Suzana Sawyer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

Crude Chronicles

Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in EcuadorBy Suzana Sawyer

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Suzana Sawyer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822332831

Chapter One

AMAZONIAN IMAGINARIES

IN APRIL 1992, over 2,000 Quichua, Achuar, and Shiwiar Indians marched from Pastaza Province in the central Ecuadorian Amazon to Quito, Ecuador’s capital, some 250 kilometers away in the northern Andes. Adorned with facial paint and feathered plumes, carrying spears and children and often ill-prepared for freezing highland nights, Amazonian men and women walked for two weeks to affirm their collective voice. Two demands motivated their march-land adjudication and constitutional reform. The first demand called for the communal titling of two million hectares of contiguous rain forest territory in Pastaza, approximately 70 percent of the province. The second demand pressed for reforms in the constitution such that Ecuador be declared a “plurinational state.” Indian leaders insisted that Ecuador was a mosaicked nation composed of multiple discrete, though interconnected, peoples and that it be recognized as such.

The 1992 march from the Upper Amazon lowlands, across the foothills, and along the spine of the Andes captured the Ecuadorian popular imagination. From the beginning, it was a national and international spectacle enveloped in an aura of euphoria and fascination. Drawing momentum from the pan-Americas Indian campaign to commemorate 1992 as marking “500 Years of Resistance” (in direct protest to celebrating it as the 500th anniversary of the “Discovery of the New World”), the march revived dormant lowland-highland alliances and momentarily exposed the possibilities for transforming race and ethnic relations within Ecuadorian society. Inspired by a handful of female elders who recalled their ancestors’ numerous treks to Quito, the march evoked indigenous solidarities on a broad scale and unearthed unsuspected sympathies from mestizos across the country.

As marchers passed through the Andes, numerous indigenous highland communities enthusiastically welcomed their lowland companeros with moral and material support. Highlanders shared their food, clothing, and inspiration. In many instances, they accompanied lowlanders on their pilgrimage to the capital. Less expected was the support encountered from the press, the police, the Red Cross, and, most surprisingly, dominant blanco-mestizo enclaves. People lined streets to applaud and gawk at lowland marchers as they passed through towns and cities. In many municipalities, children were let out of school, and the more brazen ran alongside marchers and gathered autographs. Market vendors gave out sacks of fresh fruit. Stopped cars honked in approval. Even then-President Rodrigo Borja Cevallos, who only two years previously had denied lowland Indians their request for legal rights to their ancestral lands, vowed to receive and protect the marchers.

Thirteen days after beginning their ascent up the Andes, an estimated 5,000 exhilarated Indians marched into Quito. With their numbers multiplied from highland participation, a river of marchers carrying banners and multicolored flags flowed through the capital. Their first stop was the Plaza San Blas, the site where the Amazonian hero Jumandi was condemned to death by the Spanish in 1579. The statue memorialized Jumandi for having led the first successful lowland indigenous rebellion against Spanish rule. There at the foot of his statue, Indian leaders addressed the crowd with inspirational speeches; indigenous marchers were continuing the 500-year struggle for Indian dignity and political autonomy that Jumandi began.

Tensions rose, however, as marchers neared their ultimate destination in Quito’s colonial quarters: the Presidential Palace and seat of the executive branch. Hundreds of soldiers clad in riot gear and armed with dogs, horses, and tanks cordoned off marchers’ access to the Presidential Palace and the adjacent plaza. Indians relocated their point of assembly and gathered in the Plaza de San Francisco some five blocks away, waiting as helicopters circled overhead. Apprehensions were high. Despite the presence of an intimidating military force, marchers vowed not to budge until they had an audience with the president. Following negotiations between indigenous and state envoys, it was agreed that a select group of indigenous leaders could meet with the Borja regime. By midday, one hundred indigenas entered the Presidential Palace to present their demands.

This chapter examines the 1992 march and its effects. The march was a crucial juncture in a long-standing political agenda to challenge a discriminatory and exploitative state rule in Ecuador, and to carve a space for indigenous difference within a new vision of national belonging. Here I sketch the racial hierarchy that defined state rule and normative narratives of the nation in Ecuador, and I explore how Indians challenged this hierarchical and exclusionary notion of the nation.

It is especially crucial to understand the 1992 march because in many ways it set the stage for all subsequent indigenous protest in Pastaza Province, and arguably beyond. Through collective action, Indians sought to reconfigure the material, political, and symbolic meanings of territory, nationhood, and sovereignty in Ecuador. And indeed, the march succeeded in shifting the terms of debate around these concerns. Despite these achievements, however, the effects of the march also inadvertently circumscribed the terrain (both literal and figurative) upon which future struggles among state, national elite, corporate, and indigenous actors would take place. The state de-historicized indigenous claims, instantiated new juridical entities that would transform intra-indigenous affairs, and invested new agents with the power of government. Together these strategies acted to contain indigenous opposition and frame the conduct of conduct in the Amazon region.

