In the early 1990s, anthropologist Lynn Meisch found it “highly disconcerting” that some indígenas (indigenous people) in Otavalo, Ecuador, still knelt and kissed the hands of non-indígenas (Reference Meisch2002: 214). Many other anthropologists had given evidence of similar behavior across the Andes. After conducting multi-sited fieldwork in Ecuador, in the late 1960s, Joseph Casagrande wrote, “Sierra Indians and non-Indians have learned their respective roles of submission and dominance extremely well and almost unthinkingly put them into practice” (Reference Casagrande and Whitten1981: 261). Such presentations of the indigenous self as utterly passive and meekly obedient led many non-indígenas to believe that the indígenas suffered from an inferiority complex (Rubio Orbe Reference Rubio Orbe1955; Prieto Reference Prieto2004: 181).
During colonial times, in the 1730s and 1740s, analogous behavior prompted two prominent scientists, the Frenchman Charles-Marie La Condamine and the Spaniard Antonio de Ulloa, to conclude that the indígenas were unintelligent.Footnote 1 However, the Jesuit priest and historian Juan de Velasco, who was born and lived in the Audiencia Footnote 2 of Quito, criticized the ways in which these scientists had acquired information on the indígenas: short visits, linguistic ignorance, and dependence on non-indigenous informants were hardly conducive to enlightened knowledge. As a child, de Velasco had witnessed an interaction of La Condamine with some indígenas in Quito (Cañizares-Esguerra Reference Cañizares-Esguerra, Thurner and Guerrero2003: 94), and years later he described what had transpired:
An intelligent person, let us say an academic, begins to examine an indiano [Indian]Footnote 3, asking him several questions to discover the depth of his capacity and grasp the extent of the exercise of his limited faculties. The indiano considers that for him the aim of the examiner might be detrimental. So, what does the indiano do? If he is foolish and stupid as four, he becomes stupid as twenty. And, what happens next? While the academic forms his judgment, concludes that the indiano is nothing short of a beast, and writes this down in his travel log, the indiano goes to laugh with his peers. He considers his examiner gullible and stupid, since he was able to dupe him (de Velasco Reference de Velasco1971 [1789]: 341).
What was going on in such interactions? Were those indígenas in Quito submissive and stupid or were they merely acting? The same questions are relevant more than two centuries later. Andrés Guerrero (Reference Guerrero1991) and Mark Thurner (Reference Thurner1993) have claimed that during the hacienda social regime—which in the Andes lasted until the early 1970s when its servile relations of production were brought to an end—indígenas feigned deference, ignorance, and passivity. Such claims point to the difficulty of evaluating indigenous submissive behavior vis-à-vis the stereotype of the indio (Indian) as mute, stupid, and fawning, on one hand, and the harsh realities of indigenous exploitation, on the other. What is certain is that interethnic interaction constituted a proscenium in which indígenas behaved differently than among their peers. Variations certainly existed, but there is no doubt that those behaviors were conventional, and as Alaina Lemon argues, “Conventions can only becomes such through framed repetitions—through performances” (Reference Lemon2000: 24, her italics).
Ecuadorian indígenas are no longer subservient. In June 1990, they irrupted into the national political arena staging a massive levantamiento (uprising) that paralyzed the highlands for twelve days. At first, non-indígenas could not believe that the supposedly submissive indios could be leading such an organized, mighty protest and many, including the president and the military, blamed the uprising on external leadership and manipulation. Only when a group of well-informed indigenous activists emerged as the actual leaders of the uprising did those accusations subside. Constituting one of the strongest indigenous movements in Latin America, Ecuadorian indígenas achieved demonstrable victories during the 1990s, including the constitutional identification of Ecuador as a pluricultural and multi-ethnic state and the legalization of indigenous territories in the Amazonian basin.
From 2003 onward, however, the movement has been weakened by government co-option, political fragmentation, and a lack of clear objectives. Non-indígenas have also fought back to re-inscribe their supposedly “natural” or unmarked political citizenship and weaken the indigenous political challenge (Krupa Reference Krupa and Pandey2011). Current statist President Rafael Correa, who initially sought the support of the indigenous movement, has not only criminalized social protest but also eroded the organizational structure of the indigenous movement through co-option at the grass-roots level (Martínez Novo Reference Martínez Novo, Eisenstadt, Danielson, Corres and Polo2013). What lies ahead is unknown, but it is unquestionable that contemporary indigenous activism has deeply transformed Ecuadorian society. Indigenous leaders are today outspoken participants in the public sphere and some of them occupy important government offices, from mayoralties to ambassadorships, a level of public leadership unimaginable three or four decades ago. At the ground level, indigenous political and cultural assertiveness has considerably reshaped the ways in which indigeneity and whiteness have ordered social relationships.
Analogous processes of indigenous political affirmation and ethnic consciousness, which entail the articulation of a political identity based on cultural difference, have not taken place in the Peruvian Andes, where most indigenous people still feel that indigeneity is a stigmatized condition. They identify not as indígenas but as campesinos (peasants), and have not organized as indigenous peoples.Footnote 4 In Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia indigenous peasants had participated in class-based organizations in struggles for land since at least the 1930s, but only in Bolivia and Ecuador did they begin to invest in the subject position of the politically conscious indígena, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. In the current context of anti-mining struggles, some Peruvian activists have recently started to adopt the banner of indigeneity (Wright and Martí i Puig Reference Wright and Martí i Puig2012), but the extent to which these efforts will find political resonance among indigenous Andeans in Peru remains to be seen.
Scholars have proposed two perspectives to explain causality between ethnic consciousness and contemporary indigenous political mobilization in Ecuador and Latin America. Critics such as Leon Zamosc and Marc Becker argue that ethnic consciousness already existed, either as a sense of collective purpose “based on appeals to primordial loyalties” (Zamosc Reference Zamosc1994: 54), or as an unbroken component of a synthesis of ethnic and class consciousness (Becker Reference Becker2008: 53). Other scholars have asserted that ethnic consciousness was a product of the organizational processes leading to the development of indigenous movements. Thus, Melina Selverston-Scher claims, the “fact that it is in their best interest to identify themselves as indigenous results from the gains by mobilization based on collective identity and from the political space that is being won” (Reference Selverston-Scher2001: 67). Likewise, Deborah Yashar, in a broader regional analysis, argues that a new trans-communal indigenous identity “was the product more than a cause” of the development of regional and national organizational networks (Reference Yashar2005: 71).
In this study, I analyze Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans' trajectory from submission to assertiveness, and compare it with the Peruvian and Bolivian cases. I focus on the ways in which performance and performativity have constructed indigeneity as a social reality. Performance, in the more specific sense of theatricality, implies a bounded act done by a subject who consciously performs, whereas performativity, following Judith Butler, refers to the construction of the subject by the reiteration of norms. Considering that social hierarchies are iteratively constructed, I argue that through cultural performance Ecuadorian indígenas have been able to undermine the ways in which performativity has constituted indígenas as subaltern and non-indígenas as dominant subjects. I also demonstrate that the contemporary political identity of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans, rather than preexisting or developing solely from organizational processes, has been a dialogical work-in-progress that has hinged significantly on the emergence of self-conscious cultural performance.
I use historical and ethnographic evidence—gathered during more than two years of fieldwork in Ecuador, mostly in Otavalo, Province of Imbabura, and a month in Pisaq and Cusco, Peru—to examine three interrelated fields that are crucial in the construction of indigeneity and the ethnic boundary: (1) the performativity of race and ethnicity, which reproduces and/or subverts dominant matrixes of subject construction; (2) the performance of indigenous festivities, which make tangible a sense of cultural continuity through history (B. Butler Reference Butler2006: 374); and (3) the performance of indigenous culture during organized protests, which indexes such demonstrations as indigenous.
