Quito Quichua

By Kathleen Fine-Dare

Kitu Kichwa; Kitu Runa; Kitu-Kara (may refer to a congeries of diverse groups living in the Quito Basin and/or to a cultural-political organization recognized by the Ecuadorian state); Pueblo Indígena Originario del Distrito de Quito; Naturales de Quito (somewhat antiquated and pejorative); Panzaleo (once a reference to an ethnic group or chiefdom with a distinct language located both south and west of the Quito area, this now refers to indigenous people from the Cotopaxi/Tungurahua provinces).

“Quito Quichua” is a broad, descriptive category rarely used by Ecuadorians to refer to Quichua-speakers or those of demonstrable indigenous ancestry within and surrounding the limits of Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, located at approximately 2,800 meters (9,200 feet) just south of the equator in the Province of Pichincha.  The Ecuadorian government roughly identifies the Quito Quichua scope as encompassing around 64 communities in the canton Quito parishes of Nono, Pifo, Píntag, Tumbaco, Pomasqui, Calderón, and Zámbiza; and the communities in the canton Mejía parishes of Machachi, Aloag, Aloasí, Cutugtlahua, El Chaupi, Tambillo, and Manuel Cornejo and Uyumbicho.  According to the Kitu Kara organization, which represents most indigenous persons in the Quito Basin, forty percent of their lands are still not legalized.

Of the approximately three million persons identified as comprising the Ecuadorian Kichwa (Quichua) nationality, as of 2008 approximately 80,000-100,000 were identified as being members of the Kitu Kara Pueblo by the Ecuadorian government. They live in communities delineated roughly by mountain peaks, with Cayambe at the northern edge; Antisana, Ilaló, and Illiniza to the East; Cotopaxi to the south; and the volcanoes of Pichincha, to the west.  Waters flow east  from Pichincha, ultimately arriving to the Upper Amazon drainage system.

Quichua (Runa Shimi in the Quichua language) is one of many forms of the large South American Quechua language family.  While it serves as an ethnic marker for the Quito Quichua and/or Kitu Kara Pueblo, there is debate regarding whether it was spoken in the Ecuadorian highlands prior to the arrival of the Inca invaders who imposed it in the late fifteenth century as a lingua franca of empire that was undergirded by the imperial practice of establishing residential clusters of mitimae or loyal outsiders forced to move to the region.

Evidence from archaeological survey and excavation and from oral histories recorded in ethnohistorical and ethnographical accounts indicate that movements between regions ranging from the eastern Amazon to the western Pacific coast, as well as from southern Meso and Central America to at least the Bolivian highlands painted a complex palette of cultural and linguistic diversity in the region.  The geophysical phenomena of frequent and violent volcanic eruptions that served to cover broad swaths on both sides of the volcanoes on the western side of the Quito Basin as well as from Cotopaxi volcano to the south cannot be underestimated as a major force in cultural displacement and relocation over the span of many centuries.  In addition to the upheavals produced by human conflicts over territory and resources ranging from pre-Incaic times until the arrival of the Incas in around 1460 AD, through to the Spanish colonial (1534-1820), Gran Colombian (1820-1830), and Ecuadorian national epochs (1830 to present), the early and continuing urbanization of the Quito Basin has had a resounding and deeply entrenched impact on the nature of Quito Quichua subsistence, identity, and political formation. By the eighteenth century the colonial organization of the greater Quito (“Corregimiento de Quito”) region was comprised of seven urban neighborhoods and around thirty rural towns in which distinctive populations—many of which are reinventing and/or reinforcing their indigenous identity—exist today, such as San Juan Evangelista de Chimbacalle, Machangarilla, Llano Chico, Llano Grande, Calderón, Chillogallo, Aloag, Aloasí, Machachí, Perucho, San Antonio de Llullumbamba, Lumbisí, Pomasqui, Calacalí, Cotocollao, Guayllabamba, Zámbiza, el Quinche, Yaruquí, Puembo and Pifo, Tumbaco, Cumbayá, Guápulo, Alangasí, Conocotoc, Pintag, Sangolquí, Amaguaña, and Uyumbicho.

