CARLOS DE LA TORRE

Racism in education and the

construction of citizenship in
Ecuador
My purpose in analysing the racism meted out to Indians in Ecuador's
educational system, and their response to it, is to examine the extent to
which ethnic relations have been democratised after the recent trans-
formation of the haciendas. The hacienda was a system of exploitation
based on large holdings and on the power of the land-owning class.
Indigenous people depended on the protection of the hacienda owner
or of other powerful whites and mestizos to gain partial access to
their citizenship rights, and to negotiate better daily interactions with
the members of the dominant ethnic group. Agrarian reform laws
enacted by military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s reduced the
power of the large land-owning class. These changes in power relations
allowed for the rise of an Indian middle class and the consolidation of
indigenous organisations in a new international context that favours
Indian rights. Indian responses to racial discrimination have changed
after the transformation of the hacienda system. In addition to the
establishment of personalised relations with members of the dominant
group, Indians are demanding the creation of a multicultural citizen-
ship and a novel national identity. The respondents whose accounts
inform this study are from that middle class, since it is they who
have made it through the education system.

Carlos de la Torre is Associate Professor of Sociology, Drew University, Madison, NJ and

the author of Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, 1999) and of
El Racismo en Ecuador: experiencias de los Indios de clase media (Quito, 1996).
Race & Class
Copyright & 2000 Institute of Race Relations
Vol. 42(2): 3345 [0306-3968(200010)42:2; 3345; 015054]
34 Race & Class 42(2)

The emergence of an Indian middle class is a recent phenomenon. In

1974, the American anthropologist Joseph Casagrande, who directed
several research projects in Ecuador, asserted: `To my knowledge, no
Indian has risen to public or professional prominence in Ecuador
and retained his Indian identity. There are no Indian doctors, lawyers,
engineers, authors, or elected public ofcials.'1 Unlike in the recent
past, when Indians who improved economically became mestizos,
today some prosperous Indians are claiming an Indian identity. Nowa-
days, there are Indian professionals, politicians and intellectuals. The
Ecuadorian racial and ethnic terms, blanco (white), mestizo (mixed-
blood) and Indio (Indian) are social and cultural constructs that refer
to physical features and appearance, language, dress style, rural or
urban origin, and Quichua or Spanish surnames. The uidity of this
system of racial and ethnic stratication, where changing dress and
hair style or learning to speak `proper' Spanish, for example, can trans-
form an Indian into a mestizo makes it difcult to differentiate clearly
between these categories.2 Furthermore, because the Ecuadorian state
assumes that all its citizens are mestizos, it does not include ethnic
categories in the census. There is no consensus on the ethnic make-up
of the country. In a recent study on the nation and national identities,
Radcliffe and Westwood give the following percentages for the racial
composition of Ecuador: 40 per cent Indians, 40 per cent mestizos,
15 per cent whites and 5 per cent blacks.3 Other estimates of the
Indian population vary, from a high of 45 per cent, quoted by leaders
of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador
(CONAIE),4 to the modest gure of 9.12 per cent when Indian
language and belonging to an Indian community are taken into
account in dening who is an Indian.5
For my purposes, it is necessary to examine the racism meted out
to Indians in the educational system, when the hacienda system was
just beginning to be transformed in the 1960s, and the subsequent con-
tinuities and changes in ethnic relations. These followed on the trans-
formation of the hacienda system and the Indian national uprisings
of 1990 and 1994. In these uprisings, indigenous people blockaded
roads and took over public spaces to challenge their exclusion from
socio-economic benets and to contest the mestizo character of the
Ecuadorian nation. The ideology of mestizaje, understood as the
creation of a national culture which incorporates Indian and
Spanish-western values, was built on the assumption of the superiority
of whiteness and encouraged the whitening and westernising of the
population. Mestizaje thus annulled `the possibility of incorporating
the Indians with their own identity into national society'.6 Indigenous
mobilisations that became possible due to the strength of national
Indian organisations in a less repressive political context opened up
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 35

the potential for creating a different national identity and a new

citizenship.

