Una Casa sin Tierra

Navigating autonomy and institutional legitimacy in efforts to decolonize and transform higher education

Tiago Bittencourt, María Susana Cervantes

Introduction: Highland University

Since the Waoranis have come to the university, I sit with them and amongst the extra things I tell them is this: “are you coming to the university to graduate in Waorani? And that everyone knows that you are Waorani? Or do you come to infiltrate yourself in the university to learn how white people are born and the things of white people, to learn to become part of the world of the white people”? The answer is obvious, it’s the second (Director, Highland University).

Tucked away in a valley surrounded by the majestic peaks of the Andes is Highland University (pseudonym representative of dominant higher education institutions across the region). Highland is touted as one of the premiere higher education institutions of Ecuador with prohibitive tuition fees for a country with a nominal minimum wage of 450 USD/month. Although largely catering to an upper-middle class and privately educated student body, the university also provides one of the most robust need-based scholarship programs in South America. This includes the Ethnic Diversity Program (EDP), a financial assistance and academic support service program for at-need minoritized students (primarily of Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio^[1] backgrounds) with a proven track-record of academic excellence. The program, which was established in 1993 with 10 students, now consists of approximately 520 students, with an average of 90 new students each year.

Beyond its scope, the EDP is a noteworthy program as its inception occurred within a socio-political moment in which minoritized populations in Ecuador not only experienced systemic forms of discrimination, but also had limited – or, as was the case of Afro-Ecuadorians –, no recognition within official state documents^[2]. It was not until the Constitutional Reform of 2008 under President Rafael Correa´s administration (2007-2017) that racism, restorative reparation, and the recognition of the collective rights of minoritized populations became embedded within the legal framework of the country (Walsh, 2015). Amongst the resolutions emerging from the promulgation of the 2008 Constitution was the Presidential Decree 60 (September, 2009) that slated specific equity-driven measures, such as the required implementation of principles of interculturality within the country´s higher education system, and national affirmative action policies (Di Caudo, 2015).

Although all universities in Ecuador (both public and private) are now required to implement affirmative action policies, the longevity and breadth of programs such as the EDP have allowed Highland to be lauded as a national and regional pioneer. Nonetheless, the university has also been critiqued for failing to effectively engage with primary principles of interculturality, such as the institutional acknowledgement of the country´s intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity. Indeed, a prevailing belief within Highland is that its role is not to disrupt or deconstruct existing hierarchies of knowledge, but rather to provide minoritized students with access to a “culture of power” (Delpit, 2006) for subsequent success in the workforce. As reflected in the quote opening this chapter, under this arrangement, minoritized students would be expected to abandon or at least temporarily suspend their cultural norms in the effort to enact an identity that is better aligned to the practices and values of a predominantly white mestizo^[3] and western-oriented mainstream society. In other words, although framed as beneficial to minoritized students, these expectations contribute to blanqueamento or “whitening” – an ideology inherited from colonialism that strives to distance minoritized populations from their ancestry by instilling an aspiration towards “whiteness” (DeGuzmán, 2017). Thus, expectations rooted in a discourse of blanqueamento reify structures of “epistemological dominance”, in which non-Western knowledge systems and knowledge holders are delegitimized or devalued, if recognized at all (Naepi et al., 2017).

In response to the symbolic and epistemic violence inherent to blanqueamento, numerous scholars have urged for the creation of spaces within institutional settings intent on protecting and nurturing minoritized students’ sense of identity and self-representation. K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa McCarty (2014), scholars of the history of American Indian education in the U.S., refer to these spaces as “zones of sovereignty.” The construction of zones of sovereignty is in response to their earlier work on American Indian boarding schools in the U.S. and the ways in which dominant settler ideas of Indigenous cultures were deemed either safe or dangerous and therefore permitted or punished in schools. Lomawaima and McCarty (2014) envision new zones as engaging with practices of self-determination that resist and creatively respond to processes within institutions that strive to control, domesticate and disenfranchise difference.