Highland Ecuadorian political geography is strongly shaped by the presence of partial valley floor basins located through the dual Andean range than spans the country from north to south and resembles the rungs of a ladder or the knots in a cord.  Each of these basins holds an urban center corresponding to a province around which a particular “type” of ethnic identity has been roughly established.  It is the Quito Basin, located just south of the equator and traversed by the Guayllabamba River, which has been identified as the home of the “Kitu-Kara,” whose homeland is said to lie in the interface between the “Otavalo-Caranqui”of the Imbabura provincial center of Ibarra and Otavalo, the “Kayambi” or “Cayambe” of northern Pichincha Province, and the “Panzaleo” of the Cotopaxi provincial basin seat of Latacunga, although colonial and pre-colonial history point to a much more complex history. Archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggest that native peoples of the Quito Basin were engaged in continuous trade with not only the highland basins but with indigenes to the west and east (sometimes referred to as Yumbos). Those who controlled the trade were often identified as curacas (chief- or cacique-like rulers of polities, also referred to as “ethnic lords”) that cooperated to degrees greater or lesser with the Inca and later Spanish pretenders to rule the entire region. Today a dualism exists between the Quito Quichua who reside in urban neighborhoods of Quito and nearby towns, and those who live in rural Catholic parishes.  It is generally accepted that the former speak little Quichua and have lost most ancestral ties to their cultural practices, while the latter are viewed as still holding onto ethnic marker and identity in a more authentic fashion.  What constitutes the situation today, in the early years of the twenty first century, is a marked, if inconsistent, ethnogenesis or cultural quest and affirmation taking place in both rural and urban areas.

According to the statistical analysis branch of the Ecuadorian government in 2007, nearly seventy percent of the indigenous people of Ecuador were said to be living in poverty.  While this percentage will be less for those living in Pichincha Province where poverty rates overall are lower than elsewhere in the nation, it is still an important statistic to consider when looking at Quito Quichua political economy and social organization.

