4 Dirty Indians Radical Indígenas

Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
'Dirty Indians', Radical Indígenas, and the Political Economy of Social Difference in
Modern Ecuador
Author(s): Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
Source: Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 185-205
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
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BulL Latin Am. Res., VoL 17, No. 2, pp. 185-205, 1998
? 1998 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Pergamon All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain
0261-3050/98 $19.00 + 0.00
PII: S0261-3050(97)00087-9
'Dirty Indians', Radical Indigenas, and the Political

Economy of Social Difference in Modern Ecuador1
RUDI COLLOREDO-MANSFELD
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall,

405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
Abstract ? This article examines alternative conceptions of social difference in Otavalo,

Ecuador. On the one hand, in the northern Andes, the language of ethnicity has become
a potent force, connected to an indigenous political movement and the profits of handicraft
dealing. On the other, 'race' and an 'hygienic racism' preoccupied with pernicious stereotypes
about 'dirty Indians' continue to define the social and political landscape. Contrasting these
notions of social difference, I show how the indigenous movement in Ecuador receives less
support from native peasants who see the world in polarised 'racial' terms. ? 1998 Society for
Latin American Studies. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Key words ? indigenous peoples, race, Ecuador, political movements
The Indian who has overcome his origins, besides being educated, is an Indian who
bathes.' Felipe, 19, son of an hacienda owner.2
In July of 1991, over 100 indigenous men and women from the Otavaleno peasant
community of Ariasucu in Ecuador's northern Andes hiked an hour from their homes to the
site of the provincial water project on the shore of Lake San Pablo. This communal work
day represented a rare co-operative action for local residents. The sector's growing class
differences and varied occupations ? everything from field labourer to transnational textile
merchant ? keep people apart. On this day, though, a common desire for potable water
united them. The engineer had called out the community to clear land around the springs
that would be tapped and pumped back to Ariasucu.
The work had stalled, however, when women from the homes immediately surrounding
the springs protested that they would lose their only source of clean water. As community
leaders debated what would be done, people broke for lunch. They poured pots of hot,
toasted corn and boiled beans onto sheets they spread on the grass. The workers sat around,
grabbing small handfuls of the salty mixture, popping the kernels and beans into their
mouths, and chatting. Seeing that the engineer had nothing to eat, Jaime,3 an ex-president
of the community, invited him over to eat with his group. The engineer declined. Jaime
insisted, pointing out that they had plenty. The engineer curtly refused, saying something
about the dirty ground and the dangers of cholera.
Parts of this scene could have happened 50 years ago. Government authorities had
summoned indigenous people to volunteer labour for a public project, just as hacendados
(large estate owners) and provincial prefects had been doing since the early days of the
republic. Further, in the course of the work, the professional engineer maintained rigid
social barriers between himself and the indigenas (indigenous people). Acting on urban,
186 Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
white-mestizo4 fear of filth and disease, he shunned contact with the others. His rejection of
their food reaffirmed old divisions between white-Hispanicised society and a supposedly
inferior, dirty native culture.
However, this was the 1990s not the 1940s, and the engineer's arrogance did not
intimidate Jaime and the others. Later that afternoon, the community bypassed the
engineer, resolving the dispute over the springs in one bold move. They invaded the
neighbouring fields of an absentee landowner, spontaneously cleared the land and insisted
that the pumps be installed there. In another sign of the times, when the project came to an
end, the engineer got on his motorcycle and drove back to the provincial capital. Jaime, on
the other hand, got on a plane with three other local textile dealers and flew to Europe to
sell handicrafts.
Jaime and other Otavalenos redefine what it means to be an indigena in the Andes in
these days. The dominant white-mestizo elites have long stereotyped native peoples as dirty,
lazy, irrational and backward (Stark, 1981). In sharp contrast, Otavalenos have expanded
a regional trade into a transnational enterprise, campaigned for political offices, and fought
for bilingual education. Their new wealth has reinforced native institutions. People have
increased spending on fiestas that bring family together and invested money in fields and
housing around Otavalo. Further, in a broad political movement, Otavalenos along with
Ecuador's other native groups insist that white-mestizo society recognise the cultural
differences within the nation. Toward that end, indigenas have marched, held strikes, and
negotiated for constitutional recognition of Ecuador as a pluri-ethnic society. Mobilised for
action, they repudiate the binary, stigmatised racial categories of blanco and indio and their
political offspring, the uniform mestizo national identity (Stutzman, 1981). This ethnic
resurgence both legitimises the practices that distinguish indigenous groups from each other
and has led to concrete electoral gains in the 1996 national elections (Whitten et al, 1997).
And yet, despite this cultural self-confidence, the new ethnic movement has not displaced
Ecuador's older racist attitudes. White-mestizos still use pernicious images of disease,
irrationality, and 'dirty Indians' to characterise indigenas and justify their poverty. More
insidiously, racial images circulate within indigenous society. The rising class of native
merchants insult poorer, rural Otavalenos as being dirty, borrowing racist terms to increase
social gaps. For their part, some poorer peasants use pejorative vocabulary self-referen-
tially. They speak of themselves as indios who must farm and stick with their own traditions.
Having no way to advance economically, they see the divisions of Ecuadorian society as
unbridgeable, grounded not so much in culture as class. However, as they use images of
white-cleanliness and native-fruitlessness to describe their predicament, talk of economic
inequality takes on a racial tone. Poorer Otavalenos construe their differences from the
white-mestizos' clean life as 'powerfully physical, essential, and inherently degrading' to use
Weismantel and Eisenman's words (this volume).
The co-existence of these competing conceptions of social differences ? one based on
culture and the other on 'race' ? has important consequences for both the scholarship and
politics of Andean society. First, ethnic theory alone, with its emphasis on culturally
achievable differences, gives only a partial account of Ecuador's lasting social divisions.
Attending to descent categories, boundary marking symbols and activities, and other
elements of ethnic analysis does help make sense of the politics of Otavalenos and other
groups. However, it fails to recognise many indigenous peoples' feelings of futility in the face
of white institutions and desire to remain radically separated from white mestizo people and
culture. Further ethnic theory does not account for white-mestizo preoccupation with filth
Political economy of social difference in modern Ecuador 187
and disease as markers of social difference. Only by re-opening the topic of 'race' can we
address these issues. In so doing, we need to reposition the concept, taking into account its
connections to class, hygiene, and nation.
Scholars have written that race in the Andes and elsewhere has been constructed
based on 'ailegedly biologically ascribed attributes that include morality, sexual behaviour,
and education' (de la Cadena, 1996: 144).5 In northern Ecuador, however, racial concepts
are not just about biology and blood. They also relate to the ordinary, 'natural' appearances
of bodies and material culture shaped by profound economic inequalities. Thus, for
example, when an indigenous woman wrapped in a shawl speckled with barley chaff and
drenched in the threshing-floor odours of crushed straw, labouring oxen, and dust
places some grubby bills in the soap-chaffed hand of a white-mestizo shopkeeper, 'race'
manifests itself in the physical details of the encounter, not just in perceived differences in
biology. As the shopkeeper recoils from her customer, she enacts a racial ideology which
vilifies both the woman and her work as dirty, backward, and Indian'. Their social
identities materialise in the tangible traces ? the 'sensory significata9 (Turner, 1967) ? of
