Defending against out-migration: Rural precarity, tourism, and hope in Quilotoa, Ecuador

This article explores themes of precarity and hope through histories of tourism in Quilotoa, Ecuador. The initial embrace of tourism among Quilotoans in the late 1980s responded to prevailing conditions of precarity in the livelihoods of young migrant laborers from Quilotoa and other rural indigenous communities of the Ecuadorian highlands. The sense of hope that prevailed among Quilotoans by the mid 2010s was rooted in their collective management of tourism as a shared resource, and their shared feeling that tourism provided a bulwark against the intense pressure to migrate that was still felt by young people in neighboring communities. Yet the collapse of tourism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the precarity of tourism itself, and many young Quilotoans have once again been forced to leave home in search of precarious wage labor opportunities. This article identifies how the ebbs and flows of hope, precarity, tourism, and labor migration are linked in Quilotoa, and how they are managed collectively by the Center for Community Tourism that oversees tourism there.