The precapitalist economic practices of residents of the Quito Basin were characterized by the “verticality,” or varied economic strategies defined by the steep gradient and proliferation of ecological microzones of the entire Andean region. In the twenty-first century this pattern remains important, with pastoralism centered around cattle, sheep, and sometimes alpacas and llamas and tuber cultivation characterizing the highest ecological zones (3,200-4,000 meters), along with cultivation of a variety of root crops.  From the highest elevations down towards 2,500 meters, quinoa, legumes, altramuces (lupines), maize, beans, capulis (chokecherries), cabuya and other domesticated, semi-domesticated, and wild species flows down into the rich, moist areas of the Andean foothills where coca, a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, squashes, yuca (manioc), herbs, peppers, yucca, and cotton have long been cultivated and gathered. Animals such as guinea pigs, rabbits, peccaries, and birds are still raised and/or hunted as protein sources along with fish, insects, and terrestrial snails. Although the introduction from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries of new cultivars such as bananas, plantains, eucalyptus, wheat, and barley and domesticated animals such as pigs, cattle, and sheep altered the ecosystems and their management, the most disruptive intrusion was that of forced labor practices that made it difficult for human communities to manage varied and nutritionally complementary resources along the vertical gradient of the Andes. Various subregions in the Quito Basin became associated with different types of products and their human residents with forms of artisanry, marketing specialties, trade relationships, and concomitant degrees of mystery and danger that went along with the products and the desire for them. One of the most important forms of exchange was and continues to be knowledge of divination, diagnosis, healing, and magical violence said to be more prevalent among some peoples than others in the Quito Basin. With the coming of the Spanish, dispersed settlements became “reduced” into bureaucratically-manageable communities marked with Spanish architectural styles such as plazas and street grids pinned symbolically and powerfully by a Catholic church and one or several government administration buildings. Under the encomienda system, whereby Crown loyalists were given grants of Indian labor in exchange for military protection and religious instruction, the groundwork was laid for the transference of subsistence-based economies into tributary labor regimes. This was accomplished by force under a system of royal taxation built upon the Incaic and non-Incaic forms of labor and produce reciprocity, known by the Quichua minga when attached to a communal labor project, mit’a when referring to a call for rotational labor coming from a higher, regional authority; and ayni as generalized reciprocity operating on all levels. Although in some parts of Ecuador where the long arm of the state had limited range, Native peoples could coalesce into “regions of refuge” from Spanish authority, in the Quito Basin this was virtually impossible and Spanish control became absolute, coalescing into a form of authority centered around the “hacienda” system of rural production linked to local, regional, and international markets. By the nineteenth century the Ecuadorian economy was heavily dependent on tribute from what were called “Indians,” who were no longer protected by the dual-state practice of the Spanish empire. Labor was also extracted by force from African slaves, who arrived in the sixteenth century with the Spanish and who have long played a large (but understudied) role in the economic system and in the cultural patterning of highland indigenous peoples. Contemporary indigenous settlements in the Kitu-Kara/Quito Quichua area reflect very diverse political histories linked to religious conversion, the ability to historically resist incorporation into hacienda economies, and urbanization. Another factor was whether a community was, under a 1937 law, able to claim status as a comuna and maintain economic independence up to and through the disruptions of the 1964 agrarian reform, which still forms a key arena of discourse among Quito Quichua today. Although the slave-like conditions of hacienda servitude were outlawed by the reform, the increased poverty engendered by the breakdown of the subsistence structure and concomitant land speculation and theft divested many indigenous beneficiaries of the reform of their main sources of nutrition, social organization, and future capital. The outcome of the reform as it played out and reverberated among independent and newly-formed communities of indigenes in the Quito Basin is a major element in the distinctiveness found among (and competition and resentment between) the various Quito Quichua communities today. An additional “subsistence” element that defines Quito Quichua communities is that of migration, as Native residents leave to improve their lives elsewhere and new residents—of indigenous, African or otherwise nonindigenous ancestry who come from all over Ecuador, often from Colombia, and sometimes from other Latin American nations such as Peru and Bolivia—replace the originarios (aboriginal inhabitants) of those places to take on jobs in the overlapping formal and informal economic sectors.

Economic practices among Quito Quichua peoples are said to be in “transition” between a subsistence and market economy. Participation in either depends upon the ecological zone in which the community is located. The cultivation of flowers destined for an international market is especially intense in this region. Although brickmaking and burning timber for charcoal were once prominent in the region as sources of income, these have reduced considerably since the 1990s except in a few marginal areas just outside of the city limits.

Indigenous residents of the Quito Basin area work in a variety of trades ranging from the trucking of small-farm produce, poultry, and milk throughout Ecuador; to providing domestic service in middle-class and elite households; to laboring on public works projects such as roads and construction sites. Many people have small businesses selling groceries, eggs, hardware, plumbing supplies, and clothing, while others run repair shops.  Quito Quichua people work as iron workers, teachers (with or without licensure), taxi drivers, bus drivers, domestic employees, groundskeepers, messengers, market vendors, street vendors, shoe shiners, newspaper vendors, and guards for condominiums, hotels, and shopping malls. Many have to work multiple jobs to survive. Some residents of Quito work in flower-producing factories; others work in various industries linked to the presence of an international airport in Quito, while others are drawn into new ventures related to tourism of the eco- and other varieties. Others, particularly those who cannot afford to pay the fine, engage in military service, sometimes staying their entire lives.  While in the early to mid-twentieth century residents of the Quito Basin worked in factories that made car and bus chassis, many of these industries are gone. A relatively recent form of enterprise that is related to the global phenomena of migration and information exchange is to set up a small Internet and/or long-distance phone center stocked with computers and phone booths. While a growing number of urbanites are involved in organized crime, principally related to the flow of drugs throughout the Andes, there is no way of knowing how many of these are indigenous.

