Writing the First Draft of History - Literacy in Observing Events

In 2004, I lived, worked and studied in Ecuador with an excellent program called HECUA. It was a very volatile time, though Ecuador like much of Latin America is in a nearly perpetual state of crisis with only brief rests when catastrophe and revolution seem to fade momentarily into the background. Ecuador is a very divided country, with the traditional lighter skinned, Spanish and now often English speaking descendants of the colonial ruling class still holding onto economic and political power, and, despite representing a tiny minority, being hugely overrepresented in culture and media.

In recent decades there has been a revival of indigenous pride and culture, as people and communities and philosophies which have been ground under foot since Columbus and the conquistadores have awoken and demanded autonomy and respect. In Ecuador, this movement is called Pachacuti, the Quechua name of an Inca king. In 2002, the newly mobilized indigenous voters allied with urban leftists and students to elect President Lucio Gutierrez. However, Gutierrez quickly betrayed his supporters and embraced the traditional elites and foreign business interests he had won power by denouncing. He instituted World Bank ordained austerity measures and converted the Ecuadorian currency from the patriotic Sucre to the American dollar. He cracked down, hard, on the student protesters and indigenous marchers who had brought him to office. In the first week of November I witnessed, photographed and was caught up in a war on the capital city of Quito's streets between the Grupo de Operaciones Especiales with their riot gear, guns and armored cars, and students with red banners and rocks and Molotov cocktails. I came home at the end of the 2004; by April 2005 President Gutierrez had been overthrown.

Making sense of this complicated and foreign scenario required many kinds of literacy. Most obviously, my ability to read and understand Spanish (much degraded since then) allowed me to understand the slogans being shouted. I knew that "Lucio sucio" meant "Dirty Lucio" and that "Quito no fue fundada por Espanoles!" is a cry of indigenous pride from the descendants of the people who were there for thousands of years before the new ruling class. Having read Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina by Eduardo Galeano, I was able to understand some of the economic history from the underclass' perspective, and why they hated Gutierrez for bowing to American interests. I was able to speak to the president of the Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Ecuador, the militant student union FEUE, who explained why his members where out in the street with red banners, Marxist slogans and rocks. I was able to understand the police's threats to jail, rape, murder or deport me when I was briefly kidnapped and held in an armored car during the fighting. Had I not been literate to some degree in history, in Spanish, in politics, and in basic international and domestic economics, I would have thought hell had suddenly erupted in front of the Universidad Central in Quito, and that everyone had suddenly gone mad and started fighting. It occurs to me that this is what most Americans do think when they read about third world or even inner city violence.