Working on the constitution of gender, Judith Butler has argued that identity is stylistically performed, but according to internalized norms that constitute common sense and propriety, naturalizing dominance, and subordination (Reference Butler1990; Reference Butler1993). “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed,” Butler maintains; “rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetitions of acts” (Reference Butler1988: 519, her italics). The gendered self, rather than being substantial or prior to its acts, is a performative accomplishment of iterative corporeal acts, governed by punitive and regulatory social conventions. Performativity, then, is not an act or event but a process, “the formation of the subject in process—but never one that is finished or complete” (Moore Reference Moore2007: 118).
Ethnicity, like gender, is both performed and performative. Individuals and groups might present themselves as ethnic but do so according to expectations shaped by the daily enactments constituting the ethnic boundary. Such iterative acts do not have to be conscious to be effective, as Joane Nagel observes: “Performativity is a powerful mechanism of social construction and social control, all the more so because it tends to go unnoticed, be invisible and operates at the level of intuition. Performatives just seem to feel right or wrong. They are difficult to identify or think about because they are so ingrained, presumed and seemingly natural” (Reference Nagel, Collins and Solomos2010: 197, her italics).
Although performance may be distinguished analytically from performativity,Footnote 5 in everyday interaction this distinction is less than clear. People bring both into play to constitute social reality. In addition, ideological assumptions about performance, which aim to distinguish when people are performing a role and when they are just being themselves, are constitutive of self and other subjectivities. Dominant and subaltern assumptions about performance may not coincide since they are related to “practices of personhood, agency, and authenticity” (Lemon Reference Lemon2000: 22).
Considering indigeneity as normative practice significantly realized through performance and performativity yields two important analytical insights. First, it enables us to overcome the limitations of explanations of indigenous subordination in terms of ideological control and false consciousness (see, for instance, Lentz Reference Lentz and Guerrero2000: 210), which overly rely on the analysis of discourse and representation at the expense of the analysis of practice. Second, it enables us to explain ways in which identities and alterities are dialogically constructed, a process that most analyses of indigeneity in the Andes have overlooked.Footnote 6 Dialogism (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981) suggests that meanings, subjectivities, and relationships emerge from the words and actions through which people interact. Participants not only “interpret and evaluate each other's words and actions in the course of an event, but no single individual may control the meanings and relationships that transpire” (Van Vleet Reference Van Vleet2008: 10). As dialogical interventions, performance and performativity constitute not only indigenous but also non-indigenous identities and alterities.
Considering that processes of social categorization are contextual and relational, I refrain from translating the labels indio, indígena, and blanco (white) into English. Rather than things, ethnic categories are contingent abstractions whose meanings and norms of belonging and exclusion are always political and change dialogically over time. In addition, persons may self-identify as members of a category even while another is foisted on them. For example, a blanco person in 1970s Otavalo might not be identified as a white person in English-speaking countries. Since the 1980s, some scholars have used the term blanco-mestizo to refer to ethnically unmarked Ecuadorians, but the term muddles quotidian and analytical usages because in daily life being a mestizo disqualifies a person from being blanco. In addition, the term blanco-mestizo hides discrimination within this category. I use non-indígena to refer to persons who self-identify as blanco or as mestizo, unless the use of any of these terms is warranted. Using non-indígena as an analytical category allows us to think about social categorization in relational and processual terms. The term also avoids the conundrum that self and other identification as mestizo or blanco may change depending upon context.
THE PERFORMATIVITY OF RACIAL/ETHNIC HIERARCHIES
On 31 January 2001, at the height of an indigenous uprising, three Andean indigenous leaders—one woman and two men wearing traditional attire—went to the Ecuadorian National Congress to present their demands. At the entrance, the following exchange took place:
Spokesman: “We are coordinating who is coming in.”
Indigenous woman: “Yes, we are the leaders.”
Police officer, aggressively loud: “Let's see. Your name!”
Unknown male voice in the background: “Leaders? From where, how, when?”
Police officer, again loudly: “Your name!”
Indigenous woman: “What did you say?”
Police officer: “What is your name? Your name to…”
Indigenous woman, angry: “Don't you know how to treat people politely?”
Other unknown voices: “To announce you, to bring you inside.”
Indigenous woman: “You need to say señora [madam]! You are not going to call me mi hijita [my little daughter]! I am not your little daughter!”
Police officer, radically changing his tone from aggressive to cordial: “Please, your name?”
Indigenous woman: “Good. You need to learn how to treat us as people! Respect me!”
Police officer: “Let's see. Please, your name?”
Indigenous woman: “Say, ‘Señora, your name?’”
Police officer: “Señora, your name?”
Indigenous woman: “Right. Blanca Chancoso.”
Unknown male voice: “Señora Blanca Chancoso.”
Indigenous woman: “That's right.”Footnote 7
The presence of a video camera might have compelled the police officer to yield to Chancoso's demands, but the significance of the scene rests in how she acted, how she preempted his attempts to load the interaction into a paternalistic framework. Her hyperconsciousness of the dynamics of ethnic discrimination is an outcome of indigenous historical experience. Until the 1980s, non-indígenas did not address indigenous adults with polite terms such as señor (Mister), señora (Madam), “don” and “doña” (honorific titles used before first names), or usted (formal you). Rather, they addressed the indígenas, even strangers, as “mi hijito” or “mi hijita” or as “tú” or “vos” (informal you). This oppressive assumption of inter-ethnic intimacy, which infantilized indígenas and denied them respect as adults, was naturalized inasmuch as indigenous subordination and non-indigenous dominance were taken for granted. Indigenous leader Segundo Ramos claims, “For them (non-indígenas), there was no racism. To address the indio as ‘mi hijito’ was the normal behavior. It was not seen as racist because they considered that by saying ‘mi hijito’ they were treating you well.”Footnote 8
Non-indígenas had historically forced the indígenas into paternalist relationships of dependency by means of land dispossession, denial of civil rights, and restrictions on their acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu would identify as “cultural capital” (Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986), including literacy and Spanish-language skills. At the same time, indigenous Andeans have historically assimilated into dominant, non-indigenous culture, especially when moving out of their communities of origin, in order to avoid the violence of ethnic degradation and improve their social mobility, so long as they were able to acquire the cultural capital to do so. As Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld argues, the equating of schooling with assimilation was a “basic tenet of national culture” (Reference Colloredo-Mansfeld2009: 92).
In interethnic interactions, condescending non-indigenous behavior went hand in hand with submissive indigenous behavior, which was performed in many ways, including walking hunched over, giving way on sidewalks, whining in a characteristic high pitch when asking for something, and lowering the gaze to avoid eye contact. When harassed or beaten, most indígenas did not respond, even when the harassers were children.Footnote 9 According to Hernán Jaramillo, a non-indigenous intellectual from Otavalo, “there was no reaction” from indígenas facing racist aggression. “Definitively, there was submission. Conflicts never reached physical confrontation.”Footnote 10 When indígenas visited urban centers, fear of mistreatment conditioned their behavior, and through silence and acquiescence, they behaved as if they lacked subjectivity (de la Torre Reference de la Torre1999).Footnote 11 Non-indígenas imagined urban centers as exclusively blanco spaces and treated the indígenas as if they were invisible. Under the prevailing stereotype of the indio as compliant and meek, non-indígenas qualified indigenous assertiveness as abnormal, using terms such as indio alzado (insolent Indian), indio creído (arrogant Indian), indio soliviantado (unruly Indian) and indio alzamentero (rebellious Indian) (Villavicencio Reference Villavicencio1973: 115; Cervone Reference Cervone2012: 126).
