia where the commune is located. This way we have started to build a database that we foresee will get filled up with information gathered onsite by comuneros and comuneras themselves. At the moment, information contained in such database is exclusively referred to bio-physical official features obtained from government platforms. The final goal, nevertheless, is to have this database complemented and detailed with socio-demographical data provided by communal members. Our duty has been so far that of merely creating the framework and the structure to facilitate the future construction of an open-source and wiki communal census, as well as to allow commune inhabitants to develop their own communal cadaster and their own communal land registry, which we envision will be capable of showing their own formality so as to self-regulate their communal territories.

Territorial resources appearing on the wiki-census we are helping to create might be defined, as Valerezo suggests in his research on indigenous communities in the Amazon, around four categories: • • • •

material organizational intellectual symbolic/emotional21

21 Valarezo, Báez Rivera and Ospina Peralta 2004, 213

Amongst material resources Valarezo considers soils, subsoils, water, plants and animals, ergo the various ecological niches and layers that conform the territory and landscape within communal limits. By organizational resources we mean the capacity of communal members for self-organization, self-determination and control. This feature would imply the organization of political and administrative forms within their territories capable of counteracting forms of State institutionality such as municipalities and provincial councils with their respective authorities and mechanism, generally unaware of territorial control exerted by indigenous communes. Intellectual and symbolic resources comprise the universe of ancestral knowledges, communal practicesand indigenous cosmovisions deployed in the communes. This field can include knowledges of indigenous healing practices, agrological wisdoms, forms of indigenous justice, forms of art, celebrations, festivities and social relations. All together, these four elements can be considered as the cardinal points of indigenous territorial entities.

This wide, complex and dynamic notion of territory as the space for the production and reproduction of the people’s culture and their capacity for self-determination and autonomy has fostered the highest resistance from the State of Ecuador in general and the municipality of Quito in particular. Nevertheless -or maybe because of that- it still constitutes the core guiding force for resistance from indigenous communes in Quito, and as such it has become the predominant principle structuring our project. The goal is to create a tissue of connections between knowledges-ascapacities and knowledges-as-powers (not only opinions) rather than an “everyone-is-an-expert-in-everything”-based structure that most certainly would not be viable nor desirable.22 Currently, we have short-term next steps already planned, such as further developing the census, organizing together with Kitu Kara people a series of workshops to explain the functioning of the platform and get the right feedback.

22 Fernández-Savater 2016

Fragment of socio-demographic survey drafted by communal leaders of Pueblo Kitu Kara. This, together with a cadastral index card -also in the course of development- will serve as guideline for the development of the communal census.

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SECTION 5

Project ‘En ComĂşn(a) 5.1. Previous work During the fall semester, in september 2015, while a part of our team was focused on migration patterns from rural indigenous communities to the city of Quito, we started designing a basic mapping tool to calculate and show the different levels of urban pressure suffered by the communes and understand the clash between urban expansion and communal land uses.

Lacking of a precise understanding of all of these particular issues, and without the necessary previous fieldwork within the communes, we just based our research on official territorial information found online. Being aware of our own limitations, I gave some shy steps toward communes classification vis-a-vis different characteristics such as production system, land use and usage, terrain slope, predominant cultivation, land texture,

cadastral value, vicinity to other villages or agricultural capacity.

Defining the territorial limits for each comuna, which for decades has been a struggle involving litigious processes and neverending bureaucratic and historical research, was out of reach at that moment. All the data obtained and presented, therefore, was referred to single one-dimensional points, so the level of territorial precision achieved was far from being of any help to communal leaders. When we got to show our results to comuneros and comuneras from Pueblo Kitu Kara, their reaction was a good indicator of the work yet to be done.

Nevertheless, as we will show later on, communal leaders saw a great potential in the tool, which meant a great access key to start a fruitful collaboration with them on the development of more nuanced and situated counter-mapping strategies and instruments such as the one we are presenting in this investigation.

Map created in a preliminary phase showing urbanization pressure suffered by the 49 communes active in the DMQ. Independently from their territorial extension, they are represented by a one-dimensional dot according to the Municipality of Quito. Own elaboration.

