Ecuador The Society and Its Environment
Ceramic currandero (shaman) (Jama-Coaque culture)
PROFOUND REGIONAL, ETHNIC, AND social divisions continued to
characterize Ecuadorian society in the 1980s. The country's three
main geographic regions, differing in their histories and
economies, provided one of these divisions, and there were also
ethnic and social cleavages within the regions. The Oriente
(eastern region) traditionally was a neglected backwater, isolated
geographically and culturally from the rest of the nation. Its
population was limited to dispersed groups of indigenous tropicalforest Indians who lived by slash-and-burn agriculture or hunting
and gathering. European intrusion was limited to the occasional
missionary or trader. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the Oriente
experienced colonization by land-poor peasants from the Sierra
(Andean highlands) and exploration by oil companies. Both
colonization and exploration had a devastating impact on the
indigenous population.
The Sierra, the region of earliest European settlement, was
ruled for most of its history by a narrow rural oligarchy whose
power base lay in the sizeable haciendas they controlled. The
haciendas dominated both social and economic relations. Most of the
population depended to a greater or lesser extent on the largess of
the white elite who controlled land. This elite ruled virtually
without challenge until the mid-twentieth century. Between this
white elite and the mass of Sierra Indians, were the mestizos or
cholos--persons of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. In
values and identity, they were closer to the dominant whites. The
Sierra Indians, who stood at the bottom of the social pyramid, had
very limited opportunities for economic security or social
advancement. Both mestizos and whites regarded Indians as immutably
inferior. The latter's only hope for improvement lay in
assimilating the norms and values of the dominant ethnic groups,
thereby changing ethnic affiliation.
Like the hacendados of the Sierra, the elite of the Costa
(coastal region) also had its roots in agriculture and the control
of land, but its attention focused primarily on export crop
production and commerce. Ethnically more diverse than the Hispanic
elite of the Sierra, the Costa upper class included successful
immigrant families drawn over the years by the region's expanding
economy. Most of Ecuador's blacks, the descendants of the small
numbers of African slaves who came to work on the region's
plantations, were also costeños (residents of the Costa).
The twentieth century saw the rise of an Ecuadorian middle
class whose interests were genuinely distinct from the narrowly
based rural oligarchy, and the demise of the self-contained,
autonomous hacienda. Changes in the hacienda economy created a
mobile, rural-based labor force, and by the end of the 1980s,
society consisted of a small, privileged elite; a more numerous,
diverse, and politically active middle class; and the mass of
impoverished small-scale peasants, artisans, and wage earners. The
middle class transformed Ecuadorian politics.
Like many other Latin American nations, Ecuador had enacted
agrarian reform legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. These laws
brought little substantive improvement in the lives of most
peasants, but rather afforded Costa and Sierra landlords an impetus
and an opportunity to replace their resident and permanent laborers
with temporary workers. In the Sierra this trend, coupled with
increased population pressure on land, continued a pattern of
migration to the Costa and the Oriente that had begun in the 1950s.
The volume of rural-urban migration grew in both the Costa and
Sierra until, in the early 1980s, nearly half of all Ecuadorians
lived in cities.
Data as of 1989
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