Haciendas, Liberation Theology, and Respect

In much of Latin America, large landed estates called haciendas dominated the countryside from the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century. Peasant laborers lived and worked on these estates in serflike conditions. In the Ecuadorian Andes, most hacienda laborers were Quichua-speaking indigenous people, or Runa, who grew their own food on hacienda land and were obligated to work for the landlords in return. Landlords' control over the Runa was reinforced by the latter's lack of economic alternatives, political power, or easy access to the legal system.

Violence was a familiar feature of life on haciendas. An anthropologist described the everyday use of whips on an Ecuadorian hacienda in the 1960s:

On horseback and equipped with whips,... the mayordomos and mayorales [stewards and overseers] regulate all the day's activities. The threat of the whip, usually snapped at their legs, urges the peons on to work. The peons are warned of the approaching mayordomos by the stream of... insults from the supervisors and... they usually artfully leap away from the cracking whip.... All the while they... engage in verbal interplay with their supervisors.... A kind of oral battle ensues wherein insults, frequently disguised as jokes in order to avoid open hostility, are hurled between peons and overseers. [Crespi 1968:194]

Imagine also listening to a man of around sixty in 1992 as he describes how he was punished as a youth for skinning a sheep incorrectly. It is a quiet evening in his house; we are sitting on stools between the cooking fire and the door, having finished a supper of potato soup served by his wife. He was in charge of pasturing the hacienda sheep, and one died, he says. He was supposed to skin it but was inexperienced and damaged the hide. The steward whipped him. The lash, he stresses, had three "buttons." I do not understand the significance of this, so he gets up and takes down an old riding whip hanging on the wall. He makes three loops in the leather strip, representing three knots, three "buttons," increasing the lash's impact. Then he pushes up his pants leg, indicating his calf. "It tore off the skin!" he says. His voice nearly breaks with, it seems to me, the memory of his pain, his powerlessness, and the injustice of the punishment.

His wife has been sitting by the fire, listening. She asks him what his mistake was in skinning the sheep. He explains again: he had begun at the wrong end. She punctuates his explanation with a short laugh, shaking her head at the same time.

In Ecuador, as elsewhere in Latin America, the state carried out an agrarian reform in the 1960s and the 1970s. Wage labor largely replaced the old serflike labor regime, and peasants gained title to some hacienda lands. Yet, large estates still survive in some areas, and land conflict between peasant villages and those estates continues to be an important political issue. Even where peasants now own the land, the old hacienda system has had an enduring impact on rural society, religion, and politics.

This book addresses some large questions about how indigenous peasants experienced, responded to, and remember conditions on a hacienda. How did people who were harshly oppressed and exploited make sense of their situation and of the forces that governed their world? In what ways did they resist their oppression, and in what ways were some of them co-opted or induced to accept an oppressive system? What role did religion play in how people viewed the world, in resistance, or in teaching people to accept oppression? And after an oppressive system ends, how do people remember it, what legacies does it leave, and how do these memories continue to shape their lives?

I had long wondered about such questions, but I did not set out to study the hacienda system when I began my research in 1989. I wanted mainly to study the contemporary relationship between indigenous people and the Catholic Church. Beginning in the 1960s, in the wake of Vatican II and the Cuban Revolution, some sectors within the Catholic Church in Latin America undertook a radical transformation symbolized by the phrase, "liberation theology." The church had been intimately tied to conservative, wealthy elites. Sectors identified with liberation theology attempted to reposition the church as an ally of the poor in struggles for social justice. In place of the traditional emphasis on priestly authority, the sacraments, and the saints, they encouraged the poor to take the Bible into their own hands and interpret it in the light of their own experiences of poverty and oppression. Theologians and pastoral agents understood the Bible as a call for liberation from sinful social structures.

I was interested in what Runa responses to this institutional transformation might reveal about indigenous culture and its relationship with nonindigenous influences. Did Runa villagers embrace liberation theology and find in it a reflection of their own views of the world? Or did they find it culturally alien? Did liberation theology newly awaken them to a sense of their human dignity, as some accounts suggested? Or did preexisting traditions of resistance to oppression shape their experience of liberation theology in more complex ways?

To explore these questions, I spent three years in the parish of Pangor, in Chimborazo province, from 1989 to 1992, and made shorter visits to Pangor in 1995, 1996, 1998, and 2003. Chimborazo is one of the most heavily indigenous provinces in Ecuador, a center of the contemporary indigenous political movement, and the leading stronghold of liberation theology in Ecuador. The bishop from 1954 to 1985, Leonidas Proaño, was attacked by some and praised by others as the "bishop of the Indians." He took to wearing a peasant poncho in place of the princely soutane worn by previous bishops and carried out his own land reform on church-owned estates in the 1960s. The church owned a hacienda in Pangor called Monjas Corral. Bishop Proaño stopped renting out the hacienda to wealthy landowners and rebaptized it "Tepeyac," after the mountain where a humble indigenous man encountered the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe in early colonial Mexico. Proaño turned some of the hacienda lands over to the Runa who lived and labored on the estate. They formed the community of Tepeyac Bajo, the village that hosted me during my fieldwork.

The continuing influence of liberation theology in Tepeyac Bajo was obvious from the beginning of my stay; the legacy of the hacienda era was apparent in more subtle ways. During my first week in Tepeyac Bajo, villagers met in their chapel to study the Bible, guided by a lay Quichua missionary from another parish. These meetings culminated in a Mass said by the current bishop of the diocese. In his homily, the bishop reminded villagers of the racial abuse and economic exploitation they still suffered. When one of them got on a bus, other passengers might say, as though to an animal, "You, Indian, to the back!" When they arrived in town with potatoes to sell in the market, they were offered an unfairly low price. The bishop called on his listeners to demand respect for their dignity as children of God. "No, brother," he suggested they answer those who abused them. "We are children of God by baptism like you, and therefore we are your brothers. You can't treat me that way."

"Respect," or respeto, was a prominent theme in discussions that week. At one point, I was asked to introduce myself to the assembled villagers and tell them why I had come. I explained that one purpose of anthropology was to encourage respect among people of different cultures. As a researcher in the village, I would not be criticizing their way of life, let alone trying to change their religion. Instead, I wanted to learn about their culture and, ultimately, convey my understanding to others in a way that would help others respect them.