Paternalism and the hacienda

Class and ethnic domination in the Ecuadorian highlands were articu-
lated through the hacienda system. Haciendas monopolised the best
land. The rst agrarian census showed that in the 1950s, when most
of the highland population (73.8 per cent) was rural, `large haciendas
monopolised more than three quarters of the total area'.7 Exploitation
in the haciendas was based on a series of personalised obligations on
the part of Indians and their families to the hacienda owner. The
duties included the number of days that the head of the household
and his family required the Indians to work in the elds and as domestic
servants in the hacienda house and in the city. Indians were given access
to small plots of land and meagre earnings. Part of their wage was paid
in the form of gifts and loans that were essential for their social repro-
duction and that were given as personal favours from the hacienda
owner. Thus, Indians became morally indebted to their patrons.
These social relations of domination by means of unequal reciprocity
were articulated through a moral economy. The Indian had to be
worthy of the favours of the hacienda owner, whose actions were, in
turn, judged according to parameters of what was deemed just and
moral.8 Because haciendas had encroached on the land of indigenous
communities, hacienda owners also allowed access to strategic
resources such as pastureland, water, rewood and the use of roads
in exchange for the labour of surrounding Indian communities.
Until 1979, as most indigenous people had not had access to educa-
tional opportunities, they were excluded from the franchise because of
its literacy requirements. And, because their citizenship rights were not
always enforced, Indians used the hacienda model of unequal recipro-
city as a strategy to negotiate access to their legally prescribed rights.
For instance, they would make gifts to a particular individual in the
dominant ethnic group, a bureaucrat, for example, in exchange for
being granted the `favour' of obtaining services in a state institution
or being given a bed in a public hospital. These unequal exchanges of
favours and obligations also allowed them a partial release from every-
day forms of racial violence in white and mestizo public spaces, such as
government ofces, public schools, hospitals, and so on. These prac-
tices are obviously different from the exercise of citizenship. Indians
were not seen as individuals with equal rights and duties, and their
rights were constructed as favours or charity. Hence, they established
personalised relations, based on favours and obligations, to gain
access to their legal rights from which they were otherwise excluded
because of their ethnicity.
36 Race & Class 42(2)

To illustrate how indigenous people negotiated their access to edu-

cation within the constraints of a system of racial domination based
on paternalism, I focus on the narrative of a prosperous merchant
from Otavalo. Located in the northern highlands, Otavalo provides
an interesting case study of how race and class intersected on a daily
basis, in everyday interactions. As in the rest of the highlands,
haciendas monopolised most of the land. But unlike in other regions,
some Otavalan (Otavaleno) Indians, who have had a textile-making
tradition from colonial times, have, since the 1960s, been able to accu-
mulate capital by combining peasant production with textile produc-
tion for tourism and for sale internationally (by Otavalan migrants).
Otavalan Indians have integrated themselves into the market economy,
preserving and, to an extent, selling their ethnic identity. Racism
against them is also interesting because historically they have been con-
structed by the elite as model Indians, and are still used as symbols of
the Ecuadorian Indian in postcards and other products designed for the
tourist industry.
The merchant narrated an account of his rst day of class in the
mid-1960s:
I was very happy. I remember that my parents had bought me new
clothes, and a fashionable lunch box. I always wanted to be impor-
tant and loved by all. When I arrived at school, I saw a bunch of
kids. I was a bit afraid to see so many strangers, but I saw the
kids of my mestizo neighbours. Now that I am at school they
would play with me, I would be their equal. Until that day, I had
thought that my father was mistreated because he did not speak
proper Spanish. People used to make fun of his way of speaking.
I thought that people would never laugh at me because I was going
to school.
When I approached my mestizo neighbours who were with their
mestizo friends, I got a big surprise. They pretended not to know
me, so I greeted them, `Hi!' Their mestizo friends asked my neigh-
bours, `Do you know that guy? An Indian is greeting you!' All of
them laughed at my neighbours, who answered, `We do not know
him, get lost, dirty Indian!' As I have told you, even though my
parents had bought me new and expensive clothes, they called me
dirty Indian. I was shocked and I wanted to cry. At that moment,
I was regretting having gone to school. All of my illusions dis-
appeared. The bell rang and we had to form a line to go to the class-
room. I did not go to the end of the line. I did not know that,
regardless of their size, Indians had to go to the back so they
would not mix with mestizos. A mestizo female teacher pulled me
by my braid and took me to the end of the line, yelling at me:
`Stupid, come here, here is the line, rude Indian!' A few white-
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 37