Aligned with the concept of “zones of sovereignty” applied to the Highlands context in Ecuador, a group of EDP students and a faculty ally (co-author Maria Susana) established a provisional space within Highland University that is commonly referred to as the Casa de los Saberes (House of Wisdom). Drawing on principles of etnoeducación, education that is mindful of the ethnicities of learners, the Casa de los Saberes was intent on providing minoritized students with the opportunity to engage with what scholars García Salazar and Walsh (2017) refer to as Casa Adentro (house inside/within)—a community stance that draws on collective memory, histories of resistance and ancestral knowledge in the effort to build, understand, and re-envision oneself “without the intervention of the other” (as cited in Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, p. 44). Through a pedagogy of Casa Adentro, minoritized students can be better equipped to draw on codigos próprios (their own codes), as a guide or frame of reference when engaging and intervening Casa Afuera to both the institution and beyond.

Building on these frameworks, this chapter tells the story of the Casa de los Saberes at Highlands University by tracing its roots to Maria Susana´s experiences as an Afro-Ecuadorian woman, and her social advocacy in the Valle de Tumbaco; an outlying parish of metropolitan Quito. This discussion is followed by an overview of the challenges experienced in the effort of introducing a community-based initiative into the structures of a higher education institution, namely the struggles of obtaining institutional support, recognition and legitimacy. We conclude by discussing the promises afforded by an initiative such as the Casa de los Saberes, emphasizing the value of ethnoeducacíon as a pedagogical practice.

Social movement origins: Maria Susana’s story

Maria Susana grew-up in a mestizo community in urban Quito. Since a young age, she engaged with the cultural practices common to her immediate surroundings, such as celebrating San Juan, listening to pasillo^[4] and dancing the bolero^[5]. Although she learned to love these practices and engaged with them joyfully, she also felt a sense of sorrow that emerged from a belief that through participation in these cultural processes she was gradually divesting herself from her identity as an Afro-Ecuadorian woman. Spurred by this lingering feeling, she began searching for spaces that could help her re-connect with her roots and learn about the traditions and knowledge systems that her grandparents once actively engaged with in their ancestral communities in the Valle de Salinas.

Through this search, she found the Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano (CCA), a social space administered by Comboni missionaries^[6] aimed at fomenting a sense of belonging amongst urban Afro-Ecuadorian youth. CCA promoted a pedagogy akin to what Mignolo and Walsh (2019) describe as cimarronaje, which is an approach focused on establishing social unity through a critical engagement with “collective memory, legacies of knowledge and thought, and the ever-present struggle for existence and freedom” (p. 43). At the CCA, Maria Susana read and discussed a wide-variety of topics, including the often-ignored role of Afro-Ecuadorian thought and activism in the founding of the Ecuadorian state (see Roura, 2004). These conversations propelled critical questions as to why concepts such as diaspora, collective memory, oral tradition and saberes del territorio, land-based knowledge, remained absent in her own socialization and experiences of schooling. She also began to wonder how these absences served to normalize systemic forms of racism which devalue or even negate the existence of individuals such as herself.

After the presidential election of Rafael Correa, similar questions and concerns regarding the inclusion and visibility of minoritized populations became central to political discourse and popular debates. In 2013 the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education commissioned a curricular audit aimed on addressing issues of representation of Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities. Indeed, previous studies (e.g., Stutzman, 1981) have noted that Ecuadorian curricular materials predominantly engaged with margin-center imagery, “where the centers of economic and cultural activity are associated with whiteness and what is western, while the margins continue to be correlated with race, ethnicity and backwardness” (Johnson, 2007, p. 56). Through her affiliation with the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Maria Susana was able to analyze and edit national textbooks and school materials for classes associated with the disciplines of social sciences and language and literature. Upon completion of the curricular audit, she presented her recommendations to a commission and was hopeful for change, as the revised curricular materials were well-received. Yet, the only change that did occur was within the leadership of the Ministry of Education. New priorities and policy agendas meant that the commission’s work was archived and slowly forgotten.