A catechist from a neighboring village then stood up and commented approvingly on my remarks about respect. He talked about the ways indigenous people are often not respected by other Ecuadorians. He went on to talk about the need for respect in contexts that I had not anticipated my comments might evoke—respectful behavior among Runa and their respect for their own communal authorities. I began to suspect that, by chance, I had used a word that meant more to my listeners than I had known. I was well aware of the racism indigenous people suffered and expected them to value respect in interethnic relations, but I would have to find out why the catechist saw fit to raise the issue of respect within the village.

Other discussions that week revealed that respeto referred to an important local moral value that villagers perceived was in crisis. In the religious meetings, they pondered how the Bible could help them teach children to respect their parents, and they lamented the recent decline in respect. I later learned that this sense of crisis was deeply rooted in the historical changes of the past several decades. Until the mid-1980s, youths learned and earned respect by sponsoring religious feasts, but no one sponsored feasts any more. Villagers in their forties and older recalled the hacienda era as a time of respect—even though, as they bitterly noted, landlords and their delegates did not treat Runa laborers with much respect.

As I became increasingly aware of these connections between past and present and delved more deeply into villagers' memories of the hacienda, I became more and more fascinated with the hacienda as something to be understood in its own right, not only as a prelude to the present. I supplemented what I learned from villagers' accounts by searching archives in neighboring towns and Quito for documents that would help me trace the history of the hacienda and the region. The result is this study, which focuses mainly on the hacienda era while also discussing the contemporary village and liberation theology in the light of local history.

My account focuses on Monjas Corral and its successor community, Tepeyac Bajo. It would be artificial and misleading, however, to draw inflexible lines around Monjas Corral as my unit of analysis. The estate was not the seat of an isolated society and culture. Hacienda residents sometimes moved from one estate to another, and many Pangor residents were migrants from the central Chimborazo basin. Many of my informants therefore had experience of various haciendas, and this is reflected in their oral accounts and my analysis.

Anthropologists study large questions about human experience by looking closely at particular places, places that always have their own idiosyncrasies. Monjas Corral was not necessarily a "typical" hacienda—there may be no such thing. Latin American haciendas varied widely in size (with some smaller, some much larger than Monjas Corral), in concentrating on different crops or livestock, in private versus institutional ownership, and in specific land tenure and labor arrangements (e.g., direct management by landlords versus sharecropping). They also varied in the origins and culture of the resident labor force, in landlords' origins and outlook, and in the ways broader political and economic contexts influenced the strategies of residents and landlords. I try to indicate how each of these factors affected the experience of residents of Monjas Corral.

I write in part for my colleagues in anthropology and related disciplines. Anthropologists have written very little about haciendas anywhere in Latin America (especially in English) and not much about liberation theology, either. I will try to show that this case has a good deal to teach us about the workings of a system of domination; about the nature of religion, authority, resistance, and violence under such a system; and about the processes of religious change and ethnic resurgence. At the same time, I hope to share my fascination with these questions and with rural Ecuador with a broad audience, including students and others who may be new to anthropology. I do not believe that complex arguments require impenetrable prose, or that intellectual sophistication is best demonstrated by only addressing those already familiar with a discipline's theoretical traditions and terms. I will be satisfied if this book is judged as both a good introduction to its topics and a contribution to scholarly knowledge and understanding.

Studying Culture, Past and Present

What does it mean to study how Runa experienced and responded to the hacienda system or how they relate to the Catholic Church today? How do I go about weaving together archival information, informants' accounts, and fieldwork observations to answer such questions, and what sort of generalization counts as a satisfying answer? As an anthropologist, I assume that social processes are also cultural processes: the ways people relate to other people and understand these relationships give rise to shared patterns of symbols and meanings, and, reciprocally, these shared meanings shape social relationships. Readers new to anthropology will already be familiar with the concept of culture, which has become commonplace in political discourse and even everyday conversation, but it is worth reviewing how anthropologists approach culture and its implications for this analysis.

First, to speak of "patterns of symbols and meanings" or, more metaphorically, "webs of significance" (Geertz 1973:5), is to indicate that culture is not simply a collection of disparate, separate elements. Instead, its elements are interconnected. In approaches centered on "actors" and "practice," anthropologists speak of "dispositions," habitual ways of responding to the world, that are "transposed" from one situation or domain to another (Bourdieu 1977). While different approaches variously emphasize cognitive models, symbolic meanings, learned physical responses, or other sorts of mental and embodied "stuff" seen to generate behavior, the main point here is that this stuff shows some degree of consistency and coherence from one situation to another and one person to another within the same society.

For example, suppose I notice that, when Pangor farmers pray before planting, they often say they will share food with others, implying that God and the saints expect this in return for making the crops grow. I can expect that this same assumption about the divine may be operative in other contexts as well and may have been so in the past, if people tell me they used to pray in the same way. I might look for it in the ways people celebrated saints' feasts or wondered about their landlords' harvests. Part of the anthropologist's task, then, is to discover these patterns, to find the assumptions (or dispositions, models, etc.) that underlie them, and to work out how these assumptions hang together—how they link up more or less coherently with other assumptions as people apply them in various activities and domains.

While this notion of culture as a socially shared, more or less integrated system of meanings has filtered out of anthropology and into common usage, anthropologists have become increasingly concerned with the analytic costs (and political dangers) of insufficiently nuanced interpretations of the concept. Some of our anthropological forebears and some nonanthropologists who have taken up the concept to think about identities and group conflicts have tended to exaggerate the degree to which the members of a culturally defined population uniformly share an integrated, internally consistent culture. One implication is an image of the world as composed of self-contained groups and societies, each one with "its" culture and with impermeable boundaries. In the Andes, Runa would all share a fully coherent Runa culture, mestizos (nonindigenous Spanish speakers) would all share mestizo culture, and the ethnic and racial distinction between them would prevent mestizo influences from affecting different Runa differently or introducing disparate, inconsistent strands into Runa culture. Such a model makes it difficult to imagine how cultural change can occur, and especially how it can occur without disrupting the presumed uniformity and integration of the culture. Thus, a further implication of exaggerating the shared and integrated nature of culture is either that culture does not change—Runa have simply maintained the same culture over the centuries, as tourist brochures sometimes suggest—or that cultural change is equivalent to the loss of a group's own culture, leading to either a state of cultural "disorganization" or replacement by someone else's culture.