The Quito Basin has historically and pre-historically been characterized by vast networks of trade moving from the Amazon across to the Pacific coast and back. Major archaeological complexes in both Northern and Southern Quito contain ceramics produced from all over the region, as well as stone tools, most notably made of obsidian derived from flows on the Andean/Amazonian border. The continued presence of several huge markets in the Quito area echoes a long-standing practice of bringing together the products and knowledge from across ecozones.

Until the late twentieth century, powerful landowners in the highlands extracted labor from indigenous workers through a variety of temporary work relations based on sharecropping and other forms of tenancy.  A system of serfdom known as concertaje or huasipungaje (debt peonage that was nominally “voluntary,” but involved paying off debts inherited by one’s family members through working on a hacienda in exchange for the use of a small dwelling and piece of land on the landowner’s property) was common until 1964. Within this system some indigenous social forms remained, although constrained and distorted by the encompassing power system.  In Andean communities, including those within the Quito region, all members of a family contribute to the maintenance of the house and landholdings. Children tend to younger siblings, fetch water, feed and watch over animals both in the household and in the pastures. Some children work in the streets selling newspapers, candy and gum, or are otherwise engaged in petty sales that contribute to the household economy. While there is a gendered division of labor (girls begin working in the household much earlier and more regularly than boys) with childbearing, child tending, cleaning, cooking, marketing, and caring for aged adults more regularly falling on women, with men engaging in wage labor and/or tending to heavier agricultural tasks, the line between “male” and “female” tasks is flexible, with men often lending women a hand, and vice versa. Within comunas and some rural parishes, families are expected to contribute labor to public and communal projects (e.g., construction of roads, soccer fields, irrigation ditches, chapels) by means of minga called by the comuna council or cabildo.  

Land is held privately in urban neighborhoods and rural parishes. Although in comunas some lands are commonly owned and used for planting and grazing, by the early twenty-first century this had become much less common. The main indigenous organizations of Ecuador, including those encompassing the Quito Quichua region, support an agrarian agenda that applies to both rural and urban areas and calls for, among other things, indigenous control over lands and local plants; reforestation of boundary areas; the creation of an inventory of sacred sites so that forests and water sources may be protected; and the cleanup of contaminated water (endemic to the Quito area). Much of the jurisdiction over presumably Quito Quichua ancestral lands falls under the Municipality of Quito, which as of 2007 had no representation from indigenous organizations (comunas) in its governing council concerned with privatization of water, environmental policies, etc.

Descent principles are bilateral with a patrilineal bias. Although there is some evidence of gendered parallel transmission, this is fast disappearing. Women keep their surnames upon marriage, reflecting their continued membership in a family groups from which they will inherit.  

Basic patterns of Hispanic kin classification are followed, with Quichua concepts providing some partial recognition that gender parallel forms of kin reference and address were once more common. In monolingual situations, a male parent uses different terms for his male and female children than does his wife. In addition, brothers and sisters refer to their siblings with differently-gendered terms. No special distinction is provided for cross- and parallel cousins, and affinal and consanguineal aunts and uncles are lumped together.

Marriage and childrearing are considered the ideal state for both men and women. Marriage occurs roughly before partners turn 30 years of age, with some unions taking place in the late teens. Marriage practices range from informal (in a type of Andean trial marriage, or when cohabitants who have produced children are still married to others) to those conducted within the Catholic Church.  Marriage and especially baptism ceremonies are often conducted with the participation of co-parents (compadres) who form moral and economic relationships throughout the life of the family. The practice of ritual coparenthood (compadrazgo) serves to widen familial networks and provide flows of reciprocity grounded in usually asymmetrical social relationships that often cut across ethnic and class lines. Divorces may occur but are not common, and widowed persons often remarry.

