Othering National Identity Alterity and Indigenous Activism in Otavalo, Ecuador

Abstract

Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have built one of the strongest indigenous movements in Latin America. Since 1990, their mobilization and demands have shaken the foundation of Ecuadorian nation: the correspondence between non-indigenous culture and civil society that excluded indigenous peoples from the national future. Lines of work explaining the emergence of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement have treated ethnic categories as substantial things-in-the-world. They have conceptualized ethnicity in terms of discrete and substantial groups, rather than thinking in relational and dynamic terms. Treating ethnic categories as if they were unitary collective actors, these approaches reproduce the reification constructed by identity politics as political practice. Rather than explaining indigenous political activism in terms of taken-for-granted antagonistic groups, each with autonomous cultural worlds, I focus on the practices that constitute identity and alterity—the social subjectivities of individuals as persons and groups of persons, which include power-related ascriptions by selves as well as by others. These practices relate to material and symbolic struggles, have normative effects in behavior and notions of agency, and define and are defined by notions of nationality. Examining the emergence of the indigenous intelligentsia that has provided the leadership and ideology for the indigenous movement in the highlands, this research demonstrates that indigenous challenges to the dominant constitution of identity and alterity have been fundamental for the articulation of ethnic demands by the leadership, as well as for the massive support for mobilization on ethnic grounds by the indigenous peasantry. These challenges not only disrupted the hierarchical normativity of social identification and categorization but also were pivotal to the revival of indigenous culture. This intelligentsia developed in the city of Otavalo, at a time in which indigenous peasants across Ecuador were articulating a political identity during the conflicting implementation of the land reform. The indigenous intelligentsia made visible the political horizon of indigeneity. They rejected the assimilationist ideologies of the state and projected a new way of being indigenous. In turn, indigenous peasants developed a historical consciousness as indigenes. This led to the development of an imagined community of indigenous peoples that would consolidate through organizational practice and cultural revitalization.

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