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Abstract
Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.
Fronteras generizadas de control de la tierra: territorio indígena, mujeres y disputas sobre la tierra en Ecuador
La tierra agrícola y rural se ha vuelto el sitio de una considerable atención política, gubernamental y académica en todo el mundo debido a la violencia y la desposesión, la inseguridad alimentaria y las disputas sobre los regímenes de propiedad privada. Estos temas están altamente generizados en los territorios con las mayorías de las poblaciones indígenas donde los regímenes legales superpuestos (estatutarios, multiculturales, consuetudinarios) e historias de desposesión han creado complejas espacialidades y patrones de acceso. La formalización de los derechos indígenas por parte de los estados, la restructuración neoliberal y la apropiación de la tierra son el trasfondo de las luchas de las mujeres ecuatorianas para acceder y retener la tierra y transferir la tierra a la siguiente generación. A pesar de una creciente literatura sobre los territorios indígenas en Latinoamérica, las mujeres son a menudo invisibles. Utilizando investigación colaborativa entre dos nacionalidades indígenas, el artículo analiza los regímenes político-económicos, legales y de facto, que dan forma a los reclamos de tierra y territorio indígena por parte de las mujeres. Centrándonos en mujeres kichwas en zonas rurales de los Andes y mujeres tsáchilas en un área tropical de frontera dedicada a la agricultura orientada a la exportación, el artículo analiza los criterios y las prácticas de exclusión que operan a múltiples escalas para moldear la (in)seguridad de las mujeres en la tenencia. Las luchas de las mujeres por sus reclamos sobre la tierra y el territorio también son discutidas. El artículo propone que la tensa política alrededor de la tierra en Latinoamérica requiere un análisis generizado de la territorialidad indígena para desempacar el sesgo cultural de relatos feministas de multiculturalismo, y documentar el sesgo de género racializado a lo largo de las relaciones socio-institucionales.
土地管制中的性别化边疆：厄瓜多的原住民领土、女性与土地争夺
农业与农村土地因为暴力与掠夺、粮食不安全以及私有财产制度的争夺，已成为全球众多政策、政府及学术的关注场域。这些议题在多数原住民群体因相互重叠的法律制度（法规的、多元文化的、习俗的）与土地掠夺的历史而造成复杂的空间性与可及性模式的土地上是高度性别化的。国家对原住民权利的正式化、新自由主义再结构与土地徵收，皆为厄瓜多女性力图寻求获取、保留并传承土地的背景脉络。儘管有关拉丁美洲原住民土地的文献正在迅速发展中，女性却经常是隐而不见的。本文在两个原住民民族中进行合作式研究，分析形塑女性对土地及原住民领土的要求的政治经济、法律与实存制度。本文聚焦位于安地斯乡村的克丘亚女性，以及位于热带出口导向农业边疆地带的查奇拉女性，检视造成女性在租赁中（不）安全，并在多重尺度中操作的准则和排除性措施。本文亦探讨女性要求土地和领土的斗争。本文主张，拉丁美洲紧张的土地政治，需要性别化地理解原住民的土地—领土，以拆解西方女性主义在多元文化主义解释中的文化偏见，并记录横跨社会—制度关係的种族化性别偏见。
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dana Hill, Mercedes Prieto, and David Nally for comments on earlier iterations of this article. I also wish to thank audiences at the L'Institut des Hautes Etudes d'Amerique Latine at the Sorbonne, Paris and audience at the 2012 Mérida Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, where a preliminary version was presented. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) (ESRC RES-062-23-0517).
Notes
1. The article draws on collaborative qualitative research undertaken with the women's office of the main indigenous confederation CONAIE and with various female and male Tsáchila representatives. Having designed the research focus, methods and questions with female indigenous leaders, I undertook 68 in-depth, semistructured interviews with Kichwa and Tsáchila women in 2008–2011, and interviews with local female and male leaders. Concurrently, interviews were undertaken with national and regional women's leaders, diverse ethnic leaders, policy-makers and other stakeholders, and a detailed analysis of government and nongovernmental policy documents over the past 30 years was undertaken. Simultaneously, I participated in numerous workshops across Chimborazo in villages, organized by the women's representative of the CONAIE-affiliated provincial indigenous federation COMICH (Confederación del Movimiento Indígena de Chimborazo).
