Concertaje Ecuador

Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude: The Making and
Unmaking of Ecuador's Antilandlord State, 1845-1868
Derek Williams
Hispanic American Historical Review, 83:4, November 2003, pp. 697-733 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/49211
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Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude:
The Making and Unmaking of Ecuador’s
Antilandlord State, 1845 –1868
Derek Williams
Speaking to Congress in September 1856, Ecuador’s President José María

Urvina called for the passage of legislation to protect Indian pueblos from
water-source appropriations.1 Ecuador’s indígenas, he lamented, were too often
a casualty of exploitation — their resources divested and extorted by a class of
“feudal lords.” Citing firsthand grievances collected while traveling in the
sierra north of Quito, Urvina denounced the country’s deplorable history of
halfhearted state protection of the indigenous class and affirmed his commit-
ment to guaranteeing “community rights” against powerful serrano landlord
interests. Sympathizing with the plight of pueblos that were being “squeezed
dry,” he suggested that a violent Indian uprising against aggressive landlords,
were it to happen, “might be excusable.” The president forcefully laid bare the
potentially tumultuous consequences for the rural oligarchy should its advo-
cates in Congress fail to intervene on behalf of the indígenas: “Now, I ask myself,
if the pueblo throws itself into a deplorable extreme [of violence] as a last
Research for this article was generously funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Regular Training Fellowship
from the Organization of American States. I also gratefully acknowledge Paul Gootenberg,
Andés Guerrero, Peter Henderson, Brooke Larson, Juan Maiguashca, Sean Miller, Barbara
Weinstein, and the HAHR’s anonymous reviewers for their support and insightful
commentary at various stages of preparing this essay.
1. There is a remarkable lack of consistency in the orthography of the president’s

paternal surname. Both “Urbina” and “Urvina” are used interchangeably in the historical
documentation and historiography — sometimes in the same edited volume. See, e.g.,
Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva historia del Ecuador, 15 vols. (Quito: Corp. Ed. Nacional;
Grijalbo, 1990), vol. 8. Following the president’s own usual usage, I use “Urvina,”
“Urvinista,” etc. For an explanatory note by Urvina’s principal biographer, see Camilo
Destruge Illingworth, Urvina el Presidente: Biografía del General José María Urvina (Quito:
Banco Central del Ecuador, 1992), 14 –15.
Hispanic American Historical Review 83:4

Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
698 HAHR / November / Williams
recourse [against] oppression, will the authorities have the heart to order its
repression with bullets . . . ? If it became the case that all justice was denied to
a pueblo protesting for one of its most clamorous rights, then the Government
would not be able to respond.”2
In classic caudillo rhetoric, Urvina reminded the legislature of his firm
leadership over Ecuador’s armed forces. Indeed, his successes in professionaliz-
ing and centralizing the military made any threat of nonintervention a weighty
one. At the same time, however, the speech gave voice to a broader attempt
during the Urvina era (1851– 59) to represent the central government as pro-
tector and advocate of Indian rights. Citing the “impotence” of Indian com-
munities and other “unfortunate classes” in making their grievances heard, the
central government asserted its responsibility to promote the “social well-
being” of all sectors that “make up the great ensemble of the state.”3 The 1856
water-rights law, which passed shortly after Urvina’s speech, was part of an
assemblage of midcentury legislation premised on making Indians “equal” to
“the rest of Ecuadorans in the enjoyment of their civil rights.”4 While such
laments over the Indian condition were standard official discourse in early
postcolonial Ecuador, Urvina’s willingness to identify the specific and present
causes of their misfortune was not. In his official pronouncements, Urvina
articulated a formidable critique of serrano landlord interests — their “feudal”
economics, their “colonial” social practices, and — at base — their “oligarchic”
control over political decision making. Indeed, Ecuador’s midcentury liberal-
ism was marked by antagonism toward landlord power and — adopting a simi-
lar anticolonial logic — religious authority. In so doing, it posed a coherent
alternative to the customary political model premised on the state’s transparent
and active advocacy of hacienda and church interests.
Within Ecuador’s nineteenth-century political history, the Urvina project
stands as an anomaly—a short-lived liberal exception that seemingly proves the
rule of Ecuadoran conservatism. Indeed, early republican Ecuador is best char-
acterized by its continuity with colonial attitudes, institutions, and geography.
Perhaps nowhere in the former Spanish empire did landlordism and clericalism
2. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente de la República, pidiendo al congreso una ley

especial sobre el derecho de usar las aguas en distintas poblaciones de la República,” 29
Sept. 1856, reprinted in Alejandro Noboa, Recopilación de mensajes dirijidos por los Presidentes,
Vicepresidentes de la República, Jefes Supremos y Gobiernos Provisorios a las convenciones y
congresos nacionales desde el año de 1819 hasta nuestros días, vol. 2 (Guayaquil: Imprenta de El
Tiempo, 1906 –7). Quotations from 258, 260 and 262. All translations are by the author.
3. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente . . . sobre . . . aguas,” 258.
4. Urvina, “Mensaje” reprinted in Noboa, Recopilación, 2: del Presidente de la
República,” 16 Sept. 1856, 241.
Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude 699
survive intact after independence as in Ecuador. Hacienda and church interests,

geographically concentrated in the central-north sierra around Quito, contin-
ued to dominate political decision making.5 Compared with other new Latin
American states, Ecuador’s ruling class was strikingly reluctant to experiment
with liberal-republican precepts of a secular state, free labor regimes and land
liberalization.6 Rather, Ecuador’s most viable political projects were embodied
by the monarchism of Urvina’s predecessor, Juan Flores (1830 – 45), and the
ultramontanism of his successor, Gabriel García Moreno (1860 –75).7 It would
only be in the 1870s that liberals in Guayaquil, buoyed financially by booming
cacao exports, surfaced as a legitimate opposition to the conservative Catholic
hegemony. Liberal ideologues would have to wait until 1895 before they could
marshal the military and political wherewithal to seize national power and elab-
orate a comprehensive national project of secularization and liberalization.8
This article examines the rise and demise of Ecuador’s experiment in anti-
landlord liberalism, replaced by the resolutely Catholic and antiliberal national
5. The historiography of the Audiencia of Quito is an increasingly illuminating one.

A fruitful starting place is John Leddy Phelan’s magisterial political and administrative
history, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish
Empire (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967); and Rafael Quintero López’s “El estado
colonial,” in Ayala Mora, Nueva historia del Ecuador, vol. 5. On state formation and the
politics in early colonial period, see Karen Vieira Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration,
Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press,
1995). On the late colonial origins of Ecuadoran regionalism, see Kenneth Andrien, The
Kingdom of Quito, 1690 –1830: The State and Regional Development ( New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press). For an influential historical sociology of Ecuadoran political culture and a
provocative thesis that the paternalist colonial hacienda system served “as a model for
national authority structures,” see Oswaldo Hurtado, Political Power in Ecuador, trans. Nick
D. Mills Jr. (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1980).
6. For an enlightening discussion of the conservative scope of political projects in
postcolonial Ecuador in comparative Andean perspective, see Brooke Larson, “Andean
Highland Peasants and the Trials of Nation Making during the Nineteenth Century,” in
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart
Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 3:558 –703.
7. On Flores, see the impressively contextualized biography by Mark J. Van Aken, The
King of the Night: Juan José Flores and Ecuador, 1824 –1864 (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1989). On García Moreno, see fn. 90.
8. On the origins and development of Ecuadoran liberalism, see Enrique Ayala de
Mora, Historia de la revolución liberal ecuatoriana (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional,
1994); Enrique Ayala Mora, Lucha política y origin de los partidos en Ecuador (Quito: Centro
de Publicaciones, Pontificia Univ. Católica del Ecuador, 1978); Nick D. Mills Jr., “Liberal
Opposition in Ecuadorian Politics” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of New Mexico, 1972).
project of President García Moreno. It studies three interconnected realms of

discourse and practice in Ecuador between 1845 and 1868. First, it assesses the
midcentury project of popular liberalism, emphasizing how law and official
rhetoric of the Urvina state sought to “emancipate” Indians from the colonial
structures of oppression — clerical tutelage, tribute, and, most radically, labor
servitude.9 It examines the redefinition of individual and corporate rights for
the indigenous population, which extended centralized state authority into the
serrano countryside at the expense of customary landlord and church power.
Second, it details the upsurge of popular politics and litigation, as indigenous
peasants and estate peons began to employ Urvinista discourse and law to lever-
age their day-to-day negotiations over labor conditions and mobility. Third,
the article examines the reaction of Ecuador’s serrano landlords to this increased
popular agitation and state intervention. Although short lived, Ecuador’s mid-
century embrace of liberalism would substantially shape the nature of subse-
quent conservative Catholic state-building projects
Urvina and Urvinismo
Urvina was a central military leader in the Guayaquil-based “March Revolu-

tion” of 1845 that ousted Juan Flores (1830 – 35 and 1840 – 45)— the country’s
dominant caudillo since independence. The “Marcistas” coalesced around
opposition to the authoritarian constitution of 1843, which had enfeebled both
Congress and local governing bodies.10 Emerging within a broader conjunc-
ture of midcentury liberalism in Spanish America, the Marcista program
echoed much of the Enlightenment rhetoric and liberalizing imperatives that
characterized governments in New Granada, Peru, Argentina, and Mexico
during the 1850s. Ecuador’s fledgling liberals — like their contemporaries else-
where — took advantage of the early failures of protoconservative govern-
ments, seized power, and initiated a set of legal reforms that promised to liber-
ate the republic from its colonial heritage and make all its inhabitants equal
under the law. With Flores in exile, the Marcistas chastised his clerical and
9. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente,” 241.

10. On the anti-Flores reaction, see Luis Robalino Dávila, La reacción anti-floreana
(Puebla: J. Cajica, 1967); Ayala, Lucha política, 75 – 94; Alfredo Pareja Díez Canseco, Historia
de la República: El Ecuador desde 1830 a nuestros días (Quito: Ariel, 1974), 31; Van Aken, King
of the Night, 196 – 201; Juan Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional en el
Ecuador: El rol del poder central, 1830 –1895,” in Historia y región en el Ecuador,
1830 –1930, ed. Juan Maiguashca (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1994), 367,
373 –77.
landlord supporters in the sierra as “retrogrades” who had maintained their

class privileges and exemptions while leaving the nation in poverty, “ignorance,
and barbarity.”11 The Marcista leadership, which included future presidents
Vicente Ramón Roca (1845 – 49) and Diego Noboa (1851), promised instead to
reclaim “liberalism, patriotism, and good sense” as the basis of a progressive
national project.12 This coalition of self-styled “demócratas” advocated partici-
patory and decentralized governance in order to usher in a new age of progress
and liberty. Its broadly antioligarchic platform drew support from a variety of
disaffected and historically marginalized social groups. Coastal cacao land-
lords, commercial bourgeoisie, mestizo soldiers, Indian peasants and peons, and
middling and plebeian urban sectors were all drawn to the Marcista’s “localist,
popular, and republican” values.13
Born in the central sierra in 1808, José María Urvina was educated in the
port city of Guayaquil. A career military man, he made colonel at 25 and was
appointed interim war minister two years later. Urvina was a strikingly true-to-
type caudillo, recognized even by his political adversaries as a talented orator
with a “clear and penetrating genius.” While “unversed in history or political
theories,” he was respected for his “practical spirit” and knowledge of human
nature.14 His brilliant political intuition and notorious lack of scruples made
him the dominant force in national politics until 1859. He emerged from the
March Revolution of 1845 as the dominant military leader and commanded an
impressive popular following. In 1851, after the tentative Noboa government
agreed to admit exiled Jesuits from New Granada, Urvina presented himself of
the sole defender of liberal values and installed himself in the presidency. 15
As president, Urvina ruled in a way that was “despotic, yet tolerant.”16 He
expanded, professionalized, and centralized the armed forces under his per-
sonal authority. He also set in motion a liberal-democratic program directed at
11. “El Progreso,” El Seis de Marzo, 28 Nov. 1845.