The residential group (known as ayllu in Quichua) forms the basis of familial/household life in the Quito Basin. Post-matrimonial residence is flexible, with married couples living with either of the spouse’s parents and other family members.  Neolocal residence, although ideal, usually occurs later, when affordable.  

Inheritance is partible, with all children inheriting equally from both parents at the death of one or both of them. As is the case throughout much of the southern Andes, children receive all or part of their inheritance of livestock and rights to land at the time of marriage. The youngest child will more often, however, inherit the house as an aftermath of tending to aging parents. With the increase in lifespan, however, inheritance has been delayed, which contributes to migration from rural to urban areas, especially on the part of single children. The fragmentation of plots is of great concern, and disputes often arise as a result of large numbers of children and their offspring clamoring for access to lands, livestock, and dwellings. In the early twenty first century Quito Quichua residents still talk about the way that family lands were alienated by gullible relatives who sold their huasipungo plots acquired after the agrarian reform of 1964 to urban speculators, or ambitious relatives who sold their lands and livestock to raise enough money to throw a big fiesta in the hope of heightening their prestige (or in fear of not following through obligations incurred previously, which would have negative ramifications when the time came to meet their Maker).

Socialization occurs in the home, in the streets, from watching television, and in schools.  Some families express concern that their children are treated in a racist, exclusionist fashion in the regular school system and seek to send their children to bilingual or private schools, if affordable.

Social organization operates both horizontally and vertically. Family and community members form strong bonds through kinship, marriage, work parties, and reciprocal aid.  Nonetheless, it is strongly believed that little can get accomplished without powerful palancas (“leverages”) without which one cannot hope to navigate local and national bureaucracies as equal access and a “fair shake” are not considered possible to achieve in a society that extracted labor from indigenous persons for centuries and treated them at best as invisible and at worst, as expendable brutes. Connections to the parish church, to municipal authorities, to business owners, and to government officials are actively pursued, with the idea still prevalent that those who can exert personal force on one’s livelihood are patrons (bosses linked by personal relationships) to be feared and respected.  New elements of social organization based on indigenous political organizing and participation in the electoral and legislative processes have widened the possibilities for transforming indigenous forms of social organization still suffering from centuries of unequal labor relations and human rights abuses.  

There is no overall political structure governing Quichua peoples in the Quito Basin. The Ecuadorian government agency that oversees ethnic affairs (CODENPE—Development Council of the Nations and Peoples of Ecuador) recognizes the “Kitu Kara people” as part of the overall “Nacionalidad Kichwa del Ecuador” (Quichua nation) and funnels funding (usually derived from NGOs, particularly from Spain and the World Bank) into local educational and  infrastructural  projects. The relationship between CODENPE (via its executive branch, PRODEPINE) and indigenous interests is seen by many to be contradictory, however, particularly as it calls for a certain homogenization of beliefs, practices, and diverse cultural markers, particularly in the implementation of programs in health and bilingual education. To counteract this bureaucratizing contradiction, some Quito Quichua who live in urban neighborhoods or barrios have created local organizations such as cultural centers to highlight issues of ancestry, culture, and territoriality and to legitimize locally-created schools and maintain tentative relationship with the Pueblo Kitu Kara organization, which is loosely affiliated with a network of indigenous groups that fall under the umbrella of the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Ecuadorian Nations), but receives no direct funding from them. The organization is also closely linked to the highland indigenous federation ECUARUNARI, but in 2007 severed its connections with the Federation of Communities of Pichincha Province (FPP), except for the community of Cayambe in northern Pichincha. In 2008 internal disputes over membership in Kitu Kara, its role in promoting development projects in local communities, and its participation in electoral politics (particularly linked to the political party Pachakutik), caused rifts in the organization and shifts in leadership. Recognized indigenous comunas elect a President and other representatives every year, while Improvement Committees are formed every two years. Business is conducted within a general assembly that works with peasant and other popular organizations that exist within their respective areas. The Pueblo Kitu Kara has a governing Council (Consejo de Gobierno) and chooses one representative to serve as a liaison to the Ecuadorian government via CODENPE. In 2008 the Ecuadorian government approved an unprecedented creation of a judicial office (fiscalía) to centralize and coordinate claims to land, property, etc. for communities affiliated with (or seeking help from) the Kitu Kara organization.

