Celebrating the Chagras: Mestizaje, Multiculturalism, and the Ecuadorian Nation

Abstract

This article focuses on controversial formulations of hybrid racialized identity in multicultural Ecuador as an example of the ambiguity and contradiction of racial formations in contemporary postcolonial societies. Ecuador has had to come to terms with a legacy of colonial hierarchies and power structures shaped around racialized and engendered social formations. In the Latin American region, the impact of hybrid social constructions, mestizaje, dates back to the seventeenth century, informing the way Spanish colonizers organized colonial society in a caste system built around degrees of "whiteness," yet for most of the twentieth century, mestizaje came to function as an ideological construct of cultural homogeneity and unity that informed formulations of national identity. However, the impacts of global discourses of recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity and rights ever since the 1980s have led to significant shifts in the discourse of and on national identity. Since the early 1990s, many constitutional reforms across the region moved away from the idea of a culturally homogeneous national identity by celebrating ethnic and cultural diversity. This article analyzes the impacts of these transnational and global processes on the formation of Ecuadorian national identity. By examining the discourses and social practices involving the chagra, the mestizo peasant of Ecuadorian highlands, I explore the extent to which mestizaje as a modern ideological construct still informs the formation of social hierarchies, maintaining not only Indians and Blacks but also "poor mestizos" in a liminal state of yet-to-become citizens of the nation. However, I also argue that the recognition of diversity under multiculturalism has not overcome long-standing prejudices, racism, and subordination.

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