Mosaic Representation

mo.sa.ic, noun (15th century) from Greek [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] by form of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] pertaining to the muses. –Oxford English Dictionary

mo.sa.ic, n. 1:a surface decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns. –Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

The delegation of one hundred Indian leaders passed through the imposing wooden doors and elaborate wrought-iron gate at the entrance of the Presidential Palace and climbed the wide marble staircase that ascends from the central courtyard to the governing chambers on the second floor. Halfway up the stairs, some leaders paused, admiring a massive mosaic that stretches upward one and a half stories and dwarfs all. Spanning three walls, the mosaic, titled The Discovery of the Amazon River, depicts the drama of the first Spanish expedition to descend the eastern slopes of the Andes, navigate through rugged jungle terrain and labyrinthine river systems, and eventually, more than a year later, reach the mouth of the Amazon some three thousand miles away. The sixteenth-century journey, led by Francisco Orellana, marks the earliest known European expedition in search of El Dorado, the mythic realm of gold and spices thought to be located in lowland South America.

Before continuing with the 1992 march, I would like to make a small detour and analyze this mosaic. At face value, the masterpiece depicts a story of European conquest over nature and natives in faraway lands. On futher inspection, the mosaic serves as a powerful heuristic: it offers insight into conflicting notions of history and nation in contemporary Ecuador. It both represents and leaves room to challenge normative understandings of the nation and, in particular, the race relations that undergird this normative imagining.

Created by Ecuador’s most loved and celebrated artist, Oswaldo Guayasamin, the mosaic inspires awe with its magnitude and vibrancy, made as it is of thousands of pieces of colored Venetian crystal. Each color-studded wall forms a panel in a triptych that sequentially portrays the conquistadores’ Andean descent, Amazonian passage, and Atlantic arrival. The adventure, faithfully chronicled by Friar Gaspar de Carvajal (the only man of the cloth to have survived the expedition), is familiar to all in Ecuador. Some version of Carvajal’s gripping eyewitness account is read by or told to every Ecuadorian schoolchild, adolescent, and adult. In the first scene, armor-clad Spaniards stand against a backdrop of jagged Andean peaks as they embark on their descent into unknown and mysterious lands. At the Spaniards’ feet stoop submissive Indians who will serve as the expedition’s slaves, porters, and guides. The second scene depicts the Spaniards’ arduous and treacherous journey through an Amazonian terrain. By this point in the expedition the highland Indian slaves and a number of Spaniards have died. In the upper left, the few surviving conquistadores pole downriver, seemingly alone, vulnerable, and in despair. In the lower center, two stark indigenas stand over the body of a slain conquistador. In the upper right, a lone Spaniard kneels at the feet of a female Amazon warrior, apparently beseeching her mercy. In the final scene, despite harrowing adversity, the conquistadores appear invincible, having reached the mouth of the Amazon at long last. They, alone, have prevailed victorious against the aggressions of savages and the perils of nature, and they, alone, set sail for Spain eager to present the crown with its newfound possessions.

Like the one hundred indigenous delegates, I too have been struck by Guayasamin’s mosaic ever since I first saw it in 1984. Each time I returned to Quito over the following 16 years, I visited this great work and tried to decipher its meaning. Inscribed above the mosaic, along its glittering gold border, are the following words:

QUITO, MARCH 1541 ATLANTIC OCEAN, AUGUST 1542 The Origin of Our Destiny The Epic of Francisco Orellana

The sacrifice of three thousand aboriginals glorifies the presence of Ecuador in the Amazon River. The route is marked by their blood in our spirit.

How is one to read this grand mosaic? The epigraph claims that this transcontinental Iberian “epic” marks the beginnings of Ecuador’s “destiny.” But how can a subject of the Spanish crown (Francisco Orellana) come to represent a postcolonial state (Ecuador)?5 How can a Renaissance imperial mission portend, let alone be proxy for, a contemporary Latin American polity? And how were the 100 indigenous leaders who passed by the mosaic in 1992 supposed to interpret its message?: Is sacrificing thousands of Indians necessary to establish Ecuador’s presence and its illusions of prominence?

The mosaic offers no simple interpretation. Rather, its composition, inscription, spatial arrangement, and location bespeak a myriad of contradictions: contradictions at the core of this book. Like its minute glass pieces, it is brilliantly opaque, while its cracks and fissures invite multiple readings and counter-readings. Representation, the power to assert truth claims and convey the certainty of the real, always has two sides-portrayal and proxy, depiction and political voice-and as Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak remind us, the two often intermingle in muddled ways. Guayasamin’s mosaic is a representation of the normative nation that simultaneously constitutes and critiques its self-conscious portrayal and capacity to act as proxy for all.

