Interview with Marc Becker, author of “The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate”
Estatua tallada en madera de Dolores Cacuango en el Parque Central de Olmedo (Ecuador), photograph by Montserrat Boix. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en). Posted to Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolores_Cacuango.jpg (the image was cropped).

Interview with Marc Becker, author of “The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate”

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Marc Becker is the author of Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (2022), The CIA in Ecuador (2021), The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (2017), Pachakutik: Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador (2011), and Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (2008), among other works. He is also coeditor of Transnational Communism across the Americas (2023) and editor and translator of The Latin American Revolutionary Movement: Proceedings of the First Latin American Communist Conference, June 1929 (2023). You can read his article “The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate” in HAHR 105.1.

Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles

1. What got you interested in researching the history of Ecuador?

That’s a long story. In part it is growing up on a farm in rural South Dakota and when I turned 18 realizing that the world was much larger than that and wanting to explore it. More immediately, I call myself a Sendero refugee. My master’s thesis was on the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Everyone assumed that I would continue along those lines for my doctoral work, but I had never been to Peru and I thought to establish academic legitimacy that I should at least visit the country. This was 1990 and the Shining Path insurgency was at its height, and I was not stupid enough to go on my own. All of the study-abroad programs had pulled out of the country and moved to neighboring Ecuador, so I went there instead. In June 1990, I landed in Quito in the aftermath of a massive Indigenous uprising. Those mobilizations on the street literally altered the direction of my academic career, and I ended up studying their history.

2. What is the legacy of the syndicate schools established in Cayambe, Ecuador, in the 1940s? How does your article challenge or revise that legacy?

As I mention in the essay, the schools are presented as a forerunner of Indigenous-led, bilingual education efforts, but diving into the archival documents I came to realize that is not how they were conceptualized at the time. While that may be a useful framing for contemporary purposes, it is not historically accurate. Instead, the schools are rooted in a history of class struggle of organized rural communities, which opens up an entirely different political narrative.

3. At one point in the article you strikingly note, “As is too often the case, the discovery of new documentation just frustratingly raises new questions rather than satisfactorily providing definitive answers to current ones” (p. 89). How did you assemble the source base for this article, and could you elaborate further on the challenges of assembling and working with these sources?

The key source base that we have for these schools is from the haciendas on which they were located. We only have these records because a liberal government expropriated church-owned lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and placed them under the purview of what was called the Junta Central de Asistencia Pública (JCAP). Those hacienda records were subsequently passed to the health ministry, which is why they are now located in the Archivo Nacional de Medicina at the Museo Nacional de Medicina in Quito. It is an unexpectedly rich source of information, and I have my colleague Kim Clark to thank for introducing me to this archival collection.

I always want more documentation. As an old button that I have states, we don’t want more bread we want the whole bloody bakery. But the more documents I have, the more questions they raise. I find following these archival rabbit holes just thrilling, and thrive off of the endless pursuit of a better understanding of historical developments.

At this point, I have more than 3TB (literally) of scanned archival material. Methodologically, I rely heavily on my Endnote bibliographic database to manage all of these documents. I could not undertake my historical investigations were it not for this bibliographic database.

4. What broader political lessons for today, if any, can be drawn from the activists and organizers whom you trace in this article?

At an Indigenous congress in 1995, Neptalí Ulcuango, one of the educators in this story, chastised his colleagues for chasing foundation funding. He declared that Dolores Cacuango, one of the organizers of these schools, did not have any money, but yet she managed to mobilize her communities. His observations have echoed through my mind ever since: yes, we do need some resources to organize, but that is not the key issue. Most important is the political will, and that is often what is lacking in achieving the change we want to see.

5. Read anything good recently?

By far the best book I’ve read in recent years is Tanya Harmer’s Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). I’ve fantasized about writing a similar biography of someone in Ecuador, maybe the feminist communist activist Nela Martínez, a close colleague of Dolores Cacuango who organized these schools.