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Map created in the first stages of our research showing parroquias of the DMQ categorized by levels of urbanization pressure. CalderĂłn and Tumbaco, where San JosĂŠ de Cocotog and Tola Chica are located respectively, appeared already as two of the sixth parroquias most affected by urbanization. Own elaboration.

Interactive map created for the first phase of our research aiming to visualize all the information previously gathered.

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4.2. Field Research We started the second phase of our research travelling to Quito from January 25th to February 9th, a few days after the rest of the team had left the city. Our interest was versed in doing some field research in the communes, so we thought indigenous Carnival celebrations were the best opportunity to get deeper insights and closer contact with comuneros. The social anthropologist Héctor Grad helped us to prepare a research plan in advance. We had a clear schedule and a clear set of questions.

Marco Carrera

And we knew which communes we wanted to visit based on the research conducted the previous semester. Once in Quito, reality took its own route and every plan went to pieces. But it couldn’t have been better.

Hosted by a friend of mine, our contact to the Quito team -who had been essential in our first field trip back in Octoberwas minimum. This was a half random half voluntary decision.

Somehow, we wanted to start our field research from scratch, and so we did. Our first goal became to find Santa Clara de San Millán, one of the three communes considered officially urban.

Víctor Conchambay

D. of the Municipal Archive P. of Comuna Santa Clara

Jaime Paucar Cabrera P. of La Toglla, Pueblo Kitu Kara

Jeremy Rayner IAEN, Red de Saberes

Kathrin Hopfgartner Researcher at IEE

Alejandra Santillana Executive Director at IEE

Marco León

Darío Iza

Communal leader, Tola Chica La Toglla, Pueblo Kitu Kara

Verónica Morales IAEN, Red de Saberes

Fernando Cabascango P. of Pueblo Kitu Kara

Wilmer Guachamín Luis Herrera UCE, former P. of Cocotog Photographer, Red de Saberes

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Juan Mérida

Carla Simbaña

FLACSO, Cocotog

Researcher at IAEN

Field research diagram indicating main collaborators and key partners in our project

We realized that our research could not be conducted by the combing of the urban fabric through an archeological gridding of space. We decided instead to work through rhymes. Just as words rhyme, so too can situations, characters, forms, events.1 So we got to the Barrio de Santa Clara and started asking where the commune of the same name was. Many frustrated answers finally led to a rhyme. At that point we realized how the documentation and register of this experiment could become a key part of the project. So we started writing it down. The owners of a little Colombian restaurant, ‘El Rincón Caleño’, were the first ones triggering the chain of rhymed experiences, situations and people that was about to be deployed. That first thread finally led us to the president of the cabildo in Santa Clara, Víctor Conchambay, and from there to a former communal leader, Wilmer Guachamín, and a FLACSO researcher in San José de Cocotog, Juan Mérida.

Many other names -including those of Luis Herrera or Jeremy Rayner -appeared on this entanglement of bodies, practices and discourses, in which we ourselves, somehow unnoticed and anonymous, were starting to become deeply involved, threading our trust and ties within the communal territories.

Marco León, communal leader in Tola Chica; Fernando Cabascango, leader of Pueblo Kitu Kara; Marco Carrera, Director of the Municipal Archive; Darío Iza and Jaime Inty Paucar, Kitu Kara comuneros from the ancestral community of La Toglla, have been and still are capital contributions for the development of our project. The list goes on and on and even transcends our field trip to Quito and the diagram itself resulting from it: Verónica Santillán, researcher at FLACSO; Alejandra Santillana, Head of the Institute of Ecuadorian Studies; Kathrin Hopfgartner, researcher at the same institute, have become key figures in our research. Meanwhile, we have tried to keep ourselves in the background, one actor among many.

If anything, this exploration has made us acknowledge the necessary change in the role of the architect and urban thinker and consequently the territory where our research is conducted. From there, it derives a reconsideration of the nature itself of urban practice. The invisibility we seek is threaded with anonymity. It allows us to occupy a space of possibility opened up by being unseen and unperceived. This way, the urban practitioner becomes a whatshisname-practitioner —like a stealthy criminal whose spatial knowledge goes undetected, and whose urban practice, tactics and tools work in an unobtrusive and minor way.2 1 Jalón Oyarzun, Lucía, and Mateo Fernández-Muro. “The Minstrel’s Lab. Taking steps to experiment upon ourselves.” A.R.P.A Journal. Issue 01, Test Subjects. Projects. June 23, 2014. http://www.arpajournal.net/ the-minstrels-lab/ 2 Ibid.