mestizo parents saw what had happened but they did not say a
word. On the contrary, they all looked at me, shaking their heads.
I felt ashamed. I was nervous and discouraged. I did not want to
play during the break. All we Indian children looked for a place
where they could not see us, where they could not harm us.
The experience of this child with racism was not an isolated event.
On the contrary, all thirty-eight interviewees spoke of similar
encounters,9 and a recent study of racism in twelve urban and rural
schools reported that `physical and psychological abuses are everyday
practices in elementary schools'.10 When indigenous children registered
themselves in a school system that had historically been reserved for
whites and mestizos, they were pushing at the boundaries and democra-
tising racial and ethnic hierarchies that had hitherto always assigned
them to manual labour and excluded them from white-collar occupa-
tions. Mary Jackman argues that, when the institutions that reproduce
social inequalities are altered, the members of the dominant, super-
ordinate groups will try to recreate mechanisms that will continue to
ensure their exclusive access to such institutions and social spaces.11
These are moments of intense, everyday violence. The ritualised
punishment that inicts on the bodies of Indian children blows, racist
insults and public humiliations represents symbolically the absolute
power of whites and mestizos. The punishment of children who have
transgressed racialised spaces restores and reconstitutes the assumed
`superiority' of white and mestizo children who understand that,
regardless of their social class, all Indians are, because of their ethnicity,
their inferiors.
Our interviewee continued his account:
The teacher mistreated us so much that we regretted being Indians.
She did not show any respect for us. She told us: `Sonny go to the
blackboard, Indian good-for-nothing I do not have time for you.'
Because the professor did not respect us, the mestizo children who
were liked by the teacher understood that to be an Indian was
wrong. Like our teacher, they called us `Dirty Indian!' Moreover,
when we made mistakes when called to write on the blackboard
the teacher yelled at us: `Go back to your cows, rude Indian!'
Whenever a mestizo made a mistake, the teacher never used the
same foul language that she used to refer to us. She yelled and
beat us. I was so traumatised about going to school that I had
insomnia, I could not sleep.
Racism is a social practice that takes place in particular institutions
and environments. The teacher reproduces and produces racist dis-
course and practices in her interactions with the students. Her discourse
and actions propagate widespread racist stereotypes: Indians are dirty
38 Race & Class 42(2)

and rude, they belong to the countryside and to manual labour, they do
not have the human capacity to learn. She delivers her racist discourse
in institutions that are there to produce knowledge. White and mestizo
children thus learn the `truth' about Indians, and Indian children regret
being Indians.
The interviewee, who had been physically punished by his instructor,
remembered what happened when his father took him to the teacher's
house.
The teacher came out and said, `What do you want? Why did you
come?' My father answered, `Miss, we only came to talk to you.'
She was very angry and responded, `I don't have to talk to you,
you low-class insolent.' My father said, `That might be, but I came
to talk to you about something else.' With an offensive tone, the
teacher said, `So, what do you want, speak up.' `I only wanted to
give you a present for teacher's day, and to tell you that if you do
not like it, you can exchange it for anything else that you might
like in my store, regardless of the price. I wanted to give you this
present because you are the teacher of my son.' `So he is your son?
He is a bit rough.' My father answered, `I guess that is why I want
to ask you a favour. Please help him, please teach him all he needs
to know with enthusiasm and care.' The teacher responded, `I love
all my students', and, looking at me, `Don't I?' I could not look at
her eyes, but said, `Yes, dad she loves us.' My father said, `I know,
Miss. I am only recommending my son to you so you teach him all
that you know.' The teacher answered my father, `I know, do not
worry sonny, go home, but don't tell anybody that you have given
me a present.' My father said, of course not. When my father was
getting in our car, the teacher asked, `Is that your car?' My father
said, yes. She was astonished when she said goodbye. I was confused
and when I looked at my father I could see that his face was covered
with sweat. With sadness and satisfaction, he told me, `I hope that
she will never beat you again!'
This interaction between a lower-middle-class mestiza and a rela-
tively prosperous Indian merchant is based on the paternalist model
of the hacienda. The teacher used a language and approach that estab-
lished that this was an interaction between unequals. Her insults and
rudeness contrasted with the humbleness of the prosperous merchant.
The Indian, as on the haciendas, begged for a favour. The teacher
questioned the Indian in such a way as to create a situation in which
presents would be exchanged for her not using physical force against
her student. It is important to stress that the Indian merchant used
the paternalist model as a strategy for negotiating better everyday inter-
actions with his oppressors. The worst scenario for the poor was not to
have a protector:
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 39