class occupations.6
The difference between blanco and indio, however, cannot be reduced to class or its
sensory manifestations. To do so leaves unexplained old prejudices in spite of indigenous
people's new wealth. Jaime, the ex-president mentioned above, still gets snubbed by
white-mestizos. Ignoring his powerful body and clean (almost new) work clothes, the
engineer focused on the food at his feet. Long-standing beliefs about the dangers of native
practices leads the engineer to fix on something ? anything ? that confirms indigenous
inferiority. As Fields (1982: 151) has argued, physical emblems which symbolise race
? whether born of biology or occupation ? 'are not the foundation upon which race arises
as a category of social thought'. Rather, the foundation lies in the scientific and social
ideologies underpinning the privileged position ofthe urban middle-classes. Specifically, the
odours, textures, and materials of rural life become racial emblems as the white-mestizo elite
constitute themselves and their national authority by pursuing an elusive physical and
moral ideal: cleanliness.
The creation ofthe bourgeois self in the Andes, and elsewhere during late 19th and 20th
centuries, has hinged on problems of hygiene and disease; the destiny of the national body
politic grows out of discipline and institutions that keep the nation's bodies healthy.
Foucault makes this point in his analysis of sexuality. He points out (1990: 125) that the
emphasis on the body ? 'on body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of having healthy
children and of keeping them alive for as long as possible, and methods for improving the
human lineage' ? all were linked to the establishment of bourgeois hegemony. Further,
concern with the body related to a type of 'racism'. This racism was not the conservative
form linked simply to preserving class privileges. Instead, it was 'a dynamic racism, a racism
of expansion' (ibid.).
Developing Foucault's insights, Stoler (1995) describes how race, sexuality and bodily
discipline served as ordering mechanisms, emerging with the bourgeois order in Europe and
its expansion into the colonies. To establish control in tropical lands, colonisers elevated
hygiene into a gendered and racial 'micro site' of political control. It provided a context for
appraising racial membership and designating 'character', 'good breeding', and proper
rearing (Stoler, 1995: 11). Similarly, in southern Africa, after the 1890s, white settlers
characterised Africans as filthy and depraved and used those images to justify segregation.
Burke (1996:21) notes, 'such sentiments stand out as a distinctive aspects of colonial racism
not merely because of their omnipresence, but because of their physicality, the manner in
which they influenced whites to react with revulsion and avoidance in the presence
of Africans'. Finally, in Latin America, scientists and health officials co-opted the
European science of eugenics and bound it to hygiene. The public health ministries
of Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere linked genetic purity to sanitation, social hygiene,
mental hygiene, or the hygiene of reproductive cells. State-sponsored 'public hygiene was
therefore viewed as a way of rescuing the country from racial and climatic degeneracy'
(Stepan, 1991: 89).
Given this preoccupation with racial and national hygiene, real and imagined signs of
filth indicate a person's social fitness. Fingernails crusted with dirt and clothes stained with
sweat demonstrate not just poverty but a moral failing. In the early 1990s, many white-
mestizo Ecuadorians feared indigenous bodies for another reason: the threat of cholera. The
urban middle class shunned indigenas, believing their communities were rife with sick,
contagious people. As with all racial systems, images of degenerate bodies naturalised
Ecuador's social divisions. The spectre of contamination, though, can ooze from any aspect
of native culture, not just flesh and blood. Unclean kitchens can pollute otherwise industri-
ous and upright people. Even the trade goods ofthe wealthiest indigenas suffer the contempt
of white-mestizo society. Jealous white-mestizos whisper that merchants lace their invento-
ries with cocaine; that indigenas are not artisans but narco-traffickers. The rumours recast
native material success as a threat to the purity of the proper (white-mestizo) national
economy.
Race, then, entangles issues of class, cleanliness, and national character. 'Hygienic racism'
seeks out the dirty and impure, calling for a purge ofthe countryside, a reordering of native
communities, and the cleaning up of private domestic spaces. Racial categories form a rigid
hierarchy, positing a clean, healthy, 'normal' white population and a dirty, weaker, native
population. Such a division offers little opportunity for middle-ground. Further, difference
becomes naturalised not only in terms ofthe body but possessions, clothes and all materials
that bear upon the health of the body.
The co-existence of racial beliefs with ethnic activism impacts Ecuador's native political
movements, and indeed, has parallels to similar movements in Chiapas and elsewhere in
Latin America. The mass indigenous mobilisations this decade have used indigenous
culture as a political resource to press claims for land and challenge the values of national
society. As they gain cultural recognition from the state, native leaders have been more
willing to work within the official political system. However, indigenas at the grass
roots level do not universally support such integration. Those who view white-mestizos
and their 'clean lives' as inherently different than their own people and culture participate
haphazardly in the national indigenous movement. In contrast to ethnic views, polarised,
'racial' view of Ecuadorian society works against involvement within the official
political system and leads to a narrower politics of confrontation for land, water, and local
needs.
In this article, I examine the political economy of social difference in three contexts. The
first is historical. Describing the entanglements of economy, biology and hygiene, I consider
perceptions of race in Otavalo and Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s. Next, I summarise some
of the important social and economic changes associated with the cultural redefinition of
Ecuador's divided society since the 1980s. Finally, I explore the persistence of race and dirt
as ideas used to organise thought and action in modern day Otavalo before discussing some
of the political consequences of these social beliefs.
OTAVALO AND OTAVALENOS
Otavalenos are an indigenous Andean group with historical connections to the provincial
market town of Otavalo and the surrounding countryside in the province of Imbabura,
lying 80 km north of Quito. Most indigenous Otavalenos are bilingual in Quichua and
Spanish. Numbering about 70,000, they live not only in Imbabura, but have also migrated
throughout Ecuador and abroad. About 5000 Otavalenos now live in a trade diaspora that
stretches from Quito to Bogota, Caracas, and Amsterdam (Meisch, 1987). Wherever they
live, their appearance marks their identity. Men wear their hair long and don a traditional
costume of white pants, white shirt, and blue poncho for formal business or social occasions.
Otherwise, most where jeans, T-shirts or dress shirts and nylon wind-breakers on a daily
basis. Women dress more conservatively, wearing a dark anaku (a wrap around, straight
skirt), white blouse, and a shawl or sweater.
The basic social and economic unit of Otavaleno society is a household, formed around
a single nuclear family. With very low per capita incomes, high illiteracy rates, and a large
proportion of households farming holdings of less than 1 ha, the canton (county) of Otavalo
suffers the poverty and underdevelopment that plagues much of the Andes. Rural families
depend on subsistence crops for survival?primarily maize grown on inherited plots. While
agriculture typically takes up less than 10 per cent of men and women's day, the food they
cultivate forms the core of their diet. It also hedges against the uncertainty of other work,
which may include positions as maids, construction workers, market porters or other
low-payingjobs.
However, unlike other indigenous groups, Otavalenos are not limited to the least secure
segments ofthe national labour market. The continued cultural distinctiveness ofthe region
has attracted thousands of foreigners to the local market each year. Otavaleno entrepre-
neurs have worked hard to capitalise on ethnic tourism and the world market for native
crafts. Designing new products and retailing the crafts of other ethnic groups have made
many families wealthy. Prosperity, however, has not induced Otavalenos to sever ties with
the past. Salomon (1981) and others have argued that they have preserved core cultural
values by combining handicraft manufacture with a subsistence economy and a deep
commitment to the land.7
WEAVING, FARMING, HYGIENE AND RACE IN OTAVALO, 1930-1950