12. Cited in Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional,” 377 –78.
13. Ibid.
14. Junius (Benigno Malo), “Literatura histórica — Semblanza de Urvina,” La República
(Cuenca), Apr. 1860, reprinted in Revista del Centro de Estudios Históricos y Geográficos de
Cuenca 2, no. 5 ( Nov. 1921): 84 – 88. See also the laudatory obituaries from 1891 collected
in Destruge, Urvina el Presidente, 291– 99.
15. Urvina, “Mensaje a la Convención de 1852,” reprinted in Noboa, Recopilación, 2:129.
Full bibliographical treatment of Urvina is limited, but see Destruge, Urvina el Presidente;
and Julio Tobar Donoso, “El general José María Urbina: Ensayo biográfico,” Boletín de la
Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Estudios Históricos Americanos 4, no. 12 (May/June 1920): 468 – 96.
16. Hurtado, Political Power in Ecuador, 100.
disempowering the serrano aristocracy while rewarding his multiclass coalition

of supporters. In particular, the burgeoning coastal agro-export oligarchy sup-
ported Urvina, whose economic policies mandated reduced export duties and
promoted freer labor practices.17 His anticlerical initiatives also endeared him
to this sector, which saw the church as a powerful ally of serrano landlord con-
servatism, an ideology that stymied the pursuit of their economic and political
goals. Though they lacked the substantive bite of secularizing initiatives else-
where in the region, Ecuador’s reforms barked loud enough to ensure a period
of strained church-state relations. In addition to re-expelling the Jesuits in
1853, Urvina limited the incomes of other religious orders, suspended diplo-
matic relations with the Holy See, and vetoed legislation that would have out-
lawed Masonic lodges.18
Recodifying the State-Indian Covenant:

The 1854 Ley de Indígenas
The ideological foundation of the Urvinista political project involved a subtle,

but substantial, reconceptualization of Ecuadoran republican values. Whereas
earlier administrations had professed a legalistic ideal of republicanism, Urvina
and his handpicked successor, Francisco Robles (1856 – 59), stressed the
“Anglo-American” principles of social and economic equality and advocated
egalitarianism and civil rights for all Ecuadorans.19 Urvina’s signature 1851
constitution loosened suffrage requirements and expanded popular electoral
participation. The abolition of African slavery in 1854 generated substantial
political capital and was used to contrast the state’s lofty goals of equality and
liberty with the petty economic interests of the serrano landholders; the state
presented itself as capable of mediating between classes and gradually trans-
forming society.20 Next, Urvina turned his attention to the emancipation of the
country’s Indian population, whose condition, he claimed, had “all the charac-
17. For a detailed policy statement on Marcista political economy, see “El Progreso.”
18. Hurtado, Political Power in Ecuador, 100. For midcentury anti-Jesuit sentiment, see,
e.g., [Javier Endara] “Informe de la Gobernacion de . . . Imbabura,” 13 July 1854; El Seis de
Marzo, 21 Nov. 1854; El Seis de Marzo, 9 Sept. 1853.
19. Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional,” 381, 410 –12.
20. In 1854, the public manumission of slaves and the indemnification of slave owners
made up a prominent part of the civic holiday commemorating the 1845 Marcista
revolution. Gubernatorial Decree, Pichincha, 1 Mar. 1854, El Seis de Marzo, 11 Mar. 1854.
See especially the speeches made by local politicians, military figures, and members of
“democratic societies” in Quito. El Seis de Marzo, 17 Mar. 1854.
teristics of the most opprobrious slavery”21 Beginning in 1854, the Urvinista

political project voiced a commitment to improve the conditions in which Ecua-
dor’s indígenas labored and, more ambitiously, to equalize (igualar) their status
with the rest of the republic’s population. In fact, defining and handling the
“Indian problem” was central to the Urvinista republican utopia of social and
economic equality — a politics that had the potential to transcend class inter-
ests and delegitimate the ideological basis for Catholic-conservative hegemony.22
As a centerpiece of the popular liberal experiment, the Urvinistas put forth
an ambitious reconfiguration of state-Indian relations. On the surface, the proj-
ect appears to have been dedicated to dismantling the colonial structures of
caste obligation and privilege. The onerous contribución de indígenas (Indian
tribute) was gradually phased out after 1845 and definitively abolished in
1857.23 An 1854 law ended the colonial institution of the protecturía de indígenas
(legal tutelage), which had made Indians dependent on local officials (usually
clergy) for legal representation. The suppression of Indian tutelage aimed to
give Indians unfettered access to a national judicial system, free from the
machinations of a locally powerful protector de indígenas. Urvinista educational
policy campaigned to liberate Indians from “misery, ignorance, and dejection.”24
However, the sum effect of Urvinista policy was not the erasure of Indian caste
identity but the reinforcement of indigenous collective rights and community
structures. While it advocated a moderate plan of land privatization, for instance,
it continued to recognize Indian family and community holdings. More radi-
cally, the state attempted to regulate and ameliorate rural labor servitude by
supporting “free” Indian communities against the demands and abuses of sierra
hacendados. Thus, rather than advocating a race-blind bond between individ-
ual citizen and state, the Urvinistas sought to reinvigorate the colonial state-
Indian covenant at the expense of landlord and church power. A kinder and
gentler application of Enlightenment ideas, Urvina’s Indian policy was decid-
edly neocolonial and far from ethnocidal.25
21. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente de la República pidiendo la supresión de las

protecturías de indígenas,” reprinted in Noboa, Recopilación, 195.
22. Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional,” 377 – 83.
23. Mark Van Aken, “The Lingering Death of Indian Tribute in Ecuador,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 61, no. 3 (1981): 429 – 59.
24. Ministry of Interior report, 1854, cited in Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración
nacional,” 379.
25. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente,” 241. For two influential studies of postcolonial
Indian-state relations emphasizing the “ethnocidal” consequences of liberal-minded land
and fiscal policies, see Tristan Platt, “Liberalism and Ethnocide in the Southern Andes,”
The Urvinista attempt to control the administration of the country’s

Indian population for state-building purposes was most coherently expressed
in the Ley de Indígenas adopted on November 23, 1854.26 This law codified a
reinvigorated state-Indian relationship in the highlands and sought to meld
“democratic ideals” onto a neocolonial caste system.27 Indian loyalty to the
state was rewarded with protection and special “corporate” privileges, and Indian
rights were defined through a careful mix of individual and corporate liberties.
The first section sought to rescue the Indian tributary model from “deca-
dence.” To this end, it established an unprecedented centralized framework
that tried to overcome local custom and abuse by simplifying and rationalizing
the tax system.28 It codified the sectors of the Indian population that were sub-
ject to the law, painstakingly defining who was eligible for state protections,
rights, and exemptions. As in earlier legislation, the state-Indian relationship
continued to be understood as a bond between a paternal state and adult Indian
males. Indeed, as was generally the case in Urvinista discourse on Indian issues,
mention of women or minors is entirely absent.
The law also revealed the shifting regional dynamics of the state’s Indian
policy at midcentury. Its scope was restricted to the provinces of the sierra —
excluding both coastal and Amazonian regions. In the littoral provinces of
Guayaquil, Manabí, and Esmeraldas, where Indians were a minority, biological
and cultural mestizaje was presumed to be running its whitening course, and
this “de-Indianized” population was legally subjected to the obligations of “the
commonalty of citizens.”29 While coastal Indians were excluded from Urvina’s
History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): 3 –17; and Andrés Guerrero, “Curagas y tenientes
políticos: La ley de la costumbre y el ley del estado (Otavalo, 1830 –1875),” Revista Andina
7, no. 2 (1989): 321– 65. For a critique of the generalized application of the “ethnocide”
thesis and a compelling counterargument of re-Indianization in early-nineteenth-century
Peru, see Paul Gootenberg, “Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru: Some
Revisions,” Latin American Research Review 26, no. 3 (1991): 109 – 57.
26. Ley . . . de Indígenas, 23 Nov. 1854, reprinted in Historia social del Ecuador, ed.
Piedad Peñaherrera de Costales and Alfredo Costales Samaniego, vol. 1, El concertaje de
indios y manumisión de esclavos (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1964), hereafter cited
as LI.
27. This is most explicit in the law’s justificatory preamble.
28. Based on similar legislation from 1851, the 1854 law differed both in structure and
content from earlier legislation. Absent from the 1854 law, for example, were separate
sections addressing cabildos de indígenas, resguardos, and protectores de indígenas — all
present in the earlier law. Lei de contribucion de indijenas, dada por la convencion nacional en
1851 (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1851).
29. LI, art. 2, sec. 1.
Indian policy due to their progress toward European ideals, however, the “sav-
age” peoples of the Amazon were excluded for the opposite reason. Although
the question of civilizing and colonizing the Amazon was never wholly ignored,
it was a distinctly secondary issue. The distinction between comuneros (commu-
nity-based Indians) and conciertos (estate peons) effectively replaced the Andes/
Amazonia split as the central dichotomy within Ecuador’s “Indian problem.”30
More importantly, Urvinista Indian policy articulated a redefinition of the
postindependence question of Indian exclusion and barbarity. Urvinista liber-
als framed the “Indian question” not as a cultural problem — lack of education,
morality, and patriotism—but as a socioeconomic one. They moved away from
an emphasis on bringing the “barbaric” Oriente into the fold of civilization and
instead stressed the hacienda-community divide as the essential dynamic in
understanding Indian society.31
The second section of the law, focusing on Indian rights and exemptions,
effectively codified the reconfigured state-Indian covenant. This involved,
among other things, the universal extension of legal rights and economic free-
doms to all Indians — most notably, the abolition of legal tutelage. Since the
earliest colonial times, Indians had been defined as legal minors and placed
under the ward of state-appointed protectores. With the elimination of tute-
lage, Indians would in theory enjoy the same legal identity and capacity as “the
commonalty of Ecuadorans.” Released from the protectores, individual Indians
would be free to represent themselves in any “judicial, civil, or political act.” In
keeping with the paternal nature of the law, however, Indians would continue
to enjoy special status in the courts, including exemptions from certain legal
fees.32
30. Largely based on Juan de Velasco’s influential writings in the late eighteenth
century, Ecuador’s indigenous population during the postindependence period had been
customarily understood as comprising two parts — the sedentary, docile, and civilized sierra
Indians and the nomadic, fierce, barbaric Amazon tribes. Juan de Velasco, Historia del reino
de Quito en la America Meridional, que contiene la historia natural: año de 1879, ed. Agustín
Yerovi (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1844), 183 – 216. On colonial and postcolonial
discourse on the Indian, see also Hernan Ibarra, “La identidad de los indios modernos,” in
Indios: Una reflexión sobre el levantamiento indígena de 1990, ed. Ileana Almeida et al. (Quito:
Abya-Yala, 1991); and the articles in Blanca Muratorio’s pathbreaking edited collection
Imágenes e imagineros: Representaciones de los indígenas ecuatorianos, siglos XIX y XX (Quito:
FLACSO, 1994).
31. The liberal understanding of and approach to the problems facing Indian society
at midcentury are articulated most expressly in the publication of Manuel Villavicencio,
Geografía de la República del Ecuador ( New York: Imprenta de Robert Craighead, 1858),
165 –77.
32. LI, art. 44.
While it recognized the corporate status of individual Indians, the law also
recognized the duality of the Indian population in highland Ecuador and
focused on the particular issues facing comuneros and conciertos. The institu-
tion of concertaje — an Ecuadoran version of debt servitude —was perceived as
the fundamental cause of Indian misfortune. During the first half of the nine-
teenth century, perhaps as many as half of all Indian contribuyentes were
conciertos.33 Peonage—like African slavery—was an anathema to republican
ideals, and the landlords who supported it were depicted as the direct heirs of
oppressive colonialism. However, the social situation among comuneros (or
indígenas libres, free Indians) was understood in a different light. To be sure, the
state recognized the exploitation of free Indians and acknowledged a nefarious
intermediary layer of officialdom: greedy tax collectors, manipulative church
officials, and powerful protectores. Yet, the problems of the comunero were
depicted as inherently superficial and eminently solvable. The free Indian —
more so than the hacienda peon —was considered better able to exercise his
“natural faculties” and stood on the verge of equality with his fellow white-
mestizo citizens.
The 1854 law mandated the parcelization of Indian lands to individual
households, ostensibly promoting the transformation of comuneros into small-
holders. It struck down long-standing colonial restrictions on land sales, allow-
ing Indians “to freely alienate their property.”34 In this way, the legislation’s
stance on Indian land reform fits into a larger Latin American liberal philoso-
phy that saw corporate landholding as a central obstacle to economic and polit-
ical progress. Only by freeing up the vast, underutilized, and inalienable lands
of Indian communities (and the church)— the argument went — could the
nation become productive and nurture a culture of individualism and democ-
racy. To boot, dissolving community lands would transform comuneros into
productive yeoman farmers and, eventually, mestizo citizens.
However, while Urvinismo was intent on spreading individual economic
freedoms, it was in no way committed to the wholesale destruction of indige-
nous communities. Unlike liberal land policies elsewhere, the Urvinistas made
no concerted attempt to eliminate Indian communities or their hierarchy of
33. Audiencia of Quito tribute records from 1805 classify 46% of Indians as
conciertos and 54% as libres; see Udo Oderem, “Contribución a la historia del trabajador
rural en América Latina: ‘Conciertos’ y ‘huasipungueros’ en Ecuador,” in Contribución a la
etnohistoria ecuatoriana, ed. Udo Oberem and Segundo Moreno Yánez (Otavalo: Instituto
Otavaleño de Antropología, 1981).
34. LI, art. 57.
authorities.35 Indeed, Urvina’s legislation pragmatically recognized Indian