Indigenous submission to non-indígenas was widespread across the Andes. Indigenous national leader Luis Macas, who belongs to the Saraguro people in the southern province of Loja, Ecuador, claims that this presentation of the self was a strategy for cultural survival and community autonomy. He has quoted his father as saying, “When the laichus [a Saraguro term for non-indigenous people] want to win, you have to just be quiet. It does not matter whether or not you are right; if you are going to lose, just be quiet. Why keep talking? I will not win in a fight with them, I will let them hit me if they want to” (Macas, Belote, and Belote Reference Macas, Linda, Belote and Whitten2003: 220). While indígenas behaved as if they were dull and submissive, they had to deal with the pervasive impunity of the non-indígenas, since local non-indigenous exploiters and authorities backed each other and often were related. Challenging the harassers would have provoked more violence (B. Butler Reference Butler1981: 282; Reference Butler2006: 277).
In Otavalo, the ethnic/racial categories have changed, demonstrating the ways in which identities and alterities are constituted across time. Until the 1970s, blanco was the only unmarked category of identity, free from stigma, while the term mestizo largely corresponded with the pejorative cholo, which is still used to stigmatize others as more indio than the self (Garcés Reference Garcés1957: 56; Crespi Reference Crespi and Bennett1973). Self-identification as a mestizo person was uncommon, and non-indígenas would predominantly self-identify as blanco, if they could (Stark Reference Stark and Whitten1981). They, according to my indigenous interlocutors, considered it an insult to be called mestizos.Footnote 12 Ethnic/racial categories changed in conjunction with the adoption of the ideology of mestizaje as state policy by the 1970s military dictatorship (Silva Reference Silva2005). Such ideology imagines the nation as unequivocally mestizo and demands the assimilation of its ethnic/racial others. Mestizaje has also been seen as a discourse of national homogenization that hides and reproduces practices of ethnic/racial exclusion (Stutzman Reference Stutzman and Whitten1981; Wade Reference Wade2003). Today, mestizo no longer carries a social stigma. As Beck and Mijeski argue, mestizo is an unmarked category, bereft of ethnicity, used to assert that one is not an indio. The term is also associated with the assimilationist movement in Ecuador. To be mestizo, accordingly, is to be Ecuadorian, to identify with the nation-state (Reference Beck and Mijeski2000: 124).
A few decades ago, the political and cultural meanings of blanco did not strictly correspond to those of race. After conducting fieldwork in Otavalo during the 1960s, Frank Salomon argued that blanco was “more a cultural than a racial designation” (Reference Salomon and Whitten1981: 423). Blanco-ness was associated with wealth, occupation, culture, and urbanity, rather than unambiguously with skin-color.Footnote 13 This meant that local blancos did not necessarily have light skin. In daily life and legal registration, blancos, mestizos, and indios were distinguished by dress rather than skin color. Blancos wore suits; mestizos, cheap clothing; and indígenas, ponchos. Most indígenas also went barefoot (Buitrón and Collier Reference Buitrón and Collier1971: 90; Meisch Reference Meisch2002: 202).
Performativity also constituted blancos. Predisposed to expect nothing other than dominance over the indígenas, they reiteratively enacted explicit contempt toward them. In 1963, when researcher Jed A. Cooper greeted an indígena in Otavalo, a blanco told him, “We never greet the Indians here! It's just not done. They are inferior people” (Reference Cooper1965: 30). Blanco belonging was also predicated on notions of citizenship, of participation in the realm of the national (Stutzman Reference Stutzman and Whitten1981: 79). Up to the 1970s, most indígenas were illiterate and were legally disenfranchised as such.Footnote 14Blancos in contrast participated in the public sphere, creating public opinion and defining political will. Citizenship, according to Andrés Guerrero, was enacted in terms of Bourdieu's “practical sense” (Reference Bourdieu1991) by executing “immediate and everyday strategies of power” to constantly recreate indigenous subordination (Reference Guerrero and Guerrero2000: 13). Blancos frequently kicked and shoved the indígenas and pushed their hats away, or snatched their prendas (pieces of clothing) to force them to work in any menial task. The prenda was returned when the indígena finished the task. This and other forms of appropriation of indigenous labor and products were institutionalized but not all were as explicitly violent. Some non-indígenas also developed hierarchical relationships of compadrazgo (godparenthood) with indígenas, exchanging social influence and cultural capital for indigenous labor and products.
Non-indígenas also went to great lengths to avoid being seen as flawed blancos. Holding a long-standing disdain for manual labor, they would not carry any load or work the land. Nor would they sit on the floor, work alongside indígenas, treat indígenas in an egalitarian manner, or allow their children to play with indígena children. They also tried to “stay assiduously out of the sun” (B. Butler Reference Butler1981: 171). Many non-indígenas spoke Kichwa, but only those of high-rank spoke it in public. Those who risked being taken for cholos denied that they could speak the language of the indios (Villavicencio Reference Villavicencio1973: 128). Racial ambiguity dictated that newcomers could not be categorized unequivocally as blanco (B. Butler Reference Butler1981: 158). They had to perform blanco-ness convincingly, speak Spanish without an accent, demonstrate literacy, wear the right clothes, give evidence of skilled or intellectual labor, quote recent news from leading newspapers, and hide indigenous ancestry. Any false step could undermine their self-identification as blancos. Critics could be not only other non-indígenas but also indígenas (Crespi Reference Crespi and Bennett1973; Weinstock Reference Weinstock1970). Intrinsically related to the economic exploitation of the indígenas, blanco identity in provincial towns was shaped by a moral economy of complicity, a normativity that dictated that blancos should never break their ranks, side with the indios, treat them as equals, or marry them.Footnote 15
Through reiterative enactment, indígenas and non-indígenas produced a world in which the body was known through its manifestations of indigeneity. Today, the performativity constituting indígenas and non-indígenas in terms of blanco superiority/unmarkedness and indio inferiority/stigma is not as explicitly discriminatory as it was in the recent past, nor is it as hegemonic, but by no means is it gone.
THE PERFORMANCE OF INDIGENOUS FESTIVITIES
During the 1970s and 1980s, many indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Andes halted the celebration of several fiestas that were part of the ritual cycle of the cargo or fiesta system (Cervone Reference Cervone2012: 215; Corr Reference Corr2010: 75; Guerrero Cazar Reference Guerrero Cazar and Parga1990: 154; Lyons Reference Lyons2001: 43; Walter Reference Walter1981: 183). “Pasar el cargo” meant to undertake the sponsorship of a fiesta and, in some contexts, to hold a church or political position. For newly married couples, sponsoring a fiesta was a rite of passage through which they achieved adulthood and became worthy of respect. Older and wealthier couples often undertook the sponsorship several times, in order to increase their social networks, at times competing with rival factions (Walter Reference Walter1981: 183). Many of these festivities ceased because members of the younger generation were unwilling to bear the onerous cost of the sponsorships. Their reluctance relates to several transformations of the social landscape. Land reforms transformed the land tenure structure and gradually put an end to the servile relations of production of the old hacienda regime; religious conversion from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism turned many indígenas away from participating in the fiestas; and schooling, labor migration, itinerant trade, and development projects opened new paths for social mobility (Muratorio Reference Muratorio1982; Crain Reference Crain1989; Ferraro Reference Ferraro and Guerrero2000). Because of their literacy skills, the younger generation became the new leaders, shunned cargo sponsorships, and criticized their forebears' lifestyle as burdened by drinking and exploitation. They also emphasized class rather than ethnicity in processes of political organization (Pallares Reference Pallares2002: 161).