In Otavalo, the commercialisation of artisan production did not begin with the arrival of
tourists. On the contrary, the pre-conquest population of the valley, an ethnic group known
as the Caranqui, had a reputation for cloth production and exchange. Despite the disrup-
tions caused first by the Inka invasion and subsequently by Spanish colonialism, the textile
tradition endured (Salomon, 1981). In the 1920s, local cottage industry began a cycle of
expansion as weavers in the community of Peguche adapted their looms to produce
a version of a dense English tweed for Quito markets (Parsons, 1945). This cloth, known as
casimires, sold well and formed the basis of the pre-tourist market, along with ponchos and
muslin materials.
Most weavers spent cloth profits on land, balancing their commercial work with invest?
ment in subsistence plots. To a much greater extent than today, the Otavaleno household
economy was an agricultural one. Maize, beans, peas, and tubers filled cooking pots and
store rooms. Families not only lived off these foods but also among them. Rafters hung with
drying cobs, heavy sacks of beans slumped in the corners of kitchens, and yokes, hoes,
and picks framed their domestic space. Land shortage was not so acute in the 1940s as
today. To be sure, families located near haciendas often had to exchange their labour for the
rights to fields or access to water. The majority of Otavalenos, though, planted their own
land. Indeed, since the turn of the century, successful weavers had surprised and even
alarmed the white population by buying parcels of land from large white landowners
(Herrera, 1909).
Thus, although they worked hard to expand the market for their goods, Otavalenos
resisted integration and worked to maintain the viability of their own subsistence economy.
Buitron (1947: 62) emphasised the desire for self-sufficiency, writing, 'experience has taught
them for more than four centuries to distrust the white man, and we are not going to erase
this only by offering not to deceive them from now on. The most urgent aid needed by the
Indian, in our opinion, is to acquire land'. Seeking land rather than inclusion, most
Otavalenos remained cut off from the formal institutions of Ecuadorian society. As the
Mexican anthropologists Moises Saenz observed: 'But in Ecuador, the Indian appears not
to hope for anything from the Whites, s/he hopes for nothing more than to be left in peace'
(Saenz, 1933: 166).
Otavalenos' commitment to the soil linked their culture to that of other indigenous
people. It also exposed them to the racial prejudice of the day. The Ecuadorian writer,
Neptali Zuiiiga, for example, condemned native peoples for their farming ways in his basic
social science book, Fenomenos de la realidad ecuatoriana (1940). After describing elements
of the national economy and society, he dismissed the indigenous population as an
unthinking group that lived by instinct. The source of native degeneracy was their relation?
ship to the land: 'the Indian biologically evolved cultivating and loving the land. The Indian
is son of agriculture and agriculture is mother of his race, his biological content... Indian
and land confuse themselves' (1940: 189). For an urban writer like Zuiiiga, all the ills of
native society are manifest in rural homes and agricultural hearths:
The Indian has put his temperament in the construction of his hearth... Their lowly,
rustic houses with roofs of straw or tile, enclose a miserable way oflife. The Indian lives
in an unhealthy tenement house, in a plane of reduced life, his biological development
negatively influenced by food, the environment, the hygiene and the disorder. (Zuniga,
1940: 191)
He describes a corrupted world and a stained and suffering people. Worse, he characterises
the indigenous population as less than human, an 'imprecise and amorphous mass' (1940:
189).
In Zuniga's opinion, the Indian's external conditions condemn him to further decline or
as he puts it, 'the Indian comes with a fatal legacy in individual and social inheritance'. Such
a belief allies him with public health officials in other parts of Latin America. Throughout
the region, genetic scientists sought to explain the differences between races in terms of
'racial poisons' (Stepan, 1991). Medical and public health professionals argued that such
poisons ? alcohol, nicotine, venereal disease, and other infections ? lead to hereditary
decline. Consequently, public health initiatives took on both moral and nationalist aspects
as improved sanitation could rescue the country from racial corruption (Stepan, 1991: 89).
Blurring the distinction between nature and nurture, these scientists insisted that what
separated Indians, mestizos, and blancos was not just different inherited blood lines, but
also the habits that kept blood clean.
In Ecuador, such reasoning shaped policies for 'solving' the Indian problem and integrat-
ing indigenous society within the nation. The national government in conjunction with
several UN organisations formed the first major rural development program in 1954.
Called Mision Andina, it sought to 'overcome and banish the lack of harmony in the
relations between indigenas and the other groups of the Ecuadorian population' (Mision
Andina, n.d.). Towards that end, the project's top three of ten goals were (1) organise the
community, (2) create schools, and (3) improve the hearth (including improving nutrition
and fighting against alcoholism). State authorities, thus, targeted both the corrupting
influences and the material deficiencies ofthe indigenous home in their efforts to modernise
the nation.
Otavalenos, however, fit awkwardly into this picture biological degeneracy and economic
backwardness. Back in the early 1930s, Saenz noted that they challenged prevailing
stereotypes.8 He contrasted them with other Ecuadorians by saying that they had a reputa-
tion for being 'extremely clean' while indigenas from central provinces are 'ragged and dirty.'
He elaborated, writing that whether in the market or their own communities they are 'clean
and tidy' as well as 'robust and vigorous'. He then went on to provide a physical description:
'sharp nose, large eyes, and lips that are not too thick' (1933: 37). With his comments on
cleanliness, facial features, and skin ('it is not too dark'), Saenz situated Otavalenos
somewhere in the middle of the supposed racial gap between the indigenous populations
and the white-mestizo ones.
Later, Ecuadorian writers would criticise Saenz for dwelling on Otavalenos and not
visiting other provinces when he described the state of indigenous peoples in the country
(see Monsalve Pozo, 1943). Nonetheless, national anthropologists and writers were no less
positive in their observation. They, too, seemed willing to elevate the status of Otavalenos
based on a combination of their hard work, economic success, and cleanliness. Buitron
claimed Otavalo to be 'one of the most progressive and picturesque' regions of the province
and Otavalenos the most industrious native group of the nation (Buitron, 1947). And the
Ecuadorian poet Ramon Serrano Cambert penned these lines:
Not yet dawn and yet already full are