Such assumptions overlook the fact that groups and societies have long influenced one another across permeable and historically constructed, shifting boundaries. Viewing culture as a fixed whole, they also miss a sense of people as active participants in cultural processes. People do not only "have" or "lose" culture; they engage with cultural symbols and scenarios, interpret them, make choices, rework and modify them in coming to terms with the world and pursuing their goals. As individuals negotiate the complexities of social life, the embodied dispositions and culturally shaped desires that come to the forefront in one domain may generate behavior that seems inconsistent with the ideas they express in another context. Furthermore, even in what cosmopolitan readers might view as a relatively homogeneous little village, differences in gender, age, social status, and individual biographies are associated with different patterns of socialization and different versions of a theoretically shared cultural repertoire. Class and ethnic divisions and conflicts within society as a whole imply tensions among different cultural strands and sometimes radically opposed interpretations of society.

Hacienda Runa could sometimes honor the owner of a neighboring hacienda by asking him to sponsor a child's baptism and, at other times, speak of landlords in general as having sold their souls to the devil. It would be a mistake to expect to find "the indigenous view of landlords" or "the indigenous experience of the hacienda," in the sense of a single, all-encompassing, perfectly coherent view. The same is true of "the indigenous view of liberation theology."

Instead, what one can expect to find are multiple strands, a repertoire of possibilities, an ongoing dialogue among competing views with varying degrees of coherence and elaboration. This book presents an interpretation of that dialogue in an attempt to understand how Runa have responded to the possibilities open to them under the hacienda and since.

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Reconstructing the past from oral accounts gathered decades later is a tricky matter, and even more so when one is attempting to reconstruct not only events but meanings, not only what people now say about the past but the way people thought about their lives in the past. Memories are not frozen representations of the past but change in a continual dialogue with the present. Tepeyac Bajo elders' anxieties about respect today, for example, shape the ways they talk about respect in the hacienda era. At one level, this book is all about the present: it reports how former hacienda residents remember the hacienda today. Some of my colleagues have gone further, to suggest that a study like this can only be about the present—that oral memory is too oriented to contemporary contexts to serve as genuine evidence about what the past was "really" like.

My response is that anthropologists with access to oral histories have a responsibility to the past, especially when those oral accounts concern institutions and transformations of major historical import, such as haciendas and their demise. Very few mid-twentieth century anthropologists were able to gain access and carry out fieldwork on functioning haciendas. The few full-length ethnographies of Andean haciendas on the eve of or during agrarian reform do provide some rich material on social structures, land and labor, and other matters (Crespi 1968; Mangin 1954; Skar 1981). Oriented by theoretical concerns and ethnographic conventions different from those that shape this study, however, they rarely offer direct quotations of hacienda residents' own words or a close sense of differently positioned residents' perspectives and subjective experience.

Along with these few contemporary ethnographies and retrospective oral accounts of the sort I gathered, written records are the other main source of information on haciendas. Unfortunately, peasants on haciendas could rarely write. Documents almost always reveal the perspectives and concerns of elites more directly than those of peasants or other groups that anthropologists have traditionally worked with.

I do cite archival documents extensively in some parts of this book. Yet, written records must be interpreted with as much caution as other sorts of evidence. This point was brought home to me forcefully when I read some pages of an old hacienda account book to the oldest living Monjas Corral resident, José María Pillajo, in 1995. Tayta José reacted angrily to the steward's claim that he had lent money and sold meat on credit at laborers' request. These were lies that bosses used to cheat the laborers, he said.

While hacienda residents mainly show up in judicial archives and estate records in their role as laborers, oral accounts allow us to place the landlord-laborer relationship in the broader context of residents' whole social and cultural world. To rule these accounts out categorically as evidence about the past would unnecessarily put a severe limitation on our understanding. Anthropologists who live with the subjects of oral accounts are in a position to assess how current circumstances shape those accounts and discern how the accounts still speak about the past. I do not mean to brush aside the difficulties of this endeavor but mean only to say that those difficulties are worth confronting.

One strategy I have used in interpreting oral accounts is to pay close attention to the nuances of language for clues as to how perspectives from different historical periods are embedded within an account. In interviewing informants, I took care to ask what they remembered their elders and other hacienda residents saying as well as asking about their own experiences. I use and compare multiple accounts from different informants who vary in their perspectives, gender, current religious outlook, age, and other features. I think of this as a kind of triangulation: we gain a better sense of a point distant in time by viewing it from different angles.

Finally, a holistic approach to the hacienda—that is, an approach that attempts to grasp hacienda society as a complex set of relationships, not just the landlord-laborer relationship, and that places that relationship within a broad cultural framework—yields a rich sense of context. Combined with an ethnographic examination of the present, that sense of context can help in assessing how oral accounts reflect both past and present. In this book I discuss posthacienda changes and the contemporary role of memories and analyze the hacienda, so readers themselves can make that assessment. All that said, even the ethnography of the present produces uncertain and partial knowledge at best, as postmodernists have stressed. One can only try.

Autonomy, Resistance, and Hegemony

In the course of this study, I engage successively and jointly with three overarching themes: autonomy, resistance (together with the related concept of reciprocity), and hegemony. These themes are ultimately intertwined, but each one emerges out of a distinct body of ethnographic and theoretical literature and offers a distinct angle on the hacienda and its aftermath.