2. The women–Earth Mother association is occasionally raised today but notably not among women's provincial representatives.
3. These workshops on rights and development were coordinated by the Chimborazo indigenous federation's women's representative, who was critical of the male-dominated federation's marginalization of women.
4. It is interesting to speculate whether women's association with Earth Mother emerged at this historic moment, not due to a ‘traditional’ association but to a particular configuration of power, difference and protest.
5. This disposition provided an antecedent for Ecuador's ratification of ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Rights and the 1998 Constitution (Art. 241).
6. At a time when no national legislation or regulations favoured gender equality in agrarian reform, this was significant (Deere and León Citation2001a, 43). Ecuadorian government policy is criticized for ‘the fact that rural women cannot be direct title holders … restricts their possibilities to access water, technical assistance and credit’ (Cuvi Sánchez Citation2000, 23). Deere and León (Citation2001a, 43) argue that the relatively gender equitable outcomes of Ecuador's 1994 neoliberal land law was due to ‘underlying inheritance practices that were favourable’ to women. However, they then argue that because of indigenous activisms, the resulting law is unfavourable to (indigenous) women, forgetting that it is in Andean indigenous rural areas that more equitable distribution of land among offspring regardless of gender is more common than among mestizo populations (ibid.).
7. Illiteracy is not a legal limit on land titling, but comprises a severe obstacle to women's full knowledge of the legal situation and thus becomes a risk factor influencing the extent of female control.
8. Ninety per cent of Latin America's protected areas are found in indigenous territories ([Mollett Citation2010, 360), yet neither Tsáchila nor Kichwa groups overlap with conservation areas.
9. Among Kichwa interviewees, around one-fifth had migration experience as single women working in informal urban economic sectors, which ends upon marriage. This compares markedly with other parts of the Ecuadorian Andes, where women outnumber male migrants.
10. Anecdotally women recounted how illiteracy restricted their capacity to exploit land; unable to show rightful ownership, women relied on husbands to receive credit.
11. Deere and León (Citation2001a, 53–54) point to likely gaps between leaderships' discourses on land-territory and ordinary women. Here, the Andean leader succinctly echoed village women's interviews.
12. Parallels with Tanzania are visible here (see Razavi Citation2007, 1491).
13. Ventura (Citation2012, 44) provides similar figures: Tsáchila has average household usufruct land holdings of 4–50 hectares, oriented towards commercial production of cacao and bananas, and foodstuffs such as yucca.
14. Discrepancies between the household totals and spouses' relative contribution arose from inconsistencies in recording all land sources.
15. Unlike Chimborazo, Tsáchila communities do not rely on out-migration for income.
16. Aware of this dilemma and conscious of the small amounts of land available in her husband's community, one woman said she was thinking of retaining comuna membership in her natal community while remaining married and resident in a different one.
17. In one case, four sisters received 1 hectare each, while three brothers received 8, 15 and 30 hectares (suggesting that land is unequally distributed among male offspring). The reported ratios of husbands' to wives' lands are not so markedly different, ranging from 10:1 to 1.5:1.
18. Although a minority of Tsáchila women are seamstresses (Ventura Citation2012, 62), none of the women I interviewed had an independent income.
19. This NGO was controversial as it was not affiliated with CONAIE. However, its core role in supporting a particular indigenous women's mobilization is undeniable.
20. Article 57 of the 2008 Constitution (in summary) states: The comunas, communities, indigenous peoples and nationalities will all be recognised, and guaranteed, in conformity with the Constitution and other pacts, conventions, declarations and other international rights instruments, the following collective rights: … 4. To preserve the inalienable ownership of their communal lands, which will be inalienable, un-seizable (unembargable), and indivisible. These lands will be exempt from taxes and duties … 5. To maintain the possession of ancestral lands and territories and obtain free adjudication of such lands … 6. To participate in the use, usufruct, administration and conservation of renewable natural resources which are found in their lands … 11. To not be displaced from their ancestral lands.
21. These struggles continue at the international level: see Deere and León (Citation2001b, 262–263).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sarah A. Radcliffe
Sarah A. Radcliffe is a Professor in Latin American Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the contradictions of and contests over social hierarchy and development in the Andes. Her recent publications include Indigenous development in the Andes: Culture, power and transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2009).