Imaging the Normative Nation

Mosaic, adjective, modern Latin Mosaicus, from Moses. Biblical: of, pertaining, or relating to Moses the lawgiver of the Hebrews [the ur-patriarch], or the writings and institutions attributed to him. –Oxford English Dictionary

The state commissioned Oswaldo Guayasamin to create the Presidential mural in the late 1950s soon after he completed his near-decade-long study of Huaycaynan (Quichua for “Trail of Tears”), a series of paintings depicting the anguish and dignity of Ecuador’s indigenous people-themes that would become the artist’s enduring hallmark. In line with Guayasamin’s abrupt and daring style, one could interpret the Presidential mosaic as asserting both the anguish and dignity of el indigena within the “epic” of “discovery.” In the jungled panel, Indians are formidable figures. Could it be that the mosaic seeks to reveal a forgotten history of Spanish imperialism: to render the horror of colonial exploits, and the rage they unleashed and the pain they inflicted?

But the epigraph’s bold letters suggest a more official reading. They proclaim that a sixteenth-century voyage augurs and affirms a twentieth-century state’s proprietary claim. As the epigraph states, the discovery of the Amazon is more than a fabled European expedition into the heart of exotic lands. In the eyes of those who commissioned the mosaic, it is a story of conquest, a grand epic, which confirms the rightful destiny of the Ecuadorian nation. More than simply concerned with territory, this is a claim about national membership in Ecuador-who is and who is not a part of the nation. It is instructive to explore the racial components of this claim.

The mosaic’s inscription is able to equate Orellana with “Our” (i.e. Ecuadorians’) present and future because the “Ecuador” here imagined includes only those of common European descent. The belief that those of Spanish pedigree (regardless of epoch) coexist in a single, constant temporal-spatial plane elides any dissonance that might otherwise result from equating realities more than 400 years apart: they are the rational, the modern, and the civilized. This acts not only to legitimate Ecuador’s nationalist territorial claim to the Rio Amazonas, but also to consolidate a sense of kinship-shared blood-among those who legitimately make up the nation. Thus, synecdochic substitution-the process whereby a part stands in for the whole, or the name of the material for the thing made (Francisco Orellana functioning as proxy for Ecuador)-enables the transfiguration of Orellana qua Ecuador to make sense. A synecdoche reconciles the irreconcilable; the temporal leap in the epigraph’s claim is bridged by the notion that all those of Spanish blood are one.

Indians, meanwhile, are banished to the fringes of this Ecuador via both decree and omission. Although the mosaic presents its viewer with some bold Indian physiques, and the epigraph “glorifies” them, indigenas are not the subject of concern. If anything, the epigraph is for them an epitaph-an inscription marking their tomb. “Aboriginals,” the mosaic’s inscription reminds us, were elements crucial to the unfolding of an imperial and a national drama; they sacrificed their lives in the service of a colonial exploit and a postcolonial destiny. Yet their blood does not really matter. It cannot act as a synecdoche, as the name of the material (blood) for the thing made (nation). They are excluded from national membership.

In particular, the mosaic exemplifies a dominant cultural logic whereby one cannot simultaneously be both Indian and Ecuadorian. Hierarchical binaries between civilized/savage, modern/traditional, cosmopolitan/tribal, national/indigenous infuse this origin myth of Ecuador. As a racist saying (Muestre su patria, mate un indio; “Show your patriotism, kill an indio“) often heard throughout the 1990s suggests, Indians have little place in elite notions of the Ecuadorian nation. If they are to join the process of modernization they must renounce their identity as Indians. Other than serving as dead markers in history, their existence vanishes from our nation.

In a gesture that Johannes Fabian calls “allochronism” and Anne McClintock calls the instantiation of “anachronistic space,” a postcolonial power synchronized the coexistence of distinct time across contiguous space. As in the story portrayed in Guayasamin’s mosaic and as reenacted by its viewer, progression through space marks passage through time. Importantly, this space is raced. The conquered and claimed, uncivilized, jungled terrain of Orellana’s time still occupied, in the 1990s, an unchanging Oriente landscape at the apex of elite white reason and progress. Juxtaposed on a contiguous spatial plane, Indians and vegetation represented living relics of the past, antiquated artifacts arrested in their evolution. Yet as the object of discovery, the river, the region, and its inhabitants (as “Amazon” refers to all) are Ecuador’s, and it is Ecuador’s task to protect, civilize, and develop this national patrimony-that which belongs to the father.

Continues…
Excerpted from Crude Chroniclesby Suzana Sawyer Copyright © 2004 by Suzana Sawyer. Excerpted by permission.
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