Visited communes. Above: Comuna Santa Clara de San Millán / Middle: Comuna San José de Cocotog / Below: Comuna Tola Chica February 2016

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Field research. From top to bottom, left to right: Rincón Caleño, Barrio Santa Clara / Parroquia Santa Clara / Quito Municipal Archive / Book on Comuna Sta. Clara de S. Millán (1943), Municipal Archive / Bus to Comuna Sta. Clara / Víctor Conchambay’s hardware store / Casa Comunal Comuna Sta. Clara / Comuna S. José de Cocotog / Ilaló hill, Comuna Tola Chica / Planting seeds in Comuna Tola Chica / Communal leader in Tola Chica / Casa Comunal in Tola Chica

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The Pueblo Kitu Kara has claimed himself as the organization that represents the communes in the Metropolitan District of Quito, and it is responsible for the institutional relationship of the communes with the municipality. Its function is to represent the communes before the institutions in relation to the aspects that concern all the communes.

5.2.1. Meeting with Pueblo Kitu Kara Our trip finished with the commitment to collaborate with the Pueblo Kitu Kara and their project to unify all the communes in the Metropolitan District of Quito under an organization that represents them before the municipality and the State in relation to aspects of all the communes’ interest. There have been attempts before in creating a confederation of communes in the 70’s. Therefore, the “Pueblo Kitu Kara” is taking over this project under the idea of the construction of diverse nationalities and communities in Ecuador, and based on the rights granted to them in the Constitution.

The idea of the confederation was triggered by the AIERIlaló ordinance mentioned before, which was affecting the communes located in the hill with same name. As explained, the ordinance sets a limit on the housing construction on the Ilaló hill where many communes are located, and the reason is that in front of the hill there is a plan of constructing a hotel and a business complex, San Patricio, whose views will be precisely constituted by the Ilaló hill. The aim of the ordinance is to preserve the landscape view for this luxury complex and avoid the view of informal urban growing. Even though this is arbitrary, it also represents a violation of the communes rights granted in the Constitution of self-determination and autonomy, by not consulting them for the implementation of regulations that involved their property. However, the municipality argues that they created this ordinance based on the COOTAD that gives the municipalities the full power of management of the territories, but the law doesn’t mention the rights or limitations that they have to have toward the communes, and by not establishing them, the communes are not recognized and neither their autonomy.

The local and state regulations are full of this contradictions and gaps toward the communes rights and this is used by the

local governments in their benefit to interfere with the communes territory when they want, or deny services or infrastructure when they don’t want to provide them.

Therefore, the “Pueblo Kitu Kara” has claimed themselves as the organization that represents the communes in the Metropolitan District of Quito, and it is responsible for the institutional relationship of the communes with the municipality.

Its functions are more political and related to the public policies like ordinances, legal instruments or regulations. So its function

INSTITUTIONS

PUEBLO “KITUKARA”

is to represent the communes before the institutions in relation to the aspects that concern all communes.

During our meeting with the “Pueblo Kitu Kara”, in which the president and other members of the organization attended, we presented the maps and explained our attempt to represent on them the pressures that the communes are subject to and the incongruences that we found in the information gathered to construct the maps. We also expressed that one of our biggest obstacles for the analysis was the lack of limits or boundaries in

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the communes’ territory in order to make an accurate analysis of territory characteristics. The president of the “Pueblo Kitu Kara”, Fernando Cabascango, agreed that this has been also a problem for the communes since by not having their territories defined the municipality interfere with their land , and in this way they have lost a lot of communal land. Fernando recognized that one of the organization priorities is to define their territory limits and registered them in the municipality, so the territory is recognized as communal property and in this way any action over them has to be consulted with the respective commune.

Finally, we were invited to collaborate with the “Pueblo Kitu Kara” and participate in developing the tool or mechanism that will help them to define their territories, collect information of their characteristics and of the social information of their residents. This information will help them visualize their communes potentials and capacities in order for them to regulate their territories and truly exercise their autonomy and selfdetermination.