The uneven distribution of resources between groups and the indi-

vidualized, personal structure of the intergroup relationship leaves
the individual subordinate with no option but to seek a personal
tie with someone from the dominant group who can function as
her protector.12
The teacher, who at rst showed hostility, changed her style after learn-
ing that she was dealing with a relatively wealthy merchant. She
addressed a prosperous storeowner with the paternalist term `sonny',
thus transforming him into a harmless child. It is telling that the teacher
said that she loved her Indian students. As Mary Jackman has demon-
strated, paternalism is based on love. The members of the dominant
group offer their `love' to their subalterns, who have to accept it on
the terms laid down by their superiors:
Because the daily practice of the relationship is individualised and
intimate, subordinates either return the love offered them by the
members of the dominant group, within the terms specied, or
face probable exclusion from organised social life.13
The next day of class, our interviewee narrated, the teacher was
totally transformed:
She called me `sonny' of course, but she stopped beating and insult-
ing me. Her behaviour had only changed towards me. She continued
to abuse the other Indian children. One day she asked me if I had
money, which I did, and asked me to buy candies for all the kids.
When I came back, she told the mestizo children, `Take these
sweets that this Indian is giving you. You should play with him.'
The mestizo kids stared at me; I was ashamed because I felt that I
was paying them to play with me.

Towards the democratisation of ethnic relations?

The Indian uprisings of 1990 and 1994 were the culmination of a pro-
cess that had transformed the hacienda-based system of economic and
ethnic domination. In June 1990 and again in June 1994, Indians
blockaded roads, stopped delivering agricultural products, marched
into regional capitals, and forced state ofcials to enter into dialogue
with the representatives of national Indian organisations. These upris-
ings have to be seen as the outcome of a series of economic and political
changes that had started in the 1960s. The agrarian reform laws enacted
by military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s aimed to expand the internal
market, to develop import substitution industrialisation and to pro-
mote food production for the national market. Agrarian reform was
also a response to Indian and peasant mobilisation, and resulted in
the erosion of the economic and political power of the landowner
40 Race & Class 42(2)

