Over the past two decades in Ecuador, white-mestizos have asserted their privilege in the face of gains made by indigenous1 activists seeking official recognition of their rights to cultural difference. Christopher Krupa (2011:149,164) argues that this has resulted in the operation of projects of exclusion alongside or within liberal democratic discourses of nationalism that rhetorically plurality. This article demonstrates the role that the construction of a discursively marked indigenous Other has played in the defense and maintenance of white-mestizo invisibility in Ecuadorian public discourse. Scholars studying race and ethnicity in Ecuador have used the term invisibility to highlight indigenous peoples' and Afrodescendants' exclusion from dominant national discourses. In keeping with recent work in linguistic anthropology and critical race theory, I use the notion of white-mestizo invisibility to denote the discursively unmarked character of white-mestizaje in Ecuadorian public culture. I explore the production of this unmarkedness through an analysis of the circulation of public discourses of race in interviews with indigenous activists published in El Comercio, the paper of record in the country's national capital, Quito, from 1992 to 2004. This time period represents a critical moment in Ecuador's history when indigenous peoples engaged in a concerted effort to deny the public naturalization of white-mestizo invisibility. As such, these interview texts provide significant insight into the discursive strategies that white-mestizos employed in attempts to upset indigenous challenges to mestizaje's hegemony in Ecuadorian public culture. In this article, I argue that El Comercio's reporters and editors employed a range of linguistic strategies to situate their interview texts within already existing discourses about race in Ecuadorian society. These strategies positioned interviewers voices of the generic and racially unmarked perspective, by subtly-but clearly-framing their indigenous interviewees occupying a racially marked position. Through an examination of this dynamic, I demonstrate the central and ongoing role that images of indigenous alterity have played in the defense of whitemestizo privilege in Ecuadorian public discourse.Throughout the 20th century, Ecuadorian racial ideologies have posited the country a nation (Carrion 1988) in which the ideal citizen was a product of white and indigenous mixing (Silva Charvet 2005). This notion of mestizaje rhetorically embraces a notion of national equality through its claim that all Ecuadorians are mestizo and thus share the same cultural and racial patrimony. In reality, however, Ecuadorian mestizaje is not premised on an embrace of the nation's nonwhite citizens (Weismantel 2001:38). Rather, Ronald Stutzman (1981) asserts, it is inexorably tied to the notion of blanqueamiento (whitening). This is the idea that by projecting key aspects of their downward to socially and geographically marginalized populations, the small upper class that occupies the pinnacle of economic control, political power, and social esteem and who self-identify as blancos [whites] could contribute to a progressive improvement of Ecuadorian national (Whitten 2003:54-55). This sentiment was famously articulated in a speech by former Ecuadorian President General Guillermo Rodriguez Lara (19721976) who publicly announced that there was no longer an Indian problem in Ecuador because all become white when we accept the goals of national culture (Whitten 1976:268). Thus, mestizaje preserves the supremacy of whiteness atop Ecuadorian racial orders while simultaneously Othering different peoples in different ways, producing a hierarchy of markedness. Despite the rhetoric of inclusion, white-mestizo elites have long scorned poor mestizos in daily interactions because of their lingering associations with indigeneity (Cervone 2010:100; see also Miller 2004:124, Krupa 2011), while indigenous peoples are classified those who have failed to assimilate, in contrast to Afrodescendants who cannot assimilate. …
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Aug 26, 2016
Jieh-Shian Young 
Open Access
