Challenging Convivial Imaginations: Ancestral Pueblos’ Contestations to Fundamental Education in Ecuador

• In Event: Colonialism, Conviviality, and Othering: An International Perspective

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
During the 1960s–1970s in Ecuador, Indigenous and peasant movements challenged the descriptions of rural life in government education programmes while offering a space of transculture. As Sylvia Wynter proposes it, such space allows to narrate human life with sensibilities non-aligned with normalised cultural particularities of the ideal tacit ‘we’ in national(ised) stories. This text engages with the convivial movements between narratives and counternarratives about rural lives and ways of living. It argues that rural can be thought as a genre and ruralness as a practice of existence, which disrupt overdetermining notions of what counts as dignified life, valid political demands, and possible futures. The objective of this presentations is to discuss how such disruptions are an exercise of conviviality where Indigenous and racialized peoples challenge a living together under rules and practices that demand their assimilation or erasure. This implies seeing Ancestral pueblos’ luchas (fights) as proposals for coexistence through social change.

Theoretical Framework & Modes of Inquiry
Following Sylvia Wynter’s (2003, 2015) ideas on ‘science of the word’, the analysis in this text approaches history as a social narration of stories and focuses on the bilingual Kichwa/Spanish newspaper Jatari Campesino (Rise Peasant). The newspaper stemmed from the work of radio schools and was published between 1965 and 1984. The physical copies of most of the numbers of the newspaper can be found in the Andean Center of Solidarity and the Riobamba’s diocesan archives. To historise a poem in Jatari Campesino’s issue of November 1965, I draw on primary documentation produced by the Ecuadorian Andean Mission, Ecuador’s Ministry of Education, The Alliance for Progress, CREFAL, and UNESCO – borrowed from the library of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture and the Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison –, and on three personal communications with people associated to radio schools in the Ecuadorian Highlands. I also draw on secondary sources produced by historians of the region.

This presentation looks at how the poem The Bread of Life, published in the bilingual Kichwa/Spanish newspaper Jatari Campesino, pushed back against the logics of ‘bettering’ lives offered by Fundamental Education and Community Development projects. These were projects espoused by the Ecuadorian Government and UNESCO and funded by the Alliance for Progress, among other foreign aid agencies. The poem analysed is an example of the narration of stories that escaped the grid of modernization. It narrates rural as ‘the bread of life’ (Jatari Campesino 1965), rather than a problematic, backward space and life.

Significance
This text opens the door to the conversations between the (hi)story told and the excess of content that gives foundation or makes any story possible. The analysis of such conversations is particularly important in Ecuador and other countries with a colonial history because the (hi)story of ‘developing/bettering’ the life of people in rural areas has continuation in current ‘buen vivir/good living’ reforms that appropriate decades of labour and sacrifices of Indigenous, and Afrodescendant communities.

Author

• Gioconda Pamela Coello, University of Wisconsin - Madison