communal rights to hold lands collectively. The same provision that asserted
Indian rights to a private usufruct property, for example, also guaranteed their
access to lands held “in common.” The law protected all lands with “special
titles” proving they belonged to an indigenous community, and it validated
community rights in several other places as well. Although it parceled out cor-
porate lands to individual Indian families, the law fully recognized — indeed,
reinforced—the territoriality and legitimacy of the Indian community. In short,
Urvinista land reform was conceived so as to perpetuate indefinitely the Indian
community structure.36
Article 51: Redefining the Nature of Indian Servitude
The flip side of the Urvinista advocacy of comunero rights was its antagonism
toward the institution of labor servitude. While the outright elimination of
concertaje was beyond the realm of political possibility, the regulation of con-
certaje contracts and the subordination of hacienda interests to concierto rights
were central to Urvinista policy. Article 51 of the Ley de Indígenas — a single,
but substantive, provision regarding concertaje — marked an unambiguous
shift away from state support of landlord interests. This article, in an unprece-
dented clarification of the role of debt in rural labor relations, mandated that
all Indian conciertos “attached” to haciendas or obrajes would no longer be
obligated “to pay off their debts with their labor.” Having paid off his debt, a
concierto would now be at liberty “to depart from service” prior to the annual
settling (liquidación) of accounts.37 As one proponent explained, the concierto
35. On nineteenth-century liberal land reforms in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia in

comparative context, see Larson, “Trials of Nation Making.” See also Florencia Mallon’s
cogent overview, “Indian Communities, Political Cultures, and the State in Latin America,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (fall 1992): 35 – 53; and Erick Langer, “El liberalismo y
la abolición de la comunidad indígena en el siglo XIX,” Historia y Cultura 14 (1988): 59 – 95.
36. LI, art. 47. The Ecuadoran law was not comparable, for example, to Bolivia’s
more comprehensive Ley de Exvinculación (1874) or Mexico’s Ley Lerdo (1856). The absence
of any anticommunity rhetoric made Urvinista land reforms more akin to the 1850s liberal
reforms under Castilla in Peru. See Nils Jacobsen, “Liberalism and Indian Communities in
Peru During the Nineteenth Century,” in Robert Jackson, ed., Church and Indigenous
Community Lands and the Challenge of Liberal Reform in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), 140, 144.
37. The article’s full text reads: “Indigenous conciertos who are attached to
agricultural or manufacturing estates cannot be obliged to pay off their debts with labor,
and, paying what they owe, they may depart from service prior to the liquidation [of
would now be “free to leave his service the day that he sees fit, the day in which
necessity obliges him.”38 Placed on even legal footing with Ecuador’s full citi-
zens, Indian laborers were extended the fundamental economic right to free
themselves from creditors through debt repayment.
To be sure, the 1854 law was not without precedent in legislating the
rights of conciertos.39 However, the overt antilandlord character of this inter-
vention was clearly novel, and the law’s implications struck at the very heart of
the hacienda labor system. By allowing a concierto without debt to end his ser-
vice prior to the termination of his contract, the Urvinistas boldly legislated
against the prevailing legal interpretation of concertaje as a contract of inden-
tured servitude. Rather than interpreting concertaje as an annual contract of
bondage, Article 51 defined it as a simple relation of debt or debt peonage.
Acknowledging debt as the exclusive cement of concertaje would have grave
implications for landlords, both for the provisioning of labor to their estates
and for their legitimacy as patrones. The law also challenged the prevailing
notion that landlord well-being was synonymous with national progress, sug-
gesting instead a political community that incorporated the nation’s popular
classes.40 Indeed, midcentury Indian policy emerged as an important avenue
for dispelling the commonsense association of landlord objectives with
national destiny and establishing an alternative social basis for Ecuadoran iden-
tity and integration.
In fact, the Ley de Indígenas was the harbinger of a broader affront to land-
lord privilege and legitimacy. The Urvinista coalition now explicitly held land-
lords responsible for the miserable condition of Indians and exposed their inter-
ests as contrary to the national interest. As one Urvinista phrased it, “I am not a
landlord, but a citizen, and I have the sensitivity to feel sorry for the fate of these
unfortunate ones.”41 This direct link between the lamentable condition of the
Indian and the practice of labor servitude challenged the historical landlord-
accounts] which will take place in the presence of a Teniente parroquial, if the indígena so
demands.” LI, art. 51.
38. Honorable [Deputy] Bustamante, in House of Representatives Session, 29 Sept.
1855, El Seis de Marzo, 29 Jan. 1856.
39. As early as 1831, presidential decrees had outlined specific rights and obligations
for conciertos. Juan Flores, circular, 18 Nov. 1831, cited in Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, El
indio ecuatoriano: Contribución al estudio de la sociología nacional (Quito: Ed. Quito, 1922),
161– 63.
40. Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional,” 377 – 83.
41. El Seis de Marzo, 29 Jan. 1856.
state alliance and permitted the state to position itself as the paternal arbiter
between villainous landowners and victimized Indians. Indeed, antilandlord dis-
course was central to the Urvinistas’ broader political objective: the centraliza-
tion and expansion of state power. In exposing the naturalness of the exploita-
tion of the Indian, the state’s advocacy of Indian rights was nothing short of
counterhegemonic. The despoliation of the indigenous population was deemed
a crime “of the whole society.”42 As such, it required the centralized state to not
only enact laws but also reform bad “colonial” habits — remaking the very val-
ues of republican society. Perceptions of the Indians’ “abject resignation” fur-
ther justified state intervention into areas traditionally outside of its domain.
Promising to give Indians a voice, the state assumed the role of tutor and regen-
erator—a paternal mission that called for strong, centralized, and comprehen-
sive measures. Indeed, in justifying the Ley de Indígenas, Urvinistas argued that
the guarantee of Indian rights required a centralized, paternal, and humanistic
state. With the implementation of Article 51, the concierto would be excused
from honoring a contract whose conditions he did not fully understand:
[W]hen he opens his eyes, when he realizes the enormity of the situation
to which his commitment has reduced him, when he becomes acquainted
with the bad faith with which he has been seduced — he [will now be able
to say to the landlord]: ‘I rescind my agreement, because it was not my
will to subject myself to the condition to which you have bound me. You
treat me badly; my salary does not correspond to my labor; you have
deceived me. Take your money back, and let me have my liberty.’ Can
there be any harm to the landowner in this? Can humanity and reason
allow themselves to compel the Indian to be a victim of his lack of
foresight, his lack of discernment?43
With regard to comuneros, the central state clearly favored a more direct
relationship, in which community property rights were individualized and each
family would receive land from the government’s distribution system. More-
over, it was an attempt to centralize the state’s intervention into comunero
affairs — moving the authority to redistribute Indian land away from local offi-
cials and into the hands of provincial governors appointed by the president.
State expansion into the internal affairs of the Indian community had been
ongoing in the decades after independence, as parish-level tenientes políticos
42. Ministry of Interior report, 1858, cited in Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración
nacional,” 380.
43. Honorable [Deputy] Bustamante, in House of Representatives Session, 29 Sept. 1855.
gained power and legitimacy at the expense of Indian authorities.44 The Ley de
Indígenas moved to expand on these inroads but replaced local with national
authority.
The abolition of the contribución de indígenas in 1857 was hailed as a
crowning achievement of the Urvinista pro-Indian initiative. For Ecuador’s
Indians, the abolition was also interpreted as a legal victory with the potential
to improve their social situation. In some regions, news of the abolition caused
Indian laborers to abandon their haciendas in large numbers. North of Quito,
for example, the provincial governor was forced to intervene, instructing local
officials to “make the Indians understand” that the abolition of tribute had not
affected the laws requiring peons and day laborers “to fulfill their obliga-
tions.”45 More generally, the abolition of tribute — as a climax of the broader
shift in state-Indian relations — generated expectations among Indians for the
advancement of corporate rights and the betterment of economic conditions.
Indeed, pro-Indian legislation had concrete consequences for interethnic rela-
tions in the serrano region.46 The ambiguities of the paternal liberal doctrines
of the central government provided legal and rhetorical openings for concier-
tos and free Indians to leverage their relationships with local authorities and
landlords.
The Urvinista Indian policy was a useful tool that reconfigurred the nature
and objectives of the fledgling state, delegitimized its chief opposition (serrano
landlords), and legitimated centralized power. At the same time, however, the
debate over the terms and cultural meaning of labor servitude was fought most
furiously at the local level, where Indian workers, hacendados, and the state
had the most directly at stake. The impact and meaning of increased state
intervention under Urvina on everyday social relations were ambiguous and
involved a complex engagement of state initiatives by local power brokers,
most notably landlords, clergy, and Indian authorities. Nonetheless, by the
mid-1860s, antilandlord politics had facilitated significant alterations in the
contours of conflict and collaboration in rural highland Ecuador.
44. Guerrero, “Curagas y tenientes políticos.”

