How to Fight Like an Indian

On Sunday, August 16, 1931, Ecuador’s liberal daily newspaper El Día blared a large headline that read “An Indigenous mass led by a senator and two communist comrades fall on Cayambe in a war against whites.” According to the reporter, the communist leaders Ricardo Paredes and Luis F. Chávez along with the socialist Senator Luis Maldonado had mobilized 500 members of the Juan Montalvo peasant syndicate to march on the cantonal urban center. At 2pm, the group entered the city in formation with women and children in the lead carrying a red banner with a hammer and sickle and chanting death to whites and the government. Only ten minutes later, about thirty of these Indigenous activists, including men, women, and children, were being held in the dungeons of the city’s jail, some with open wounds on their heads. Local authorities had rallied the local mestizo population to fight back to protect the town from an attack by hostile Indian masses. According to Senator Maldonado, however, the three were part of a peaceful delegation to study ongoing land disputes and the local political authorities had stirred up the unrest. While politicians debated competing narratives of what exactly had transpired, Indigenous defendants remained in prison in Cayambe and faced fines that they could not possibly pay.

This essay will examine how a marginalized Indigenous peasantry reached out to sympathetic urban allies to place what had previously been invisible local economic and political struggles squarely in the center of the national consciousness. In this manner, even though members of rural Indigenous communities did not enjoy citizenship rights they effectively entered directly into national debates over what kind of political economy should be developed in the country.