The book under review fills a gap in Ecuadorian research on the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It engages in a discussion of the links between nation-state formation and the participation of indigenous populations and women, complemented by a reading of the gendered construction of the nation-state. Erin O'Connor deals with the multi-layered processes of nation-state formation in three chronological stages: the time period from the political independence of Spain until the official abolition of the Indian head tax in 1857, the Garcia Moreno presidencies of the 1860s and 1870s when Catholicism became a requirement for Ecuadorian citizenship, and a final period of liberal secularising policies between 1895 and 1925 that took away corporate privileges from indigenous peasant communities (communal lands, protector de naturales, indigenous leaders).
In general, the author's reading of the historical processes in the long nineteenth century is based on common perceptions as reported in official documents, including civil and criminal lawsuits. As such, indigenous agency is circumscribed to describing how indigenous individuals and groups reacted toward various sets of (similar) official discourses, and how they used the interstices of state rhetoric and local reality to forward their own interests. Following Mark Thurner's notion of ‘unimagined community’ the author concludes that throughout the long nineteenth century, one can see – in spite of skilful responses to official discourse – how Indians, even more than women, were excluded for various reasons from participating in the construction of the nation-state: the main exclusionary device being the contradictions of the official discourse itself.
The making of Ecuador had – as shown by the author – divergent effects on Indian men and women, in large measure because male Indians paid the tribute and male Indians were deemed heads of households when it came to distributing land and when dealing with inheritance issues. In early republican Ecuador, ‘republican interethnic paternalism’ was deemed to have a transitional nature and contained transformative intentions. Most protective ideas were based on the homogenising definition of ‘Indians’. The author highlights some interesting regionally distinct responses to interethnic paternalism during the first phase of her analysis, one pattern appearing in the Northern and Southern highlands, where labour shortage existed; here, Indians took advantage of changing laws. In the central highlands, where labour was abundant, Indians actively engaged with state developments through legal and violent means. In the Southern highlands (the area around Cuenca), Indians opted to migrate to urban areas where they had more opportunities to influence political developments.
By 1870, the shortcomings and contradictions of the abolition of the head tax became clear. Abolishing the tribute was key to establishing – in García Moreno's view – a unified Catholic country. From 1857 onwards, state builders construed a rhetoric by which they were intent on incorporating the indigenous masses into the mainstream nation on an equal footing with whites and mestizos. Such a discourse was mediated by what the author calls the Indian child-man idea, namely the unfulfilled ability to exert patriarchal rule that Indians still had to learn. To ‘learn’ tacitly meant an attack on communal property, the implementation of a forced draft for public works, the establishment of tenientes políticos (mostly mestizos) who duplicated and often annulled the duties of the traditional gobernadores de indios. At the same time – as stipulated in the 1860 code – women were outside the political nation, while simultaneously becoming the ‘mosaic of the edifice’ in terms of morality and education. Indian women had to be doubly redeemed from backwardness and barbarity, because they were Indians and because they were women. Indian women – state officials argued – expected blows from their husbands as a demonstration of love, thus, none of the prescriptions by which other women could seek a divorce – namely physical mistreatment and abuse – could count for Indian women. Blows were part of ‘otherness’. Mainstream decency was far away from how Indians, and Indian women in particular, were identified and described. Rules of marriage, sexuality and the abuse of alcohol were culturally trespassed by non-whites. Consequently, even Indian men were undeserving patriarchs.
The abolition of the Indian head tax increased fiscal and labour obligations for Indians. Since hacienda owners were also in control of local politics, Indian recourse to legal means of defence became very constrained. Violent response was more frequent, most prominently the Cacha-Yaruqui (Chimborazo) upheaval in 1871, when the governor had to conscript all men between 16 and 60 years of age in Riobamba to put down this uprising.
Towards the turn of the century, the woman question remained separate from the Indian question. The official view on Indians turned toward educating them, and some attempts were undertaken to enforce general obligatory education for children between five and 12 years of age. In this same time period, the historical explanation as to why Indians lived relegated from the nation state shifted from initially blaming colonial rule to blaming bad priests and hacendados by the 1900s.
According to the author, it was the engagement with liberal ideas rather than the success on the ground that defined the modernisation of Indian-state relationships. And this engagement happened mainly in the realm of gendered relationships. Based on an analysis of the different gender practices within communities and state-sanctioned ones, the author finds a significant dissonance between what the law stipulated and what Indian men and women did. Thus, the perceived domestic violence was only tolerated to a degree acceptable to the indigenous community; marriage and property rights were handled according to local kinship and production needs rather than following the dictates of the officially established civil code. Such divergent notions led to the emergence of two quite distinct ‘public spheres’ that could be used alternatively and interchangeably according to the interests pursued, even by indigenous people, who – as the individual case might be – resorted either to community arbitration or to the official court system. Important translators of sorts between both public spheres were the local state administrators, who in their role of mediators between both spheres played a key role in the evolving Indian-state relations.
During the final period of the author's analysis, the hacienda-concertado relationship is researched. Within haciendas, concertados were more protected from outside encroachment, but at the same time – through notions of reciprocity, marriage and morality – the hacienda reproduced social and cultural hierarchies within its boundaries, establishing an ‘alternative patriarchy’.
The processes described – the author argues – show that the evolving Ecuadorean nation-state was not a top-down process. To the contrary, it was the result of a sometimes overt and (more frequently) a subtle negotiation at various levels of society, including the indigenous population. It was a give-and-take that informed the development of the nation-state.
The book is a straightforward analysis of Ecuador's nation-building process intelligently written. In spite of the author's assertion to the contrary, the Ecuadorean process sounds very similar to the Peruvian and Bolivian scenarios, in large measure because the elite rhetoric was the same and because the analysis provided is more on the reactive than on the agency side. If one were to make intra-Ecuadorean regional differences based on the higher or lower demand for indigenous labour, what needs to be assessed is how much this economic determinant informed indigenous reactions to the various stages of liberal discourse. What was the land tenure pattern like? How widespread was concertaje?
In comparison with Peru and Bolivia, I found myself wondering about some other aspects: what was the daily content of the struggles over land and agrarian resources? What happened at the level of marketing agrarian produce? How was the tax structure, and changes in it, used to engage in local economics and politics? Or more broadly, how much of the tenets of liberal economics affected the distribution of land, the organisation of exchange? After all, liberalism not only implies the politics of inclusion or exclusion and the use of rhetorical devices. What were – a question we have asked ourselves for quite some time – the alternative economic and political projects envisioned by indigenous peoples? There is abundant evidence that such projects existed, beyond the register of sporadic upheavals. One such register is the continued exchange of goods across the newly created national boundaries, continuously challenging territoriality as one of the main markers of nationhood.