45. Governor of Imbabura to Jefe Político of Otavalo, 23 Jan. 1858, Archivo
Histórico del Instituto Otavaleño de Antropología (hereafter IOA), Secretaria Municipal,
caja 23(c).
46. Derek Williams, “Negotiating the State: National Utopias and Local Politics in
Andean Ecuador, 1845 –1895” (Ph.D. diss., State Univ. of New York–Stony Brook, 2001),
chap. 3.
Shrewd or Seduced? Indian Conciertos and

the Right to Change Servitude
In his engaging 1867 travelogue, Four Years among the Spanish Americans, Frie-
drich Hassaurek wrote extensively on the plight of Ecuador’s Indians.47 Has-
saurek, appointed by President Lincoln as the U.S. minister to Quito, carefully
considered the issue of labor servitude on the haciendas of the interior. His
description (though framed awkwardly within a broader antislavery argument)
provides a valuable snapshot of the nature of labor mobility within the concer-
taje system at midcentury.
It is not usual to settle accounts every year. In many cases it is only done
when the Indian, tired of his master, asks for a settlement. He is then taken
before a justice . . . , a balance is struck, and the debtor imprisoned. . . .
His huasipongo [family plot of land] . . . now revert[s] to his master, and
the Indian remains in jail until somebody else pays his debt and thereby
purchases his services. . . . [However,] laborers are in great demand; the
Indian himself perhaps has already made an arrangement with his new
master before he left the old one (and some Indians are shrewd enough to do
this to their own advantage).48
For Hassaurek, such observations were evidence of the virtual slavery under
which Ecuador’s indigenous population toiled. Yet, beyond an indictment of
Ecuador’s backward labor regime, his findings point to the broader impact —
both its achievements and limits — of Urvinista antilandlord policies on local
agrarian conflict.
These comments serve as a reminder of the unwavering state support of
concertaje, both during and after the Urvinista period, through imprisonment
for debts. To repeat: far from threatening the legality of the hacienda-concertaje
system, the 1854 law ultimately reasserted the state’s support of Indian servi-
tude. Hassaurek also corroborates the idea that debt—and not any prearranged
contractual period —was the determining factor for worker commitment to
estates. While the author interprets this as evidence of the eternal character of
Indian servitude, he notes as well that it did afford the peon the possibility to
improve his condition by selling his services elsewhere. Finally, the recognition
47. Friedrich Hassaurek, Four Years among Spanish-Americans ( New York: Hurd and
Houghton, 1867). All quotations from the work are taken from the 1967 abridged version,
Four Years among the Ecuadorians, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Univ. Press, 1967).
48. Hassaurek, Four Years, 170 –71. Emphasis added.
that many peons initiated such transfers “to their own advantage” suggests that
in regions where demand for labor was high, it was often difficult to discern the
aggrieved from the aggressor. In such cases, conciertos held considerable
power to change their lot.
Most perceptive is Hassaurek’s intimation of an increasingly open chal-
lenge to landlord authority. The effective application of peon mobility rights
within the concertaje system, he noted, was understood by hacendados as a
novel phenomenon, labeled disparagingly as “perfidy,” “refractoriness,” or “bad
faith.” Similarly, Indians’ “shrewdness” in transferring their service broke with
customary landlord expectations of “a doglike servility and submissiveness on
the part of the Indian.”49 Thus, Hassaurek identified a broader climate of land-
lord disgruntlement over their loss of control over the labor force and the
state’s active protection of Indian rights. Indeed, while unversed in the Indian
legislation of the Urvina period, Hassaurek unwittingly articulated the linger-
ing impact of the 1854 Ley de Indígenas and its redefinition of concertaje as a
debt relation. Indians could and did translate legal rights into power in their
relations with hacendados, maximizing their mobility within the system and
even exiting servitude altogether.
To fully appreciate the vexing implications of the 1854 law for the landlord
class, we must contextualize it within the broader history of concertaje and
state-hacienda relations in Ecuador’s central-north highlands. Although it dates
back to the seventeenth century, concertaje only emerged as a widespread
method of labor provisioning in the Audiencia of Quito after the decline and
abolition of the quinta (mita) labor drafts in the late colonial period.50 The term
concertaje, apparently particular to the Ecuadoran region, translates simply as
a “concordance” for labor services made between consenting parties.51 Though
the terms of such agreements varied widely depending on time and place, they
49. Ibid., 171.

50. Hernán Ibarra, “Haciendas y concertaje al fin de la época colonial en Ecuador
(Un análisis introductorio),” Revista Andina 6, no. 1 (1988): 175 – 95. The end of the quinta
(literally, one-fifth of the working-age male Indians drafted on a rotating basis) also
promoted the expanded use of other labor arrangements on haciendas, such as
sharecroppers ( partidarios), service tenants ( yanaperos), and wage workers ( jornaleros).
51. From the verb concertar— to agree — concertaje was similar to other debt
service/tenancy arrangements elsewhere in Latin American, such as terrazgueraje in
southwest Colombia or inquilinaje in Chile. On the nature and historical development of
concertaje, see Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego, Historia social del Ecuador,
1:283 – 87; Andrés Guerrero, La semántica de la dominación: El concertaje de indios (Quito:
Libri Mundi; E. Grosse-Luemern, 1991), 83 – 86; Ibarra, “Haciendas y concertaje”; Roque
Espinosa, “Hacienda, concertaje y comunidad en el Ecuador,” Revista Cultura (Quito) 19
(1984).
typically involved the advancement of cash and other goods (food, clothes, and
sometimes a huasipongo) from patron to laborer. Both Ecuadoran and foreign
observers of midcentury rural society emphasized the importance of debt in
binding conciertos to an eternity of servitude.52 Following this interpretation,
nineteenth-century patrons seemed well equipped to keep conciertos tied to
their estates through a combination of excessive church fees, miserly wages,
and the distribution of overpriced foodstuffs. Concertaje, like the quinta labor
system before it, depended on state support and regulation. Historically, the
institution of debtor’s prison had effectively impelled Indian compliance to
their agreements and posed an abominable option for peons who, for whatever
reason, wished to exit servitude altogether.
Yet, while debt might keep Indian peons locked into their condition as
conciertos, it did little to prevent them from moving between estates or from
large hacendados to lesser patrones in search of better working conditions.53
Landlords disparagingly labeled this labor mobility as the “seducción de indios”—
the luring away of peons from one estate with false promises of higher wages or
more amenities. Nor could debt obligations alone prevent conciertos from
leaving service at any time on the promise of debt payment or while pursuing
legal action against the estate. Even if an Indian ended up back on the same
estate, the legal proceedings and the physical absence of the peon from the
estate caused expensive disruptions for landlords. Thus, enforcement of debt
peons’ obligations through imprisonment alone was insufficient to guarantee
workforce stability. Landlords were, of course, attentive to this reality and dur-
ing the early republican period had successfully lobbied for the legal enforce-
ment of yearly contracts that bound contracted workers to a patron regardless
of indebtedness. This second type of state intervention had served both to reg-
ulate the mobility of Indians within the system and to prevent the untimely
absences of conciertos from the estate.54
52. Joseph Kolberg, Hacia el Ecuador—Nach Ecuador: Relatos de viaje, trans. Federico
Yepez Arboleda (Quito: Centro de Publicaciones Pontificia Universidad Católica del
Ecuador, 1977), 79; President, Message, “. . . Transmitting, . . . the Report of George Earl
Church upon Ecuador,” [21 Sept. 1881], 47th Congr., 2d Session, Ex. doc. no. 69, 16 Feb.
1883, 19; Hassaurek, Four Years, 169 –72; Pedro Fermín Cevallos, Resumen de la historia del
Ecuador desde su origin hasta 1845, 2d ed. (Guayaquil: Imprenta de la Nación, 1889), 6:145.
53. Historians have tended to view the state-sanctioned debtors’ prison as the key to
concertaje. Such an interpretation follows that of the early-twentieth-century
“abolitionists” of concertaje, who believed eliminating debtors’ prisons would end of labor
servitude. For a convincing dissenting view, stressing the extraeconomic social and cultural
bonds between peon and patron, see Guerrero, La semántica de la dominación, 83 – 86.
The Ley de Indígenas removed the customary legal justification for

immobilizing hacienda workers, threatening to complicate hacienda labor pro-
visioning.55 Urvinista Indian policy created a freer, more mobile labor force —
generally undesirable for the undercapitalized haciendas of the Ecuadoran
sierra — and effectively decriminalized the “seduction” of Indians. Landlord
groups were further concerned over the unprecedented national scope of the
legislation — its pretension to impose universal rights and practices onto very
diverse regional contexts of power and labor relations.
This is not to suggest that the Urvinista initiatives were universally applied
or uniformly effective; rather, they would play out with wide variation in dif-
ferent regions, and even among neighboring estates in the same region. Sort-
ing out the social, cultural, and economic meaning of the Ley de Indígenas at
the local level is a complex task that is ultimately beyond this essay’s scope.
Nonetheless, three principal factors came into play: (1) The question of labor
demand on estates and the willingness of a region’s landlords to compete
against each other. The level of competition in a given region depended on the
type of estate that predominated — ranching, agricultural, manufacturing, or
mixed — and their economic prospects in regional, national, and international
markets. (2) The nature of the working conditions within estates or smaller
farms and the economic, familial, and cultural ties that bound workers to a
given estate. In large estates that encompassed entire kinship communities or
in haciendas where laborers were granted huasipongos, workers might be less
likely to risk moving to another estate. (3) The relative economic, political, and
territorial weight of landed estates in relation to community-based and small-
holder agriculture. This, in turn, helped to determine the variety and plausi-
bility of labor options outside the hacienda complex — in independent share-
crop farming, manufacturing, service tenantry, or other less binding arrangements
with hacendados. In the end, the implementation and understanding of mid-
54. The insufficiency of debt alone to translate into coercive power has been noted in
other Latin American contexts of rural labor servitude. As Arnold Bauer notes, “To
establish the presence of a functioning peonage, there must be evidence of the landowner’s
ability to restrict workers’ mobility” (“Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of
Peonage and Oppression,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 1 [1979]: 34 – 63). See
also Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends
and Tendencies,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (1974): 1– 47, esp. 15 – 23.
55. In response to landlord complaints, the 1831 Flores government, for instance, had
drafted a measure that obligated Indian conciertos “to religiously fulfill [their] role as
concierto, without being allowed to break the contract on the pretext that they [will pay
off] the balance against them.” Cited in Jaramillo Alvarado, El indio ecuatoriano, 161– 63.
century antilandlord measures were filtered through regionally specific inter-

