Long Live Atahualpa: Indigenous Politics, Justice, and Democracy in the Northern Andes

Abstract

Emma Cervone’s Long Live Atahualpa contributes to the scholarly trend of examining Ecuadorian indigenous political activism from the perspective of grassroots organizations rather than only via national indigenous leaders. Also important is Cervone’s focus on activism in the central highland civil parish of Tixán, Chimborazo, rather than on the better-known cases in the northern highlands of Ecuador. Cervone asserts that examining national events from a local perspective “works at the frontier of culture, identity, and power to explore the meanings generated in the everyday by the people who resist domination” (p. 19).The focus on Tixán and Cervone’s many years in residence there provide a richly detailed discussion of indigenous versus nonindigenous perceptions of the rise of the Inca Atahualpa organization in the region. She shows, for example, how the context of national indigenous uprisings emboldened local indigenous peoples to act on their grievances (particularly over land) and how the rise of the indianada made nonindigenous tixaneños both resentful of indigenous actions and afraid to counter them. Moreover, her discussion of local indigenous politics considers not only the big moments of overt confrontation but also the resistances offered through daily interactions, particularly the ways in which indigenous peoples often ignored abusive demands rather than submitting to them. It was out of this particular convergence of local and national politics that the Inca Atahualpa organization came to serve as an alternative justice system in Tixán (p. 171), holding meetings on Sundays to hear disputes between indigenous peoples and to mete out justice, including punishments for those found guilty.Perhaps the best discussion of the overlapping issues of identity, politics, and inter-ethnic interactions in Tixán can be found in chapter 6, “Celebrating Diversity,” in which Cervone scrutinizes the “festival of the Quichuas” held in Tixán around the summer solstice in June. The celebrations date back to the days in which hacienda owners presided over harvest festivals, but in the aftermath of the 1960s agrarian reform, indigenous peoples gradually took over the planning and oversight of the festival, which became an indigenous event located in the white-mestizo town center of Tixán. It was symbolically, culturally, and politically crucial as an event that developed alongside rising political activism. Eventually, the festival became more inclusive of nonindigenous as well as indigenous peoples. Cervone offers a particularly fine discussion in this chapter of the variety of ways that indigenous peoples used clothing to highlight distinct parts of their identities at different times. In this chapter, theory and detail, collective and individual experiences, and indigenous and nonindigenous views all blend seamlessly for a powerful and fascinating look at a well-known yearly event.Other chapters do not blend theory and detail or description and analysis nearly as well. Cervone offers interesting quotes and descriptions throughout the monograph, but these are typically separated from theoretical discussions, and the connections between the two are often not well developed. Moreover, despite Cervone’s emphasis on doing “politically engaged” anthropology by collaborating with the indigenous group she studied (p. 31), she makes only brief references to things like organizing workshops in Tixán. This was a missed opportunity to explore the significance of anthropological engagement along the lines set out by Maximilian Viatori in One State, Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador (2009), in which he discusses his political involvements with the Amazonian community that he studied.Cervone is at her best when discussing the rising political power of both the Inca Atahualpa organization and the broader Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the 1990s. Her discussion of events from 2000 forward offers a useful summary of scholarly studies on national developments, but her references to local activities are brief in contrast to her richly textured and specific discussions of the Inca Atahualpa movement in the 1990s. More problematic is her discussion of the earlier twentieth century: she often takes indigenous peoples’ memories of the hacienda system as fact rather than analyzing them in light of the context in which they were made. Furthermore, she does not take full advantage of some of the available scholarship on the preagrarian reform decades, such as Marc Becker’s groundbreaking study of Indian-state relations in the early to mid-twentieth century, Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (2008), which, while included in her bibliography, is underutilized. Similarly, although she often mentions haciendas in Chimborazo and the problem of respect for indigenous peoples, she never references the important work of fellow anthropologist Barry Lyons on these subjects, Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (2006).Even with these limitations, Long Live Atahualpa is a solid book that will be of interest to scholars who focus on the complex issues of indigenous identity and politics, particularly with regard to local versus national experiences of political change both in Ecuador and in Latin America more generally.