The street, the markets
With clean Indians, so clean
That they could serve as a pleasing example
For the rest of the Indians that we have seen
In all the American continent.9
Health statistics corroborated the favourable impressions. Civil records in Otavalo fr*om
1934 to 1944 refute Zuniga's contention that natives lived on 'a reduced plane of life.' The
population categorised as 'Indian' had lower infant mortality rates and higher life expect-
ancies than those defined as 'Mestizo' or 'White' (Buitron and Buitron, 1945). With low
populations densities, adequate subsistence resources, and sufficient water flowing from
springs on Imbabura and the river that drains Lake San Pablo, rural residents lived
a relatively healthy life.
Ultimately, though, in spite of the praise and the progress, Otavalenos could not escape
the stigma associated with their rural, indigenous culture. The Ecuadorian social scientist
Pio Jaramillo Alvarado (1949), for example, described his visit with a North American
anthropologist to a weaver's home as follows:
And we could verify that in Otavalo the industrious Indian is intelligent and rich and
consequently owner of magnificent arable lands. But, likewise, our astonishment was
great when we visited a house of one of these industrious Indians and one could not
differentiate his home life from that of the needy Indian. And we asked ourselves: if the
Indian has been to school and is industrious and a property owner, what more is
necessary to live at a level corresponding to his economic situation? Culture? With this
word one says much, but in concrete cases it signifies very little or perhaps nothing.
In his words, one detects almost a note of despair at the contradictions. Otavalenos had
advanced economically further than any other indigenous group. Yet, he finds them living
in the conditions of Indian serfdom {condicion de indio concierto). All those deficiencies of
domestic hygiene endure, threatening the whole idea of progress for the 'industrious Indian.'
The Otavalo case troubled this observer because the obvious causes lowliness had been
removed; the indigenas enjoy an improved economy and education and yet still 'failed' to
live like white-mestizos. Thus, the writer vacillates between indigenous culture and a native
inferiority complex as the cause of the problem. Either way, indigenous life comes across as
crippled by its own inability to clean itself up.
Such attitudes have endured in the decades since Jaramillo Alvarado visited the weaver's
home. In the 1980s, white-mestizos still recoiled from physical contact with indigenas.
Indeed, mestizo resentment of native bodies frequently became most bitter in that intimate
public space of provincial life: the interior of local buses. For years bus conductors had
mistreated their indigenous passengers. On crowded market days, they refused service to
the poorest and most humble riders, would not touch the bundles women carried on their
backs, over-sold the seats and aisles, then elbowed their way through the crowd complain-
ing about Hndios sucios' or 'dirty Indians.'
Finally, in 1986, this resentment came to a head. A mestizo-owned bus company was
driven from native communities on Mount Imbabura in a week long bloody strike. At the
time, the papers reported the causes to be the bus conductors' habits of overcharging people
and treating them rudely. From the perspective of one of the participants, though, it all
came down to this: 'The drivers were always calling us "dirty Indians".' The white-mestizo
irrational fear of indigenous dirt met its violent reflection in indigenous anger at mestizo
racism.
For much of this century, then, images of dirtiness have underpinned a racist ideology
that divided Ecuadorian society into invidious social categories. Since the biological reality
of Ecuador's population did not allow divisions based on natural phenotypic variation,10
notions of cleanliness provided another ? similarly ambiguous ? way to characterise
races. Talk of diseased Indians established an hygienic category encompassing both people
and their environment. Such classification could not clear up the inconsistencies of racial
schemes, as the quasi-elevated status of Otavalenos shows. Nonetheless, images of filthy
Indians and clean whites carried a discursive force, inducing white-mestizo reactions of
condemnation, confrontation, and separation.11
Both national development and racial oppression subsequently unfolded as a matter of
the purity of and danger to the body politic. The 'expansive racism' of Ecuador subjected
indigenous people to criticism in their homes and scorn as they worked in urban spaces.
That is, if dirt is 'matter out of place' as Douglas puts it (1966: 35), then 'dirty Indians' are
bodies out of place ? rural peoples emerging from their fields to join the mainstream while
still committed to a rural way of life. These bodies pose a danger to white-mestizo power
and society as they advance economically or move physically into schools, shops, govern?
ment offices, and other institutional settings.
FROM RACE TO ETHNICITY
Cast as something dirty, indigenas and their culture were: 'that which must not be included if
a pattern is to be maintained' (Douglas, 1966: 40). White-mestizos reacted to presumed
impurity personally by flinching from the touch of rural labourers' gnarled bodies and
politically by trying to 'clean up' the countryside: organise neighbourhoods into neat
political units and eliminate the old ways of country hearths. Six decades of writing and
political activism have sought to redress the prejudice implicit in the dominant society's
treatment of indigenas. In the 1940s, Ecuadorian authors railed against the offensive
meanings of the word indio.12 In the 1960s, North America scholars argued for a social,
rather than a biological, conception of race (see, for example, Harris, 1964). And in the
1970s, Andeanists participated in a broader change within the discipline of anthropology by
reconceptualising the problem of native peoples in terms of ethnicity and class instead of
race (van den Berghe and Primov, 1977). Rather than review the historical literature in
detail, I look at the things it has made possible, for whom, and then look at what it obscures.
Abandoning the concept of race, which has always implied fixed identities in both 'folk'
and 'academic' theories (Goldberg, 1992), has yielded analytical flexibility. Ethnic theory
opens up questions about individual mobility across boundaries, social change, and the
political processes that perpetuate group differences (Williams, 1989). In Otavalo, the flow
across ethnic boundaries is two way. Not only do indigenous people move to cities, cut their
hair, and eat white rice and fried food as do white-mestizos, but expatriate Otavalenos
return home, grow their hair, and tend their maize seedlings. Further, both mestizos and
other indigenous Ecuadorians have occasionally adopted Otavaleno costume to participate
in the area's market. Theories of ethnicity, with their emphasis on 'multiple and overlapping
sets of ascriptive loyalties', grapple with these problems in a way that racial approaches
have not (Cohen, 1978: 387).
Scholarly precision, however, is only a part of what is at stake here. At a personal level,
avoiding terms like indio and sticking with indigena, in Spanish and runa in Quichua, affords
respect. Where the word indio connotes a crude way of life, poverty, and irrationality,
indigena signals the historic legitimacy of a culture and people. My compadres, informants,
and neighbors are scrupulous in referring to themselves as indigenas and I follow suit. Using
these culturally sensitive terms is not only polite but also allows me to sidestep some of the
awkwardness of racial categories as I build my own identity as a 'gringo' anthropologist. As
a gringo,13 I avoid the untrustworthy characteristics that indigenas associate with mishus
(white-mestizos). Indeed, on several occasions, I heard friends in the community scold their
children for calling me a mishu. They corrected the kids to say 'amigo9 (friend) or 'compadre9
(co-father). Being a friendly foreigner, I am less threatening than a member of the local
white-mestizo elite. And, I become a key informant for them. People turn to me to explain
foreign tourists, lost hikers, Macgyver's non-violence, Baywatch lifeguards and other
televised manifestations of US life.
It is not just ingratiating anthropologists like me, however, who choose to see the world
in terms of cultural difference. In the rare but increasingly numerous friendships of equality
between indigenas and white-mestizos, people seem to downplay their differences. For
example, I spent an afternoon with an indigenous sweater dealer and his taxi-driving,
white-mestizo friend. Consuming quantities of fizzy, warm beer, we had gathered together
to 'inaugurate' the sweater dealer's new pick-up truck, which the two of them had spent the
morning picking out. They were well at ease in each other's company. When I asked the
dealer about having such a close mestizo friend, he replied that he saw more similarities in
their lives ? especially their life on the road ? than differences.
The emphasis on similarities allows for intermediate identities between indigena and
white-mestizo. For instance, I once attended a confirmation party that brought together
a mixture of ethnicities. Typically, these family gatherings use symbolic foods and for-
malised etiquette to celebrate social bonds within indigenous society while reinforcing the
boundaries between indigenas and white mestizos. On this occasion, though, the lines
between ethnic groups were blurred. Some male guests with short hair and white-mestizo
clothes, handed out cups ofasua (corn beer) from old plastic buckets for other participants,
skillfully performing the serving rites of the fiesta. Similarly, a few women there sported an
ambiguous, quasi-urban look by combining traditional anakus with elaborate hairstyles
and glittery sweaters. Despite their 'exotic' look, they willingly participated, shuffling
around the patio with poncho-clad men to off-key renditions ofthe soap opera ballad 'Dos
mujeres, un camino\
Later, when the host of the party and I watched a video tape of the event, he identified
these guests as cousins of his compadres. He went on to describe them as 'media-indigenas'
(half-natives). The term re-invents the idea of mestizaje (cultural and racial blending). The
official ideology of racial mixing elevates the importance of ancient native cultures while
negating contemporary native practices. In contrast, the people gathered here emphasised
ongoing indigenous contributions to mestizo identity.14 Both these hybrid guests and the
taxi-driver testify to a growing dimension of rural Otavaleno life: the acceptance of family
parties as a cultural common ground for indigenas and white-mestizos.
These personal connections take place in light of new economic opportunities for
Otavalenos. As mentioned above, more than any other native group in Ecuador, they have
profited from the global demand for ethnic arts. As First World tourists search for
authentic, non-industrial artifacts, weavers oblige by adapting their skills and wares to new
tastes. Festooning their stalls with carved birds from the Ecuadorian rain forest, molas from
Panama, and weavings from Bolivia, they sell crafts that previously had no place in the
market. The scale of their trade is impressive. In 1994, the largest operations exported more
than one million sweaters to retailers in the US and Europe.
Furthermore, thousands of Otavalenos have moved to where tourists live. In Bogota,
Amsterdam, and New York, Otavalenos sell everything from bootleg Andean music
cassettes to crocheted hacky-sacks preferred by Deadheads. The transnational circulation
of Otavalenos, has redefined the meaning and functions of their fields and rural communi?
ties. Many expatriates have 'lost' Otavalo as a homeland, glorifying it as the source of their
identity while also dismissing it as economically unviable. They return to participate in
fiestas and build large houses, while at the same time lamenting that they can no longer farm
the way their grandparents did (and ignoring their cousins and old neighbours who still try
to). These regular return visits are part of what differentiates Otavalenos migrants from
white-mestizo migrants ? at least according to one textile trader. 'Those mishus go [to the
US] and stay, go and stay, but we runakuna (Andean people) do not travel like that,' he said.
He told me that Otavaleno migrants always return to their land, women, and children.
These stories of migration coincide with larger Otavaleno claims to a 'true Andean'
identity that help sustain their craft business. By affirming their cultural difference through
costume, agriculture, and fiestas, Otavalenos authenticate their goods. Indeed, tourists who
come to Otavalo go in search of these signs. Many begin their market day, not in the
Poncho Plaza where the crafts are, but in the animal market. Standing amidst cow manure
and squealing pigs while watching indigenas bargain with white-mestizo middlemen, foreig-
ners seem satisfied that they have come to a true Indian market.
Otavalenos largely accept the foreigners' search for difference. They tolerate gringos'
presence in the communities and at local fiestas. When going to sell in the Poncho Plaza,
most dealers shrug on their shawls and ponchos rather than sweaters and wind-breakers.
Although the choice of clothes cannot be put down simply as a show for the tourists,
Otavalenos are well aware of their outfits' ethnic meanings and marketing potential. In
Venice Beach, California near where I live, indigenous music groups sweat under their wool
ponchos as they play for hours next to a chainsaw juggler and tarot card readers. They use
their formal clothes as an index of their distinctive culture, drawing tourists looking to be
entertained by either domestic novelties or exotic others.
THE NEW BODIES OF THE ETHNIC ARTS ECONOMY
The prosperity ofthe crafts market has affected Otavalenos in numerous ways, not the least
of which is in the transformation of their bodies. Wealth has made indigenous men and
women bigger, heavier, and apparently sexier. Earlier generations suffered broken teeth and
swollen gums without adequate dental care and endured chronic intestinal parasites
without proper medical attention. Their diet consisted primarily of maize and often lacked
sufficient protein and other nutrients. These deprivations took a physical toll as many
indigenas rarely grew taller than five feet and bodies stayed lean.
Since the mid-1960s, things have improved for those who have capitalised on the tourist
boom. With more income, people could provide their families with eggs, milk, and fruit.
Evening meals in many indigenous homes now smell of frying eggs or roasted chicken.
Further, in the 1970s, the government finally began investing in rural health centres and
potable water. All these changes have resulted in big bellies on men, wide girths on women,
and children who are 6 in taller than their parents (see Meisch, 1995: 448 for a fuller
description). Indeed, in my own experience, I found that my height (6 ft, 2 in) made me
freakish in the countryside where I towered over others. Yet, in Otavalo, I would see eye to
eye with some of the young men who grew up in cities.
The physical changes have caused resentment among some and excitement among others.
For example, rural people take for granted that if someone has money then he or she is fat. If
this is not the case, it is often pointed out to me with comments like 'although he is rich, he is
not fat' or 'he is rich, but he is thin, thin. He is still a good person'. The latter comment hints
at the animosity that has developed between the wealthy and those who have missed out on
the tourist boom, a topic I address in the next section. Mean while, gringas (North American
or European women), have taken a fancy to the physiques of indigenas, particularly young
men. As one woman from the US told Meisch (1995: 449), 'These guys are so sexy! Long
hair, high cheek bones, white teeth, well-built, nicely dressed, friendly... Sometimes I just
like to sit and look at them. They're Madison Avenue Andean Indians.'
From 'indio sucio9 to Madison Avenue, Otavalenos have come along way. Previously,
foreigners merely wrote approvingly of their cleanliness. Now, North American women are
erotically attracted to young indigenas. For their part, many white-mestizos are no longer
repelled by indigenous people. Instead, they all sit together on wooden benches, drinking
beer from the same foamy, dripping cup. For indigenas themselves, asserting ethnic differ?
ence has important economic consequences. Otavalenos skillfully market 'native' crafts,
icons of a 'traditional' agrarian culture. It has made some rich. Many experience their new
wealth through better diets, bigger homes, and louder parties. Indigenas amplify their
culture to positive effect.
THE CLEAN LIFE, 'LABOUR-IN-VAIN' AND THE ENDURING PROBLEMS

