Reimagining the Nation: Community, Difference, and National Identities among Indigenous and Mestizo Provincials in Ecuador

During the late 1980s and 1990s, Andean Ecuador experienced the reconfiguration of national ‘imagined community’, thereby making a new civil society. With the aid of research in rural and urban Cotopaxi province—which comprises self-identified indigenous and mestizo populations—I examine how varied notions of community are expressed at the present time. Evidence from Cotopaxi suggests that senses of community are considerably more ambivalent and uncertain than either social movements or nation-centred analysts recognise. Provincial inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Andes have constituted a number of different ‘routes to community’, utilising the various resources, institutions, and cultural practices available to them, and forging an identity and political agenda from within wider circuits of power, capital, and flows. The recommunalisation of Andean society taking place at ‘local’ spatial scales and in diverse arenas—such as religion, civil associations, consumption, land distribution—has profound implications for the projects of nation building by the state, and the mobilisation around an ethnic politics of CONAIE (the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). Serrano populations formulated a critical political interpretation of the (national) community they comprise, whereas the community of indigenous nationalities offered by CONAIE appears more attractive.