Becoming multicultural emblems: The politics and poetics of Quichua language and culture in intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador

This dissertation asks: How, and why, does a politics of indigeneity, especially through intersecting with liberal recognition initiatives, draw from and bring about particular ways of speaking about and in Amerindian languages? Ecuador is revered for having indigenous organizations with unprecedented success. Advances have led to constitutional recognition of the language Quichua in 2008 as a “language of intercultural relations,” as well as the first time in Latin America that 70 indigenous leaders have run an entire school system from inside national-level government offices. This project draws on 25 consecutive months of ethnographic research from 2011 to 2013. Research sites have included the National Directorate of Intercultural Bilingual Education, the coordinating offices of indigenous education in Ecuador’s Ministry of Education; two intercultural bilingual schools; and an indigenous migrant neighborhood in urban Quito. ^ This dissertation examines the interplay between shifting social hierarchies of “indigeneity,” recent waves of liberal multicultural policies, and the politics of speaking in indigenous languages like Quichua. It re-thinks two roles that have long been considered mutually exclusive in the social sciences: being both an upper-level state agent and a director of an indigenous organization. It argues that policies of liberal multiculturalism usefully create spaces that help indigenous individuals achieve certain positions of influence while at the same time promoting particular models of indigenous citizenship, especially external notions that convey indigeneity and Amerindian languages through Western terms as discrete and objectified. It shows how Quichua directors ambivalently promote such ideals across different activity frames like speaking in Quichua at international conferences, or conducting official translations of major laws from Spanish to Quichua. This dissertation offers that the irony of marginalized groups assuming control of an educational system within the state is that by virtue of fulfilling their newly recognized roles of power, they are placed at odds with those whom they represent.