OFRACE
Given the naturalness of talk of cultura9, the pride people have in their own way of life, and
the prosperity of the ethnic arts industry, I took it for granted that notions of culture lay at
the heart of indigenas9 sense of difference. It took me a while to see the incompleteness of my
understanding. That, in fact, for many indigenas, the racist contrast between urban cleanli?
ness and rural brutishness still orients thought and action.
For example, in one limited sense, many rural indigenas would agree with the hacienda-
heir Felipe quoted at the beginning: economic advancement and cleanliness are linked. In
the course of interviews I have conducted about material change in Otavalo, people often
saw recent economic changes as the move towards the white-mestizo's clean life. An older
man once explained to me that the youths of today 'want to sell handicrafts, they want to
get money in order to live well and cleanly'. Another man, Jaime, the ex-president of
Ariasucu, spoke of his own desire to move from the country down into town, because, he
said, 'life is already changing, it is different, it is cleaner'. Their observations on cleanliness
are not just about an absence of dirt and dust. Rather, they indicate a set of changes,
a categorical shift.
If Jaime is able to make the move into town, he would not be the first to 'clean up' his life
in that way. Because of craft business earnings, hundreds of families have moved to the
center of the market town. They have bought property, torn down the adobe houses of an
older generation of white-mestizos and built cement-block ones with tinted windows.
Others have built big homes in the countryside and have equipped them with stereos,
blenders and other cooking appliances. These emerging elites enroll their children in the
town's better elementary schools and pay for them to go onto high school.
A compadre of mine observed that newly wealthy indigenas pick up more than the
material trappings and educational goals of white-mestizo life. They adopt their racist
views. He said that some urbanised merchants are as likely to call rural folks 'dirty Indians'
as some mestizos. Once again metaphors of dirtiness are used to accentuate growing
class differences. Because the ragged signs of peasant hardship have long been associated
with racial inferiority, some of the wealthy reject poor indigenas with caustic remarks
about their appearance, imagined drunkenness, and presumed laziness. In so doing,
they reproduce racism's logic. They minimise any claim the poor may have on their
capital and contacts by dehumanising them. Instead of recognising their common ethnicity,
they turn material difference into a moral divide linked to inferior bodies and physical
appearances.
Indigenous use of racist terms differs from mestizo use, however. Rich, corpulent, finely
dressed indigenas express their contempt in Quichua. 'Dirty Indian' becomes 'mapa runa9
(Quichua) not 'indio sucio9 (Spanish). Thus, their disparagement of their country cousins
does not mean a repudiation of Quichua language and culture. These rich textile dealers are
still proudly indigena, if not proud of all indigenas.
The rich are not the only indigenas to use racist labels. From time to time, I heard people
who habitually used the term 'indigena? suddenly refer to themselves or others as indios or
longos, another negative synonym for indio, For instance one afternoon, I sat with three or
four men gossiping about a resident of the community who spent a lot of time away selling
sweaters to tourists. It was reported that this man had told the teachers at the community's
nursery school to speak only Spanish to his son. Upon hearing this, one man blurted out,
'the indio must speak Quichua, to speak only Spanish is wrong'. The others agreed, and they
also affirmed the links between language and identity speaking of indios, not indigenas.
A few months later, I listened as one of these men complained to me about the family his
daughter wanted to marry into. Her boyfriend's family lived in a prosperous textile dealing
community and they collectively had spent many years selling in a city on the Colombian
border. 'Are they good longos? the man worried, 'Do they work their fields? Do they take
care of their families?'
Two things strike me about the self-referential use of these terms. First, I never heard
anyone use them on a regular basis. Rather, 'indio' or 'longo' are rarely uttered and when
they are I heard the terms spoken with a certain sharpness and raised tone. Even when used
among indigenas, these terms do not shed their racist burden. Second, words such as indio or
longo show up in normative context, like the 'indio must speak Quichua' or the 'indio must
farm.' Although farming their small holdings and speaking their own language are just the
activities that provoke the contempt of urban society, some still passionately insist upon
these practices. Indeed, by using the word indio, they underscore the hostility these practices
expose them to. They call to mind and reinforce a spiteful 'us versus them' distinction.
While my rural informants borrow from racial terms and imagery of clean white-
mestizos, they do not fully adopt it. For rural Otavalenos, the structural opposition is
transformed from clean life: dirty life {limpiu kawsai: mapa kawsai) to clean life:
humble/fruitless life {limpiu kawsai: yanga kawsai). Thus, for example, when two women
complained ofthe lack of piped water in their community, they contrasted the pain of their
yanga kawsai ? the useless or humble life ? with the limpiu kawsai of the city. The word
yanga is complex. Depending on context, it can mean humble, useless, in vain, simple, or
worthless. People use it to describe everything from a poor sales outing, to a belt with
a simple woven pattern {yanga chumbi), to the Quichua language itself {yanga shimi). Once,
when working alongside an older man as we tried to dig a segment of the ditch for the
potable water project, I heard him describe himself as being yanga, as lacking the force or
strength to swing his pick.
For many the abstract notion yanga is made real in a household's core worn implements.
Yanga cosas (humble things) include blackened pots with busted handles, broken down
looms, and wooden bowls patched together with tin strips. Yanga is not confined to
traditional goods, though. People extend the idea to encompass the newly decrepit such as
black and white TVs and transistor radios with tinny speakers. In common usage, the yanga
kawsai is the Indian way oflife that depends on these various things to get by. That is, those
families who coax a maize crop from an eroded plot using dull hoes and picks hafted with
a raw tree branch are said to be living yangata or humbly/uselessly. Likewise, the wife and
husband who weave bag straps at a piece rate of 350 Sucres per meter (about 15 cents) on
looms held together by ribbons cut from inner tubes are also seen as living the yanga kawsai.
Even my own work was devalued by its association with yanga cosas. Asking about old
grindstones or the age of a loom was seen as a silly activity. My pen and ink renderings of
household goods were considered labour spent in vain after I assured people that no one
would buy them. However, no matter how fruitless my particular efforts may have seemed,
I did not lead a yanga kawsai. Indeed, I had to be careful about using the term. For instance,
even though other people would tell me it was good that I spoke yanga shimi, if I myself used
the words 'yanga shimt it sometimes led to awkward pauses and smiles frozen on faces
a moment too long. It was not for me to say whose language was worthless or whose life was
led in vain.
My talk of yanga could only call more attention to the social and economic gaps that
existed between me and my compadres and neighbours. It re-introduced the whiteness and
'cleanliness' of my life. In fact, for older residents, these qualities marked me as a corrupting
influence. After the first time I stopped by Santo Conejo's house, for example, news of the
visit quickly travelled to his mother. She came by later in the day to warn him in no
uncertain terms about the dangers of letting an auca (devil, evil being, savage) into his house.
My white body threatened not other bodies, but souls.
The substitution of yanga for dirtiness in native racial schemes is important. It switches
the emphasis from the supposed deficiencies of indigenas to the injustice of a racist
Ecuadorian economy. The words yanga kawsai draw attention to the way years of indigen?
ous toil translate into nothing more than tired bodies and a handful of worn possessions.
That is, in Quichua, the problem is not that people are unhealthy and dirty, but that their
labour is expended in vain. As much as they yearn to live well, they cannot succeed under
the current conditions of their lives. The division between runakuna (native Andeans) and
mishus, however, goes beyond economies to basic differences in human nature. Some
indigenas consider white mestizos to be naturally ? even supernaturally ? untrustworthy.
They do not share the same humanity.
CHOLERA, DRUGS AND THE WHITE-MESTIZO REINVENTION OF A

