Commentary on Gamonalismo

I find the commentary that the persistence of ideological and social structures of gamonalismo are a continuous presence and not a mere remnant intriguing and worthy of investigation. Along with Breton, I do not think that many local practices, shared cultural expressions, and forms of social differentiation, even when intentionally more liberatory, are able to be easily disentangled from historic and often hierarchical ways of thinking and interacting that were shaped and informed by gamonalismo. But, at the same time, I do not think the ongoing realities of gamonalismo necessarily contradict studies of indigenous political and social mobilization as a break from concrete forms of social and economic domination. Rather, they shed light on the complexity of a postcolonialism in which overarching historic frameworks of signification continue to shape local social categories and relations. For example, Emma Cervone discusses how even when organizing independent organizations with alternative justice, local leaders in the 90s remained “strongly tied to the lived experience of domination posed by the local distribution of power and resources and to local networks of social relations” (23)1. This power of the local became even more important in what Cervone calls the post-recognition phase that is ushered in with the Correa regime, characterized by a growing disconnect between grassroots organizers and national indigenous leadership, the decline of the second-level organization of Tixán (to a more transactional level) and the resurgence of communal power and authority. In this context, the identities and experiences that inform communal processes stem from a shared history of long-standing power relations and their ruptures. Additionally, studies that have followed indigenous politics post land reform and 90s mobilization do not necessarily assume that land reform itself, or that the indigenous struggles that enabled the implementation of land reform and the rise of national indigenous movement, completely ended or overturned social, economic, and political hierarchies. For example, Goodwin's (2020) detailed work on how the creation of land markets in the post land reform decades has both enabled mestizos to keep the most fertile lands (or sell them to other mestizos), while rendering fertile land inaccessible to most indigenous people (while simultaneously creating some indigenous differentiation) is an important reminder that even when indigenous peoples were able to benefit from some opportunities activated by land reform, the development of land markets closed down many of these opportunities.2 Finally, on a methodological note I think it's important to interrogate the assumption that an interviewees’ affective connection with a “good gamonal” who did not violate the norms is evidence of a tacit support of gamonalismo. I think such a claim requires extensive social and historical research to understand what is meant in a specific context. One cannot assume, for example, the moral economy is a constant, and that the practices and norms that informed who was a good gamonal from who was not were unchanged through different phases of economic and political development. Amalia Pallares's (2002) discussion of Cacha, Chimborazo analyzes how members of a free community understood themselves as seeking a respect that was denied to them by mestizo elites who were exploiting them economically and blocking them from burying their dead in the town of Yaruquíes.3 Those articulations of disrespect and violation of norms were themselves the result of changing relations between indigenous and mestizos as a consequence of political and economic mobilization of indigenous free communities as well as those within the haciendas- In a context where indigenous peoples were increasingly seen as a socioeconomic threat, the distinctions between those within haciendas and free communities were not as important as the common ways in which they were racialized by mestizos. (a process- which I would argue facilitated a shared identification among members of free and hacienda communities, despite their important differences). As with many civil rights struggles, the power dynamics of social mobilization include the creation of spaces of interrogation and challenge from those engaged in resistance as well as backlash and aggression from those feeling threatened by change. It is in that dynamic that “goodness and evil” or “right and wrong” become frames in which existing norms and practices are constructed, reconstructed and challenged.