In a context of land conflicts triggered by the uneven application of the 1970s land reform, the 1970s and early 1980s also witnessed a proliferation of community and trans-communal organizations. Many of these developed under the tutelage of non-indigenous activists who belonged to leftist parties and class-based organizations, and liberation theology clergy and supporters. In 1972, religious activists founded the ECUARUNARI (Ecuador Runacunapak Rikcharimui: The Awakening of Indígenas of Ecuador) as a pan-Andean umbrella organization. In 1976, ECUARUNARI indigenous activists, growing tired of their subordination, expelled the non-indigenous leadership. However, indigenous activists would take until the early 1980s to articulate a political identity that emphasized their indigenous over their class status. Uniting forces with Amazonian activists, in November 1986 they created the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), the first countrywide indigenous organization. From these processes emerged, for the first time, the articulation of a shared political identity between Andean and Amazonian indígenas, which is still lacking in Peru, and also the definition of the different indigenous populations in Ecuador as nationalities.
According to Amalia Pallares, the demands of Amazonian activists for a right to territory influenced the ideas of their Andean counterparts (Reference Pallares2002: 172). Marc Becker notes that indigenous activists adopted the concept of indigenous nationalities from Ileana Almeida, a non-indigenous, leftist intellectual who, after traveling to the Soviet Union, had argued that indigenous Andeans constituted a Quechua nationality (Reference Becker2008: 171). Yet scholars have paid not enough attention to the emergence of cultural self-consciousness among the indígenas and their awareness of the political power of the performance of culture at the level of both interethnic face-to-face interaction and national politics. For indigenous activists, this transformation amounted to a cultural turn in the long history of indigenous struggles.
The Left and the Liberation Theology Church wanted to co-opt the indigenous movement … for their own interests. From this contradiction emerged a group of young intellectuals who understood that this must be stopped, who understood that it was very important to recuperate the millenarian history of the indigenous peoples of this country.… It was then that the theme of cultural struggle emerged as the backbone of the political initiative of the indigenous movement.… The idea … came from indigenous intellectuals … from the Kichwas of Pastaza [an Amazonian province] and from the Kichwas of Otavalo. This was very important because the non-indígenas who acted as self-appointed guardians of the indigenous movement were set aside. The cultural struggle enabled the strengthening of the primary actors, the indígenas … [who] began to debate their own proposals, ideas, philosophies, and worldviews. The Church had helped us, the leftist parties had helped us, but at that moment, a consciousness in itself came into being.Footnote 16
Another activist considered that these processes developed into “the awakening of the spirit of being indio,” and a vital “political and cultural indigenous renaissance.”Footnote 17 In Otavalo, this awakening was supported by the newly found economic prosperity of some indigenous families involved in itinerant trading of artisanal handicrafts across the world. From that milieu emerged educated indígenas, fluent in Spanish language, who were able to confront non-indigenous harassers challenging their identity as blancos (Huarcaya Reference Huarcaya2010). Some of these young indígenas would later become the intelligentsia that has provided the “ideologies that shaped the nature of the national indigenous movement” (Korovkin Reference Korovkin1998: 126).
From the late 1980s indígenas started to recuperate festivities that had “died out,” as a part of what Barbara Butler calls “self-conscious indigenous revival” (Reference Butler2006: 393; see also Corr Reference Corr2010: 75). In some areas, these processes preceded the levantamiento of 1990; while in others they started later, after this and subsequent uprisings galvanized communities into cultural revival. In 1986, indigenous activists in Cayambe staged the Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun in the June solstice, challenging their subordination to non-indígenas in the festival of San Pedro (Mars Reference Mars2010: 28). In 1988, the indigenous organization Inca Atahualpa in Tixán took over the organization of the Festival of the Harvest, a celebration for both indígenas and non-indígenas that had started in 1982, and turned it into the “festival of the Kichwas” (Cervone Reference Cervone2012: 213). The Fiesta of the Caporales (foremen) in Salasaca, in which indigenous men parody black soldiers and hacienda guards, was not celebrated during the mid-1990s, “but by 1998 men were again volunteering to serve as caporales” (Corr Reference Corr2010: 75). Across the Ecuadorian Andes, many other indigenous communities have re-appropriated the festivities of San Juan or San Pedro and, like in Cayambe, turned them into the Inti Raymi.
In Otavalo, indígenas started to celebrate two fiestas that may be considered invented traditions: the Pawkar Raymi (Festival of Flowering) in 1999 and the Kulla Raymi (Festival of the Inca's consort) in 1995 (Wibbelsman Reference Wibbelsman2008: 50; Rogers Reference Rogers1999: 60). Both were adopted from the Inca ritual calendar. The Pawkar Raymi, in February, is a sport and music mega-event that developed from a football championship. The Kulla Raymi, in September, is a celebration of women and fertility staged each year in a different hosting community by the Federación Indígena y Campesino de Imbabura (FICI: Indigenous and Peasant Federation of Imbabura). It was started in response to the subordination of the indígenas in the Fiesta del Yamor, a non-indigenous festival organized by the Municipality of Otavalo.Footnote 18 Both the Pawkar Raymi and the Kuya Raymi receive financial support from corporate and state sponsors.
Indígenas in Otavalo have also revived other festivities such as the Entrega de Gallos, in which roosters, tied by their feet to a pole that is carried horizontally, are offered to local authorities,Footnote 19 and the Fiesta del Coraza, in which the sponsor mounts a horse and wears a spectacular costume. The latter is now staged not only in some of the communities that celebrated it before, around Lake San Pablo, but also in others that did not, north of the city of Otavalo. The FICI also stages a coraza as part of the Kulla Raymi. In addition, newly elected and appointed indigenous authorities are arranging the presence of the coraza in state ceremonies. Through its increasing visibility and festive reproduction, the coraza has become a symbol of a renovated indigeneity, representing indigenous culture as something of worth.
Contemporary renditions demonstrate the ways in which the nature of indigenous festivities has changed. The bygone cargo system was part of the ritualized reproduction of ethnic hierarchies by which hacendados, priests, and local authorities were accepted as legitimate tutelary rulers. As Mark Thurner argued, politics under the old hacienda regime “were encoded in a shifting cultural practice of subordination and domination” (Reference Thurner1993: 42). Performing festivities, indígenas engaged in symbolic and material contests with non-indígenas, but in doing so they submitted to the hierarchical framework that placed them at the bottom of the social scale.
For most of republican times, non-indigenous intellectuals, government agents, and clerics had criticized indigenous festivities as harmful and irrational traditions that demonstrated that the indígenas were lagging in cultural development (Barlett Reference Barlett1980). In Otavalo, the Fiesta de San Juan, known today as Inti Raymi, included not only widespread drunkenness but also a ritual combat between communities known as tinku, which could result in injuries and even deaths.Footnote 20 Non-indígenas complained that during fiestas the drunken indígenas turned bravos, insolent and courageous. However, most non-indígenas supported the celebrations because they channeled indigenous economic resources into their hands. Sponsoring festivities necessitated the purchase of food, liquor, and fireworks, the rental of costumes and horses, the hiring of brass bands and the payment of Mass fees. Excepting for part of the food, indígenas obtained these goods and services from non-indígenas. As recalled by an indigenous woman of the community of Huaycopungo, the system was very exploitative: “The chief of the civil registry named the sponsors each year, forcing them to undertake the position. The band, food, drink, everything was very expensive. The indígenas spent a lot and continued to live in poverty. To cover the expenses, they took out loans from the mestizos, pledging animals and land as debt securities. Many were unable to repay the loans and lost their animals and lands” (see also Corr Reference Corr2010: 40; Butler Reference Butler1981: 192, 225).Footnote 21
Today, in contrast, there are no exploitative hacendados, authorities, priests, or costume renters. The main expenses of the festivities are shared among community members, who pay a small fee for the cost of food, drink, and music, and the rental of stages, tent canopies, and chairs. In the Entrega de Gallos, the roosters are offered to members of the cabildo, the community council, rather than to the hacendados. The revival is also contagious: after seeing the community of Cotama celebrate the Entrega de Gallos for several years, the community of Guanansi began to celebrate it again in 2010.
