Rethinking the agrarian and indigenous question from the Andes of Ecuador

Abstract

Within the context of the transformations of the Ecuadorian Andes in the last decades of the twentieth century, this text explores the relations between these changes, the strategies deployed by subaltern indigenous groups, and the use of an ethnic identity as an activating element in the struggle for social recognition and access to resources. Resulting from a lengthy research project in the province of Chimborazo, this article examines some provisional lines of thought that suggest several working hypotheses. The first of these lines of thought focuses on how the debunkment of the landowning regime conditioned the political forms that peasant and indigenous leaders adopted as an outcome of these processes. This implies reworking and updating the old debates about Andean community by enhancing specific ethnographic localities in order to produce arguments that have a regional scope. This leads us to a third line of reasoning that acknowledges the variety of the processes of ethnic politicization, the reconfiguration of power structures, as well as forms of intermediation with the indigenous world that arose especially after the agrarian reform. Such new forms of dialogue were concomitant with the widening of social space due to the advance of globalization.