actions between customary labor practices, legal intervention, and everyday
forms of negotiation.
It was in the southern highland provinces of Azuay and Loja that the Ley
de Indígenas was most disruptive to latifundia agriculture and apparently most
beneficial to Indian peons. Around the provincial capital of Cuenca, for exam-
ple, where local elites faced growing competition for labor from expanding
coastal cacao farms, hacendados were impacted heavily. Landlord proponents
condemned the law, claiming that it had “mortally wounded” the province’s
agricultural industry. They complained that Indian peons, with the law’s back-
ing, had increasingly stopped honoring agreed-on contracts — belittling “the
good faith of the landlord.”56 However, opposition to Article 51 in Azuay was
more than regionalist posturing against the central government’s efforts to
implement national legislation. It was also an attempt to address a formidable
economic and cultural problem for the region’s landlords. Indeed, it would be
Cuenca’s landlords who would captain a spirited, though ultimately unsuccess-
ful, battle in Congress to have the article revoked.57
Further south in Loja, the law caused provincewide labor shortages and
similarly challenged the interests of local landlords. They claimed that newly
empowered conciertos had been transformed from docile farmhands into “errant
peons,” moving freely between estates and “demanding an increase in debt
from each new patron.”58 In both Loja and Cuenca, local officials predictably
conflated widespread peon mobility with a perceived rise in Indian immorality
and social disorder. More revealing, however, is the absence of references to
landlord “seduction.” That is, Indians were not being lured away by unscrupu-
lous patrons, but apparently initiating transfers between estates themselves. In
fact, although they decried the law’s negative economic impact, powerful land-
lord advocates seemed more disturbed by the shift in social relations between
56. “Informe del Gobernador de . . . Cuenca . . . 1855,” 19 July 1855, El Seis de Marzo,
2nd series, no. 168 (Sept./Oct.? 1855).
57. On the 1855 debate, see Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego,
Historia social, 1:283 – 87; Andrés Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image:
Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late-Nineteenth-Century Ecuador,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 555 – 90. On hacendado interests and
hacienda-community relations in Azuay during the early nineteenth century, see Silvia
Palomeque, Cuenca en el siglo XIX: La articulación de una región (Quito: FLACSO/Abya-Yala,
1990), 146 – 85.
58. “Informe de la Gobernador de . . . Loja . . . 1855,” 28 June 1856, El Seis de Marzo,
12 Aug. 1856.
patron and peon. Granting conciertos the legal right to leave an estate before
the settling of accounts had led to an increasingly bold and refractory attitude
among Indians in their relations with landlords. As one local official ominously
warned: “To authorize an Indian . . . not to fulfill his contracts in which he has
committed his services to an owner of an agricultural estate, not only deprives
the farming industry of labor . . . , but as well, it legally authorizes the Indian
to do bad.”59 Indeed, southern landlords seemed most beleaguered by the abil-
ity of Indian laborers to mock patriarchal authority “with impunity.”
In the central-north highlands, the immediate impact of law on hacienda-
peon relations was less dramatic. In the central provinces of León and Rio-
bamba, for example, peons appear to have been less able to translate new legal
protections into economic or social advantage. In some jurisdictions, extraor-
dinary concentration of land among a small number of estates and an excep-
tionally large and impoverished rural labor pool likely rendered a peon’s right
to “change servitude” irrelevant. In the canton of Pujilí, for instance, Indians
were considered fortunate to have a stable concertaje contract. With little com-
petition among landlords and slim economic opportunities outside of the estate,
Pujilí’s conciertos lived in fear of being expelled by their patron and losing
their access to huasipongo land.60
In the northern serrano province of Imbabura, the law — and antilandlord
politics in general — had favorable, if equivocal, consequences for Indian labor
mobility. As in the south, many Indians here were well positioned to benefit
from the pro-Indian attitude of the central government. Labor demand was
high, as expanding sugar estates of the Ibarra and Chota Valleys competed with
the traditional obrajes and ranching estates of Otavalo and Cotacachi. More-
over, the region’s obrajes required skilled weavers, a reality that afforded textile
workers power to transfer their services to another estate or even outside the
concertaje system. The province’s Indians also had other economic opportuni-
ties — particularly household cloth production, but also small-scale hat mak-
ing, leather work, and reed-mat making. The relative resilience of the Indian
59. “Informe del Gobernador de . . . Cuenca . . . 1855.”

60. Jefe Político of Pujilí to Governor of Leon, 7 May 1867; Oficios de la Jefatura
Política de Pujilí (1867), Archivo de la Gobernación de la Provincia de Cotopaxi
(Latacunga) (hereafter AGPC), bundle 34. Elsewhere, such as the canton of Cumbe
( province of Azuay), Indians entering into concertaje contracts were obliged by patrons to
put up their community lands as collateral for their advances. Martha Moscoso, “La tierra:
Espacio de conflicto y relación entre el estado y la comunidad en el siglo XIX,” in Los Andes
en la encrucijada: Indios, comunidades y estado en el siglo XIX, ed. Heráclio Bonilla (Quito:
Libri Mundi; E. Grosse-Luemen; FLASCO, 1991), 385.
community structure in the region further hampered the estates’ capacity to

attract and maintain a stable labor force.61
Indeed, Hassaurek’s perception of a highly mobile workforce and land-
lords’ resulting frustration was largely gleaned from his frequent visits to Imbab-
ura in the early 1860s. His observations are corroborated by legal sources
demonstrating local obraje owners to be on the defensive in combating Indian
labor mobility.62 A lawsuit originating in 1865 is particularly illustrative of the
process by which some conciertos — variously called gañanes (farmhands) —
changed employers, asserted their new rights to state officials, and undercut
landlord profit and legitimacy.63 In early October, José María Vinueza, a weaver
in the large obraje of Pinsaquí, requested to have his account settled by a
municipal judge so as to transfer his servitude to a new patron. Vinueza, along
with a dozen other obraje workers, had recently come to terms with an agent of
an hacienda in nearby Ibarra. Once their accounts were settled and the money
consigned by their new patron, the conciertos left Pinsaquí. Manuel Salvador,
the owner of Pinsaquí, immediately intervened — refusing to acknowledge the
workers’ right to physically leave the estate simply by covering their debt. Cit-
ing a civil code provision which forbade laborers from leaving until suitable
replacements could be found and trained, Salvador argued that his workers’
61. The industry and strength of free communities in Imbabura relative to other
serrano regions is evidenced both in statistical and anecdotal sources of the period. See,
e.g., “Libro de Tributo,” Otavalo, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Tributos 27,
1820; Censo del Canton de Otavalo, 1885, IOA, cajas sueltas. Joaquín de Avendaño,
“Memoria sobre el comercio y la navegación del Ecuador con los demas paises, y
especialmente con España,” in Imagen del Ecuador: Economía y sociedad vistas por un viajero del
siglo XIX (Quito: Corporación Ed. Nacional, 1985 [1858]), 249. Edouardo André, “América
equinoccial (Colombia–Ecuador),” in América pintoresca: Descripción y viajes al Nuevo
Continente por los más modernos exploradores: Carlos Wiener, Doctor Crevaux, D. Charney, etc.
(Barcelona: Montaner y Simon, 1884), 827.
62. Textile obrajes required a relatively stable year-round workforce to meet
prearranged orders from New Granada. Moreover, obraje workers were highly skilled and
required extensive training in specific tasks, making transfers costly in both lost labor and
wasted investment in training. See, e.g., Teniente Político of Jordan (Otavalo), 26 Jan.
1873, IOA, Secretaria Municipal, caja 35, 3; and IOA, Jefetura Política (hereafter JP) 1, caja
43, doc. 1165 (1865).
63. [Various gañanes vs. Hacienda Pinsaquí], IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165 (1865). For
similar lawsuits initiated by Imbabura-area conciertos claiming rights granted under Article
51, see, e.g., Siete gañanes vs. Hacienda Perugache, IOA, JP2, caja 50, doc. 888 (1857);
Nicolas Vasquez 2º, Jaspar Teran, and José Mariano Ramos vs. Hacienda Peguche, IOA,
JP1, caja 44, doc. 1594 (1866). Vicente Simbaña vs. Hacienda Cambugan, IOA, JP1, caja
45, doc. 1603 (1866).
debts were irrelevant to what was essentially a contractual obligation. The crux
of the hacienda’s argument, however, was not legal. Instead, it emphasized the
harmful economic, moral, and social consequences of unregulated Indian mobil-
ity. He predicted, for instance, that Indian absences would cost the obraje sub-
stantial lost contracts with its large Colombian buyers.64 Moreover, he described
Indian attempts to leave his estate as a failure to “fulfill their duties,” which set
a dangerous precedent that threatened the maintenance of “morality and
order” in the entire region.65
In legitimating their decision to leave the hacienda, the Pinsaquí Indians
marshaled a number of arguments to articulate their rights as gañanes. As in
similar lawsuits, some made specific accusations of overwork, work-related
infirmities, or insufficient remuneration. Virtually all, however, grounded their
defense in Article 51 and asserted their legal right to transfer their labor service
to whomever provided “the best comforts and guarantees.” As two of the con-
ciertos simply explained: “[W]e are moving with our families to serve another
person who will provide us with more amenities.” Municipal judges concurred
with the gañanes’ claims and in late 1865 settled their accounts and transferred
their debt to the new patron. The decision affirmed the Indians’ “free and
expeditious right” to “change their servitude.”66 As in other similar rulings, a
concierto without debt was now judged to be “in absolute liberty to dispose of
his labor.” Between December 1865 and April 1866, some twenty workers
abandoned Pinsaquí, the majority contracting their services in haciendas
around the city of Ibarra. Remarkably, others managed to pay off debts and
shed their concierto status altogether, becoming sueltos (free peons) in the
neighboring pueblos of Ilumán and Carabuela.
A year later, however, Quito’s Superior Court ruled that the gañanes’ deci-
sion to leave service had been “untimely,” as it had caused “grave harm to the
landlord.” Overturning the municipal decision, the court ordered the Indians
to honor their contract and return to the Pinsaquí obraje for another year, until
replacements could be trained.67 The high court decision was indicative of a
64. [Apoderado] M. Veintimilla, 21 Oct. 1865; Various gañanes vs. Hacienda Pinsaquí,
IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165 (1865), ff. 16r–v.
65. [Apoderado] M. Veintimilla, 2 Nov. 1865. Various gañanes vs. Hacienda Pinsaquí,
IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165 (1865), f. 4. Such arguments were standard landlord defense.
See below, and Siete indígenas gañanes vs. Hacienda Quinchuqui, IOA, JP1, caja 45, doc.
1645 (1866).
66. Vicente Simbaña vs. Hacienda Cambugan, IOA, JP1, caja 45, doc. 1603 (1866),
f. 12.
67. IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1066, ff. 23 – 31.
broader shift in approach to the question of Indian servitude underway during

the era of President García Moreno. By the mid-1860s, Urvina’s liberal reform-
ers were long gone from the central government, and its antioligarchic rhetoric
was replaced by more normalized state-hacienda relations. Yet, while Imbabura’s
landlords might now count on support from García Moreno’s order-and-
morality administration, they could not simply undo the expectations and
mobilization generated and fostered under Urvinismo. Indeed, attempts to
reclaim the former obraje workers were met with Indian recalcitrance — both
legal and physical. Most of the gañanes and ex-gañanes refused to return to
Pinsaquí, condemning the state’s apparent abandonment of a paternalist com-
mitment to Indian rights. Specifically, they reproached the state for placing the
economic interests of estate owners above the mobility rights granted under
the Indian law. More generally, Indians challenged the Garcían state’s reversal
in favoring landlords over Indians and questioned the state’s commitment to
favoring the interests of oppressed peoples generally. “Is not the 1854 Law . . .
[that] privileges Indians, . . . [unable] to be revoked or reformed by any other
law?” one petitioner asked rhetorically. “If, given the case that it were revoked
only because of [one landlord’s] wishes, might the constitutional guarantee
[prohibiting] slavery in the Republic be revoked as well?”68
The petitioners sought to maintain the favored legal position that their
ambiguous Indian citizenship had afforded during the 1850s — simultaneously
claiming the freedoms of citizenship and the privileges of the Indian class.
Those few who had managed to buy themselves entirely out of servitude were
even more adamant in their refusal to return to Pinsaquí. Identifying himself as
an “indígena suelto,” ex-concierto José María Morales, for example, documented
that the municipality had declared him “free from commitment.” Having
worked as an independent weaver in the community of Carabuela for well over
a year, Morales asserted that he had lost his former “gañan condition” and had
“no obligation whatsoever” to serve in any hacienda. Indignant regarding the
hacienda administrator’s efforts to reinstate him, he threatened to hold the
government responsible for any further attacks on his liberty.69
To be sure, the ability to shed one’s concierto status was exceptional; that
is, the freedoms fought for and partially won by Otavalo’s gañanes were gener-
ally within the concertaje system. While contracted workers might pass rela-
tively freely from one estate to another, they seldom escaped the peonage sys-
tem altogether. Peon mobility was restricted by a host of extralegal bonds to a
68. José Vinueza de Manuel et al., 8 June 1867, IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165.
69. José María Morales de Antonia, 15 June 1867, IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165.
hacienda. Well-established patrons wielded impressive paternal power and