CONTAMINATED CULTURE
The racial discourse used against indigenous Otavaleno society, however, still greatly
overshadows such discourse used within it. In 1991, racist thought and action gained new
life in the wake of a cholera outbreak. As with other diseases, most notably AIDS, a general
public health problem quickly took on a specific 'racial' identity and became a pretense for
resurrecting boundaries between clean and 'infected' populations (Farmer, 1994). Cholera
had reappeared first in coastal cities before moving into the rural highlands. Once in places
like Imbabura, cholera remained limited to particular segments of the population. In
Ariasucu, for example, four of the five victims said to have died from cholera were men,
older than 40, and living in the highest, poorest neighbourhood. Others in the community
told me that men died because they do not cook. If their wives were away during the day,
they would wave the flies off cold, left-over meals and snack on infected food. Even among
the poorest, though, those with the right skills (i.e. women) could protect themselves.
Despite both its urban origins and the narrow population of victims, cholera soon
subjected all indigenous communities to white-mestizos' suspicion and fear. In Otavalo,
hotel owners warned me about trying to go into the countryside. Taxi-drivers refused to
take indigenous people from the town back to their homes. When fares did convince drivers
to take them up, the cabs would rush back to the city. Residents in Ariasucu described to me
how cabbies locked their doors and waggled their index fingers to reject any indigenous
men and women impertinent enough to seek a ride back down. In the urban imagination,
peasant communities once again seethed with filth and corruption.
Wealthy, urban indigenas have not been immune to racism, either. Jealous mestizos have
been known to single out and attack well off indigenas. Typically, though, prosperous
dealers suffer a more insidious form of prejudice. Many of Otavalo's old elite refuse to
accept the legitimacy of indigenas9 new fortune. They insist that the money comes from
drugs, not handicrafts. I once sat in a doctor's waiting room with three white-mestizos ? a
gaunt, grey haired man in a cheap suit, a pregnant woman, and matronly middle-aged
woman ? listening to the suspicions they had about the textile dealers. The older man
complained about the buses to Peguche, the wealthiest native town. He then said, 'these
Indians {indios) almost do not need buses. They all have cars.'
'Nice cars, big cars', the pregnant woman added.
'The Indians are all walking around with drugs, aren't they?' the man queried. The other
woman heartily agreed while the pregnant woman said nothing. The older two then
nattered away, enumerating all the signs of an illicit drug trade such as the large new houses
up and down the Pan-American Highway. Occasionally, the pregnant woman tried to
interrupt and say that the money actually came from handicrafts, especially overseas sales.
I supported her position. The other two were not swayed.
According to many white-mestizos, everything that indigenous business people have or
trade is tainted with drugs. They build houses with illicit profits; smuggle drugs in the plastic
lining of their new pick-up trucks; and sew packets of cocaine into the collars of the shirts
they ship to Europe (cf. Meisch, 1996). These rumours stigmatise the 'cleanest' Otavalenos
as the most dangerous. Despite the total lack of evidence of drugs in Otavalo, richer
indigenas are branded as traffickers. White-mestizos have re-connected them to a 'racial
poison', threatening the health ofthe nation and the well being of society. Racism rises again
as mestizos have a new reason to spurn indigenas.
THE POLITICS OF CULTURE AND RACE IN THE 1990s
The indigenous political movement challenges this racism. Traditionally, indigenous

