Long Live Atahualpa

Indigenous Politics, Justice, and Democracy in the Northern AndesBy Emma Cervone

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5175-7

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................xiIntroduction: Redefining Indigenous Politics.....................11. The Time of the Lords.........................................392. Tixán Becomes Modern.....................................733. Invisible Victories...........................................1034. When the Hills Turned Red.....................................1355. Words and Scars...............................................1636. Celebrating Diversity.........................................1997. Beyond Recognition............................................233Conclusion.......................................................267Appendix.........................................................279Glossary.........................................................283Acronyms.........................................................285Notes............................................................287References.......................................................305Index............................................................323

Chapter One

The Time of the Lords

The social history of a small rural town such as Tixán is emblematic of the process of formation of modern Ecuadorian highland society and its hierarchies. Tixán's social structure was profoundly shaped by the hacienda regime and later by its disintegration. The point of departure for my examination of the local development of political mobilization is, therefore, life under the landlords of the haciendas. Through the act of remembering that my questions would bring about for the elders who had lived in the haciendas, it was my intention to evoke the affective dimension that the memory of this lived experience was able to revitalize, extending beyond a descriptive narration of life and work in the hacienda. What was left of the complexity of this human experience, which I already knew (from my readings and hearsay) had been marked by exploitation and abuse? What was the affective response that allowed the past, the political struggle, and the everyday to come together and make sense of the present and of the possibilities for the future?

Injustice and Resilience

Taita Xavier Buñay claimed to be over one hundred years old when I interviewed him for the first time. Although there was no birth or baptismal certificate to prove this claim, he was certainly the oldest living Quichua in Tixán. He would, therefore, offer an ideal opportunity to learn about processes of change that had occurred over the previous century. With my developing Quichua, his broken Spanish, and the help of an interpreter, we engaged in a series of conversations. His words and narrations, however, differed markedly from the factual and politically informed discourse of other elders that I would interview in the course of my work. From our very first encounter, Taita Xavier declared he only wanted to talk to me about "las cositas de Dios" (God's little things), which he proudly affirmed to know well. To my question on the life in the haciendas, he first responded, "There were two men—to the white one, God said, 'I give you science,' to the indigenous one, He said, 'I give you patience.' And so the white man built the machines and the indigenous man worked the land. But then the white man wanted the indigenous man to do everything and so the indigenous man said no and stopped working the land" (Taita Xavier, 1992).

Although other activists did not consider Taita Xavier as having been active in the political struggle, he was regarded as living proof of the traditional indigenous life of the past. Despite his age, he still went barefoot in his community and walked twenty miles to the market of Guamote every Thursday to beg. Some of the youngest in his community regarded him as senile and at times made fun of him for accounts that sounded nonsensical to them. Yet, in religious terms, Taita Xavier articulated the same sense of injustice and resilience that later came out in interviews with others on the same topic. Cabecillas (a word formerly used to identified prestigious leaders and chiefs), activists, and commoners of different generations, who had participated in different political processes, articulated their own links between the past and the present. When these otherwise diachronic voices are connected, their past and present experiences converge in one common perception—that of injustice and resilience. The understanding of what constitutes an injustice is closely related to the lived experience of the speaker and therefore associated with different moral codes and social relationships. Taita Xavier applied a mixture of Catholicism and indigenous religious beliefs to make sense of his world. In his words, the breach came when the white man refused to comply with the destiny assigned by God, and this disobedience was met by the disobedience of the indigenous man, who in turn refused to keep doing what he was supposed to. This response was motivated by the injustice of being assigned tasks that did not correspond to his duty by the white man, who pretended to have attributes of God.

The Almighty Patrones

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two large landed estates on the eastern side of the cordillera and one estate on the western slopes defined the local economic and social landscape. On the eastern side, the Aña Chaupiloma Moyocancha estate belonged to the Salem family, a powerful family of uncertain origins; the Zula estate extended to the adjacent parish of Achupallas and was owned by the diocese of Riobamba. On the western side was the hacienda Galte-Tipín, which belonged to the Borja family. Following independence at the beginning of the twentieth century, the liberals expropriated all properties owned by the Catholic Church. All church estates were transformed into state properties, Asistencia Pública (Public Assistance), and were rented to individuals, arrendatarios. Being a church property, Zula was expropriated by the state and in 1969 was granted to different indigenous communities, whereas the other two haciendas remained in the hands of the powerful Salem and Borja families until the agrarian reform. I focus here mainly on the hacienda Moyocancha, since the Salem family dominated the political and economic life of the parish until the second agrarian reform, in 1973. However, the local agrarian struggle was initiated by the peons of Galte-Tipín.

