The Valley

The Valley - Awake!

In 1946, John Collier, Jr. and Aníbal Buitrón wrote The Awakening Valley, telling the story of a social miracle happening in Ecuador - in the valley at the foot of Tiata Imbabura. (1, cover) In 1993, forty-three years later, I set foot in that same area and discovered a valley, not awakening, but awake! My son, Matt, and I were traveling by bus, north out of Quito, on our way to Colombia. (4) We had been advised to be in Otavalo on a weekend to experience the famous market. Little did we know that this trip would evolve into many more trips and to special relationships with the people living in this valley, high in the Andes.

Ecuador, among the smallest and most unspoiled of South American nations, owes its name to its geographic location - astride the equator. (6, p. 59) The Andes divide into two parallel chains in Ecuador - the western and the eastern, which run like twin spinal columns from north to south. The valley in which most Ecuadorians live, and where most of the mountain areas agricultural produce is grown, runs for about four hundred kilometers in between. Some thirty volcanoes serve to fence in the valley from either side. The deep river valleys (hoyas) are home to agricultural communities whose way of life seems to have remained unchanged for centuries. (6, p. 64)

A book written by Linda A. Newsom, Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, and reviewed by Mary A. Y. Gallagher, (2) begins with a study at or just before the point when the Ecuadorian sierra began to be incorporated into the Inca Empire (ca. 1460). She describes in great detail what can be inferred about the preconquest population of Ecuador’s regions: sierra, coast and Oriente. She then describes the disastrous impact of Inca penetration and partial conquest of Ecuador, and of the prolonged wars still being fought there when Spanish brought Ecuador’s first colonial period to an abrupt end and began a new series of invasions which subdued and "reduced" the indigenous population over a number of years.

This history, laced with the invasion of the Incas and the Spanish had a great impact on this small country.