politics have focused on land and access to water (Field, 1991). By the 1980s, though,
economic and political activism had taken on a distinctly cultural flavour. Thus, for
example, during the 1986 Imbabura bus strike, the local peasant federation called for more
than lower fares. They also demanded that the new bus company show its passengers
respect. Further, the federation wanted to protect local cultural integrity by insisting upon
the removal of the 'nefarious, foreign' Summer Institute of Linguistics from indigenous
communities.15
More dramatically, in 1990, Ecuadorian indigenas organised a nationwide uprising over
land. Pacari (1993), a leader of CONAIE, the national congress of indigenous organisations,
has argued that this revolt was a cultural as well as a political event. For instance, she
mentions that the collective efforts of communities sustained the strike. By sharing responsi?
bilities to feed strikers, much the way Ariasucu residents shared their meal during a work
day, native communities maintained round the clock occupation of the highways. She also
noted that women blended political activism and child care responsibilities in a way that
resonated with their daily life. Women typically carry their children on their backs during
daily chores around the house and in the fields. Thus, when mothers dragged tree trunks
into the Pan American highway with children peering over their shoulder, they were not so
much neglecting the maternal responsibilities for political ones, but weaving the two
together.
And she explains how Otavalenos used Inti-Raymi (the sun festival/Feast of San
Juan) as a way to circumvent the military and participate in the uprising. This fiesta
is celebrated annually in June, when men dress in costumes that range from hairy wild
men to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles play instruments and dance from house to house.
When challenged by the state's efforts to keep them from protesting in 1990, Otavalenos
advanced the date of the fiesta, and used their disguises and dances as a means to take the
highways.
In all these efforts, from shared meals to a politicised Inti-Raymi, the uprising was
a 'sacrament of dignity'. It reafltoned the culture of indigenas while at the same time placing
them on 'the national political stage as important social actors' (Pacari, 1993:185-186; see
also Selverston, 1994). By 1992, calls for the open acceptance of native cultures upon this
stage motivated the protests of the Columbian anniversary, not just in Ecuador but
throughout the Americas. Indigenas engaged in a spiritual movement against the ex-
ploitative values of dominant culture (Meisch, 1994; Hale, 1994).
In the politics of this ethnic movement, though, fighting for the legitimacy of indigenous
cultures meant accepting deeper involvement within the state and, finally, a commencement
of 'harmonious relations' with white-mestizos. As the president of CONAIE, Luis Macas,
put it: 'what we want is true unity among Ecuadorians within a framework of justice and
equity' (Hoy, Sunday 4 October 1992, as cited in Meisch, 1994). Four years later in another
part of America, the Zapatistas in Chiapas echoed these same sentiments, proclaiming:
Through our act of demanding recognition of our Indian identity, we wish to contribute
to the formation of a more fundamental unity of all Mexican men and women, a unity
that recognises the true diversity of the ethnic communities that make up modern
Mexico. (Foro Nacional Indigena, cited in Gossen, 1996)
Even as indigenous leaders fight for their cause, they are careful not to repudiate the
sovereignty of the nation. The goal is not independence but an equitable integration
reflecting indigenous values. The movement, therefore, represents a double shift in native
political sentiments in Ecuador. Indigenas proclaim both the relevance of their culture to
state politics and also the legitimacy of national institutions within their own communities.
The attitude is no longer wanting to be left in peace, as Saenz once said, but wanting a piece
of the action.
Cultural politics, however, has yet to payoff for disadvantaged members of rural society.
And people in communities like Ariasucu participate ambivalently in the recent indigenous
protests. Indeed, while Ariasucu's residents fought against the bus company and invaded
land for water, they stayed away from the 1994 national strike against the government's new
land reform laws. Some did not follow the lengthy debates about the wording of legal
statutes or the relevance of making special cultural demands. Indeed, I heard people refer to
the negotiations as another instance of a fruitless (yanga) indigenous effort.
The political process reinforced beliefs about the fundamental untrustworthiness of
white-mestizos. Rather than integration, many rural Otavalenos want to limit the intrusions
of a 'white' political system into their lives. They engage in the politics of separation
punctuated by confrontation over material needs. With their insistence that 'indios9 speak
their own language and farm their own fields, they emphasise the importance of solidarity
and some control over the means of production and expression rather than official
recognition of their culture. They trust the earth and their industry to provide what white
society has not stability, security, and continuity.16
Official indigenous political discourse acknowledges the rural poor's distrust of formal
political institutions. Native leaders and intellectuals have tapped into Andeans' feelings of
frustration by trying to reclaim the word 'indio9 (Blanco, 1972). During and after the
national uprising against new land tenure laws, for example, Luis Macas, the president of
CONAJE regularly talked of the agrarian needs and rights of 'indios9. In fact, his organisa-
tion's newsletter is called Pueblos Indios. Through the continued use of racial terms, the
political leadership recognises the painful socioeconomic gaps and the legacy of rural
poverty and discrimination the words connote.
CONCLUSIONS
No one single schema explains the social divisions of modern Ecuadorian society; both race
and ethnicity exist as social facts. On the one hand, white-mestizos and indigenas construe
social gaps in terms of racial difference. From the mestizo perspective race is a matter of
hygiene. A generation ago, writers explained how the disorder and dirt of native life led to
biological degeneracy. This racist discourse of contamination endures in concerns about
cholera and drugs. Emerging from fears of filth and corruption, white-mestizo development
programs aimed to build the nation by cleaning up the political organisation, homes, and
bodies of the countryside.
From the indigenous side, race is tied to the painful experience of working for a lifetime
with nothing but yanga cosas (useless/humble things) to show for it. Indigenas contrast the
clean, white-mestizo way oflife with a fruitless one, bluntly making their points with words
like indio and longo. Casting the world in racial terms, Otavalenos emphasise the distance
between themselves and mestizos, underscore the uselessness of rural poverty, and reinforce
skepticism that runakuna and mishus could ever get along. Such a perspective supports
a politics of confrontation and self-reliance, not integration.
On the other hand, Ecuador's social divisions are increasingly seen in ethnic terms. In this
case, cultural difference provides a resource for indigenas to get ahead in the modern world
while preserving the strength of native traditions. As Kearney (1996: 181) has pointed out,
'the indigena is an identity that perhaps most clearly and effectively deconstructs the
opposition of modern and traditional.' Claims to native status authenticate Otavaleno
products and sustain the international marketing of handicrafts. Drawing on an ideology of
ethnic difference, indigenous political leaders gain official recognition of their own distinc?
tive culture while at the same time become stronger participants in national political
institutions. The politics of ethnicity offers the possibility of inclusion on terms at least
partly set by indigenas themselves.
Given this co-existence of racial and ethnic understandings of Ecuador's social differ?
ences, I would like to make the foilowing three points. First, one version is not necessarily
more true than another. Both schemes shape lives and describe people's experiences. Not
only are both points-of-view present within a town like Otavalo or a rural indigenous
community, but single individuals sometimes speak in terms of race and other times in
terms of ethnicity. The overlapping concepts of what it means to be different contribute to
the flexibility of indigenous identities and the complexity of their politics.
Second, when anthropologists and others speak solely in terms of cultural difference
? i.e. use the language of ethnicity ? we are not simply speaking politely. We are
constructing a version of indigenous society which potentially ignores problems of class and