Autonomy

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, scholarship on Latin American haciendas tended to emphasize peons' dependence and lack of autonomy vis-à-vis their landlord. Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz set the tone in a classic article analyzing haciendas and plantations ([1957] 1977). Wolf and Mintz distinguished the two types primarily as a matter of their access to markets and capital: hacienda landlords used limited capital to supply small-scale markets, whereas plantations were more capital intensive and supplied large-scale (often European) markets. As a result of their limited capital and markets, haciendas could not pay sufficient wages to attract and retain laborers; instead, they relied on a series of "binding mechanisms." These included monopolizing landownership to deprive peasants of alternatives, granting laborers access to land and other resources they could use to subsist on, indebting them, developing relationships of mutual service, and reinforcing all these bonds through coercion. Workers became psychologically as well as economically dependent on the landlord, a symbolic "father" who disbursed "favors" to his "children" and "mediate[d] between them and the outside world." Only in passing did Wolf and Mintz acknowledge horizontal "relationships which spring up among the hacienda workers," giving these relationships no analytic attention, in sharp contrast to the consciousness of common condition, marital alliances, ritual kinship, and union organization they recognized among plantation workers ([1957] 1977:41-44, 57-58; see also Keith 1977).

In research on Andean haciendas, a geometric image crystallized a similar view: the "open triangle," or "triangle without a base" (see Figure 1). With the landlord at the top, the vertical legs of the triangle represent his relationship with individual peasants. The missing base of the triangle represents the absence of horizontal relationships among peasants, both within the estate and beyond its boundaries. Deprived of any autonomy, they competed with each other for the landlord's favor (see Thurner's review of this literature, 1993:43-44).

Some scholars writing in the 1960s and the 1970s were especially interested in the rise of peasant leagues and unions. They understood the base of the triangle to refer specifically to formal organizations that enhanced class solidarity and used the model to conceptualize "political mobilization" where such organizations had previously been absent, not to deny the existence of informal horizontal relationships (e.g., Tullis 1970; Whyte and Alberti 1976).

Nonetheless, especially as combined with Wolf and Mintz's model, the image easily lent itself to a view of hacienda peasants' (premobilization) social life as emptied and flattened under the weight of landlord domination. If one imagines the landlord as holding all power and control over resources, nothing seems left that could have animated horizontal social relationships—let alone any autonomous vertical relationships among peasants. A more recent Freudian analysis of paternalism on Cuzco-area haciendas based on these models exemplifies this view (Anrup 1990). While stressing that peons referred to the landlord as tayta, or "father," the study makes no attempt to explore hacienda residents' family dynamics and their relationship to other taytas besides the landlord. Tayta is actually an everyday term of respect among Runa, but the author appears to assume that only their relationship with the landlord was psychologically significant.

Certainly, indigenous political history in areas of hacienda domination can be summarized as a loss of local political autonomy and authority and only very recent recovery. In much of highland Ecuador, the position of native chiefs became so compromised under Spanish rule and communal autonomy so vitiated that indigenous commoners fled to haciendas as a better alternative. It was extremely difficult for them, as hacienda peons, to organize themselves collectively and openly without the landlord's approval. Only in the twentieth century did former hacienda communities like Tepeyac Bajo gain legal and territorial autonomy, and with it the ability to pursue their collective interests routinely in direct negotiations with other organizations and the state.

Yet, when we look more closely at indigenous people's lives on haciendas, another dimension emerges. Galo Ramón has shown that, as people resettled on haciendas, they re-created a web of social ties and a zone of partial autonomy (1987). Wolf and Mintz viewed peasants' need for land as binding them to the landlord, but hacienda residents' rights to use farmland and pastures formed the material basis for an autonomous economic and social life. In some areas—though I would not say this of twentieth-century Pangor haciendas—landlords' control over land and labor was rather tenuous; thus, Juan Martínez Alier could characterize "the history of haciendas" as "the history of how landowners attempted to get something out of the Indians who were occupying hacienda lands" (1977:142; see also Webster 1981). Large upland pastoral haciendas found it especially difficult to control their scattered and mobile labor force of herders (Maltby 1980), but as we shall see, farming as well as herding could sustain autonomous social networks.

Hacienda residents parlayed their access to hacienda resources into relationships of exchange and mutual aid with peasants in neighboring communities—sometimes to landlords' dismay, as when hacienda residents incorporated neighbors' animals into their own flocks on hacienda pastures (Guerrero 1991:279-285; Mallon 1983:77-78; Martínez Alier 1977). Residents' kinship ties and compadrazgo (ritual kinship) within and beyond the estate counterbalanced their subordination to the landlord (Crespi 1968:95-120, 205, 315-373; Guerrero 1991:162-170). As for hacienda peons' debt to the estate, another one of Wolf and Mintz's "binding mechanisms," Bauer (1979), Ramón Valarezo (1987), and Guerrero (1991) interpret it less as a sign of their bondage than of their ability to pressure landlords into disbursing money and goods. These reinterpretations add up to a picture of a much more vital, self-assertive, and autonomous social world among hacienda residents than that suggested by the classic images of debt peonage, binding mechanisms, paternalism, and a triangle without a base (see also Thurner 1993). Orlove and Custred, emphasizing the flexibility and range of links among households, put it this way: "[P]easants in the Andes create their world rather than passively and impotently inheriting a tragic past that offers them no choice but to continue it" (1980:54).

I already knew that Pangor Runa maintained wide-ranging networks of mutual aid and exchange before I ever went to Pangor. I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1980s in San Ramón,5 a mestizo village on the other side of a mountain range from Pangor. Villagers there warmly recalled old practices of mutual visiting and exchange between the two regions and Pangoreños' occasional participation in the maize (corn) harvest. My research in Pangor confirmed the economic and cultural significance of these ties and others for Pangor hacienda residents. Hacienda Runa constructed a richly meaningful social world on and beyond their estates, based on both horizontal ties among peers and asymmetrical and vertical relationships structured by kinship, age, gender, and fiesta sponsorship. Within this social world, they sustained a critical understanding of the hacienda, exerted pressure from below on Runa overseers, and sometimes found support in conflicts with landlords and their agents.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the autonomy of Runa social and cultural life or to idealize it as a realm of pure solidarity, insulated from larger structures of oppression. Landlords and hacienda administrators regulated relations among neighbors, spouses, and different generations within the resident community. They also supported and made use of the fiesta system and the authority relations associated with it. The complexity of Runa social life thus provided openings for cultural influences across ethnic and class boundaries.