Cultural revival has not only given indígenas a sense of pride but has also strengthened their solidarity. A case in point is the community of Huaycopungo, where the Fiesta del Coraza was staged anew in 2000 after a sixteen-year hiatus. The celebration was organized by a major leader of the evangelist church, who three years before “had singled out the traditional Corazas fiesta as a reason for the local Protestant revolt from the Catholic Church” (B. Butler Reference Butler2006: 342). The self-conscious revival that indígenas have put into action affirms a sense of cultural ownership and pride that did not exist a few decades ago. As a female leader from Huaycopungo argues, indígenas only started to revive the Fiesta del Coraza once they realized that it was theirs: “A few years ago, the Fiesta del Coraza was very discredited. People did not want to hear anything about it. Some asked, ‘Do we want to revive the Coraza? What for?’ The evangelicals said that those were pagan festivities. Others asked, ‘How are we going to revive a festival in which we suffered discrimination, humiliation, and at the same time exploitation? We do not want that.’ But then we realized that the festival belongs to us, that it is our own. From then on we have resumed the celebration.”Footnote 22
This cultural awareness extends beyond Otavalo. Referring to the Salasaca, a Kichwa population in the Ecuadorian Central Andes, Rachel Corr has asserted, “People are aware of the uniqueness of the customs and reflect on the meanings of local ritual to their own sense of identity as part of a unique indigenous culture in Ecuador” (Reference Corr2010: 162). However, examining indigenous performances as uninterrupted survivals from the past, she pays little attention to their dialogical construction and meanings.
In Ecuador, many non-indígenas share the idea that the indígenas are losing their culture. If an indígena does not wear the proper ethnic markers, for example if he wears a jacket instead of a poncho, then non-indígenas might label him as an “aculturado” (acculturated). In Otavalo, non-indígenas have often told me that indígenas in the Plaza de Ponchos, the handicraft market, wear traditional attire acting on economic interest to attract tourists, or that indigenous leaders, because of their sophistication in dealing with dominant culture, are not indigenous any more, or not enough (see also Massal Reference Massal1998). Non-indigenous ideological assumptions about performance are shaped by the assimilationist ideology of mestizaje, which hides racial and ethnic discrimination behind a mask of national inclusiveness (Stutzman Reference Stutzman and Whitten1981). The premise is that change among indígenas equates to cultural assimilation. As Beth Conklin argues, dominant sensibilities across the Americas locate authentic indigeneity in opposition to change (Reference Conklin, Ewart and O'Hanlon2007). Accordingly, supposedly authentic Indians must embody exoticism and primitiveness. In Ecuador, if indígenas change, they are indígenas no more—they have become mestizos. Still associating indigeneity with marginalization, many non-indígenas consider that a poor, monolingual, Kichwa-speaking peasant is more authentically indigenous than a rich multilingual trader or a savvy politician. Consequently, many non-indígenas consider that sophisticated indigenous leaders, such as the three-time mayor of Otavalo, Mario Conejo, are simply acting the role.Footnote 23 However, it is through cultural performance that indígenas position themselves, and are seen by non-indígenas, as not acting but being themselves. Cultural performance is then a site in which indigenous self-identification and non-indigenous interpellation of the indígenas as others coincide. Because “performances are locations where culture is accomplished” (Johnston Reference Johnston2009: 7), they invalidate non-indigenous claims of indigenous inauthenticity.
Performing culture in indigenous festivities, indígenas also provoke in non-indígenas feelings of uncertainty about cultural belonging, ownership, and authenticity. They are like the ladinos in Guatemala who, as Charles Hale asserts, feel “identity-less” in the face of indigenous cultural and political activism (Reference Hale2006: 114). Although they often voice racist remarks, many non-indígenas consider indígenas to be ultimately better off because they “have a culture and we do not.”Footnote 24 In Otavalo, the reaffirmation of indigeneity has enabled indígenas to criticize mishukuna (mestizos or non-indígenas in general) as persons who lack cultural grounding, want to be more blanco, deny their indigenous ancestry, and are confused about who they are.Footnote 25
For indigenous activists, cultural revitalization has been fundamental for the articulation of a new indigeneity that is disentangled from stigma, upon which they could build a new political identity. Rather than being fixed by tradition, contemporary festivities demonstrate the creative cultural transformations that make tangible for participants a sense of their continuity as a people (B. Butler Reference Butler2006: 374). Three or four decades ago, when indigenous ways of life were heavily stigmatized, such community festivities were inward-looking events in which visitors were unwelcome and might be harassed. Today they are outward-looking celebrations in which everybody is welcomed. That said, they are not folkloric performances for touristic audiences; they are by and for the indígenas.Footnote 26 Some non-indígenas do participate, but they are reminded by the constant claims on cultural ownership by the indigenous presenters, broadcasted through speakers, that they are excluded from the “us” to whom “our culture” refers. These celebrations contrast starkly with the performance of indigeneity in the Inti Raymi in Cusco, Peru, which includes an invented staging of the Inca celebration and numerous ensembles performing traditional indigenous dances in a competitive parade. Stereotypical and geared for tourists, these are performances from the subject position of the mestizo claiming to participate in national culture, rather than from the politically conscious indígena.Footnote 27
THE STAGING OF INDIGENOUS CULTURAL PERFORMANCES DURING TIMES OF PROTEST
Ecuadorian indigenous peoples staged major uprisings in 1990, 1992, 1994, 2000, 2001, and 2006. In addition, they carried out a March for Life and Water in March 2012 to protest land concessions to mining companies and the privatization of water. To distinguish contemporary indigenous uprisings from class-based strikes, the indigenous leadership has deliberately labeled the uprisings levantamientos, a term used since colonial times to refer to indigenous revolts (Zamosc Reference Zamosc1994: 37). Until the 1960s, a levantamiento conjured the fear among non-indígenas that the indios had risen up in irrational, mass revolt (Prieto Reference Prieto2004: 22; Clark Reference Clark1998: 197).
During contemporary levantamientos, indígenas have blocked highways and roads with large rocks, tree trunks, and their own congregated bodies, effectively bringing interprovincial traffic to a halt. This tactic is relatively straightforward because the Ecuadorian highlands have only one main highway, the Panamericana. Protestors have also stopped the delivery of their agricultural production to local markets. Through these actions, the leadership has exercised political leverage and pressured the government to negotiate in order to restore normality in the name of the common good and national security. Despite the mobilization of tens of thousands of indigenous demonstrators, the levantamientos have overall been nonviolent demonstrations, with no looting or vandalism. During these protests, indígenas have occupied highways and city centers as well as television screens, making themselves physically as well as conceptually visible. The uprisings have demonstrated that they have not become extinct, as the assimilationist ideology of mestizaje predicted they would. Imaginings of Ecuador and what it means to be Ecuadorian can no longer exclude indigenous peoples.
The physicality of the tens of thousands of indígenas protesting not only has put pressure on the government but also has constructed indigenous agency and sociality. Opposing the common distinction between symbolic action and physical intervention in the analysis of protest, Susan Foster argues that it is the engagement with the physical that “imbues participators with a deepened sense of personal agency” (Reference Foster2003: 412). Bodies in obstructing demonstrations, rather than being mere instruments of expression, may achieve a collective, corporeal connectivity that transforms notions of individual agency and collective action: “Agency does not manifest as the product of a transcendent state. Instead, the process of creating political interference calls forth a perceptive and responsive physicality that, everywhere along the way, deciphers the social and then choreographs an imagined alternative” (ibid.).
In the levantamiento of 1990, indigenous participants expressed their amazement at experiencing a new collective strength as indígenas. As one participant remarked, “We were all together, as we had never been. We came from all over.… All united, we were different. Nobody could stop us.… In Ambato … we took everybody by surprise. The streets were full of indios. What could they [non-indígenas] have done? Instead [of repressing us], some of them applauded. Let's see, when have they applauded an indio?” (León Trujillo Reference León Trujillo1994: 53). As interfering actions, indigenous demonstrations are meta-commentaries about corporeal, individual, and social identity that have constructed a new empowering indigeneity.