could shield “their own Indians” from outside exploitation from state and church
agents or other landlords. Moreover, conciertos often had deep ties to land,
family, and community inside large haciendas, which they risked severing by
moving. Thus, changing one’s patron for another in hopes of a better life was
often an empty promise, and some conciertos ended up returning to their orig-
inal patron.
However, the eventual return of his conciertos, whether willingly or by
legal order, was a small victory for a landlord. The loss of skilled labor during
peons’ long absences and legal proceedings created an unstable workforce. And
even when “seduced” workers returned, this did not ensure their permanent
loyalty to the hacienda. Indeed, those conciertos who returned after a brief hia-
tus were no less shrewd than when they left first left. Using the same justifica-
tion for their original transfer, they reasserted their right to improved working
conditions. “Having carefully consulted our interests,” began a typical petition,
“we wish to return to the Hacienda to which we once belonged, because nowhere
else will we be able to enjoy the amenities or guarantees that we have there.”70
Even when conciertos were eventually reinstated in their original hacienda,
they did not necessarily come crawling back, rescinding their right to mobility.
Rather, they often did so still affirming their rights to find the best terms of
concertaje. Thus, while Imbabura’s landlords would enjoy a more favorable
political climate in the 1860s, they remained unable to effectively curtail Indian
mobility and oblige workers to fulfill commitments.
Indeed, from the perspective of conciertos, the right to “vary their servi-
tude” was a linchpin in their more central, day-to-day struggle to maximize
living and working conditions. Whether exercised or not, the mere threat of
changing patrons gave them some leverage in negotiating a better lot within
their present hacienda. Increased ease of mobility appears to have been part of
broadly favorable climate for Indians in negotiating the terms of their service
with haciendas. The extent to which this reveals a crisis of authority for land-
70. Shrewdly, the conciertos claimed that they been “seduced” by the agent of a
neighboring hacienda but had now come to their senses. José María Vinuesa de Manuel i
Ramón Vinuesa, “Solicitud,” 2 Nov. 1865, IOA, JP1, caja 43, doc. 1165, f. 10. In 1868, five
conciertos, who had worked in an Ibarra-area estate for a few years, used similar arguments
in requesting permission to return to Pinsaquí. Calling the switch an “inconceivable
mistake,” they were successful in obtaining a settling of accounts and transfer back to
Pinsaquí. See also Antonio de la Torre de Manuel et al., 30 Sept. 1868, IOA, JP1, caja 46,
doc. 2802.
lords should not be overstated; yet, the political climate of Urvinismo did open
up the customarily private negotiation between peon and patron to public scru-
tiny and broadened the space for peons to pursue their legal rights. Empowered
by the abolition of legal tutelage, peon petitions multiplied. They increasingly
used the state as an ally in claiming new comforts, questioning unfair changes to
custom, or challenging advances made by patrons in previous decades. These
legal conflicts over economic issues and, more broadly, over the terms and
meaning of the contractual bond between Indian and landlord involved the
state as a mediator, through its laws and network of local officials.71
The dominant characteristic of Ecuadoran Indian politics during the
1850s and 1860s was its tactical engagement with both liberal rights of citizen-
ship and neocolonial rights grounded in class membership. Of course, such
dualisms had been present since Bolivarian times. Yet, before midcentury, a
harmony between landlord and state interests ensured a narrow scope for the
extension of Indian rights. During the Flores era, the nebulous Indian-citizen
status had overwhelmingly translated into a double jeopardy: exploitative colo-
nial institutions were curtailed, but so were colonial land and legal protections.
However, within the antilandlord climate cultivated at midcentury, Indians
were encouraged to advocate both their rights as individual citizens and their
rights as a protected class. Although regional outcomes varied, this political
potential was converted into real, if temporary, political power for Ecuador’s
highland Indian population.
Landlords Strike Back:

Local Labor Codes, 1861–1868
Ecuador’s serrano landlords were attentive to the material, cultural, and broader
state-formation threats of Urvinista Indian policy. Terratenientes correctly per-
ceived that the 1854 law was the leading edge of a movement to make liberty
and equality into essential principles of national identity. They faced a govern-
ment allied with both the emerging coastal bourgeoisie and empowered popu-
lar sectors, committed to refashioning itself as a representative of “the people”
and not beholden to landlords. Redefining the república in these unprecedented
“popular” terms not only dismissed serrano landlords as the bearers of national
identity and values but also cast them as villains in the script of national
progress. In response, they vociferously defended their legitimacy and interests
both as individual patrons at the local level and as a class at the level of national
71. Williams, “National Utopias and Local Politics,” chap. 2.

politics. In part, landlords hoped to counteract the immediate economic impact

of the state’s support of Indian labor mobility. Beyond the defense of individual
material well-being, however, the collective landlord response must also be
understood as a claim to reinstate themselves as the legitimate embodiment of
the national interest.
At the local level, landlords implemented a whole spectrum of strategies
against government intrusion into their customary domain of power. In fact,
the Ley de Indígenas precipitated an all-out effort by landed elites to combat
the inconveniences and loss of economic and social power within local political
contexts. In ousting the Urvinistas in 1859 and establishing a more landlord-
sympathetic government under García Moreno, terratenientes sought to shore
up their local power and put an end to the pro-Indian political climate. By the
early 1860s, landlords began to act in concert to counteract this national assault
on local custom and power, implementing both traditional and novel strategies
to override “prolabor” state intervention and stabilize their workforce. Perhaps
their most formidable weapon was their continued ability to exercise paternal
authority over resident peons; despite the erosion in legitimacy during the
Urvinista period, well-established patrons still wielded enormous informal
power over resident peons. Another tactic was collusion—exchanging and shar-
ing peons according to seasonal labor needs. This essentially served the same
purpose as seduction but had the important advantage of being done internally
without the intervention of the state. Landlords reacted in other extralegal
ways, such as foot-dragging in legal proceedings. Finally, landlords and their
administrators were well integrated in municipal authority structures — as
councilmen, police chiefs, and parish judges —which gave them considerable
influence in local political decision making.
It is in the realm of local government that the defense of serrano landlord
interests took a novel form. During the early 1860s, town councils across the
sierra responded with a series of ordinances directed at reestablishing and rein-
forcing landlord control over labor. For example, market days were switched
from Sundays to Saturdays to minimize Monday-morning absenteeism.72 And
many municipalities drafted reglamentos de trabajadores, or local labor codes.
Municipal councils penned these comprehensive local labor codes between
1861 and 1867 to address the specificities of their jurisdiction.73 Reglamentos
72. Rosemary Bromley and Robert J. Bromley, “The Debate on Sunday Markets in
Nineteenth-Century Ecuador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 7, no. 1 (1975): 85 –108.
73. With the exception of standard anti-seducción dispositions in local police codes,
questions of labor contracts and workers’ rights had been customarily governed under
sought to decentralize and customize labor regulation in favor of local elites

and authorities in order to codify their paternal power and counteract the still-
lingering effects of Urvinista antilandlord legislation.74
Each canton strove to codify local practices that fostered an orderly and
disciplined workforce. Some, like the 1861 Cuenca code, extensively addressed
the rights and obligations of urban artisans, while others in the central-north
zone dealt in great detail with jornaleros — rural day laborers not bound by
debt.75 Yet, despite regional peculiarities, the codes identified a common set of
problems and proposed broadly similar solutions. First, all sought to reestablish
a more tightly controlled system of labor provisioning through legal means.
Such loss of control was identified as a breach of customary order and moral-
ity that was responsible, according to local lawmakers, for recent agricultural
declines and food scarcities. The Cuenca code, for example, legitimated its
intervention into labor regulation as an effort “to prevent vagrancy and to
moralize artisans.” In Ibarra, rural workers had become “entirely demoralized”
and estate agriculture lacked “suitable order,” a situation resulting from the lack
of a comprehensive labor code, the municipal council noted.76 Local bylaws
were justified as a necessary codification of “capable and fitting punishments”
so as to “correct” the behavior of rural workers.77
To this end, the new reglamentos contained provisions aimed at improv-
national civil code. In 1861, for the first time, municipalities were specifically granted the
jurisdiction to pass ordinances regulating “workers in workshops and factories” and
“agricultural peons and day laborers,” Ley de regimen municipal, art. 30, sec. 20, 13 June
1861, El Nacional, 20 June 1861.
74. My analysis builds on Guerrero’s interpretation of similar reglamentos after 1878
as measures that “codified repression” according to the dictates of “regional power.” He
concludes that the codes ratified “with a cold realism the triangle of intersecting
clientelisms of the three fundamental centers of [rural] power: the Church, the State, and
the hacienda,” La semántica de la dominación, 62 –79; esp. 63, 74.
75. “Acuerda municipal,” Reglamento de artesanos, sirvientes de diversas clases, 13
Aug. 1861, Ordenanzas y acuerdos municipales, 1861– 80; Archivo Histórico Municipal
(Cuenca), doc. 341, ff. 9 –12. “Reglamento y ordenanza del municipio de Ibarra de
trabajadores asalariados,” 1862, Archivo del Banco Central (Ibarra), 653/172/1/M, 1862,
1879, 1889; “De la vigilancia i protección de los indígenas, artesanos i jornaleros” in
“Reglamento de Policia,” Canton de Latacunga, 1 July 1865, Acuerdos municipales de los
años 1848 a 1909; AGPC, 58. In Otavalo (1862) and Azogues (1867) similar reglamentos
were drafted: Jefe político de Azogues to Governor of Azuay, 5 Jan. 1867, Archivo
Nacional Histórico/Casa de la Cultura (Cuenca), Gob. Adm. 27.945.
76. “Reglamento y ordenanza”; “Reglamento de Policia.”
77. “Reglamento y ordenanza.”
ing the morality and orderliness of Indian workers. Laborers were prohibited,
for instance, from entering gambling houses and chicherías (local taverns) on
workdays. Fines were levied against both the peons who violated the disposi-
tion and the establishments or individuals who promoted such debauchery.78
Some codes explicitly called for renewed respect of religious worship and “pure
morality” or obligated estate owners to provide Catholic education for all res-
ident peons.79 Laments of social disorder and immorality, however, were also
understood as a symptom of a labor system gone awry — that is, one in which
Indians had too much freedom. Indeed, the codes’ intimations of Indian
“immorality” are easily decoded references to the excessive mobility and power
of peons to freely change haciendas or return to free Indian communities.
Thus, above all, the reglamentos were an attempt to regulate the nature and
terms of concertaje so as to reestablish landlord control over its workforce.
The reglamentos reaffirmed the contractual imperative of labor agree-
ments, counteracting any notion that debt was the sole bond tying concierto to
patron. For example, reglamentos usually contained antiseduction provisions
that prohibited landlords from knowingly hiring peons or jornaleros already
under contract elsewhere and obliged them to inform the authorities so that
any such worker could be returned “where he belonged.”80 Transfers between
estates were only permitted under the mediation of a “competent authority,”
which would ensure the legal transfer of a worker’s debt. Novel in the 1860s
codes, however, was an explicit subordination of debt obligations to the “term
of commitment” of service contract.81 That is, conciertos were forbidden to
leave an estate “before the time stipulated” in their agreement.82 In direct con-
travention to Article 51, reglamentos did not deem solvency sufficient grounds
to exempt a peon from service. Only a “just motive” or special circumstances
78. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” arts. 3, 4; “Reglamento de Policia,” arts. 86, 87.