While scholarship oriented by concepts of paternalism and the open triangle tended to overlook everyday social ties among peasants and, thus, to underestimate the autonomy and vitality of their social world, it correctly recognized that the absence of formal organization weakened peasants' autonomy and ability to pursue their collective interests. Informal social networks helped sustain everyday, spontaneous resistance, but communal structures or class-based organizations could build local unity, link peasants to more encompassing levels of organization, facilitate flows of information about larger political contexts, and channel struggles over hacienda working conditions or land reform in qualitatively different ways. Monjas Corral residents seem to have kept their distance from outside organizations during the initial stages of agrarian reform—not because of any dependency on paternalistic overlords but because of understandable suspicions. Had they developed and used ties to such organizations to gain a better understanding of provincial and national political processes, they might well have come through the land reform period with title to a larger and better portion of the former estate than they ended up with.

In the course of agrarian reform, the people of Monjas Corral, like other former hacienda residents all over the highlands, did constitute themselves as a legally recognized community. Today, they meet in a weekly assembly to discuss matters of common interest and work together one or two days a week maintaining village paths, clearing irrigation ditches, and planting potatoes or trees on communal land. Along with thousands of similar highland communities, they participate in parish-level, provincial, and national federations. These organizations make up the strongest mass-based social movement in Ecuador and perhaps the strongest indigenous movement in Latin America.

Leaders of the national indigenous confederation CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador) called for indigenous people around the country to mobilize in June 1990 in support of a series of demands on the government concerning land, economic policy, indigenous cultural rights, and other issues. Pangor Runa gathered in village assemblies and intervillage meetings and talked about their long history of oppression and the president's refusal to meet with their national leaders. They responded by blocking the highway that runs through the parish, holding their products from town markets, and joining in a mass demonstration in the provincial capital. Hundreds of thousands of other indigenous people staged similar actions in other highland regions, essentially shutting down the country for a week. This first national indigenous levantamiento, or "uprising," marked the emergence of the indigenous movement as a force that presidents ignore at their peril.

This book does not delve into the development of this national movement and its struggles since 1990 (see Almeida et al. 1992; Pallares 2002). Instead, it offers a long-term historical context and some insights into the local-level dramas that underpin the movement. Pangor Runa's bitter memories of racial oppression and economic exploitation under the hacienda sharpen their perspective on current inequalities and help fuel their commitment to organized, collective struggle. Trying to make sense of their continued experience of poverty and racism after the demise of the hacienda, they sometimes say things like, "We are still oppressed [llakichishka]; only now instead of the hacienda, they oppress us through inflation, low prices for our products, bad government, the whole economic system."

The particular struggles have changed, and so have the organizational forms through which Pangor's indigenous people fight back. Still, contemporary villagers draw on some organizational forms and cultural practices inherited from the hacienda, reworking and adapting these inherited forms to negotiate intravillage tensions, strengthen communal authority, and reinforce ethnic solidarity. As members of an official community, they certainly maintain an expanded autonomy and more direct engagement with the state and other institutions as compared with the hacienda period. Then, people relied on informal social networks to confront the harsh conditions of hacienda life. Now, they also look to formal organizations to defend their interests in issues ranging from local utilities projects or cattle rustling to national economic policies or proposals for a free-trade area of the Americas.

Resistance and Reciprocity

During my work as a Peace Corps volunteer in San Ramón, I was struck by the continual flows of small gifts I saw among kin and neighbors and the strong obligation that people seemed to feel to respond to others' material needs and desires. This strong sense of obligation sometimes clashed with my own assumptions—rooted in my upbringing in a very individualistic, capitalist society—that people are obligated to fulfill only commitments they have freely chosen. As a beginning graduate student in the mid-1980s, I learned that this sort of gift giving and sense of obligation was a classic theme in anthropology, usually treated under the concept of "reciprocity," since gifts tend to flow back and forth and imply mutual obligation (Mauss 1990; Sahlins 1972).

I also learned that reciprocity was a very prominent theme in Andeanist anthropology. In addition to looking at more or less symmetric exchanges among social equals, scholars had analyzed how the Inca state gave gifts to conquered peoples and their lords to draw them into unequal relationships. These relationships added up to a system of redistribution, meaning that "gifts" and services flowed into and out from a central point, in this case, the state (Murra 1962, 1978). Some Andeanists (e.g., Wachtel 1977:83) claimed that these gifts kept Inca subjects from experiencing the relationship as exploitative. Similarly, contemporary wealthy peasants used asymmetric reciprocity to legitimate the exploitation of poorer peasants, as hacienda landlords did to legitimate the exploitation of hacienda laborers (see, e.g., Orlove 1974).

This work on reciprocity and redistribution as legitimation struck me as overlooking something that loomed large in my own experience. I had heard over and over again from sharecroppers in San Ramón about exploitative sharecropping arrangements that they had to negotiate and maintain through the ostensible exchange of "favors" and "gifts." They described these arrangements as a denial and a perversion of reciprocity. The contrast between the everyday flow of gifts and favors among poorer peasants and what they viewed as the greediness, stinginess, and lack of human consideration on the part of wealthier villagers led them to develop a complex moral critique of the "rich" that associated their behavior, ultimately, with the devil. If public appearances of reciprocity among rich and poor "masked" domination (Orlove 1974:316), the poor that I knew did not seem in any way taken in by the disguise but only more embittered by it.

My teachers eventually directed me to the work of James Scott, a political scientist specializing in Southeast Asia. In fieldwork in a Malaysian village, Scott found a gap similar to what I observed in San Ramón between official representations and the critical discourses that subordinates develop in autonomous social spaces away from their overlords' gaze (1985). Reviewing accounts from around the world, he argues that such gaps were the normal condition of colonial, slaveholding, and peasant societies (1990). Scott also shows that peasants' attachment to a "moral economy" rooted in reciprocity and guaranteeing basic subsistence has often generated resistance to the claims of landlords and the state. Focusing at first on open rebellions (1976), he later turned his attention to everyday forms of covert, often anonymous, resistance (1985).