On 28 November 2005, thousands of indígenas blocked the Panamericana Highway in the province of Imbabura, from Cotacachi to Cajas, a distance of about 20 kilometers. The demonstration aimed to pressure the provincial government to resume a halted project, the construction of the channel Pesillo-Imbabura, to bring water to 160 communities. Indígenas blocked the highway with rocks, trees, and poles and beyond the northern end of the blockade the lines of motionless vehicles extended for several kilometers. Within the blockade, demonstrators were discussing in groups the course of action. No armed forces were present and the atmosphere was relaxed. Standing on the traffic-free Panamericana Highway, I had the uncanny feeling of occupying a space that is usually dangerous for pedestrians. I also saw numerous street vendors selling food to the demonstrators, from fritada (fried pork) to confectioneries to snow cones. Local buses and pickups were using secondary roads, which had been blocked for some hours but then reopened. Later, I saw a convoy of military trucks carrying soldiers going up the road next to the waterfall of Peguche.
At night, the military reopened the Panamericana, but the next morning thousands of indígenas came from their communities and blocked it again, and also secondary roads. On the dirt roads between the indigenous communities of Quinchuquí and Agato, which would have allowed traffic to circumvent the blockade, a group of around forty indigenous adolescents, moving together as a unit, patrolled the streets to stop the circulation of vehicles. When a vehicle came close, two or three of the protestors ran ahead and told the driver to turn around before confronting the larger group. They accepted no justification and let no vehicle pass. Empowered by the community council directive to block the traffic, they channeled the responsibility for their actions toward the drivers. Disobedience would have resulted in damage to their cars.
These choreographies of protest construct ethnicity by strengthening the discursive indígena/non-indígena dichotomy, even though in quotidian practice these ways of being interpenetrate. As the blockade continued, tensions intensified and both factions increasingly insulted each other (see also Colloredo-Mansfeld Reference Colloredo-Mansfeld2009: 192). Ultimately, uprisings climax as battles of wills: who wins, indígenas or mestizos, demonstrators or troops? What is at stake are not opposing worldviews but the delineation of alliances: on which side are you? Indigenous protest ultimately turns essentialized ethnic difference into tangible political practice.
During mobilizations at the national level, indígenas congregate in provincial centers and the capital, Quito, to protest. They march, chant, and wave not only the Ecuadorian flag but also the wiphala, the rainbow flag that today represents indigenous peoples across the Andes. They also perform indigenous culture overtly. During the levantamiento of January 2000, which lasted eleven days and ousted President Jamil Mahaud, indigenous demonstrators performed in duets playing the pinkullo, a small Andean flute and a small drum. Many danced in their regional styles, following the music of guitars, drums, bandolinas, and melodicas. A few played the pututo, a seashell trumpet that in pre-conquest times was a war instrument and today is used to warn or call together community members. Yachaks, indigenous healers, took time to fire up incense and perform ritual offerings to the powers of the landscape. And many, following a well-known indigenous leader, Salvador Quishpe, chanted in Kichwa, “Lluqsiy kaymanta shuwa Jamil! (Thief Jamil get out of here!). In subsequent uprisings and demonstrations, Kayambi and Otavalo peoples have danced during road blockades, Huaorani men have performed warrior dances with spears in front of soldiers, Puruhá highlanders have danced traditional choreographies to the rhythm of drums and trumpets, and Tsáchila youth have danced in the streets of their regional center, Santo Domingo de los Colorados.”Footnote 28
These performances are either stagings arranged by indigenous organizations or impromptu acts by indigenous demonstrators. To start off marches, assemblies, and occupations, indigenous organizations usually bring yachaks to perform offerings to the sun, moon, and mountains in exchange for protection and guidance. The yachaks follow a ritual orientation toward the four cardinal directions that is widespread across the Andes. Rather than taking for granted continuity in ritual orientation from Inca times to the present, I argue that these rituals express harmony with Mother Earth and idealize the economic distribution of the Inca state to question the current postcolonial social order. In these performances, yachaks emphasize what non-indígenas supposedly lack: respect for the powers of the cosmos and landscape and concern for the well being of the whole society.
On 12 June 2012, the ECUARUNARI (Ecuador Runakunapak Rikcharimui: the awakening of Ecuadorian indígenas), the umbrella indigenous organization in the Andean region, staged a demonstration in Quito's center to commemorate its fortieth anniversary and to follow up the March for Life and Water. The demonstration started in the Plaza San Francisco, from which the protestors marched to the National Assembly, the Constitutional Court, and the Attorney General's office, a distance of approximately 5 kilometers. The leaders presented letters to those institutions demanding (a) the fulfillment of their constitutional right of consultation, which states that local indigenous populations have to be consulted before the government grants mining concessions, and (b) the halting of the criminalization of social protest, by which the government of President Rafael Correa has initiated legal proceedings against many indigenous leaders. The organizers chose the plaza San Francisco for its pre-conquest significance. Mario Bustos, an ECUARUNARI media producer, started the event with the following speech:
This area was the Amaru Cancha (the Plaza of the Serpent), before the Spaniards desecrated it when they arrived. We want to recover this ritual, this ceremony of the Amaru Cancha, so that we might receive the spirit of Mother Earth, the Pacha Mama. [Inca] Atahualpa was also regarded as Amaru. Amaru is fruit of the land. Therefore, Amaru is a symbol of fertility and wisdom. Atahualpa embodied those qualities, and he also was an Inca, a son of the sun. As such, he was meant to be a guide, a conductor of our people. He also was wise. His actions should be for everyone, for everyone's wellbeing.Footnote 29
Such explicit identification with the Incas has been referred to as incanism, a pan-Andean phenomenon that has become a “kind of postcolonial template for all projects of cultural recognition and revalorization” (Greene Reference Greene2007: 467). Incanism, however, is not solely indigenous. Its complexities are demonstrated by the adoption of the wiphala as the flag of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. According to van den Berghe and Flores Ochoa, cuzqueño incanistas, members of a non-indigenous urban elite aiming for national ascendancy, created the wiphala during the first decades of the twentieth century. “Even though flags were unknown in the Tawantinsuyo, the incanistas invented the rainbow flag as a representation of the empire, and later, it was adopted as the official bandera [flag] of the city. Its incanista symbolism now transcends Cuzco and extends to Peru at large, and even to neighboring Andean countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, where it has become an emblem of indigenist movements” (Reference Van den Berghe and Ochoa2000: 13).
Incanism is by no means recent. During colonial times, several indigenous peoples, such as the Saraguro and the Cañari, turned to the symbolic capital of the Incas to construct their political identity (Ogburn Reference Ogburn2007: 147; Salomon Reference Salomon and Striffler2008). According to John Rowe, “With growing resentment of Spanish oppression and the decline of old local loyalties, the Inca tradition emerged as the obvious symbol shared by the native peoples, which marked their common difference from the Spanish and represented their opposition to foreign domination” (Reference Rowe, Collier, Rosaldo and Wirth1982: 114).
The contemporary incanism of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement emphasizes a connection with Inca Atahualpa, reproducing a nationalistic and inaccurate discourse that portrays him as the Ecuadorian Inca, in opposition to Huascar, his rival during the 1529–1532 civil war of succession who is portrayed as the Peruvian Inca (Foote Reference Foote2010). Even though the Incas governed present-day Ecuador for less than seven decades, incanism enables links with an ancient civilization, and thereby challenges the stereotypical correlation between indigeneity and primitiveness. In addition, by tracing Ecuadorian nationality to pre-conquest times, incanism questions imaginings of the nation that claim Hispanic or mestizo origins (Huarcaya Reference Huarcaya2014).