Therefore, our project adds to the existing one of the “Pueblo Kitu Kara” and helps to build under the politics of the commons and collaboration: the planning and governance tools needed for political self-management. We wanted to create the tools that could help the communes in their self-organization regarding their necessitates, and that could also be useful for the

CENSUS SURVEY

future confederation of communes.

The first tool is a cartography tool that comprises the physical, topographical and geographical aspects that will help to delimitate the communes’ territory. For its development, we have used as reference the limits of the communes created before through workshops and in other investigations. This tool will help the communes to work and debate over the different footprints to finally define them.

The second tool is an extended census that goes beyond the traditional ones and covers the organizational practices , material aspects, intellectual and ancestral knowledge of the residents of the communes which we are still constructing with the help of the Pueblo Kitu Kara.

The third tool is to identify the collaboration activities in order to join them and create associations to consolidate an economic structure using the current organizational structure of the communes.

The three tools are joined on a platform that we wanted to be easy to manage and accessible to consult. So the information can be seen of one commune or of all the, at the same time. The aim of the platform is to provide the communes with the capacity to exert their collective rights, create a union between them, and stop being fragmented or vulnerable to capital pressures and the accelerated urban expansion processes.

CARTOGRAPHY

SELF-MANAGEMENT

-organizational practices

-topography

-social activities

-material aspects

- geography

-economic activities

-intellectual knowledge

-property regimes

-activities with a specic purpose

-ancestral knowledge

-plots -territorial limits

PLATFORM provide the communes with the capacity to exert their collective rights and create union between them 90

5.3. Self-governance tools 5.3.1. Interactive mapping As the researcher Kathrin Hopfgartner -involved in these processes from 2010- explains, communes’ most recent efforts, combined or isolated, might be structured under two main lines of work that are intimately connected: on one hand, communes are willing to recover every kind of ancestral and communal practice as a way of life; on the other, they are looking forward to foster intra- and inter-communal economic and infrastructural development. We envision this platform as a living framework for the development of those strategies.

We are not proposing an alternative planning, communes are. It is called “Plan de Vida del Buen Vivir Comunitario” (Life Plan for the Communal Good Living), as we explained before, and it constitutes an alternative proposal to State planning that they have been developing in the last few years from their own convictions, cosmovisions, requirements and demands. We are just offering a framework for them to develop such plan. To put it shortly, Planes de Vida are a vision for development from a perspective of territoriality in its broadest historical, cultural and political meaning.

Our platform, “Herramientas de autogestión para la producción urbana en comuna” (in English, ‘Self-governance tools for an urban production in commune’), or simply “En comuna”, is right now offering three main tools. They differ in territorial scale and range.

The first one is still work in progress. We are directly collaborating with Marco León from Comuna de Tola Chica and Pueblo Kitu Kara who is helping in the development of their own communal census that aims to goes beyond and counteract the official from the State and the municipality, helping the communes to self-regulate their territories and to show their own formality. It will be comprised of two surveys: •

•

The first one will be land-based and will comprise a register of land uses, property regimes and territorial resources. All the data will be accessible in the mapping tool explained in the following lines.

The second survey, instead, will address the individual or the household unit, and besides typical demographic data it will take the form of a participatory diagnosis that will allow to show the loss of communal forms of life on one hand and the continuity of ancestral knowledges in their territories on the other.

Screenshot of one of the three interactive mapping tools provided by EN COMUNA in order to visualize and edit the limits of communal territories.

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The second instrument, as mentioned above, is a participatory mapping tool that will start compiling all the information gathered. It is structured as follows: • As a starting point, we created a whole data base from official geographic information which we then related to each and every cadastral lot registered in the municipality. We even gave them a made-up identification code to facilitate its access. The communal limits we considered are those created in a participatory workshop organized by researchers in the Institute of Ecuadorian Studies, with whom we are collaborating. In those workshops 18 out of 49 communes were mapped by its inhabitants. Given the unofficial and