class. Unlike the 1950s, when haciendas occupied around 75 per cent of
the land, by 1985, 36.2 per cent of the land in the highlands belonged to
large farms, 30.3 per cent to medium-sized units and 33.5 per cent to
small units.14 But these agrarian transformations did not nish the
latifundio-minifundio system or Indian poverty. The Indians' `third of
the agricultural land is physically insufcient to sustain the majority
of the population and invariably includes the highest, driest, and
least fertile tracts'.15 A recent study shows that the areas of dense
Indian population are the poorest and that, according to such social
indicators as education, housing, mortality and health, Indians are
the poorest sector in Ecuadorian society.16 Due to insufcient land,
`reproduction of the rural household is achieved through a complex
combination of agricultural production (for household consumption
and for the market), rural employment, and urban-based labour'.17
The transformation of the hacienda system resulted in a power
vacuum in the countryside that allowed for the rise of Indian organisa-
tions and the penetration of political parties into Indian communities.
A new model of political domination for the Indian population was
established by the return to civilian elected regimes. The Constitution
of 1979 eliminated the literacy requirement for the vote. As a result,
the national electorate was increased by 32.3 per cent and, in highland
provinces with a strong Indian and peasant population, by 45 per
cent.18 For the rst time, Indian votes counted. The state policies of
the civilian regimes of the last constitutional phase (1979 to the present)
also allowed for the consolidation of Indian organisations. The state
showed a new interest in Indians. In 1980, the government of Roldos-
Hurtado organised a literacy programme in Quichua and other Indian
languages. In 1988, the social democratic government of Rodrigo Borja
gave the national Indian organisation, CONAIE, the responsibility of
managing a programme of bilingual education in all Indian areas of the
country. Since the 1970s, the Catholic church and the state have
developed university programmes to train Indians as bilingual educa-
tors and as anthropologists. Catholic and protestant churches and
non-governmental organisations have implemented health, develop-
ment and technological co-operation programmes. These programmes
not only transfer resources to Indian communities, they also train
Indian brokers and, by dening Indians as Indians, help to reinforce
Indian identities.
Since the late 1970s, middle-class Indians who have had access to
education, and who are politicised representatives of their com-
munities, have become Indian leaders. They have created autonomous
organisations (autonomous from the Left and from religious bodies),
through which they are contesting the mestizo national project. For
the rst time, they are constructing their own representations of the
Indian. They are also demanding citizenship rights.
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 41

Even though the old discriminatory practices and responses based

on the legacies of the hacienda system are still in place, new strategies
to challenge racism can be observed. Novel responses to discrimination
after the Indian uprisings combine the language of citizenship rights
with the corporatist practices of the Indian organisations that have
become the representatives of the Indian interest. The following narra-
tive, by a prosperous female Indian merchant from Otavalo, illustrates
the changes in Indian responses to discrimination. Due to the strength
of Indian organisations and the resignication of their identity, Indians
now have more resources than in the recent past to confront prejudiced
actions.
She recollected:
My son came back from school and told me, `Mummy, go and talk
to the teacher because she says that we have to cut our hair for the
parade. That we have to wear a jacket and shoes, and that the main
thing is that we cut our hair.
Indian mothers went to talk to the representatives of their organisa-
tion to stop the teachers from forcing their sons to cut their hair and
wear shoes, and thus dispose of very important symbols of Otavalan
male identity: their long hair tied into a braid and their hemp sandals.
Our interviewee continued:
We organised a committee to go and talk to the Indian organisa-
tion. We told them what was happening, and that when we tried to
talk to school ofcials, they refused to listen to our concerns. The
Indian leaders told us to organise a group to go to talk to the
provincial director of education. Fortunately, because there were
going to be elections soon, the candidates had to be nice to us.
Therefore the director was willing to meet with us. We told him
our problem, that they wanted to cut our sons' braids for the
school parade. It seems that he was sincerely shocked, so he sent
an ofcial note to the school stating that they could not cut the
male Otavalan Indian's braid because Indians are the cultural
foundation of the nation. We delivered the document to the
school director. She was upset and abruptly said, `When one tries
to help Indians to overcome backwardness, they insist on living as
savages.' I replied to her that she should not address us in those
harsh terms, that we should all be equals. She answered me,
`If you continue to make trouble, you had better look for another
school.' The school personnel had to obey the orders of the
provincial director, so they did not cut our sons' braids. We, their
indigenous mothers, were happy to see them in full, with their
braids.
42 Race & Class 42(2)

