Interwoven: Andean Lives in Colonial Ecuador’s Textile Economy

Abstract

The colonial town of Pelileo in Ecuador was home to San Ildefonso, one of the largest and longest-lasting textile mills of Quito—a region known for its textile production for export to Potosí. Interwoven is a microhistory that documents the way textile production affected indigenous lives, families, and ethnicity from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries—leaving marks in the way ethnic identities are defined today.Anthropologist Rachel Corr reconstructs the multilayered processes and human encounters that transformed the indigenous coca fields into sugar and textile mills, increasingly populated by sheep. The textile mills were complex social structures that put indigenous laborers under the surveillance of Europeans, African slaves, and layers of indigenous mediators, administrators, and accountants. Interestingly, these accountants were quipocamas, or quipo masters, who kept colonial records using the Inka system of knotted cords. Corr’s close reading of judicial archives allows her to bring to life the frictions between these different actors and to document how the textile economy affected indigenous lives, authority, and family relations as well as the strategies native peoples employed to mitigate the harm.Corr is interested in the ways in which the labor systems of the mill impacted the creation and re-creation of ethnic identities, rituals, and kin systems. Indigenous workers at Pelileo originally came from four different sectors: the Pilata, Chumaquí, and Guambaló, who were forced to work in the mill, and the Sigchos Collanas, who belonged to a different encomienda and were not forced to work in the mill. Corr argues that the Sigchos Collanas re-created themselves as the indigenous Salasacas, today a distinctive indigenous culture of the predominantly mestizo Pelileo. While the Salasacas have been traditionally seen as a mitimae colony of the Inkas, Corr argues that Pelileo’s ethnic affiliations can only be understood by exploring the dynamics of cross-cultural interactions created by the mill and the way indigenous peoples recreated and reimagined their ethnic affiliations through strategies of landholding, kin, and “cultural refusal.” Rather than remnants of the Inkas today, the Salasacas emerged as a distinctive group during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.In essence, Interwoven is a microhistory of the style originally practiced by Luis González: it focuses on a small town and traces its history in the longue durée. Corr’s writing is at its best when zooming into dense descriptions of local situations, such as the escalating violence of the popular rebellion after the Jesuits were expelled and the administration of the mill was entrusted to imperial administrators, or the ways in which indigenous peoples used wills, dowries, and co-parenthood as survival strategies in the difficult conditions of the mill. This is, however, the book’s main limitation as well: concentrating on very concrete situations in such a long span of time makes it difficult for the reader to grasp the transformations and continuities of this society and how they are connected to a larger world. This quibble aside, the book successfully shows how ethnic identities of Pelileo are historical and have been formed and reformed in the power relations originated from colonial forced labor systems.