New and ancestral connections: Juan Garcia Salazar and Etnoeducación

Amidst her resulting frustration and disillusionment, Maria Susana was introduced to Juan Garcia Salazar, a public intellectual and cultural activist committed to rescuing and preserving the oral history and folk wisdom of Afro-Ecuadorian communities. As Garcia Salazar discusses in the book Pensar sembrando/sembrar pensando con el abuelo Zenón [Thinking by sowing/sowing by thinking with grandfather Zenón], his commitment to Afro-Ecuadorian people began at a young age while living with his grandparents in El Cuerval, a township located in the northern part of the province of Esmeraldas. Within his grandparents´ community was a tradition that when an elder awaits death, s/he must choose a worthy descendant to dar tierra, give earth. The chosen descendant would be entrusted with ensuring that the funeral process would abide by local traditions, which include safeguarding that the elder is buried in his/her chosen location. Moreover, the descendent would inherit the secrets and wisdoms that the elder stores in his/her memory. In this way, dar tierra served as a tradition of continuity, where metaphorical cultural seeds are sowed in each subsequent generation.

Once Garcia Salazar was entrusted by his maternal grandfather with the responsibility to dar tierra, he realized that it entailed much more than cultural preservation. Historically, it served as a strategy and practice of resistance that helped affirm a slave´s humanity amidst the physical and ontological violence of slavery. While slavery was officially abolished in Ecuador in 1851, dar tierra remained an act of subversion towards assimilationist processes that continue to be articulated as universalist, yet serve to delimit the modes of being, thinking and acting that are deemed “correct” and, in doing so, subordinate any form of difference. In effect, these delimitations (guided by ideologies of blanqueamento) negate Afro-Ecuadorians as legitimate members of the nation by either rendering their wisdoms, conceptions of territory and collective identity as relics of the past that are incongruent to the current socio-political moment, or simply by denying their very existence.

Through these realizations, Garcia Salazar understood that rescuing and preserving the oral history and folk wisdom of Afro-Ecuadorian communities had a clear political significance. Namely, as Walsh (2012) contends, this work could “build and strengthen epistemologies and practices of questioning, resistance, reconstruction, and liberation” (p. 19). Collaborating with local communities and grassroot organizations, he advocated for etnoeducación - a pedagogical and epistemic intervention aimed on developing an afro-oriented education that acknowledges and validates collective memory and community-based knowledge systems as those taught by elders. Through etnoeducación, the goal was to first strengthen collective forms of identity and belonging amongst Afro-Ecuadorians—in other words, cultivating casa adentro, to then forward a proposal to restructure and reform social institutions (including education) on a national level to include the history, knowledge-systems and culture of Afro-Ecuadorian communities—casa afuera. To achieve this goal, Garcia Salazar and other members of Afro-Ecuadorian community established the Comisión Nacional de la Etnoeducación [National Commission of Ethnoeducation], a working group focused on developing pedagogical materials, providing teacher training, and advising the Ministry of Education on matters related to the curricular representation of Afro-Ecuadorians.

Land, Drums and Wisdoms

After meeting Garcia Salazar and discussing her shared interests and experiences, Maria Susana was invited to become a member of the Comisión Nacional de la Etnoeducación. Through her affiliation, she had the opportunity to not only collaborate on a number of initiatives, but also spearhead the creation of a social space in the Valle de Tumbaco parish aimed on cultivating a sense of social cohesion amongst Afro-Ecuadorians through the sharing of customs, knowledges and life-stories. Originally referred to as Mi Tierra (My Land), the space catered primarily to Afro-Ecuadorian women who were recent migrants to metropolitan Quito, and felt alienated and excluded from their predominantly mestizo social surroundings. Later, with support from the local municipality, the space was officially named Tierra, Tambores y Saberes [Land, Drums and Wisdoms] in reference to the elements that have historically nourished and sustained communal life.