The Ecuadorian Constitution of 1998 (under serious revision in 2008) recognizes the right of indigenous communities to employ their own forms of justice in resolving disputes.  In the early 21st century, however, very little evidence of this reached the news media.  Social control is exerted through the parish priest through homilies and control over church-sanctified rites of passage (which command hefty fees), but overall the relationship is neither as direct nor as extractive in terms of indigenous labor and money as it was earlier in the twentieth century. While in some cases tithing is still paid to parish priests, and in San Isidro del Inca the priest exacts fees from masked dance troupes during the observation of its patron saint, in general the hold of the Catholic church is not as absolute as it was even in the 1970s.

Indigenous militant resistance to dispossession, injustice, and poverty has emerged throughout the post-Columbian era in Ecuador up to the present. The intersection of labor interests, socialist activity, and indigenous rights concerns resulted in insurrections and indigenous organizing as early as the 1920s in Pichincha Province. Experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination are not uncommon, linked not only to how a child “looks,” but what his or her surname connotes about family history and class standing. Indigenous comunas and residents of urban barrios and rural parishes find themselves increasingly in conflict with municipal and state authorities regarding the protection of forest lands, the demolition of old houses (forcing residents to move to new dwellings and leaving familial burials behind), the filling up of spring-fed streams, the building of roads that impede traffic across old footpaths for both humans and animals, and the creation of municipal garbage dumps in outlying indigenous lands. In 2008 several communities organized to protest the building of the new international airport in Kitu Kara ancestral territory.  Public and domestic violence has increased enormously in recent years, leading some indigenous leaders to identify this issue as a primary concern. Indigenous shamanic power that drew from lowland sources deployed in the highlands was a powerful tool against colonial and republican authorities. Today,  “magical violence” carried out through sorcery and other supernatural means, is expressed in dance performances and everyday life, as tales of suspicious “rag dolls” tucked into a roof tile, the debilitating power of someone’s envy, or battles conducted with spirits in the nocturnal search for buried treasure are commonly told among indigenous and mestizo residents of the Quito area.

Most Quito Quichua are nominally Catholic, although Protestantism and Mormonism have made significant inroads (Protestantism often brought in by indigenous migrants from other areas of Ecuador such as Chimborazo Province). When the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century they encountered local belief systems centered on chthonic forces emanating from mountains, hills, mountain peaks, and volcanic peaks and craters; and hydraulic sources such as springs, water-fed gullies (quebradas), waterfalls, and lakes. Although no evidence of human sacrifice has been found on these peaks, it is known that they were important interment sites for the dead. Powerful animals such as the spectacled bear, pumas, condors, and other birds were treated with reverence and imitated in ritual dances, which formed a central role in religious expression. Sacred places (huaca) were visited regularly and paid with offerings (apachita) of stones, animal fat, sacrificed animals, shoes, and many other objects. Shamanic power was sought for healing, divination, and retributional killing, a practice that intensified in the eighteenth century when Indians became disillusioned over their access to Spanish-based forms of power. Aspects of these beliefs still exist and are even being strengthened through cultural revitalization movements emerging throughout the Quito Basin. Since the early 1980s waves of change have taken place that have carried elements of what was believed to be Incaic practices (focused on Inti, the sun god and instantiated most specifically in the Inti Raymi festivals that fall around mid-June; and on the pachamamaor “Earth Goddess,” to provide one common translation of a more complex concept); as well as generalized shamanic, yogic, Buddhist, and other practices and beliefs associated with the so-called “New Age Movement” and its practitioners. The efflorescence of what is called “traditional” religious practices in the early twenty first century is a product of several confluent forces: global religious/spiritual responses to capitalism; spiritual, ecological, and cultural tourism; pan-Andean and pan-Indian human rights movements that draw from international indigenous rights initiatives; and the romanticization of indigenous identity such that growing numbers of non-Indians throughout Ecuador, but especially in the Quito area, are identifying as “Kitu Kara.”  Although continual attempts are made to establish an Inca-like sacred geographical scheme to the area with Quito said to be shaped like a puma from the center of which radiate lines demarcating four quarters of the former Inca empire, with all places bifurcated into “upper” (urin) and “lower” (hanan)  according to a mirror image (i.e., in reverse of) the Cuzqueño scheme, no such elements can be firmly established in Quito or identified at all outside of the immediate Quito area. Pilgrimages are still made to sacred sites with pre-Hispanic (and continuing economic and trade) significance, most notably on November 21 to the Sanctuary of the Virgin of el Quinche, on the east side of the Quito Basin, but also to smaller shrines and caves where the shamanic power of the “yumba” is said to exist. Ambivalent power and wealth is achieved through pacts with the Devil who may appear as the “Caja Ronca” and the discovery of buried treasure (which only men can search for using witching wands or varillas). Tales of hidden Inca treasure abound, but may have been fueled by stories of booty spilled by Spanish and English galleons and pirate ships that ran aground on the western Pacific shores. Vestiges of ritual combat believed to be important to the dynamic flow of blood, water, and fertility substances still exist and are embodied in rural bullfights and in some dance performances (e.g., sanjuaneros, la Yumbada) where whips are wielded and dancers display signs of having “counted coup,” or engaged in battle with an enemy.