After the Indian uprisings, the symbols of Indian identity, such as

the Otavalan male's braid, have become politicised. Otavalan Indians
are proud of the symbols of their identity and are struggling for their
cultural right to be different from whites and mestizos. They are reject-
ing the symbols of mestizaje and have the strength and resources to
demand that their sons participate in a patriotic parade, displaying
their symbols of Indian identity. The school professors and adminis-
trators continued to use the colonialist language of civilisation and bar-
barism. Their racist discourse, unfortunately, is not isolated or extreme.
A recent study of racism in the educational system reported the follow-
ing comments from white and mestizo educators about their Indian
students: `The more an Indian child progresses and improves, the
further she would be removed from her ancestral roots.' Indians
`seem to come from prehistory, they are mystics and rude, they have
not developed language, they are scanty of words'.19
It is interesting that the provincial director of education, the other
white-mestizo character in this story, had a different attitude towards
Indians. He not only talked to the committee of mothers and represen-
tatives from the Indian organisation, he also wrote a letter supporting
their claims in which he declared that `Indians represent the foundation
of Ecuadorian national culture'. His actions are explained by our
interviewee as those of a savvy politician, searching for Indian votes
in a new historical context where Indian votes are pursued by all
political parties. The action of this elected state ofcial also reects
the ambiguities of white and mestizo attitudes towards Indians. The
members of the dominant group have simultaneously praised what
they have labelled the pre-Hispanic roots of national culture, while
scorning contemporary indigenous people and discriminating against
them. This interaction also shows the strength of Indian organisations
in Otavalo which have the power to negotiate with state ofcials.
The personalised forms of ethnic domination articulated around the
hacienda owner have been transformed. In addition to the age-old
strategy of establishing personalised relations with powerful members
of the dominant ethnic group, indigenous people nowadays use other
methods to make their claims. Indian organisations have become
corporatist representatives of Indian interest, with authority to enter
into dialogues with the state to achieve concrete results. Indigenous
people are also organising `clientelist' networks that exchange votes
for goods and services to be delivered by political parties. The relevance
of political practices based on clientelist exchanges and on corporatist
arrangements is explained by the weakness of citizenship as an insti-
tution in Ecuador. As in other Latin American countries, there exists
a system of law under which all citizens are held to be individuals
with rights and duties. This system or state of law, however, is applied
selectively. A few patricians, in addition to being individuals possessing
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 43

rights and duties under a state of law, can also be above the law, when it
is in their interest. But the destitute, the excluded and the poor are not
granted their rights, even though there is legislation that is meant to
guarantee them. Being an important person in the community, or
having connections to brokers or somebody with power, guarantees
access to those rights from which common citizens are systematically
or, at best, selectively excluded. Clientelism thus continues to operate
as one of the main mechanisms of political control and access to
resources. For instance, to have access to education or health benets,
the poor still need to establish personalised relations with a broker,
who belongs to a wider network that can guarantee access to people
with inuence, those who can deliver these services.
The most interesting innovation in this conict is, perhaps, the atti-
tude of Indians. Unlike in the recent past, when they would use the
paternalist model of the hacienda to achieve better social relations,
Indians today demand the right of cultural difference. When the
school administrators did not listen to their grievances, the group of
Indian mothers discussed above formed a committee and solicited
the help of the Indian organisation. Their struggle for their citizenship
rights and for preserving their cultural identity goes together with the
valorisation of a formerly stigmatised Indian identity. Indians no
longer accept the binary opposition that transformed them into an
inferior `other' against the white-mestizo norm. They value the speci-
city of their culture and are challenging the exclusionary project of
mestizaje. Indians are seeking a new national identity in which they
can have access to the same economic and social benets as whites
and mestizos, while preserving their cultural difference.

Conclusion
The Ecuadorian case illustrates the change in everyday ethnic relations
that has followed the transformation of the hacienda system. The
paternalist hacienda model regulated ethnic relations in daily social
interactions in the hacienda as well as in other social spheres. Paternal-
ism and unequal reciprocity allowed Indians some protection from the
brutal power of dominant ethnic groups. By seeking personalised
relations with hacienda owners, teachers, store owners, and so on,
Indians negotiated better social interactions for themselves, but only
by participating at the same time in a system that guaranteed the
power of white hacienda owners and their white and mestizo inter-
mediaries.
Even though the legacies of the hacienda, as manifested in the
continuing discrimination against indigenous people and in the resort
to personalised, paternalist arrangements, are still with us, Indians
today have more resources with which to confront discrimination.
44 Race & Class 42(2)