poverty that exist within native cultures. Further, ethnic discourse is increasingly tied to
a political agenda of tighter integration within the official political system. This incorpora-
tion is not unanimously supported in indigenous communities.
Third, race and ethnicity are experienced physically as both qualities of the body and
properties of the material world. They derive their power to separate or bring together
through their sensory realities. The racism of an elderly white-mestizo is inextricably
entangled in the smell of cement dust and eucalyptus smoke coming off the poncho of
a man riding next to him on a bus. Mended bowls, grainy soups, and bad TV reception
reinforce rural residents' sense that they live a hard life fundamentally different
than mestizos. Multi-day parties with the province's most popular bands provide a feel
for the new vitality of Otavaleno culture. These culturally constructed experiences
orient people towards moral and political action, whether it is ostracising 'dirty Indians,'
distancing oneself from mishu society, or dancing past military vehicles during a popular
uprising.
In summary, we must attend to the variations that exist within understandings of social
difference and to sensitise ourselves to the substances that make those variations real. For,
in the Andes, social boundaries are not drawn cleanly. Conflicting experiences of filth,
futihty, and prosperity make for a murky social landscape and complicated politics. Only by
reopening questions of race, by talking about the experience of dirtiness and poverty, and
by addressing the elusive qualities of 'cleanliness' can we hope to take on the enduring
injustice of northern Andean society.
NOTES
1. Funding for research was provided with awards from the National Science Foundation (# 9318289), Fulbright
Hayes/IIE program, UCLA Latin America Center Small Grants Program, and the UCLA Department of
Anthropology. For their impassioned and patient discussion of these topics, I thank my compadres and
comadres Luis Antonio Castaneda, Elena Chiza, Zoila Arias, and especially Pedro Vasquez. I am also gratcful
for the advice and insights offered by Lynn Meisch and Tim Earle as well as Mary Weismantel, Jane Jaquette,
and the other participants in the Ocddental College Faculty Workshop on Conflict and Conflict Resolution.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the session 'Naked Whites, Dirty Indians: Race in the Andes
and in Andean Ethnography' at the 1996 Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San
Francisco.
2. Quoted on 12 October 1992, in Hoy, a daily newspaper published in Quito and GuayaquiL Citation found in
Meisch (1994), her translation.
3. A pseudonym, as are all the personal names in the article.
4. I use the term 'white-mestizo' to refer to the Spanish speaking, dominant population living primarily
in Ecuador's highland cities and small towns (see also Meisch, 1995). Like all racial and ethnic labels
in Ecuador, 'white-mestizo' is not entirely accurate. It implies the exclusion of important peoples of
African or Asian descent Further, many urban Ecuadorians think of themselves as 'blancos' and disdain the
idea of mestizqje (Stark 1981). Nonetheless, I use the term to refer to non-indigenous people because it fits with
both indigenas and non-indigenas dichotomised perceptions of social life in small provincial towns like
Otavalo.
5. In her analysis of the social position of mestizas in Cuzqueno society, de la Cadena's (1996) argues for
maintaining the analytical distinction of race and ethnicity. She notes that for Cuzquefios, the contrasting
conceptions of race and ethnicity coincide with social position. Dominant groups have subscribed to racial
schemes, while subordinate groups assert ethnic ones. Her analysis has important parallels to my explorations
of Otavalo society. For another example of analysis that distinguishes between racial and cultural perceptions
of difference, see Park (1996) on the relations between Koreans and Blacks in Los Angeles.
6. See Beteille (1990) for a discussion of the interpenetration of the physical world and racial categories and
Goldberg (1992: 547-548) for an analysis of the various ways that the contemporary uses of 'race' assume
significance in terms of class.
7. Since the 1940s, numerous researchers have stressed the cultural and political importance of textiles in
Otavalo. Buitron (1947) provides interesting regional, quantitative data, while his book with Collier (Collier
and Buitron, 1947) has invaluable pictorial documentation. Parsons (1945) complements his work with the
study of Peguche, perhaps the wealthiest indigenous community in Ecuador. Salomon (1981), Casagrande
(1981), Rubio Orbe (1956) and Salz (1955) describe how indigenous culture developed through the 1950s and
1960s, in part, on the strength of the weaving business. Walter (1981) and Chaves (1982,1985) document the
growing self-confidence of the wealthiest weavers in the 1970s, as does Meisch's (1987, 1995) and D'Amico's
(1993) for the 1980s and 1990s.
8. Saenz himself was an important voice in the Mexican indigenista movement (although he himself was at times
ambivalent about the label). He saw anthropology as meaningful only in its service to a well-defined goal:
national integration. Indeed, he became the most fervent partisan for a pohtics of incorporation during the
period when he was subsecretary of education in charge of the rural program (Aguirre Beltran, 1970: xxvi).
9. The lines come from the poem 'Estampa de Otavalo' that was included in an anthology called, Paisaje y alma
de Otavalo, about the region put together by Virgilio Chaves Valdospinos. The book carries no publication
date, but the materials inside range from colonial days to the mid-1970s, with the majority dating from the
mid-20th century. Another poem in the collection was titled Tndios de Otavalo' and included the lines:
El indio es buen mozo
y la 'longd linda
El con trenza negra
y camisa limpia.
(The Indian is a handsome fellow/and the Indian (fem.) is pretty/ He with the black braid/ and the clean shirt.)
10. In fact, no human population has the kind of natural, biological phenotypic variation that would allow
for any consistent division into 'races'. See Wade (1993) for the way that social scientists struggle with this
point
11. In this analysis, I have been inspired by the ideas of Gose (1994:19), who suggests that the words 'indio9 and
'blaneo' persist in the southern Andes not as descriptive labels of modern life, but verbal indices of a violent
encounter. They evoke the historical moment of conquest and produces a sense that the primordial encounter
between Hispanic and Indian still goes on. The language captures the aura of violence which underpins
political rule in provincial Andean towns. I argue that the language of cleanliness has similar pragmatic force.
12. Maiguashca (1949) Jaramillo Alvarado (1949), and Monsalve Pozo (1943) all write strongly against the word
'indio9 as 'insulting and offensive'.
13. While in Otavalo there is something a little derogatory and White about the term 'gringo,' it tends to mean
foreigner in a general sense. Thus, there are Japanese and Italian gringos as well as North American ones
(Meisch, 1995: 444).
14. A recent volume on mestizaje (hybridity or mixed blooded-ness) in Central America and the Andes highlights
the pliability of mestizo identities (Hale, 1996a). In the hands of the ehte, mestizaje becomes a racial ideology
used to establish a national identity while delegitimising indigenous identities. However, in grass root versions
of mestizaje, market women assert the importance of indigenous traditions to their urbanised lives (de la
Cadena, 1996). Definitions vary according to such factors as political affiliation or the degree of cultural
plurality envisioned by the term's users (Hale, 1996b).
15. As reported in La Verdad (12 October 1986), a provincial newspaper printed in Ibarra, the capital of the
province.
16. See Orlove (this volume) for the culture-affirming properties of dirt and the earth in an Andean society.
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4 Dirty Indians Radical Indígenas

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Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)

'Dirty Indians', Radical Indigenas, and the Political

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall,

Abstract ? This article examines alternative conceptions of social difference in Otavalo,

Key words ? indigenous peoples, race, Ecuador, political movements

OTAVALO AND OTAVALENOS

WEAVING, FARMING, HYGIENE AND RACE IN OTAVALO, 1930-1950

Not yet dawn and yet already full are

FROM RACE TO ETHNICITY

THE NEW BODIES OF THE ETHNIC ARTS ECONOMY

THE CLEAN LIFE, 'LABOUR-IN-VAIN' AND THE ENDURING PROBLEMS

CHOLERA, DRUGS AND THE WHITE-MESTIZO REINVENTION OF A

THE POLITICS OF CULTURE AND RACE IN THE 1990s

The indigenous political movement challenges this racism. Traditionally, indigenous

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