Religious practitioners devoted to divination and curing are known as yachac taitakuna or yachac mamakuna). Being recognized as such a specialist usually involves apprenticeship and training, preferably with practitioners from the Amazonian, Bolivian, or Peruvian regions. Some practitioners apprentice with Sibundoy, Kogi, and other curers from Colombia. Power is also said to be taught by Afro-Ecuadorian specialists. Some persons are believed to be “compacted” with spiritual powers, often exhibited through musical talent (particularly via flute, drum, and guitar) in men and healing with herbs, roots, etc. for both women and men.

Dance performances take place throughout the year, but particularly during the dry season (late May through September). The dances are scheduled in accordance with the Catholic liturgical calendar (primarily centered around the days celebrating Corpus Christi, St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter, in addition to All Souls’ Day in November, and festivals surrounding Christmas and local patron saint celebrations) and have historical links to the many waves of influence that have moved through the area, ranging from the Inca incursions in the fifteenth century, through Catholic control and evangelism linked to powerful tribute expectations that lasted well into the twentieth century. Other important celebrations that feature dancers costumed as yumbos (lowland shamans and traders), negros (coastal, militaristic Afro-Ecuadorians), capariches (a parody of street sweepers from the eastern Quito Basin), and clowns fall primarily around December 24 (day of the Christ Child), and May and June (for Corpus Christi and the eight days that follow, which falls around the time of the spring equinox; and for St. John the Baptist and St. Peter, which fall around the time of the June solstice). While some of these ceremonies feature the acts of spiritual practitioners known as yachajkuna and are viewed as very private, many have become quite public and are promoted by the municipality of Quito to promote tourism. In addition, many communities invest energy in celebrating their respective patron saints, which often involves contracting local bands and dancers.

A vibrant indigenous arts scene exists in the Quito Basin area. Some artisanry is related to labor practices tied to the colonial textile production activities; some are tied to the pottery-making that goes back to pre-Incaic times; while others are tied tightly to the tourist market (e.g., bread dough dolls and ornaments), some of which are organized into cooperatives and given both governmental and non-governmental (NGO) support.  Cultural revitalization events taking place at all levels are tied to NGO-funded programs to revitalize music and dance forms. Music is a particularly important source of identity and community solidarity. Some of these “revitalizations” are seen, however, as inventions promoted by outsiders who too easily move into the fabric of Quito Quichua life. The Municipality of Quito is one of the strongest promoters of art forms within the district, tying the sale of objects to tourist treks to places marketed as having ecological, cultural, and spiritual beauty and significance. Another key phenomenon not to be underestimated is the presence of indigenous migrants from Cotopaxi, Imbabura, and other provinces who incorporate their ethnic arts practices into their economic practices in Quito.

