Saraguro people

A Saraguro woman wearing a traditional dress.

In the 1460s the Inca empire conquered the Saraguro area. The pre-Inca people may have been the barely-known Palta or the Cañari. The ancestors of the modern-day Saraguro people, according to oral traditions, were moved to Saraguro by the Incas from other areas, possibly the Colla or other people from the Lake Titicaca and Cuzco regions. The Incas had a policy of forcibly moving people from one region of the empire to another, thereby diversifying the population and dispersing possible opposition to their rule. The resettlement policy was called mitma. The numbers resettled were large, estimated to be up to 80 percent of the population of some provinces.[5] One Spanish document says that the ancestors of present-day Saraguros were elite soldiers in the Inca army. This statement is bolstered by the fact that the Saraguros live along the Inca road or Kapak Ñan that stretched from Cuzco to Tumebamba (the northern capital of the Incas), and onward to Quito and thus occupied an important link for Inca communications and control of the empire. The town of Saraguro, however, seems to have been founded by the Spanish rather than the Incas although a number of Inca ruins are in the nearby area.[6]

Whatever the facts about their origins. Saraguro in the 20th century celebrate their Inca heritage. In a debunked theory, some authors ascribe the black clothing typical of the Saraguro as a sign of mourning for the death of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa. Schools have been named after Inca emperors, Inca customs recreated, Inca architecture copied, and efforts made to preserve the Kichwa language.[7] Historical records and oral traditions also attribute the traditional black and white colors of their clothing to ceremony and nobility, which were the meanings given by the Incas according to chronicler Cieza de León and recounted by the Saraguro. Being descendants of the elite soldiers of the Inca army, they retained that symbolism as well as the male population retained their long-braided hair, which was another marker of nobility among the Incas. Black as a sign of mourning is not part of the Inca symbolism nor among the Saraguros but has been adopted, especially by the young generations. Likewise, they attribute the symbolic concepts of their clothing to a representation of the Curiquingue (carunculated caracara), which has black and white feathers and was a symbolic bird of the Inca royalty. The Curiquingue inhabits the Saraguro parish and páramos and its symbols represented in costumes continue to be present in the Kapak Raymi (the Great Celebration) celebrations in Saraguro.[8]

Carunculated Caracara

The Saraguros have retained control over their lands more successfully than many of the Andean subjects of Spanish colonization and contemporary colonialism [9][10] of the independent country of Ecuador. Part of this may be due to their initial hostility to the Spanish and the Indigenous people who collaborated with them. More importantly, however, the Saraguros were required by the Spanish to maintain an important tambo (inn or way-station) along a major communication route. They successfully argued that the operation and maintenance of the tambo required that they retain their land and its resources. They continued to manage the tambo until the 1940s when a motor road reached the area.[11]

Most of the Saraguros live at intermediate elevations in the Andes between 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) and 2,800 metres (9,200 ft). Traditionally they are farmers and livestock herders. A shortage of land in their homeland has led many to migrate eastward into the Zamora-Chinchipe Province of Ecuador.[12] Others have migrated to Europe and the United States. Many contemporary Saraguros are doctors, architects, engineers, musicians, photographers, construction workers, artisans, farmers, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers, lawyers, cooks, activists. And others continue to do agro-pastoralist activities while holding professional careers or combine more than one occupation. While having a distinctive identity, they are engaged in the consummer society and technology as much as most of the Ecuadorian society is. Issues such as teenage pregnancy, environmental degradation, deforestation, discrimination, racism, discontinuation of traditions are also present across the Saraguro territory.[13][14]

Saraguro girl taking a selfie with the Wikis during a Kapak Raymi celebration in December 2017

Saraguro activists and intellectuals are fighting for food sovereignty, decolonization, water protection, against polluting mining, Indigenous resurgence, legal pluralism, Indigenous Justice and autonomy from the Ecuadorian State.[14][15]

500 Years of Resistance

Young Saraguro musicians break from tradition not only to index their aspirations to do something with their lives other than what tradition and stereotypes dictate for them, but also to index their real opportunities to do so as Saraguros. With greater participation in formal education and increased occupational diversity and mobility, young, cosmopolitan Saraguro musicians in the southern highlands of Ecuador are working to reconstitute their Saraguro Kichwa identity in a creative and selective process by which they discard, amplify, and reinvent the aspects of what they perceive to be authentic Saraguro musical culture.[22] They also have found other ways of expressing themselves that are compatible with their self-identification as Indigenous and do not strictly rely on ties to an Inkaic past, or even to a particular expression of Indigeneity. Rather, the tastes and ambitions of many Saraguro youth point to an alternative conceptualization of Saraguro identity that is both firmly rooted in the "modern" and respectful of a long tradition of Indigeneity. A large number of (primarily male) Saraguro youth affiliate themselves with a subculture of heavy metal music. They listen to nation and international metal bands. Some of them play in local bands and organize local concerts.[14]

Saraguro metal band

The film Saraguro: Historia Escrita con Sangre Inka (2010) (Saraguro: A History Written with Inka Blood) traces the roots of the origins of the Saraguro people by combining anthropological data with Inkan cosmovision in consultation with the Saraguro people.[23]

These are external sources about the Saraguro people and geography as well as institutions where Saraguro intellectuals are or have contributed with their knowledge:

Amawtay Wasi Pluriversity (Pluriversidad Amawtay Wasi)

I.C.C.I (Instituto Científico de Culturas Indígenas--Scientific Institute of Indigenous Cultures)

Saraguro.org

Behind scenes--Saraguro: Historia Escrita con Sangre Inka