While Maria Susana expended time and energy leading the Tierra, Tambores y Saberes initiative, she also maintained a full-time faculty appointment at Highland University. At the university, she noticed that many of her EDP [Ethnic Diversity Program] students had similar feelings of alienation as the Afro-Ecuadorian women in the Valle de Tumbaco. Moreover, given Maria Susana´s position as one of the few minoritized faculty members, through the years many students felt at ease to confide in her their experiences of explicit and implicit forms of unwelcoming and exclusion within the university. Although the particularities of these experiences were wide-ranging and diverse, they largely signaled to a prevailing belief that in order to survive and positively inhabit the university, minoritized students were required to conform to the values and practices of a predominantly white mestizo and classist mainstream society, often to the detriment of their own cultural identities. Students who were unwilling or felt unable to comply often experienced isolation: their social interactions were limited and their movements within the university were largely confined to specific spaces such as the library. Others, primarily Indigenous students, often felt self-conscious and compelled to adapt how they looked, acted or dressed in the effort to “blend in”. For example, in an interview conducted for an ongoing study led by co-author Tiago, Genesis, a Kichwa student from Cotacachi, explained:

During the first semester I would always come with my typical clothing and there were students from buenas familias [a term to reference white mestizo families] that, I don’t know if they asked, but they kept looking at me. And I was: hehe [awkward laugh] “hi…” from there I had other uncomfortable situations, right. Later, around the halfway point of the second semester I stopped coming with my typical clothing.^[7]

With growing awareness of experiences of unwelcoming gestures from dominant groups experienced by students such as Genesis, Maria Susana became committed to adapting the Tierra, Tambores y Saberes initiative to serve minoritized students attending Highland University. The challenge would be to create a space for a diverse group of minoritized students, while being cautious to not ignore or dilute the nuances of the distinctive cultural life ways and personal experiences of each participant.

La Casa de los Saberes: Premise and Purpose

During the Summer of 2021, Maria Susana submitted a proposal to Highland University for an initiative entitled Casa, Tierra, Tambores y Saberes (House, Land, Drums and Wisdoms). The proposal solicited the creation of a fixed space for a Galería Intercultural (Intercultural Gallery) where students could engage in structured yet flexible activities aimed at generating critical reflection and dialogue regarding their lived-experiences both within and outside the university and the socio-cultural processes that undergird them. Activities would include life-narratives, panel discussions with community elders, the sharing and displaying of cultural artefacts, and research projects aimed toward understanding community approaches and innovations towards social problems.

Aligned with principles of etnoeducación, the goal of these activities was two-fold. First, there was a commitment to strengthen students’ collective identity and cultivate a sense of belonging by promoting a space which vindicates experiences and wisdoms that are often either absent or silent within the broader institutional setting. Second, activities were envisioned as abiding by what Khatibi (2001) refers to as a “complot of ‘other’ thought”, meaning a process aimed at highlighting the plurality of knowledges-systems and forms of thinking in the effort to confront and destabilize the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the only perspective of knowledge. In this sense, Casa, Tierra, Tambores y Saberes was not conceived as merely providing minoritized students with a “safe space” or a refuge, where they could be themselves outside of the racialized expectations of the broader university community. Rather, the entire initiative was viewed as a creative and generative space where, through dialogue and collaboration, minoritized students could leverage other ways of knowing and being in the effort to question, resist and even push back against the domesticating impulses of racializing ideologies.

The proposal was considered by the university’s leadership and eventually approved pending a series of revisions and modifications. This included a request for the initiative’s name to be changed to Casa de los Saberes, House of Wisdoms. The feedback received from administration was that the word tierra, land, was highly politicized and contentious, given the country’s long history of land appropriation and the recent large-scale Indigenous mobilizations around land (i.e., Paro Nacional, National Strike) that forwarded a list of demands that include greater Indigenous self-determination and territorial autonomy (see Altmann, 2020). Moreover, while Maria Susana would be allowed to lead the initiative, it would be overseen and incorporated into the EDP and presented as one of the many services offered by the program, which already included financial assistance and academic tutoring. The administrative rationale was that embedding the Casa de los Saberes within existing university structures could provide the initiative with additional support, resources and legitimacy. Finally, given the shortage of available rooms within Highland, the initiative would not be offered a fixed location. Instead, an available space would have to be found and secured at the start of each semester.

While Maria Susana disagreed with the suggested modifications, she felt compelled to accept because beginning something at Highland at least signaled the presencing of minoritized and Indigenous students in ways that could be led by them. In doing so, the Casa de los Saberes was allowed to officially inaugurate in the Fall of 2021, in an empty classroom in a predominantly administrative building on campus. Even with less-than-ideal conditions, the initiative was enthusiastically received, where a group of approximately 30 EDP students signed-up to partake in the activities scheduled to occur every Thursday afternoon.