The internal relations that regulated labor within the haciendas were no different from the type of precapitalist relations existing in other highland haciendas in the Andean region. Indigenous families who lived on Moyocancha land were considered part of the estate. Indigenous workers received no compensation for domestic (huasicamía), agricultural, and pastoral (huagracamía) work, except for a small plot of land, called huasi-pungo, whose production was meant for their household subsistence. One of the sons of an indigenous peon from the Salem's hacienda remembered: "The owner made my dad work from Monday to Saturday from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon. And only gave a glass of trago [sugarcane alcohol], no food. Sometimes he would throw the workers five cents [reales]" (Taita Anselmo Estrada, 1993). Another common source of unpaid labor was provided by the arrimados (literally, "stuck on") and levied on huasipungueros' extended family members, who came to the hacienda from other areas in search of work. Landowners demanded this unpaid labor in exchange for permission to stay on the hacienda. However, the inhabitants of the anejos in the high plateau of the páramo land, which were not included in the perimeter of the hacienda, were said to be "free," meaning that their relationship to the hacienda was regulated not by access to cultivable land, but by access to other resources, such as pasture, water, and wood located on an estate's land. Known as sitiajeros and yanaperos, such "free" indigenous workers from the sector called today Pachamama worked for the Salem family in exchange for pasturing herds and gathering water or wood on Moyocancha.

During the post-independence period, many large estates in Ecuador were given or sold to foreigners in recognition of their service during the war or postwar reconstruction. Moyocancha may be one such case. I was unable to find detailed documentation regarding the origin of Moyocancha, and the oral accounts I collected are at times discrepant. Townsfolk said that the land, over 10,000 hectares, previously belonged to a foreign gentleman from Quito, whose name nobody seemed to remember. This detail is confirmed in the accounts of several indigenous elders, who identified the first owner as "Zambrano" and said he was not Ecuadorian. The townsfolk version narrates that when the first owner (Zambrano) was on his deathbed, the mayordomo (field foreman) of the hacienda, Julio César Salem, of Colombian descent, paid a lawyer to prepare a false will, stating that the landlord had left the property to his faithful mayordomo in gratitude for his service. According to Taita Xavier Buñay, however, Julio César Salem had married Zambrano's daughter, María and thereby inherited the property.

On 7 January 1935 Julio César Salem divided his estate among his le gitimate offspring, four daughters and one son. The partition of the hacienda did not signify for the related anejos anything more than a change of landlord, since it did not modify the labor regime; the huasipungaje remained along with the system of yanapería and sitiaje. Indigenous peons would fight later against these five haciendas—La Pacífica, of Pacífica Salem de Polanco; Moyocancha, of Rosa Mathilde Salem de Gallegos; San Carlos, of Mercedes Salem, widow of Polanco; La Ermita, of Julia Salem, widow of Banderas; and Santa Lucila and Pachamama, of Julio Teodoro Salem. Each hacienda was a law unto itself, where relations of asymmetrical exchange varied with the inclinations of the landlord and his or her nature, whether kind and generous or brutal and greedy (see Guerrero 1991b). Some elders, for example, narrated that in the hacienda of Pacífica Salem, they could resort to sharecropping in addition to the huasipungo. Taita L. B., from the community of Pachagsí, identified sharecropping as the principal labor arrangement for the people of that anejo.

Although mingled with nostalgic evocations resembling the "well- fed herds, good production of grains and the splendour of the festivals in the hacienda times" mentioned by Carola Lentz, exploitation and abuse characterized the prevailing memory of the hacienda system among the Quichuas I talked with in Tixán (Lentz 1986, 191). When remembering the patrones timpu (time of the lords), all of the elders whom I interviewed described the various forms of mistreatment they had suffered at the hand of hacienda owners and administrators. Taita Anselmo Estrada grew up in the Pishillig sector under the Salem family with the specter of such abuse: "With clubs, with whips, with sticks, the patrón treated the people, this is how the rich treated the poor. The patrones did not give food, did not pay, they mistreated the poor indigenous workers such as my father" (Taita Anselmo Estrada, 1993).

In addition to engaging in physical abuse and labor exploitation, some landlords and hacienda administrators took advantage of their huasipungueros' and workers' harvests and produce. One of the key figures in the reconstruction of this period was Taita Pedro Marcatoma, a former huasipunguero from Galte-Tipín, who became one of the most respected leaders of the area including Tixán. When I was seeking elders to interview, many suggested that he would be the perfect person to talk with about the haciendas and agrarian struggle. From direct experience, Taita Pedro remembered: "The patrones mistreated me, beating me, blaming me, charging me: when we counted the harvest they said it was missing, grain was missing and charged and blamed us for stealing and so they charged us and took away our grain.... At Carnival they said we had to salute the patrones and had to give them a chicken, at least three or four guinea pigs and so then they would give us a small glass of trago or a small plate of food" (Taita Pedro Marcatoma, 1992). Even those involved in sharecropping were often subjected to the greed and abuse of field foremen and administrators. Taita R. L. worked mostly as a sharecropper, as did many people from the community of Pachagsí, formerly part of a Salem property. As he recalled, "The mayordomos were really bad, beating up, cursing, kicking. They did not give us what we were to have of the harvest, the portion we should have had and if I were to say something they would beat us up and blame us and insult us, 'Indian liar, beast.' They didn't give any food, sometimes only a handful of tasteless barley for the whole day and nothing, nothing else" (Taita R. L., 1992).

