Linda D’Amico’s Otavalan Women, Ethnicity, and Globalization offers an important corrective to scholarship on globalization that presents a generalized analysis of mass human mobility which often glosses over the particularities of different groups. Focusing on the creative ways in which indigenous women from northern Ecuador have historically engaged global interconnections as active participants, D’Amico exposes the key roles Otavalan women have played in shaping Otavalan global experiences and opportunities.
D’Amico’s long term involvement with Otavalan communities (from 1989 to 1997) gives her a unique perspective on historical connections and enduring cultural roles of indigenous women. Her friendship and ethnographic interviews with Rosa Lema, a pioneer of Otavalan international ventures in the 1940s, anchor D’Amico’s understanding of the complex connections between gender, ethnicity, and globalization. D’Amico’s ethnography, moreover, engages the work of Elsie Clews Parsons, author of Peguche: A Study of Andean Indians (1945) and close friend of Mama Rosa Lema in the 1940s, thereby bridging more than six decades of understanding of the multidimensional lives of Otavalan women.
The first three chapters of the book are dedicated to Mama Rosa Lema’s memories and interpretations of her transnational experiences, which underscore the ways in which Otavalan women have used their gender and ethnic status to challenge prescribed cultural boundaries. Mama Rosa Lema’s story sheds light on the business acumen of women as well as their ability to negotiate expanding webs of opportunity toward mutually beneficial relations. D’Amico shows how, faced with international events designed to showcase the exotic “other” or alternatively co-opt Otavalan identity as the poster child of Ecuadorian national progress and inclusion, Rosa Lema, in her own perspective, recast these occasions as key moments of entry into global commerce and transnational networks. D’Amico reports that far from feeling used or objectified, Mama Rosa felt she was a person of consequence and used these invitations to empower herself and her community, and to assert economic independence and cultural self-determination. Most importantly, these chapters reveal the ways by which creative improvisations as people step into different roles figure centrally in Otavalan tradition, defined as dynamic, vibrant, and always transforming.
D’Amico’s focus on gendered knowledge of well-being, health, cosmology, and foodways in chapters 4 and 5 further highlights global experiences not as a break with Otavalan tradition, but rather as part of a cultural continuum. D’Amico maintains that food provides the physical and emotional sustenance at the core of Otavalan ethnicity and that gendered knowledge of food and well-being moors a sense of ethnic identity and epistemology even as Otavalans migrate farther away from home. Global opportunities are simply one more path to achieving the personal and social well-being women are intent on nurturing in their communities. Dignity and respect define social well-being. These principles also intersect with indigenous notions of interculturalidad, which functions on the basis of reciprocal respect and concern along “horizontal” (non-hierarchical) associations among social groups, be they local, regional, national, or international. In this way, women deploy their cultural knowledge in imaginative ways that allow for hybrid configurations of social well-being across a constellation of relationships that connect back to Otavalan cultural cannons. In this section, D’Amico presents a series of engaging vignettes that capture the centrality of foodways and cosmology in Otavalan society and provide a particularly useful springboard for classroom discussions.
A final chapter in the book explores the formation of transcultural identities in local and global markets. D’Amico provides a useful history of the Otavalan feria or open market and a synopsis of the economic climate that accelerated global migration and thrust Otavalans into myriad transnational bazaars. In these contexts, Otavalans have continually adapted their business practices and their effective use of identity as part of their marketing technique. Whereas initial ventures involved cottage industry production of Otavalan crafts, the pressures of global commerce have prompted Otavalans more recently to purchase merchandise abroad rather than importing goods from Ecuador. International Otavalan market stalls today are likely to feature Indonesian products made in China and purchased from a central distributor in Spain alongside Otavalan tapestries and sweaters. D’Amico points out that Otavalans are also likely to sell side-by-side with African, Gypsy, and Chinese vendors, suggesting new configurations of intercultural relations, social convivencia, and professional networks. The author draws on Nestor García Canclini’s discussion of cultural cross-pollination and nested identities in transcultural spaces to convey a revealing picture of Otavalan transcultural dispositions and the range and diversity of Otavalan global experiences. She concludes with a statement about Otavalans that stood out for me as spot-on. “Otavaleños,” she writes, “are intrepid as they respond to and affect globalization forces” (178).
In her postscript, D’Amico makes reference to the concept of “Sumak Kawsay,” a Kichwa philosophy of the interrelation of all beings in the cosmos that is integral to the well-being and sustainability of the Pachamama, the Andean universe. D’Amico makes us aware of the ways in which the knowledge and creativity women bring to bear in nurturing their families and securing the physical, social, and economic health and dignity of their communities resonate with the broader Kichwa conception of a relationship of mutual respect and care with nature and the cosmos.
Linda D’Amico’s book makes an important contribution to scholarship on migration, ethnicity, gender, globalization, the Andes, and indigenous peoples of Latin America. D’Amico’s analysis is thorough and her writing is accessible, making Otavalan Women, Ethnicity, and Globalization suitable for use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms. The book is certainly an essential text for supporting new directions in research on transnationalism and globalization, which scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are sure to appreciate and benefit from. The book includes excellent chapter notes and a helpful index. It also features exquisite black-and-white and color photographs throughout. For those teaching in Spanish language classrooms, a Spanish language translation through Editorial FLACSO-Ecuador/Abya Yala is available.
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[Review length: 967 words • Review posted on September 20, 2016]