Urban Mountain Beings

Urban Mountain Beings is an ethnographic and historically-grounded study of recognition strategies and ethnogenesis in postneoliberal times carried out on the flanks of Mt. Pichincha in Quito, Ecuador. The author demonstrates through the application of feminist geographical and Indigenous pedagogical frameworks that it is not urban geography per se, but rather histories of exclusion that have created attitudes and policies treating Native peoples as “out of place” in cities. The book concentrates on two overlapping contexts for Indigenous vindication. The first is the Yumbada of Cotocollao, an ancestral performance through which mountain and other spirits are called into the urban plaza by danzantes of diverse backgrounds. The focus shifts to Yumbada dancers who are members of the Hummingbird Corporation, a legal entity founded by ex-hacienda workers and connected to Pueblo Kitu-Kara, the Indigenous political organization covering the Quito Basin region. Indigenous revindication activities of the “hummingbirds” include workshops, filmmaking, photography, classroom and community teaching plans, and the formation of alliances with local and international anthropologists, activists, filmmakers, engineers, and educators. Indigeneity is defined by this group less through biological and linguistic criteria than by public educational practices designed to confront gender inequity and violence, pernicious national racism, and environmental degradation.