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vague condition of such limits, other footprints defined in different researches are included in the map. Contradictions between them and relations to land property regime can be consulted in this section. • Through a Google Earth visualization, comuneros will be able to understand and visualize the strong link existing between the limits of the communes and the topography and will help participatory mapping workshops in the future. • Based on all of this information and of course with the help of on-site visits, the last of the tools provided will help each comunero and comunera to draw, on his or her own terms, the

limits of his or her commune. We aim, ultimately, to activate a deep debate around the notion of limit and its relation with the different dynamics of inhabiting the territory. That what to the eyes of the State is a unidimensional point -the minimal unit in the classical geometry system-, a commune has the power to turn suddenly into an Aleph for its inhabitants, acquiring a living thickness along a certain dimension that traditional systems of representation are unable to recognize: passive limitlessness can become active infiniteness. Our project, in direct collaboration with Kitu Kara people, seeks to envision forms of political construction capable of bringing such shift into light and reimagining a notion of limit that, while challenging classical forms of representation, has the real

capacity to interfere and negotiate with State property regimes defined through the latter.

But beyond a quantitative biophysical and socioeconomic study of their communal territories, we aim above all to help in the generation of qualitative self-governance tools capable of harboring and fostering the repertoire of the multiple ancestral and contemporary forms-of-life and practices being deployed in the communes. To that aim we developed the third tool, presented in the following section.

Screenshots of mapping tool created in CartoDB to allow communal members to visualize contradictions and differences between the various delimitation criteria.

This tool also includes the first stages of a communal census and cadaster of land plots within communal boundaries.

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5.3.2. Economic Self-Management.

How Does It Work?

As seen before, the project is formed by governance tools that will help the communes for their political self-management.

For their economic strategy, we helped to develop the selfmanagement tool that is used to identify the collaboration activities that exist in the communes for satisfying their individual or collective needs. The purpose of it is to explore the possibility to join these activities in the communes and between communes, in order to establish an organization of the same or related activities.

In this way the activity can be strengthened , the benefits can be increased and the inhabitants can satisfy their economic, social or cultural needs. By mapping the activities they can be visualized in each commune as well in all communes at the same time. The visualization of activities helps in first place in identifying the activities that the communes have so the residents know. In the second place, it helps to join similar or related activities in order to work together. The purpose of joining them is in the case of the activities that have products is to gather their

production and commercialize the products at better prices and avoid intermediaries. The linking of activities can also help to share knowledge and experiences. The union of activities can easily be transformed in cooperatives that will help the communes build their economic strategy to fulfill their needs and allow them to develop other activities to improve their resident’s life and will provide them with social security. At the same time, the cooperative in the long term can also provide the gains that will help with the urban projects that the communes need and the municipality denies them such as paving, water infrastructure, electricity infrastructure, etc...

The tool concept and function is easy but it’s aim is complex since it would help to construct an economy from the current activities that are already being developed within the communes. The aim is that the communes have the economic resources and structure to truly exercise their autonomy.

Therefore, we divide the activities into three categories:

Screenshot of the homepage for the economic self-management tool provided by EN COMUNA

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Activities with an Economic Purpose

The first one are the activities that have an economic purpose or that are related to exchange or management of money.

Activities with a Specific Purpose

Then we have the activities that have a specific purpose where most of them are based on the solidarity or mutual help to develop a work, and they usually have a short or medium period of time for their development.

Activities with a Social Purpose

Lastly are the activities with a social function that are based on the collaboration of individuals that work to achieve a purpose for the community’s benefit and are usually long term.

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The economic activities are probably the most important ones to identify, in order to develop a strategy that will help the communes to create their own economic structure, to improve their territories and enhance their inhabitant’s life. In this sense, most of the communes struggle with the economic resources to improve their communes or simply to construct basic infrastructure. We have divided the economic activities in: Production:

This activity comprises the different production that can be done in the commune from the harvesting of crops and vegetables to the animal raising or any other activity that produces a product which purpose is to be sold.

Credit:

Activities related to management of money such as lending loans or credits like communal banks or credit unions.

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Saving:

Also related to the management of money but activities for saving provided by saving organizations or cooperatives.

Service:

Activities of groups or individuals that provide a service that can be professional or technical. An example is the services of transportation, construction or for education.

Insurance:

The insurance activity is the one related to individuals or groups that provide financial protection or reimbursement against losses, illness or accidents.