Scott defines resistance as "act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims... made on that class by superordinate classes... or to advance its own claims... vis-‡-vis those superordinate classes." He argues that repression makes open, collective resistance rare, and the general absence of such collective resistance has misled scholars into viewing peasants as passively accepting their condition. Covert, individual acts of resistance are less risky, and their ubiquity is a better guide to peasant attitudes. Furthermore, unorganized, individual, but ubiquitous acts of resistance have sometimes had powerful historical consequences. For these reasons, Scott's definition of resistance includes "both individual and collective acts." He also makes clear that his definition encompasses "ideological resistance that challenge[s] the dominant definition of the situation and assert[s] different standards of justice and equity," such as criticism of elite individuals' moral character and behavior (1985:290; original emphasis). While Scott's definition and his work on resistance focus on class relations, he considers issues of dignity and respect as well as control over labor and surplus production to be central to those relations (1985:236-240; idem 1990:22-23).

Scott's first two books focus on peasant resistance to the erosion of a traditional "moral economy" as agriculture becomes commercialized and market-oriented landlords intensify their demands on peasants or ignore customary obligations of paternalistic care. Erick Langer has found cases of Andean haciendas that seem to fit this scheme. A wave of agrarian capitalism swept over Latin America beginning in the late nineteenth century, and peasants in Chuquisaca, Bolivia, staged strikes in response to entrepreneurial landlords' attempts to reduce their traditional prerogatives (Langer 1985, 1989). On the other hand, an overly mechanical application of Scott's (1976) model risks oversimplifying Andean history by dividing it neatly into "before" and "after" commercialization and idealizing an earlier period of supposed harmony among landlords and peasants. Andean peasants have, in fact, suffered a series of successive waves or cycles of state impositions since the Incas and of commercialization since the sixteenth century (Larson 1991).

I did find considerable resentment toward landlords and resistance on the part of Monjas Corral residents. Unfortunately, the limited evidence available concerning particular landlords' economic strategies and temporal fluctuations in resistance allows only a tentative assessment of whether residents were responding to an erosion of the moral economy associated with broader historical trends. The formal abolition of debt peonage in 1918—a liberal government measure to "modernize" labor relations and free up labor for the booming lowlands export economy—may have indirectly led Monjas Corral renters to treat laborers less "generously." In addition, several renters put laborers to work on capital improvements to the estate or increased agricultural production. At least one drafted laborers into service on another commercial enterprise off the estate. All of these measures may have exemplified general regional tendencies associated with closer ties to lowlands markets, and they could have intensified tensions over renters' labor demands.

On the other hand, notably lacking in the accounts I gathered in the 1990s was any memory of an earlier period when landlords (owners or renters) were more generous, any subjective sense of the erosion of an earlier moral economy. Former hacienda residents did have clear ideas about how decent landlords should have behaved and a well-developed critical discourse about how landlords generally violated those expectations. In part, as Scott (1976) suggests, their expectations arose from the insecurity of peasant agriculture and peasants' reliance on reciprocity and redistribution as social insurance. In part, as Scott also suggests, they were associated with universal human needs for respect and dignity (1985, 1990), and as Mauss (1990) suggests, with the common notion that labor services are a kind of gift. Landlords themselves found it a useful strategy occasionally to display their generosity, thereby reinforcing the expectations that they violated at other times (see Scott 1985:335-340).

Finally, Runa's moral expectations and their critique of landlords arose from the particular ways they developed and maintained a moral economy and a cosmology (an understanding of the universe) founded on reciprocity in their social, economic, and religious life. A principal objective of Part Two of this book is developing a rich understanding of this critique and its grounding in everyday life and cosmology.

In the wave of resistance studies Scott's work helped inspire, social scientists have applied the concept of resistance to many sorts of relations beyond class, including gender, race, and ethnic difference. Yet, relations structured by different axes often crosscut one another in complex ways that make resistance itself ambiguous and ambivalent. As Abu-Lughod notes, "resisting at one level may catch people up [in webs of power] at other levels" (1990:53). This leads us to the related question of hegemony, the third general theme that runs through this book.

Hegemony

Broadly, the question of hegemony concerns whether and how people come to participate in, accept, and support structures or systems of rule, inequality, and exploitation. The concept of hegemony was developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and the 1930s in his attempts to understand the stability of capitalism in Western Europe and lay the theoretical bases for an effective revolutionary strategy (1971). Since the 1970s, anthropologists and others have widely adapted the concept to analyze the relationship between culture and power in many other contexts.

What Gramsci meant by "hegemony" is, at times, uncertain and variable (Anderson 1976-1977), and scholars differ in the ways they have interpreted and adapted the term. In one meaning, hegemony refers to the intellectual and moral leadership that a ruling group exercises over allied groups or classes. These groups identify with and accept the prestige, values, and outlook of the leading group, consenting to its leadership and joining it in a ruling coalition, or "hegemonic bloc." Hegemony in this sense is contrasted with the domination that rulers exercise over subordinate classes through coercion (see, e.g., Kurtz 1996).

Scholars have also commonly used the term hegemony to refer to the role of ideas, meanings, and culture throughout society, and especially among subordinate classes, in perpetuating inequality. Used in this sense, the term is often qualified as "ideological" or "cultural" hegemony and is close to "false consciousness" and "mystification," which refer to ideas that blind people to their real class interests. The concept of ideological hegemony suggests that ruling groups and the "traditional intellectuals" who serve them promulgate ideas that lead subordinates to "consent" to the existing order in some sense. Hacienda-era priests, for example, preached obedience to authority, and their sermons influenced Runa's worldview. Likewise, indigenous people seem to have internalized some racist associations between European physical features and inherent superiority and beauty. Nonetheless, I argue that the concept of ideological hegemony, like false consciousness, focuses too narrowly on ideas alone and leads to an unhelpful analytic separation between "what people believe and value" and "what society is really like."

Thus, I follow others (Hall 1988; Mitchell 1990; Roseberry 1994) in understanding "hegemony" as a deeply material and social as well as a cultural concept. In this sense, hegemony refers to practices, relationships, and meanings that establish or maintain domination on a broader basis than simple coercion while not precluding coercion. The great advantage of the term thus is that it invites us to consider not simply ideas and meanings but ideas in practice. It directs our attention to patterns of alliance and division among social classes as well as the ideas and identities that shape and reflect those patterns, and to material transactions together with the way people interpret those transactions as fair or unjust.6

Note that this definition does not imply the absence of any conflict. Indeed, Roseberry (1994) has written of hegemony as providing a "language of contention," a framework within which conflicts are understood and pursued. The definition does suggest that hegemony shapes conflicts in ways that ultimately stabilize inequality.