Launching the Casa

The first four weeks of the initiative focused on cultivating a sense of community amongst the registered participants. Accordingly, activities included workshops preparing students to create and present “life narratives” grounded in personal experiences, but that could elucidate the values, beliefs, knowledges and traditions that were present in their own socialization. The sharing of these life narratives accentuated the vast diversity amongst the EDP students, which ranged from Afro-Ecuadorian students residing in urban Quito who, much like Maria Susana, felt disconnected from any sense of community, to Kichwa students from small rural villages who actively participated in mingas[8] since a young age. Despite these differences, students discussed feeling a sense of relatedness with their peers, something that was viewed as being glaringly absent in their previous interactions within the university. As Katya, an Afro-Ecuadorian from the Valle del Chota noted:

In the Casa de los Saberes it’s like, before anything we were able to gather a group of people who felt like I did. I felt it was a space where I was safe, at ease and also a space where I felt confident to speak about topics that we cannot discuss in class because we are not understood^[9].

Through the students’ own initiatives and recommendations, the subsequent activity consisted of adorning the room with artefacts of cultural significance. The agreement was that each artefact would be accompanied by a brief description of its meaning both to the individual and his or her community. With this, the Casa de los Saberes was now able to include an array of objects such as the Aya Huma, which is an outfit representing the spirit of corn and used during the Inti Raymi festival, and the sombrero de los Montubios, a straw hat commonly used by the Montubio population. Students viewed the process of adorning the once empty classroom as an act of claiming a space to make their own and thus having somewhere in the university where they could feel “at home”.

Signals and tensions

As the weeks progressed and mid-term exams approached, attendance began to fluctuate and soon the Casa de los Saberes consisted of only 10 regular participants. Dwindling participation was predominantly attributed to a prevailing concern with grades and the looming anxiety amongst EDP students that their scholarships may not be renewed. Although EDP students were high achieving and often did not feel academically challenged in their respective high schools, many struggled once at Highland, particularly in academic writing and English. As educators, we interpret these struggles as being the byproduct of enduring systemic faults, where schooling for minoritized populations in Ecuador often inadequately prepares them for specific areas of higher education. The fear of failing and disappointing their families and communities was often internalized and not only negatively affected students’ sleep and overall well-being, but also instilled a belief that any available time should be devoted to remedial tutoring and preparing for class rather than attending “extracurricular activities” such as the Casa de los Saberes.

The few students who remained were steadfast and committed to the initiative’s overarching vision and intent. For the remainder of the semester the Casa de los Saberes was required to navigate scheduling and budgetary constraints, which greatly curtailed its ability to conduct some of its proposed activities such as hosting a panel of community elders. Nonetheless, the initiative provided students with the opportunity to discuss their cultural, academic, and personal experiences within the university, while collectively devising strategies to reposition themselves when faced with the assimilationist pressures central to the widely circulating discourse of blanqueamento. These strategies included compiling a robust collection of sources written by minoritized Ecuadorian authors such Juan Garcia Salazar and petitioning the library to create a permanent Casa de los Saberes archive – a request that was accepted. It also consisted of a commitment amongst the initiative’s participants to designate specific days in which they would attend classes wearing their traditional clothes.

During the last weeks of the semester, Maria Susana was asked to vacate the classroom that hosted the Casa de los Saberes. The multiple adorning artefacts, many of which were donated to the initiative by the students, were required to be boxed and stored until a new space could be located and secured. For the students, the uncertainty of the initiative’s continuity and this act of what they saw as “undoing” spurred feelings of disappointment and disillusionment. As Maria Susana petitioned for the need of a permanent location, she was advised to transform the Casa de los Saberes into a student club that could be open to all members of the university community. While this recommendation would technically increase the number of participants, it did not speak to the vision of the proposal and to minoritized and Indigenous student needs. Said differently, there was a collective concern that transforming Casa de los Saberes into a generic club would dilute the initiative’s intent and transform it into a curricular enhancement opportunity for dominant mestizo students rather than a space that spurs self-determination and critical consciousness amongst minoritized students. These concerns were heard and acknowledged by the administrative staff, and they requested a proposal for a broader initiative that builds on the experiences of the Casa de los Saberes but that still more actively considers its potential contributions to the university community as a whole. Currently, as this chapter is being written, a proposal for a new iteration of the Casa de los Saberes is being drafted and will be considered for the upcoming academic semester. Meanwhile, it has been over a year since all activities associated with the initiative have been suspended. The suspension of the Casa de los Saberes did not arouse outroar or pushback from Highland’s broader community. In fact, very few people even knew of its existence.