The yachaks conducting the ritual at Plaza San Francisco were Jaime Pilatuña Nicango, from the recently self-designated Kitu-Cara people, and Mercedes Chuma, from the Cañari people. ECUARUNARI has used the services of these yachaks in several levantamientos and demonstrations. The ritual included the blessing of the attending leaders, not only to give them strength and protection but also to bind them morally to the indigenous movement. In the performance the yachaks burned palo santo (guaiacum wood) and blew liquor to repel threatening spiritual forces.
After the ritual, the demonstrators marched off through the streets of downtown Quito, led by a group of eight young indigenous dancers wearing the traditional attire of the civil parishes of Pastocalle and Toacaso in the province of Cotopaxi. The women wore colored skirts and white blouses with embroidery, the men white pants and red ponchos. The women also wore sashes, from left shoulders to right hips, with the colors of the wiphala. The dancers swung skirts and ponchos energetically to the rhythms of a mestizo brass band.
When the march arrived at the National Congress, a man carrying a wiphala flag walked defiantly very close to a line of thirty policemen, some wearing riot gear, who were guarding the building. Dancers followed and performed in front of the policemen, effecting a powerful juxtaposition of moving, colorful, and joyful indígenas against stiff, dull, and potentially violent non-indígenas. Aware of the extensive presence of video cameras during demonstrations, indígenas have performed such scenes in several levantamientos, particularly at very tense moments when repression might have been imminent. According to one interviewee, “Dancing and playing music fill the indígenas with energy while draining it from the armed opponents.”Footnote 30
During the levantamiento of 2000, the indigenous leadership set off to take over the National Congress, and President Mahuad ordered the police and army to guard it at any cost. Troops erected barriers of barbed wire around the building, and the indigenous demonstrators camped out on the streets nearby. In a situation of increasing tension, the indígenas played music, sang, and danced in front of the riot squadrons. Through these performances indigenous demonstrators not only forge solidarity, as they come to see themselves as the actors driving the movement, but also interpellate the movement's others, the national non-indigenous audiences reading those performances, mostly through television. Expressing common grievance and displaying themselves as worthy and determined, demonstrators aim to “effect changes in attitudes and practices of those inside and outside the ‘movement.’” As Roy Eyerman has said, for a social movement to be successful “these others must be ‘moved’” (Reference Eyerman, Alexander, Giesen and Mast2006: 196). When changes outside the movement occur, “society itself may be said to have moved” (ibid.: 194).
In Ecuador, non-indígenas have read those performances through the historical matrix of the brutish indio, the stereotype that dictates that in normal circumstances indios are passive and compliant but during uprisings they become irrationally violent (Prieto Reference Prieto2004: 22). In the scenes described above, the policemen and soldiers are involuntary participants in purposeful choreographies that mobilize morality. Performing dissent through music and dance, indigenous demonstrators display themselves as rational and nonviolent, channeling the responsibility for irrational violence to the forces of repression and questioning the dehumanizing stereotype of the indio.
Speaking about the participation of Imbabura indígenas in the March for Life in 2012, Auki Anrango, a leader of the FICI, stressed that music and dance are an organic part of indigenous protest:
In the March for Life, the FICI organized the demonstration. More than eight thousand people reached Quito. We started the march in Otavalo, and in Cajas, Tabacundo, and other places; more people joined the protest. First, we held a ritual ceremony in the Plaza Bolívar [Otavalo's city center] with a female yachak. We played music along the way. There is no need to encourage people to bring instruments; they do it by themselves. The music and dance give us energy to keep walking. Music and dance are not planned, they just happen. We could say that playing music and dancing are essential to indigenous protest.Footnote 31
Indigenous choreographies of protests have a special resonance because of their historical and cultural significance. The occupation of urban spaces during the levantamientos is akin to the “tomas de plaza,” the indigenous occupation of provincial urban centers during fiestas. Until the 1970s, these plazas were considered blanco spaces in which the indígenas were unwelcome, other than for cleaning. In keeping with the bodily transgression of boundaries and norms enabled by a festive time, indígenas have occupied plazas since times immemorial. In addition, indigenous music and dance have remained recognizably distinct in spite of non-indigenous influences. In contrast to non-indigenous dances, which are performed by two partners, many indigenous dances in the Ecuadorian Andes are group performances that involve dozens of people. Such performances, according to Thomas Turino, create an actual sense of unity because “the subtle signs involved (detailed ways of moving, sonic attack, articulation, pitch coordination, rhythm) are not perceived as explicit propositions about identity but rather are the very experience of similarity, of identity, each participant responding to and coordinating with the sounds and movements of others” (Reference Turino, Turino and Lea2004: 18). Furthermore, indigenous dancing during festivities are tests of endurance—those who quit before dawn are criticized as weak in spirit and physical strength. Indígenas consider non-indigenous individuals to be weaker in this respect. Through performance, indígenas bring that spirit to their demonstrations.
In April 2005, five years after indígenas staged the uprising that ousted President Jamil Mahaud, President Lucio Gutiérrez was ousted, this time by non-indigenous mobilization. In contrast to the indígenas, non-indigenous demonstrators did not display their culture overtly. They chanted slogans and marched. Occasionally, singers/guitar players accompanied the protests, but these performances did not stand for the collectivity of demonstrators as a whole. All protests are politically oppositional performances and music has been a factor in many major movements (Johnston Reference Johnston2009), but it is clear that for indígenas and non-indígenas the performance of culture during protest does distinctive political work. In such contexts, indigenous performance has an indexicality and self-referentiality that non-indigenous performances lack.
An index, according to Charles S. Peirce, is a sign that “stands for its object by virtue of a real connection with it” (Reference Peirce1998: 14). This connection is determined by the context of its production, and its meaning can only be determined through knowledge of relevant context, but as Lemon points out, “Relevant context is not limited to the ‘real-time’ here and now but can include knowledge about the past, about social hierarchies, or about cultural and generic associations” (Reference Lemon2000: 25). Indigenous cultural performance during times of protest indexes who is doing the talking: the collectivity constituted by the indigenous demonstrators not only in their numbers but also in the articulation of their political identity, within the context of the contemporary history of levantamientos. The performance of non-indigenous culture during times of protest lacks the same indexicality because non-indigenous culture and political identity are not coextensive. Non-indígenas do not articulate their political identity as exclusive bearers of a culture. Their performances may build solidarity, give identity to a movement, and unfold the movement itself (Johnston Reference Johnston2009: 17), but they do not index the demonstrators as a people. Seeing a protest in which non-indígenas play music and dance, one would not conclude that the protest is mestizo or blanco-mestizo. Indigenous performance during protest is also self-referential. Indígenas perform what they are fighting for: the viability of indigenous culture and identity. Those performances are legitimized as they refer to existing community practices, to music and dance that are reproduced today in indigenous festivities.
In Bolivia, the indigenous political mobilization of the last four decades, leading to the current presidency of indigenous leader Evo Morales—who was born into an Aymara community—is also intrinsically linked to cultural performance. As Sian Lazar has observed, indigenous demonstrators/performers while dancing in fiestas and protests constitute a new sense of citizenship, “not an abstract status or category of belonging, but concrete, physical and embodied, involving a sense of collectivity which includes a common relationship to place but which cannot be taken for granted” (Reference Lazar2008: 143). Popular participatory performance has become a means through which indigenous Bolivians put pressure on the government, and Morales's government has sought to construct a new hegemony through the theatrical performance of indigenous culture (Howard Reference Howard2010). The way in which these performances constitute not only indigenous selves but also non-indigenous others was recently made explicit by the indigenous Vice-Minister of De-colonization Félix Cárdenas, who said, “If we compare them [mestizos] with the Aymaras, is there a proper mestizo territory, a proper mestizo culture, a proper mestizo language, a proper mestizo religion? If they exist, let's discuss them” (Oblitas Zamora Reference Oblitas Zamora2012).