Here I come back to reciprocity, redistribution, and moral economy. For all the endemic conflict over levels of redistribution and labor demands, did hacienda landlords gain a measure of acquiescence on the part of residents through displays of "generosity"? Scott makes several points that are pertinent here: "[T]he euphemization of property relations... is always the focus of symbolic manipulation, struggle, and conflict. We must not view these patterns as merely a ploy, a mystification, as dust thrown in the eyes of subordinate classes" (1985:308-309; original emphasis). A "hegemonic ideology," he goes on, should not be seen as created and promulgated purely from the top down; "it is always the creation of prior struggle and compromises that are continually being tested and modified" (1985:336n). Moreover, these struggles and compromises have a material dimension, entailing real concessions on the part of the elite. "The struggle of subordinate classes, in other words, helps determine what kind of compromise will make consent possible" (1985:338n).

Scott develops these points in the course of an argument largely directed against the concept of hegemony, which he interprets in purely ideological terms. However, they are compatible with a broader concept of hegemony that encompasses social processes, conflicts, and material concessions. I do not claim that hacienda landlords secured a very strong hegemony at the level of relations of production and exchange; resentments were endemic and coercion ever-present. It appears to have been very difficult for landlords and laborers to reach a stable compromise both sides could live with. Having cautioned earlier against oversimplified constructions of "the indigenous experience of the hacienda," however, I do not want to limit the picture to resentments, resistance, and coercion. As Scott suggests, landlords faced with a recalcitrant labor force sometimes made material concessions. To the extent they did so, those concessions sometimes reduced friction and resistance. Some hacienda residents probably did occasionally experience landlords as generous and viewed some features of the hacienda system as beneficial, such as access to abundant land on Monjas Corral.

Along with redistribution and reciprocity, another, less often described, dimension of social relationships in the Andes is what I call the "respect complex." This is a set of understandings, practices, and relationships centered around moral regulation, elder-junior hierarchies, and notions of "respect." This term, borrowed from Spanish into Quichua as respeto (noun) and respetana (verb), pervades oral accounts of the hacienda era. Young couples gained respect by sponsoring fiestas under the guidance of Runa elders who were often hacienda overseers. Elders and hacienda authorities worked together to maintain moral order, resolve conflicts, and instill respect in their juniors through ritual discipline. In an Easter ritual of confession and purification, for example, overseers and elders gave their subordinates three lashes "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" and then blessed them. Force and religious meanings were intimately intertwined in local understandings of how ritual discipline reshaped subjectivities.

Most scholars writing on power and domination, whether within a Gramscian framework or otherwise, treat coercion and persuasion as opposite and interchangeable ways rulers can gain subordinates' compliance. This includes Scott, in his influential model distinguishing the "public transcripts" that subordinates perform under duress from their "hidden transcripts" of dissent and resistance; Scott argues that the coercion underlying the public performance precludes any true persuasion (1990). The respect complex forces a reconsideration of such oppositions. Rather than approaching persuasion and coercion as separate strategies, I find it more fruitful to explore their interrelation. This requires examining the politics of discipline associated with the labor regime together with discipline that regulated relationships among Runa themselves. This approach reveals respeto as simultaneously an aspect of hacienda hegemony, a strand in Runa culture and social relations, and a "language of contention" between hacienda bosses and variously positioned hacienda residents.

As the discussions in the village chapel my first week in Tepeyac Bajo indicated, respeto remains a language of contention, taken up and reworked in new struggles and projects. Indigenous Catholic activists and mestizo priests appeal to respect for elders to argue for ethnic and religious loyalty. Activists and ordinary villagers draw on memories of hacienda-era discipline in developing models of community authority and "indigenous law." Villagers of different generations and stances invoke respect in varying ways as they respond to the Bible and liberation theology. Out of this complex interaction between past and present, a distinctive local modernity is emerging.

***

These approaches to autonomy, resistance, and hegemony will help us see how indigenous people have actively engaged with landlords, priests, the state, and others in ways that have both reshaped and been shaped by indigenous culture, society, and identity. Indigenous people have not been passively dominated or unilaterally "awakened" by stronger outside forces. They have often found ways to press their own agendas and resisted the demands and projects of others at odds with those agendas. Yet, they have not only resisted external forces, and especially not as a monolithic group. Indigenous people have interacted with others in complexly differentiated ways influenced by age, gender, and social status within their communities. These differences have allowed for loyalties as well as resentments toward nonindigenous others, cooperation as well as resistance, and cultural flows across ethnic boundaries.

Plan of the Book

Chapter 2 completes this introductory part of the book by describing Pangor and its history from pre-Inca times. To dispel images of timeless Indians, this chapter stresses the ways indigenous people have participated in regional history and been shaped by it. I consider how hacienda formation, migration, and ethnic transformation in Pangor may have influenced local historical consciousness. Finally, the chapter assesses how church ownership of Monjas Corral, renters' strategies, and regional and national political and economic history affected life on the estate.

Parts Two and Three focus on the hacienda era. The three chapters in Part Two, "Society and Resistance," emphasize the autonomy of hacienda residents' social life, their critical perspective toward landlords, and their resistance. Chapter 3 uses the image of a triangle with a base as a first approximation to survey hacienda social relations, both vertical and horizontal. Chapter 4 focuses on the ritual expression of reciprocity in religious fiestas and agricultural rites, showing how these practices generated both an implicit theology of agricultural production and a hierarchy of authority and respect. Chapter 5 examines how Runa applied expectations of reciprocity in judging and responding to landlords' behavior.

Part Three explores respect and authority, ritual discipline, and the contested meanings of violence on the hacienda. Chapter 6 presents two life histories as an entrée into individual attitudes and strategic postures toward hacienda authority. Chapter 7 analyzes the respect complex, critiques Scott's (1990) model of domination and hidden transcripts, and develops an alternative approach to hegemony.