Concluding Thoughts: Una casa sin tierra

Highland University recently published and circulated a newsletter celebrating a former EDP student, who finished his doctorate and secured a tenure-track position in a prestigious university in the global North. Although many years had already passed since he graduated from Highland, the former student was explicit in expressing his gratitude, noting that the opportunities, academic support, and financial assistance offered by the university were instrumental in his subsequent academic experiences and successes. His research now focuses on better understanding the phonological structures of different varieties of Kichwa in the effort to revitalize the language in different Indigenous communities throughout Ecuador, including his own. His example showcases the value of Highland’s commitment and approach to affirmative action as translated in Ecuador, which has historically provided minoritized students with the tools and opportunities to transform their positions within a dominant mestizo society while making contributions toward attenuating structures of discrimination rooted in colonial discourses of blanqueamento. While it is important to acknowledge higher education efforts focused on better serving minoritized populations, feelings of gratitude emerging from exceptional examples can become distractions that ultimately serve to deny or excuse the ongoing epistemic violence circulating within institutions of higher education through their abidance of a Eurocentric hegemonic model of knowledge construction, production, and transference that ultimately serves to control, domesticate and disenfranchise difference. In other words, exemplars are not enough without systemic attention to the needs of minoritized students and the places from which they come.

Drawing on etnoeducación, the Casa de los Saberes aimed to provide minoritized students with a real and epistemic space that intentionally draws on community resources to support their efforts to confidently navigate the university setting and reposition themselves to confront and creatively respond to the exacting pressures of blanqueamento. While the proposal was well-received, the process of requiring Casa de los Saberes to adhere to the structures and limitations of the institution in ways that still marginalized it showcased the multiple techniques and procedures that are routinely enacted by the university and that restrict and hinder what this and other initiatives like it can accomplish. Two of these techniques are worth emphasizing. First, similar to Warikoo’s (2016) “diversity bargain,” the legitimacy (evidenced in the granting of a permanent location) of the initiative was somewhat predicated on our ability to articulate its value to a broader dominant mestizo community. Creating “zones of safety” for minoritized and Indigenous students neither has to be a threat or benefit to all, yet this implicit expectation demanded a series of negotiations and trade-offs that may curtail the ability of Casa de los Saberes ability to be self-determining in the activities it conducts and the priorities it addresses. Second, scholarships based on grades greatly conditioned students’ behaviors and interfered with guiding principles of etnoeducación, specifically the stated assertion of the importance of strengthening casa adentro in the effort to more positively engage casa afuera. In this case, while the activities proposed by the Casa de los Saberes generated widespread interest, they were still perceived as extracurricular and eventually were only attended by students who were already academically high-achieving. To a certain extent, the extracurricular designation of the Casa de los Saberes engendered a wide-spread belief that only students who are successful to some degree engaging casa afuera are prepared and should be afforded the opportunity to engage with casa adentro within the institutional setting. This is problematic, as principles of etnoeducación should not only be available to all minoritized and Indigenous students through initiatives such as the Casa de los Sabers, but present in other (and perhaps all) areas of their higher education experience. Indeed, the Casa de los Saberes was never envisioned as a permanent solution to existing forms of epistemic violence within the university, but rather as an important step that could potentially engender broader and further-reaching change.