79. “Reglamento de Policia,” arts. 74, 75. In the Ibarra legislation, all male workers,
their wives, and their children were required to attend the doctrina twice weekly.
“Reglamento y ordenanza,” art. 8.
80. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” arts. 6, 7. “Reglamento de Policia.”
81. All adults under service contracts — one labor code read —“will not be able to
leave service before the term of their commitment has expired.” “Reglamento de Policia,”
art. 162. Guerrero notes a similar provision in an 1882 reglamento from the canton of
Otavalo: “[T]he peon . . . will be obligated to work in it even if he owes nothing, for the
entire time that his commitment lasts”; Reglamento de trabajadores asaliariado, jornaleros y
domésticos para el canton de Otavalo (Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1882), art. 16, cited in
Guerrero, La semántica de la dominación, 71.
82. Reglamento de artesanos, art. 13.
could afford him the freedom to pay back what he owed in money; otherwise,
he was left to work off his debt until the contract ended.
Reglamentos went further toward facilitating a pliant workforce for estate
agriculture, codifying as well the obligations of “peones sueltos.” These labor-
ers, though outside of the concertaje system, were similarly required to fulfill
all commitments in a timely manner, whether on estates or public works.83
While jornaleros without debt were allowed to pass freely to the service of
another person, those who had received cash advances remained obligated to
pay off what they owed “in labor.”84 More generally, strict and weighty punish-
ments were laid out for all workers who resolved not to fulfill their contracts.85
Above all, the new labor codes made it clear that concierto expectations
for guarantees and amenities from a patron would be strictly contingent on
compliance with their contractual obligations. That is, the onus for good-faith
cooperation was placed squarely on the peon. One labor code, for example,
charged local police to “ensure that peons and conciertos in haciendas fulfill
their duties and render all possible assistance to the landowners or their admin-
istrators.”86 Thus, both in content and spirit, the labor codes signaled a clear
shift away from the pro-Indian commitment of Urvinismo. To be sure, the
reglamentos also codified patrons’ responsibilities, such as paying workers
fairly, settling accounts regularly, and providing peons with “all their necessi-
ties.”87 Thus, while they moved away from the overtly antilandlord national
legislation of the 1850s, the reglamentos nevertheless provided a framework
through which Indians could exploit the ambiguities of the law and press for
their rights. Moreover, as national discourses and laws shifted to an emphasis
on moralization, religiosity, and order under the Garcían regime, conciertos
and sueltos would incorporate the rhetoric of these new national imperatives in
their everyday engagements with local governors, priests, and landlords.88 Still,
83. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” arts. 9, 13, 5.

84. “Reglamento de Policia,” arts. 196, 182.
85. Reglamento de artesanos, arts. 29 – 30. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” art. 1. In
Cuenca, conciertos were obliged to honor contracts “regardless of race or class” and were
only able to break them in cases of “cruelty, immorality, lack of food, or contagious
disease”; Reglamento de artesanos, art. 12.
86. “Reglamento de Policia,” arts. 177 –78.
87. “Reglamento de Policia,” art. 178.
88. Detailed studies of Indian-state politics at the local level in the Garcían era do not
exist. But see Williams, “The Making of Ecuador’s Pueblo Católico, 1861–1875,” Political
Cultures in the Andes, 1750 –1950, ed. Cristóbal Aljovin and Nils Jacobsen (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, forthcoming).
while it did not entirely disable Indian political strategies, the reglamentos de
trabajadores of the mid-1860s marked the end of an exceptionally advanta-
geous period for Indian litigation.
The institution of local labor codes in the 1860s corresponded with a
return to a period of more general “harmony” between government and land-
lords, one that restored political autonomy to local authorities and terminated
the state’s legal favoritism toward the popular classes. Indeed, the political cri-
sis of 1859, which ushered in a new era of Catholic-conservative nation build-
ing under García Moreno, was a resolute rejection of Urvinista state central-
ization and pro-Indian “populism.” During the brief balkanization of Ecuador
into four separate republics in 1859, regional power holders sent a double-
barreled message to those who sought to govern the country: decentralize
political decision making and rescind the state’s role as paternal tutor of the
rural masses.89
The prolandlord municipal legislation of the early 1860s emerged from
within in a new national context of decentralized governance. The 1861 con-
stitution, and the Ley de Régimen Municipal of the same year, empowered
regional elites with unprecedented autonomy from the dictates of central gov-
ernment. Moreover, the newly installed García Moreno administration consid-
ered the sierra’s hacendados to be key local partners in its morality-and-order
program. In much the same way he would use the national infrastructure of the
Catholic Church, García Moreno hoped an alliance with landlords would aid
him in his master plan to create a “pueblo católico”— a pious and morally supe-
rior Ecuadoran citizenry.90 The new president shared the conservative colonial
position that haciendas remained valuable institutions of tutelage under repub-
lican government. He left the education and moralization of Indian peons
largely at the discretion of hacendados, seeking to harness their existing pres-
tige and clientele networks.91 By the mid-1860s, state intervention in address-
89. Maiguashca, “El proceso de integración nacional,” 383. For a succinct narrative
and analysis of complex political events that brought down the Urvinista government in the
late 1850s, see Ayala, Lucha política, 107 –12.
90. On García Moreno and his state- and nation-building project, see Marie-Danielle
Demélas and Yves Saint-Geours, Jerusalen y Babilonia: Religión y política en el Ecuador,
1780 –1880, trans. Carmen Garatea Yuri (Quito: Corporación Ed. Nacional, 1988);
Enrique Ayala Mora and Rafael Cordero Aguilar, “El período Garcíano: Panorama
histórico (1860 –1895),” in Ayala, Nueva historia del Ecuador, vol. 7; Derek Williams,
“Assembling the ‘Empire of Morality’: State Building Strategies in Catholic Ecuador,
1861–1875,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14, no. 2 (2001): 149 –74.
91. Williams, “Empire of Morality.”
ing the “Indian problem” was mainly restricted to comunero society, while
landlords were entrusted to manage their own internal affairs.
At the level of national politics, highland landlords similarly engaged and
confronted intrusive intervention into hacienda labor practices. In fact, despite
regional distinctions, terratenientes increasingly imagined themselves as a
national class and asserted a coherent notion of their collective interests. The
elaboration and expression of landlord legitimacy and incipient class conscious-
ness came forth during the 1855 congressional debates concerning the Ley de
Indígenas —where serrano landlords still held a minority voice. In advocating
the suppression of the legislation’s most antilandlord content, they openly
offered their own vision of the national interest, the Indian problem, and state-
hacienda relations.
The midcentury debate reflected a shared mentality among all political
elites concerning the role of Indians in national society. The differences be-
tween liberal Urvinista and conservative landlord viewpoints were constructed
upon a common conception of the Indian as a passive, childlike member of
society who required tutelage.92 In this sense, the debate neatly illustrates some
of the boundaries of the hegemonic discursive framework within which the
Indian question was understood and discussed.93 Moreover, it serves as a warn-
ing not to idealize the “democratic” intentions of Urvinismo nor to overstate
its optimism in incorporating Indians into national society. Yet, the debate also
remains useful for assessing the political utility of the Indian question in defin-
ing Ecuador’s peculiar conservative and liberal ideologies at midcentury.
Although the institution of concertaje was never on the legislative chopping
block, the state’s attempt to reform labor servitude sparked a high-stakes polit-
ical struggle. Indeed, it revealed a broader discord over not only the Indian
question but also the nature of state power and the role of landlord class inter-
ests within national society.
Landlords’ response to the 1854 Ley de Indígenas provides perhaps the
most explicit nineteenth-century expression of landlord legitimacy and defense
of the estado terrateniente (landlord state)— a model of state power that con-
flated hacienda interests with the national well-being. They confronted state
assertions that hacendados, as a class, were antithetical to the development of
92. Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image,” 562 – 68.

93. On the construction of a common discursive framework as a critical element of
hegemonic processes, see William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of
Contention,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in
Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994),
361– 65.
the nation. They sought to demonstrate, instead, that they were both a “pro-
gressive” and “civilizing” force within society, the principal bearers of broader
national interests. They argued that pro-Indian legislation was counterpro-
gressive and threatened the advance of agricultural production and prosperity,
and their proposed reform of the Ley de Indígenas was nothing less than a
defense of the “progress of agriculture” and “public wealth.” Only estate agri-
culture, backed by a disciplined (and immobile) workforce, could generate pro-
ductive workers truly “devoted to the cultivation and benefit of the land.”94 In
contrast, they depicted smallholders and comuneros as unproductive and back-
ward and labor mobility as synonymous with vagrancy, sloth, and economic
disorder.95 Article 51, having undercut the stability and order of the concertaje
system, constituted a “legislative injustice” and a “self-evident wrong.” While
recognizing that Indian liberty merited state protection, they held the govern-
ment responsible to achieve these freedoms in harmony with the agricultural
foundation of national prosperity: in short, “to reconcile the liberty of Indians
with landlord interests.”96
Landlord supporters were careful not to depict their vision of progress
in narrow class terms; rather, they framed their advocacy as a crucial step
to achieving the “destiny of the Republic.”97 Indeed, landlords sought to por-
tray their interests as universal ones, pitting instead the “favored” Indian class
against “the rest of society.” They routinely claimed to be inspired by wide-
spread “public disapproval” and to be acting in defense of the interests of “the
Ecuadoran People.”98 That is, they identified themselves as representatives of
a national climate of discontent, the logical and inevitable captains of “public
prosperity.” State enforcement of concertaje contracts was thus a defense not of
hacendado privileges but of national progress.
The second component of landlords’ discourse of legitimacy was built
on the claim that the hacienda was a valuable institution of tutelage and the
hacendado a civilizating agent. Just as they correlated their economic interests
with national prosperity, so too did they depict their disciplinary and moraliz-
ing efforts as the definitive and exclusive path for civilizing the nation. Since
early colonial times, when encomenderos had been granted the authority to
collect Indian tribute from conquered territory, it was understood that these
94. El Nacional, 4 Mar. 1874.