In Peru, indigenous Andeans have yet to challenge mestizaje ideology and mestizo personhood through cultural performance. They practice and value indigenous dance, music, and ritual, but do so without occupying the subject position of the politically conscious indígena. They also consider their communities of origins as backward places to which civilization—schools, electricity, drinking water—is still arriving.Footnote 32 These ethnographic observations are supported by secondary literature. Zoila Mendoza (Reference Mendoza2000) thus states that the folklorization of indigenous dances in Cusco should not be seen as merely staged stereotyping but rather as a valorized way through which many individuals of indigenous origins become part of an emerging urban mestizo culture. In opposition to either/or constructions of the categories of indio and mestizo, Marisol de la Cadena (Reference de la Cadena2000) argues that persons who self-identify as mestizo in Cusco proudly display and reproduce indigenous culture in performance contexts. Gisela Cánepa Koch (Reference Cánepa Koch, Koch and Ulfe2006) demonstrates that Andean migrants in Lima have challenged hegemonic notions of cultural citizenship through the performance of Andean fiestas in main plazas but, as in most cases of cultural contestation in Peru, they do so from the discursive and practical field of mestizo identity.
This might change, but most Peruvian Andeans still equate the terms indio and indígena with socio-economic conditions and marginality expressed through the experience of exclusion, poverty, and illiteracy. They often speak of superarse—to improve oneself, and salir adelante, to get ahead—not only to mean to acquire an education but also to “become whiter and shed an Indian way of life” (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008: 110). Whereas Bolivian and Ecuadorian Andeans have challenged through performance the imaginings of their countries as mestizo nations, Andeans in Peru perform indigenous music and dance as folklore to participate in the Peruvian mestizo nation. In doing so, they leave unchallenged the hegemony of mestizaje, which values whiteness over indigenousness and naturalizes racial and ethnic discrimination.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Inquiring about the ways in which contemporary indígenas are attempting to redefine their identity, Barry Lyons asks, “How can one root a positive identity in a history of oppression?” Either indígenas reformulate that identity as a source of pride, shedding its historical stigma, or they abandon it and become mestizos (Reference Lyons2001: 44). The stigmatization of indigeneity has significantly been the effect of performativity, of gestures, words, and physical violence reiteratively enacted. This has not been theatrical self-presentation, but rather a process of iterability that has constituted non-indígenas and indígenas as subjects in time. In Ecuador, indígenas are shedding stigmatized identities and redefining themselves through cultural performance. Overt and self-conscious displays of indigenous culture in festivities and protest are geared to challenge the performative naturalization of indigenous subordination. In the dialogic constitution of indígenas and non-indígenas, indigenous performance, as both voice and action, articulates not only indigenous identities but also alterities, constructing non-indígenas as lacking genuine culture. These processes go beyond the strategic mobilization of cultural essentialisms (Spivak Reference Spivak and Harasym1990). Self-conscious cultural performance is the prime way of “being-and-becoming” a modern, proud indígena, embodying values and sentiment through practice and congealing abstractions such as community, culture, and indigeneity into lived experience (see Comaroff Reference Comaroff2010). Such self-conscious indigeneity involves deliberate effort of indigenous activists to challenge notions and sentiments of national belonging that have equated indigeneity with inferiority and non-indigeneity with superiority, and doing so with awareness that in a globalized world local indigenous culture has worth that “national” mestizo culture lacks.
In contrast to prevailing arguments that ethnic consciousness among Ecuadorian indígenas was preexistent or has emerged from the processes of political organization, indigenous intellectuals of Otavalo, who became the ideological leaders of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, argue that the emergent articulation of a renewed cultural and ethnic identity enabled those processes. Ironically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, while indigenous fiestas were languishing in the communities, indigenous music and dance started to achieve national and international recognition for the first time. Groups from Otavalo, such as Grupo Peguche, Obraje, and Nanda Manachi began to perform in theaters and universities and to record vinyl albums. Soon afterwards, otavaleño music groups started to play music abroad, in plazas and fairs increasingly afar, following the path opened by itinerant traders. At that time in Otavalo, leftist activists, who were trying to mobilize indígenas under the banner of class-consciousness, validated indigenous music and dance as part of Ecuadorian national culture. A pressing debate between the leftist and the yet-to-be indigenous activists focused on the relation between indigenous culture and national identity. According to indigenous intellectual Germán Muenala, who is one of the ex-members of the Grupo Peguche, “The left always claimed that what we were doing was folklore, as a foundation to ground [class] vindication. But we, Grupo Peguche, said, ‘No more folklore.’ If this is alive, it is not folklore, and it is alive because it is quotidian practice in our communities. Folklore is something to recreate. Something that is already dead, that does not exist anymore, that someone self-appoints himself or herself to recreate.”Footnote 33
The implication is that one performs folklore but lives indigenous culture. This critical insight aligns with the concept of “folklorization,” which involves the exoticization, commodification, and de-contextualization of indigenous cultural performance through non-indigenous mediation (Turino Reference Turino, Urban and Sherzer1991). From the time in which indígenas in Otavalo realized that indigenous culture was worthy of recognition, indigenous performance has achieved significant political work. According to Muenala, “Cultural work left the door open for the [later] political work.” It was then, fellow intellectual Ariruma Kowii argues, “that we started the search for indigenous identity.”Footnote 34 Performance was the foundation for (a) the revalorization of indigenous culture, not as folklore but as culture alive in the communities; (b) the challenge to the supposed cultural superiority of non-indígenas; and (c) the articulation of a new indigeneity, opening up its political horizon to enable challenges to the assimilationist ideologies of the Ecuadorian state. By 1983, otavaleño indigenous leader Blanca Chancoso, as secretary general of ECUARUNARI, had criticized the then-prevalent notion that the indígenas had to assimilate: “The government speaks about integration.… We ask, into what do they want us to integrate?… Since the arrival of the Spaniards, we have been told that it is necessary to civilize the indígenas. I don't know whom they are going to civilize. We, indígenas, have our own culture. We possess our own language, our customs, and our organizational forms” (“Blanca Chancoso” 1983: 42). Before this time, indígenas did not speak about their worth as culturally different peoples. Instead, in the face of crass discrimination by non-indígenas, many indígenas denigrated their own ways of life as “uncivilized” (Lentz Reference Lentz and Guerrero2000: 202).
Indigeneity is not only a condition of historical continuity with precolonial societies; it is also a normative construction significantly realized through performance and performativity. Indigenous peoples might fight to validate their cultures, but non-indigenous factions may dismiss them as either archaic or assimilated, depending on context. Considering indigeneity as a normative construction has the following two implications for research on indigenous politics across the globe. First, it enables the elucidation of practices that structural analyses have left mostly unexplained: the contingent processes of interethnic interaction by which indigeneity is constructed and felt as a social reality. Second, as a normative construction indigeneity might be contested, but it also may work as a “savage slot,” as the pre-established symbolic compartment in contrast to which the non-indigenous self is constructed (see Trouillot Reference Trouillot and Fox1991), constraining the aspirations of indigenous peoples for liberation.
Upholding cultural difference through performance and criticizing folklorization, Ecuadorian indigenous activists have distanced themselves from imaginings of Ecuador as one mestizo nation, whose members share a unified subjectivity. In Peru, in contrast, indigenous Andeans do not criticize folklorization. Rather, it is through the performance of folklore that they become Peruvian nationals.Footnote 35 They value indigenous cultural performance but do not occupy the subject position of the politically conscious indígena. It remains to be seen which notion of indigeneity, as stigmatizing or as empowering, will prevail across the Andes in the long run.