Consumption:

Activities for consumption are the ones related to the provision of products for the use of the members, but that can also be sold to third parties, in most of the cases, these activities are developed to avoid intermediaries and are used to buy products at lower prices directly from producers.

Housing:

The housing activities are related with the join of individuals to construct houses for their own use, and they are also in charge of the construction, therefore the cost is lower compared with the one of buying a house from developers or from hiring them.

For the social organizations we divided them in: Associations:

Associations refer to groups of people organized for a joint purpose that can be for profit-seeking or not, and they don’t necessarily have to register, so they have a declarative character.

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The activities with a specific purpose are more informal and have a very short time of duration compared with the last ones.

Foundations:

While the foundations have the same purpose, the difference with an association relies on in that they need an initial endowment or investment to create a patrimony, and they are obligated to register so they have a constitutional character . Also, the foundation can be created by an individual or group, when the association always have to be created by a group.

Collectives:

The collectives are formed by members that share specific characteristics or skills , and work for a common objective and their particularity is that decisions are taken collectively.

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Mingas:

The first activity of this category is the mingas which word in Quechua means collective work in favor of the community or with a social utility. In the communes, these activities are done periodically but it depend on each commune the times they have them. The works developed in the mingas are for example the construction of retaining walls, incorporation of pipes to bring water, cleaning of areas, etc . Usually, the mingas are requested by the residents of the communes to the administration,which is in charge of organizing the minga.

Groups of families, friends or relatives:

This category refers to the activities of groups of people that develop a certain type of jobs in an informal way, meaning that are not necessary established or registered. They distinguish because the groups are usually formed by relatives or friends. We see a lot of this type of activities in the informal construction and in the commerce activities of the markets.

Explanation of tool

Selection of activity

Description of activity

Selection of category

Por último están las actividades con una función social que se basan en la colaboración de las personas que trabajan para lograr un propósito para el beneficio de la comunidad y que son por lo general a largo plazo.

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Explanation of category

Selection to map activity

Esta categorĂ­a se refiere a las actividades de los grupos de personas que desarrollan un cierto tipo de puestos de trabajo de una manera informal, lo que significa que no son necesarias establecido o registrado. Se distinguen porque los grupos suelen estar formados por familiares o amigos. Vemos una gran cantidad de este tipo de actividades en la construcciĂłn informal y en las actividades de comercio de las mercados.

Selection of activity layer

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Adding of marker and description

Above all, we need to understand such platform as an ongoing open source and always evolving framework for the counter-planning strategy the communes in Quito are developing with the final goal to fully re-inhabit their territories. So it is not us but the communes those who, in the last few years, have been developing an alternative proposal to State planning from their own convictions, cosmovisions, requirements and demands. We are just offering some bones for them to start adding flesh to such plan, which after all constitutes a vision for urban production from a perspective of territoriality in its broadest historical, cultural and political meaning.

Communes in Quito are making their territory exist, constructing it, giving it a consistency.3 This is not just about people defending a ‘territory’ in the conditions they found themselves in, but about people inhabiting it “with thoughts of what it could become”.4 3 The Invisible Committee 2015, 186 4 Ibid., 185

Indeed, the ways of living invented or rediscovered after so many years of conflict with the State and the city, are those capable of linking the various different struggles over the territory. Struggles that are -we must not forget- not only reactive or resistive, but mainly proactive and constructive, as we have seen during the research. We know how the very fight for empowerment over their territories, in fact, can already create empowerment. Yet the most interesting thing is to witness how the struggle itself is able to produce territory.

That what until now has always appeared as a onedimensional point to the eyes of the dominant powers -the minimal unit in the classical geometrical system-, a commune has now the potential to turn into an Aleph for its inhabitants, acquiring a living thickness along a certain dimension that traditional systems of representation are unable to recognize.

Passive limitlessness, at last, can become pro-active infiniteness.

Map showing the identification of activities that can be joined within a commune and same or related activities that can be joined between communes. The potential of this tool is to join the activities and be represented on a bigger scale by the Pueblo Kitu Kara organization for its management and promotion.

The tool will help to visualize the activities and the potential ones that can be joined in a cooperative within the commune, and joined similar cooperatives of other communes.

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