Indigenous organisations have become a new group demanding state

resources. They are also articulating a language of citizenship rights,
here understood as the right to equality and cultural difference. It is
premature to predict whether citizenship, or clientelism and corpora-
tism, or a combination of both, will be the tools used by Indians to
struggle for their interests. Given the weakness of the concept of
citizenship in Ecuador, it is naive to expect that relationships based
on unequal reciprocity will be transformed into relationships of equal-
ity vis-a-vis the law. But, in any case, the weakening of institutions like
the hacienda system, with its articulation of class and ethnic domina-
tion, implies that subaltern groups no longer have to accept their
patrons' denitions of what their real interests are. Indians today are
gaining the economic and educational resources that will allow them
to articulate their own project of nationhood.

References
This research was funded by the Centro Andino de Accion Popular, Quito-Ecuador, and
by a faculty research grant from Drew University. The data is based on thirty-eight in-
depth interviews with twelve female and twenty-six male middle-class Indians from the
Ecuadorian highlands. The data was gathered in 1995 by Indian university students.
My thanks to Guillermo Churuchumbi, Cecilia Llasag, Milton Llasag, Patricio Ulcuango
and Blanca Vega for conducting the interviews. I also wish to acknowledge Carmen
Mart nez, Fredy Rivera, Francisco Rhon, Andres Guerrero, Hernan Vera, Felipe
Burbano, Leon Zamosc and an anonymous reader of Race & Class for comments on
earlier versions of this paper.

1 Quoted by Linda Belote and Jim Belote, `Drain from the bottom: individual ethnic
identity in Southern Ecuador', Social Forces (Vol. 63, no. 1, 1984), p. 33.
2 Blanca Muratorio, `Protestantism, ethnicity and class in Chimborazo', in Norman
Whitten Jr (ed.), Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador
(Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 50634; Norman Whitten and
Diego Quiroga, `Ecuador', in Minority Rights Group (ed.) No Longer Invisible:
Afro-Latin Americans today (London, Minority Rights Publications, 1995), pp. 287
319; Belote and Belote, `Drain from the bottom', op. cit.
3 Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, Remaking the Nation: place, identity and
politics in Latin America (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 6.
4 Nina Pacari, `Ecuador: taking on the neoliberal agenda', NACLA (No. XXIX,
1996), p. 24.
5 Jose Sanchez-Parga, Poblacion y Pobreza Indgenas (Quito, CAAP 1996).
6 Blanca Muratorio `Protestantism, ethnicity and class in Chimborazo', op. cit.,
p. 522.
7 Leon Zamosc, `Agrarian protest and the Indian movement in the Ecuadorian high-
lands', Latin American Research Review (Vol. 29, no. 3, 1994), p. 43.
8 Andres Guerrero, La Semantica de la Dominacion: el concertaje de Indios (Quito,
Libri Mundi, 1991).
9 See chapter 2 of my book El Racismo en Ecuador: experiencias de los Indios de clase
media (Quito, CAAP, 1996).
10 Paul Cliche and Fernando Garc a, Escuela e Indianidad en las Urbes Ecuatorianas,
(Quito, EB/PRODEC, n/d.), p. 65.
 de la Torre: Racism and citizenship in Ecuador 45

11 Mary Jackman, The Velvet Glove: paternalism and conict in gender, class, and race
relations (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994), pp. 778.
12 Ibid., p. 83.
13 Ibid., p. 80.
14 Leon Zamosc, `Agrarian protest', op. cit., p. 43.
15 Ibid., p. 43.
16 Jose Sanchez-Parga, Poblacion y Pobreza Indgenas, op. cit.
17 William Waters, `The road of many returns: rural bases of the informal urban
economy in Ecuador', Latin American Perspectives (Vol. 24, no. 3, 1997), pp. 556.
18 Rafael Quintero and Erika Silva, Ecuador: una nacion en ciernes, Volume 3, (Quito,
FLACSO and ABYA-YALA, 1991), pp. 2656.
19 Cliche and Garc a, Escuela e Indianidad, op. cit., p. 108.

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