Finally, Part Four, "The Legacy of the Hacienda," brings the story up to the beginning of the twenty-first century with an emphasis on how the hacienda past continues to inform the present. Chapter 8 explores the ambivalent relationship between villagers and the Catholic Church during the agrarian reform, questioning the common narrative according to which indigenous peasants were passive until liberation theology opened their eyes. This chapter also describes transformations in local political organization and religious life in the aftermath of land reform. Finally, in Chapter 9, I show how villagers' relationship with the past and with the Catholic Church influences contemporary local religion, community politics, and ethnic revitalization.

Translations, Names, and Citation Conventions

In general, I try to give fairly close, conservative translations, and I indicate even small omissions with ellipses. The translations are somewhat freer and looser—though maybe more faithful to the spirit of the original in some ways—in the life histories in Chapter 6. I provide Quichua or Spanish words in parentheses or brackets when the original wording is ambiguous, difficult to translate, or of special interest for Andeanists. Some fuller citations, Quichua texts of many citations, and discussions of specific translation issues may be found in Lyons (1994b).

Representing speech on paper is a challenge. Rhythm, tone, and patterns of repetitive elaboration, even pauses and "ums" and "ahs," carry a good deal of meaning in a face-to-face context, but these are either difficult to convey on paper or tiresome to the reader. Talk is often more like poetry than like prose—the distinction itself is an artifact of Western literary tradition—and at times I follow Tedlock's suggestion of using poetry-style broken lines and other devices (1983:3-61). I also indicate pauses by repeated commas—two (,,) for brief pauses, three (,,,) for somewhat longer pauses. I reserve the ellipsis (. . .) for places where I have cut words.

Spanish and Quichua diminutives pervade rural highland Ecuadorian speech. The Spanish diminutive, frequently used in Quichua as well, is the suffix -ito or -ita. The Quichua diminutive is wawa, which as a noun means "baby" or "child." In some cases, I retain the original words in diminutive; in others, I use "little" (e.g., taytito as "little father"). The use of "little" may sometimes strike the reader as odd; it should be understood as expressing a sort of affectionate regard or deference. Where four or five diminutives occur in rapid succession, I do not feel compelled to translate every one; the repeated diminutive would call undue attention to something that is locally unremarkable.

To make the etymology clear, I generally retain the Spanish spelling of loan words used in Quichua. This does not mean that these words are not "really" Quichua. Some of them have evidently been in the language for centuries, as attested by the retention of an /h/ in some loan words whose h has become silent in modern Spanish. At least from the speaker's point of view, such words are just as much a part of the mother tongue as any words from the native pre-Inca Puruhá language that entered local Quichua centuries ago and whose origin is long forgotten.

Yet, this is not necessarily the case for every Spanish word incorporated into Quichua conversation. Unlike Puruhá, Spanish is a living language and a part of Quichua speakers' social environment, and Quichua speakers do sometimes switch back and forth between Quichua and Spanish. Many Latin Americanists write every Spanish word incorporated into the speech of indigenous language speakers according to the orthographic conventions of the indigenous language, implying that the word is being used as a word in the indigenous language, not Spanish. This practice may be more faithful to speakers' pronunciation, but it seems to me to suggest a more closed linguistic environment than may be the case. Here, it would imply that every Spanish-origin word is thoroughly "Quichuacized," that Quichua speakers think of it as only a Quichua word with no connection to Spanish. In other words, this convention seems to erect an artificial boundary, sealing off the two languages from each other despite the loans, in a way that misrepresents the ethnographic reality. A Quichua speaker using a Spanish-origin word may be simultaneously speaking Quichua and Spanish, in the sense that the word's meanings for speaker and addressee are shaped by prior experiences of its use in both Quichua and Spanish conversations. Since cultural influences across ethnic boundaries are part of my argument, I choose to write Spanish-origin words in a way that does not obscure their origin.

Otherwise, my orthographic conventions for Quichua are a compromise between a faithful representation of local Pangor or Chimborazo forms and accessibility to the reader. I adopt the k and w from the current standardized Quichua alphabet, except for words with a long history of being spelled in other ways in Spanish-language documents and scholarship, such as huasicama (not wasikama).

The phonetic reading of letters used is generally similar to standard Latin American Spanish, with the following modifications:

• g—Always hard, as in English 'get'. E.g., kangi.
• h—At the beginning of some Spanish loan words where it is now silent such as hacienda, habas, and horno, pronounced in Quichua like an English h.
• k—When followed by a vowel, same as in English. At the end of words or before another consonant, somewhere between a velar Spanish j sound and an English k; occasionally voiced. E.g., ñukanchik, shamukpi, chairik.
• kh—An often strongly aspirated k sound, in khipu 'overseer'.
• ll—As in Ecuadorian highland Spanish, pronounced like the s in the English leisure.
• r—As in Ecuadorian rural highland Spanish, intermediate between a trill and the highland ll.
• s—Like the Spanish or English unvoiced s, with the exception of some loan words, where it is voiced in Quichua as /z/ (e.g., casi, casarana [~casarse], casuna [~hacer caso]).
• sh—As in English.
• ts—As in English tsetse.
• w—As in English; the diphthong aw is pronounced like ow in the English cow.
• z—As in English.

Stress in Quichua falls on the penultimate syllable of the word, unless otherwise indicated by an accent mark.

For readers who do not speak Spanish, the pronunciation of the most important place names used here is roughly as follows:

• Monjas Corral: Moan-hahss Core-all
• Tepeyac Bajo: Teh-pay-yoc Bah-ho
• Pangor: Pahn-gore
• Chimborazo: Chim-bore-ahss-so

Unless otherwise specified, informants named in this book should be assumed to be former Monjas Corral residents. Following my informants' wishes, I generally use the true names of individuals and communities. The exceptions are Andrés Castillo, Armando Guerrero, José Krueger, María Lema, Ignacio Lara, Lorena López, and Agustín Paca.

One final note on my citation conventions. I cite archival documents with an asterisk and an abbreviated title and date, for example, "*Gallegos-Barba 1873," and list these documents in a separate section of the Bibliography under these abbreviated titles.