Most families that live within or outside city limits have house gardens that provide a host of ethnopharmacological plants that range from abortifacients to lung cleansers.  Everyday cuisine is encompassed  by medicinal concepts, as a balance between wet/dry, hot/cold, and savory/sweet foods must be achieved for a person to be healthy. Illness is often blamed on “wind” and “dust”, and maintaining the right body temperature and protection from the sun through the use of shawls and hats and jackets is considered a must.  Illnesses are generally divided into “natural” (de Dios) or “unnatural/evil” (e.g., de caballo) and even “wind” and “dust” may be viewed in either category, depending on other proximate causes that may have unleashed a bad wind, an evil eye, or some other force that can weaken the body, frighten the soul out of its corporal locus, or bring objects deep inside the body that need to be extracted by a male or female curer. Beliefs about illness, danger, curing, and herbs are widely shared throughout the Quito Basin among indigenous and non-indigenous persons, as well as a skepticism regarding Western medicine and the potential of hospitals and Western-trained doctors to do more harm than good. Mountain peaks and the spirits that inhabit them are thought to be especially dangerous. Not only can they react vindictively if not propitiated with the proper offerings, dances, and prayers, but humans can get caught in the mountain peaks’ jealous struggles with each other as they reflect the same hierarchies and destructive sexual longings found among humans. Rainbows and mountain peaks can cause pregnancy, illness, and soul loss among the unsuspecting humans, even as they provide the rainfall, hydraulic force of springs and streams, and other powers central to human existence. Images of saints, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary are treated with reverence and kept in people’s homes rather than in Catholic church-sanctioned temples or chapels. Characteristics associated with these nominally Catholic images are often more akin to those displayed by tricksters and other beings with supernatural and always ambiguous power. In 2002 the Pichincha provincial office of the Ministry of Public Health set up a program of “Intercultural Health” at the urging of the indigenous movement. The initiative supports local projects among Quito Quichua and the neighboring Tsátchila  ranging from maternal mortality prevention, neonatal health, and indigenous traditional medicines.

A variety of pre-Columbian (AD 1-1500) burial practices has been noted for the Quito Quichua area, including distinctive cemetery zones found across rotating settlement areas, shaft tombs in well-drained soils in northern Ecuador, secondary burials for those of higher status, and a preference for burial in high regions on mountains or next to flowing water. Today, burial for those with resources to continue paying the burial fee sometimes takes place in the nearby Catholic cemetery, either in plots or in side niches. But for many people in the Quito Basin area, it is believed that the proper burial site is next to the house, where the spirits of the dead can continue to watch over the family. Throughout the Quito Basin graves are cleaned, food and colorful offerings made to ancestors, and specific funeral games played during Day of the Dead activities. These observations often include ceremonial practices such as dances in which it is believed the dead participate, providing a source of support for the recuperation of indigenous identity among Quito Quichua peoples who are more often than not classified as mestizo or non-indigenous persons.  Although the current process of ethnogenesis is complex, uneven, and not without risks, it forms part of an ongoing struggle to keep complete racial mixture and “whitening” (mestizaje or blanqueamiento) from outlasting the processes of indigenous history and identity formation in the Quito Basin.

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The culture summary was written by Kathleen Fine-Dare in September, 2008. Norman E. Whitten, Jr. was instrumental in advising separating of the original Ecuadorian Highland Quechua collection (SD13) into this (SD15), the Otavalo Quichua (SD16), and the Saraguro Quichua (SD17) collections, and recommended the new documents included. The synopsis and indexing notes were written by Leon G. Doyon in June 2010.