The annexation of Pachamama Chico is another example of the abuse by the all-powerful terratenientes, who, this time in the person of Julio Teodoro Salem, used violence and coercion to impose control over indigenous lands. This specific abuse is engraved in the popular memory of both Quichuas and Tixán dwellers. According to various people, Julio Teodoro arrived "bravísimo" (furiously) in the Pachamama sector on his horse, accompanied by his men. Taita Espiritu Vargas remembered that vividly. As a highly respected cabecilla of the Pachamama sector, he knew well all of Julio Teodoro's vexations: "Coming one day with other mishus, armed, shooting in the air he said those lands were his, carajo" (Taita Espiritu Vargas, 1992). The de facto usurped lands were later transformed into a legitimately owned property. Of the two communities known today as Pachamama Chico and Pachamama Grande, the former became part of the hacienda, while the latter was under a regime of sitiaje.

The daily life of the Quichua population of the parish revolved around the hacienda. Farming, cattle and sheep raising, and domestic service, the huasicamía, constituted the huasipungueros' basic socioeconomic activities. A former huasipunguero from La Pacífica explained, "Everybody worked for the patron for free, like slaves. My wife served in his house and my children helped with the animals. I worked from four in the morning till eight at night on the patron's lands. If I don't go, 'lazy,' they say and beat [me] up" (Taita G. G., 1992). In the case of sitiajeros and yanaperos, the bond with the hacienda was less omnipresent, although it remained vital for their economic stability.

The subsistence requirements of households at that time devoted only a little surplus production to the market. By bartering with members of their extended families, indigenous peasants were able to acquire the agricultural surplus of other ecological niches such as the lower valleys, where corn could be cultivated. Generally, in order to gain access to more resources, especially for ritual occasions such as weddings, funerals, and festivals, the huasipungueros and the arrimados asked for socorros (subsistence doles), a kind of symbolic loan in goods that the peons received from the landowner. They owed nothing in an immediate sense, yet they were often tied to the hacienda for life in order to avoid imprisonment for debt. Known nationally as the concertaje system, this permanent state of indebtedness guaranteed on the one hand the availability of labor for the landowner and, on the other, the fulfillment of traditional ritual obligations for the peons.

Gathered in the smoky communal house of Pachamama Chico, five elders from various communities reminisced about the patrones timpu. Unlike the interviews I had conducted with individual elders in their community, this collective remembering induced an outflow of memories made more vivid by the act of sharing them. This was the first occasion on which I heard discussion of the distribution of socorros in the area. Even if it was not always easy to reach agreement on the details of how and when, they agreed on the fact that it was customary for the mayordomos to summon the peons to the yard of the hacienda mansion every two weeks and to distribute socorros (potatoes or barley) to those who asked for it. However, such "generosity" was not always forthcoming. Taita M. G., a former huasipunguero from the hacienda La Pacífica, lamented that the new Gallegos landowners had started to refuse socorros to their workers: "Those Gallegos were tight-fisted. They would give nothing." Taita M. G.'s remark sparked immediate response among the other former huasipungueros, all of whom expressed similar complaints, usually referring to the landlords they had had immediately prior to the agrarian reform, younger landlords anxious to make their farming more profitable. The new landowning generation was frequently accused of ignoring customary rights (Clark 1992, 29). In order to reduce expenditures and control production, the new landowners ignored the obligation of generosity epitomized by socorros under the hacienda regime of unequal reciprocity. Moreover, according to the five elders, not all terratenientes of the past had been "generous." Taita Pedro Marcatoma emphatically lamented the lack of generosity of the Galte-Tipín landlord Luis Borja: "The patron did not give anything. If we asked, he gave nothing. 'Abusive,' he said to us, 'you already are taking my land and many things.' He said, 'What do you have to do with us?' ... Some other patrones they gave, they gave socorros as they called them, yes, some rational patrones gave that, but not our patrones here in Tipín, they gave nothing" (1992). Such a lack of generosity, which Taita Pedro considered a form of irrational behavior, rendered the abuse and exploitation even more unbearable. And it was the peons of Galte-Tipín who, under the leadership of Ambrosio Laso, initiated agrarian struggle throughout the area, including Tixán.

(Continues...)

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