96. President of Congress, Session of 29 Sept. 1855, El Seis de Marzo, 29 Jan. 1856.
98. Ibid.
patrones would provide their Indians with instruction in Catholic doctrina. The
nineteenth-century Ecuadoran hacendado, as heir to this tradition, continued
to claim a tutelary role in the religious education and moral discipline of his
“indios propios.” Indians were perceived as mental and spiritual infants who
required the protection, discipline, and moral teachings of a “buen patrón.”99
Here, the gendered language of labor “seduction” was useful to legitimate the
patriarchal power of hacendados. Landlords’ laments against the luring away of
peons neatly emasculated Indians, depicting them as irrational, irresponsible,
and unable to fend off the advances of unfit “suitors” for their services.
In short, landlords confronted the sophisticated Urvinista rhetoric of
Indian “regeneration” with their own neocolonial discourse of civilization.
Indeed, midcentury landlord rhetoric framed the “Indian Problem” as most
urgent outside the hacienda gates, in the unregulated and “demoralized” com-
munities of sueltos.100 In contrast to the Urvinista focus on economic inequal-
ity, landlords continued to blame the Indians’ lowly condition on cultural infe-
riority. Indian backwardness did not stem from economic servitude but rather
from bondage to barbaric customs. Only through painstaking religious tute-
lage from priest and patron, they asserted, would the Indian be brought slowly
into the civilized world.101
At the center of these protestations were concerns about the distancing of
state power from landlord authority. Landlords confronted the Urvinista pre-
tension to monopolize Indian tutelage by casting themselves in the role of
Indian defender. They argued that Indian interests would, in fact, be better
protected within a system of limited labor mobility controlled locally by enlight-
ened landlords. The failure of the Ley de Indígenas to stipulate a time limit to
concertaje contracts, they argued, hurt not only “good-faith” patrons faced
99. Honorable [Deputy] Freile, Acts of the House of Representatives and Acts of the
Senate, Sept. to 27 Oct. 1855, cited in Guerrero, “Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image,”
565.
100. Landlords’ definition and characterization of the situation and destiny of the
Ecuadoran Indian class are most directly traceable to the late colonial writings of Velasco
de Ibarra, Historia del reino de Quito, 1:183 – 216.
101. Similar arguments would be made by conservative landlords in the early
twentieth century; see, e.g., Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, Política conservadora (Quito: Banco
Central del Ecuador; Corporación Ed. Nacional, 1981). On the representations of Indians
by indigenista thinkers in early-twentieth-century Ecuador, see Kim Clark, “La medida de
la diferencia: Las imágenes indigenistas de los indios serranos en el Ecuador (1920s a
1940s),” in Ecuador racista: Imágenes e identidades, ed. Emma Cervone and Fredy Rivera
Vélez (Quito: FLACSO, 1999).
with high labor turnover but also Indians, who were vulnerable to be con-
tracted indefinitely by double-dealing labor contractors. Disassociating them-
selves from these abusive and praetorian lesser landowners, powerful hacenda-
dos presented an alternative “pro-Indian” position more harmonious with
their class interests. The Indian problem had a straightforward solution: a
return to the idealized state-hacienda harmony of colonial and early republican
times, in which rural patrons assumed paternalist responsibility to protect
Indians in exchange for government support of a disciplined rural labor
regime.102 This was to be at the center of the political resurgence of serrano
landlords and their relegitimization as the quintessential representatives of the
nation.
As Ecuador’s landlord class reasserted itself in the 1860s and 1870s, its
projects and discourses were marked by an explicit engagement with the
pro-Indian and antilandlord objectives of midcentury liberalism. To be sure,
Urvina’s popular-liberal model lacked the class solidarity or resolve to threaten
the structures of church and hacienda.103 At best, the Urvinista state sought to
empower coastal elites and popular sectors as a counterbalance to serrano class
interests — striving for a “Bonapartist” autonomy from which to mediate class
conflict. Still, by openly questioning the paternalism of the serrano landlord,
Urvinismo provided a powerful impetus for large landowners to both sharpen
their class consciousness and unify their political action.104 Indeed, it was to be
a critical turning point in the evolution of the landlord class, who —with their
church allies —would overwhelmingly define Ecuador’s nineteenth-century
development. Whether through their formal articulation of a discourse of legit-
imacy or their day-to-day reinforcement of customary clientelisms, Ecuador’s
hacendados would be inspired to chart a national course — one that sought to
keep popular and indigenous classes immobilized.
102. More generally, serrano landlords prided themselves on “knowing the situation
of the indígenas”— a not-so-subtle barb at the Urvinista approach, which they claimed
sought to resolve the Indian question with legal abstractions. They questioned the
prudence of nonlandowners legislating social relations within haciendas and tried to pass
off firsthand knowledge as evidence of landlords’ superior ability “to defend Indian
interests.” President of Congress, Session of 29 Sept. 1855, reprinted in El Seis de Marzo, 29
Jan. 1856.
103. Ayala, Lucha política.
104. The articulation of the conservative ideology in the second half of the 1860s
was typically framed as a reaction to the diffusion the Urvinista antilandlord initiatives.
See, e.g., the pro–García Moreno periodical La Estrella de Mayo (Quito), no. 1 (1 July
1868).
Urvina’s Legacy
Upon his death in 1891, José María Urvina was eulogized in the liberal press,
praised for his “pure republicanism” and “liberal and humanitarian nature.” In
addition, he was uniformly lauded for ridding the country of the institutions of
African slavery and Indian tribute.105 When Liberals seized national power
four years later under Eloy Alfaro, they strove to give new life to the Urvinista
experiment in popular liberalism. As Urvina did when he rose to power at mid-
century, Alfaro likewise enjoyed the backing of coastal economic interests and
effectively legitimated himself through a rhetoric of “the emancipation of the
Indian race.” More remarkably, Liberals echoed the Urvinista indictment of
concertaje and the church as the principal causes of the indígena’s lamentable
condition. Liberal writers, such as Pedro Moncayo and José Peralta, fruitfully
exposed the nefarious consequences of landlord and clerical control over the
masses.106 They marshaled the rhetoric of the Indian question to confront and
displace the legitimacy of the formidable Catholic-conservative authority. As
Guerrero suggests, Alfaro’s Liberals were remarkably successful in subordinat-
ing conservative middlemen and establishing a direct paternal relation with
Indian peons and peasants — a political “ventriloquy” that fortified secular state
power. Indeed, while the turn-of-the-century Liberals would fall far short of
eliminating either Indian servitude or church influence in political decision
making, they institutionalized “liberalism as a form of the state.”107
While Urvinismo foreshadowed the dynamics of this more consequential
turn-of-the-century liberal project, it also directly shaped the nature of the
immediate conservative reprise after 1860. Indeed, García Moreno’s project of
state formation and nationalism recognized the achievements of midcentury
liberalism. Such legacies, however, have been obscured in conventional narra-
tives that characterize the 1860 – 95 period solely by the ascendance and
consolidation of the “landlord state.”108 In this conception, García Moreno
quickly rolled back the liberal program to reinstate the conservative-oligarchic
political project initiated by Flores in the 1840s. Within this master narrative
of Ecuador’s conservative century, Urvinismo is reduced to a disorderly, liberal
pause — a rhetorical and legalistic project that was unable to dismantle the
colonial structures of church, the hacienda, or the Indian community. How-
105. Destruge, Urvina el Presidente. Quotation from 295.

106. Guerrero, “A Ventriloquist’s Image,” 587; Ayala, Revolución liberal, 206.
107. Guerrero, “A Ventriloquist’s Image,” 587.
108. See, for example, Rafael Quintero, El mito del populismo en el Ecuador (Quito:
Univ. Central del Ecuador, 1983); Hurtado, Political Power in Ecuador.
ever, depicting the post-1859 period as the inevitable return of conservatism not
only diminishes the concrete impact of midcentury liberalism on state-Indian
and state-society relations but also runs the risk of misinterpreting the nature
of García Moreno’s formative Catholic-conservative national project.
First, the Garcían state — like its landlord supporters — explicitly incorpo-
rated a previously unarticulated “republican” and “populist” dimension into a
conservative discourse of legitimacy. Such an interpretation, of course, runs
counter to commonsense depictions of the Garcían national project as a para-
doxical pursuit of modernity through a return to the monarchism of Flores or
a swerve toward theocracy.109 Yet, this conception overlooks the Garcían gov-
ernment’s recognition of the political importance of incorporating society’s
popular sectors into a common national identity. As Maiguashca argues, García
Moreno’s political project is better understood as part of a broader postcolonial
enterprise that tailored republicanism to fit the reality of Ecuadoran society. In
effect, the Garcían state sought to replace the Urvinista ideals of republic based
upon socioeconomic equality with the notion of a “Catholic republic” based
upon reinvigorated morality and religiosity. Sidestepping the stick y question
of whether Indians — after the abolition of tribute —were citizens, all Ecuado-
rans were deemed members of a “pueblo católico”— an inclusive community of
pious, moral, and industrious members, open to men and women, to all races,
to every class.110 Adopting a Christian populism reminiscent of France’s coun-
terrevolutionary cult of the Sacred Heart, García Moreno posed a powerful
alternative to Anglo-American–inspired popular liberalism.111
Second, the midcentury antilandlord project irrevocably elevated the
Indian problem to an issue of national import, demonstrating its discursive
utility for would-be state builders. Redeeming the “unfortunate” Indian condi-
tion became a “rhetorical centrepiece” of the Garcían project and marked sub-
sequent conservative projects of national scope.112 While the Garcían govern-
ment would redefine the Indian question, it would recognize the political
109. Ayala, Lucha política, 172.

110. Williams, “The Making of Ecuador’s Pueblo Católico.” On postcolonial Ecuador as
a context of competing “utopias” of republicianism, see Maiguashca, “El proceso de
integración nacional.”
111. On counterrevolutionary “Christian populism” in nineteenth-century France, see
Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000).
112. Larson, “Trials of Nation-Making,” 600; Blanca Muratorio, “Nación, identidad y
etnicidad: Imágines de los indios ecuatorianos y sus imagineros a fines del siglo XIX,” in
Muratorio, Imágenes e imagineros.
prudence of speaking on behalf of the indígena. Indeed, like Urvina, García

Moreno partially justified the centralization of state power on the basis of local
elites’ inability to protect and improve the Indian population.113 To be sure, the
Garcían government delegated some state functions to “local forms of ethnic
domination”—clergy, landlords, municipal governments, and Indian authori-
ties.114 However, while the state ceded certain state functions to the “regional
backstages” of landlord control, it remained activist and interventionist in its
pursuit of national cultural Indian policy. Thus, while it ended the Urvinista
quest for central administration of labor practices, the Garcían state advocated
and implemented an ambitious national Indian policy — moralization through
Christian schooling and the regulation of vice. Not infrequently, these national
imperatives collided with the economic interests of hacendados and local gov-
ernments. In the end, despite their distinct national visions, Garcianismo and
Urvinismo shared strikingly similar approaches to the postcolonial challenges
of state building. Like the Urvinista pursuit of Anglo-Saxon progress, Ecua-
dor’s Catholic conservatives would be similarly obliged to envision a state-led
project of modernity that filtered the promise of republicanism through the
neocolonial realities of Ecuadoran society.
113. Williams, “Assembling the State.”

114. Guerrero, “A Ventriloquist’s Image,” 568 –70. For a comprehensive overview on
the relationship between central and local governance in nineteenth-century Ecuador, see
Enrique Ayala, “El municipio en el siglo XIX,” Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 1, no.
2 (1991): 69 – 96.

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Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude: The Making and

Unmaking of Ecuador's Antilandlord State, 1845-1868

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Speaking to Congress in September 1856, Ecuador’s President José María

1. There is a remarkable lack of consistency in the orthography of the president’s

Hispanic American Historical Review 83:4

2. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente de la República, pidiendo al congreso una ley

survive intact after independence as in Ecuador. Hacienda and church interests,

5. The historiography of the Audiencia of Quito is an increasingly illuminating one.

project of President García Moreno. It studies three interconnected realms of

Urvina and Urvinismo

Urvina was a central military leader in the Guayaquil-based “March Revolu-

9. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente,” 241.

landlord supporters in the sierra as “retrogrades” who had maintained their

11. “El Progreso,” El Seis de Marzo, 28 Nov. 1845.

disempowering the serrano aristocracy while rewarding his multiclass coalition

Recodifying the State-Indian Covenant:

The ideological foundation of the Urvinista political project involved a subtle,

teristics of the most opprobrious slavery”21 Beginning in 1854, the Urvinista

21. Urvina, “Mensaje del Presidente de la República pidiendo la supresión de las

The Urvinista attempt to control the administration of the country’s

authorities.35 Indeed, Urvina’s legislation pragmatically recognized Indian

Article 51: Redefining the Nature of Indian Servitude

35. On nineteenth-century liberal land reforms in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia in

44. Guerrero, “Curagas y tenientes políticos.”

Shrewd or Seduced? Indian Conciertos and

49. Ibid., 171.

The Ley de Indígenas removed the customary legal justiﬁcation for

century antilandlord measures were ﬁltered through regionally speciﬁc inter-

59. “Informe del Gobernador de . . . Cuenca . . . 1855.”

community structure in the region further hampered the estates’ capacity to

broader shift in approach to the question of Indian servitude underway during

hacienda. Well-established patrons wielded impressive paternal power and

Landlords Strike Back:

71. Williams, “National Utopias and Local Politics,” chap. 2.

politics. In part, landlords hoped to counteract the immediate economic impact

sought to decentralize and customize labor regulation in favor of local elites

78. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” arts. 3, 4; “Reglamento de Policia,” arts. 86, 87.

83. “Reglamento y ordenanza,” arts. 9, 13, 5.

92. Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image,” 562 – 68.

94. El Nacional, 4 Mar. 1874.

105. Destruge, Urvina el Presidente. Quotation from 295.

109. Ayala, Lucha política, 172.

prudence of speaking on behalf of the indígena. Indeed, like Urvina, García

113. Williams, “Assembling the State.”

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