The story of the Casa de los Saberes is ongoing, and new iterations of the initiative will be required to navigate the tenuous line between preserving autonomy while obtaining institutional legitimacy. Nevertheless, the initiative provides important insights and questions for ongoing attempts to transform higher education into a space which is welcoming and validating for minoritized peoples. If anything, the Casa de los Saberes underscores the need for spaces that are purposeful in their attempts to strengthen collective identity and leverage ancestral forms of knowledge in the effort to equip minoritized students with tools to confront and creatively respond to the violence inherent in the Westernized university (see Grosfoguel, 2013). Etnoeducación vitally provides language and a flexible framework on how this may occur. The question that remains is whether these types of spaces can formally exist within institutional settings as self-determining projects or whether they must remain in the margins, working almost in isolation in the effort to counteract or mitigate the negative effects higher education may have on minoritized students.

To conclude, we would like to return to the imagery and symbolism of the cultural practice of dar tierra, to give earth, that served as the premise and inspiration for etnoeducación. Under this cultural practice, the concept of tierra takes on multiple meanings. It refers to an end point; a physical place of personal connection and meaning in which an elder will be buried. It also refers to an act of continuity and renewal where a descendent offers him/her/their self so the secrets, stories, and knowledges of the elder can be re-planted and given new life. The use of the word tierra and its associated symbolism provides an interesting lens to not only interpret the story of the Casa de los Saberes (and the lack of a permanent space) but also the limits of affirmative action policies instituted by universities in Ecuador and perhaps elsewhere. While affirmative action policies provide minoritized students with access to higher education, it fails to provide the necessary conditions to ensure the continuity and/or cultivation of other knowledge systems and practices. Returning once more to the quote opening this chapter, within Highland and surely in other institutions, affirmative action is not about encouraging continuity by affording individuals with the possibility to remain Waorani or to find new ways to be Waorani, but rather about providing access to existing codes of power so minoritized students can survive and be tentatively accepted within a predominantly white mestizo mainstream society. In this sense, minoritized students’ entry and subsequent persistence within higher education is predicated on their ability and willingness to at least temporarily surrender tierra by accepting and enacting the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the only perspective of knowledge. It is therefore imperative for higher education institutions to find ways to ensure continuity, where other knowledge systems can be re-planted and afforded new life. If not, what remains is una casa sin tierra (a house without land); a physical space where only that which already exists within it can grow.

References

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Notes

1. Agricultural/land-working peoples from the central coastal region of Ecuador ↑

2. It is important to recall that in Ecuador indigenous serfdom lasted until 1964 and voting rights were not universal until 1979 (see Novo and de la Torre, 2010). ↑

3. Ethnicity in Ecuador is often a matter of self-identification, where the vast majority of the population (71.9%, according to latest available census) identifies as mestizo (born of mixed race). Nonetheless, as Roitman and Oviedo (2017) observe, there are important distinctions and forms of discrimination within mestizaje, where polysemic terms such as cholo and longo are used in colloquial exchanges in order to create racialized hierarchies within mestizo identity. The authors argue that “white mestizo” identity is often leveraged and claimed by a dominant upper class to advance their positions and separate themselves from others who also identify as mestizo. ↑

4. A musical genre that emerged in Ecuador in the 19th century that is a fusion of Indigenous (i.e., yaravi) and European (i.e., valse) music. ↑

5. A musical genre of Cuban origin that is popular throughout Latin America. ↑

6. A Roman Catholic missionary congregation known for working towards empowering marginalized and underserved population primarily in Africa and Latin America. ↑

7. The original transcript in Spanish: En primer semestre siempre venía con mi ropa típica y había chicos de buena familia que, no sé si preguntaban, pero me quedaban viendo. Y yo así: Jeje, hola… Y de ahí, más como situaciones incómodas, no. Después, a mediados del segundo semestre ya dejé de venir con la ropa típica ↑

8. A voluntary and collaborative effort where community members gather to contribute to a project of collective interest and need (i.e., paving a road or creating a new irrigation waterway). ↑

9. The original quote in Spanish: “En la Casa de los Saberes es como que, primero que nada, logramos reunirnos este grupo de personas que se sentían igual que yo… fue como que me sentí en un espacio más segura, más tranquila y también en espacios en los que yo sentía más confianza, para hablar los temas que no podemos hablar en las clases porque no somos entendidos.” This interview was conducted by Tiago in 2022 at a coffee shop near Highland University. ↑