“The Fire in the Streets Also Burns in the Kitchen”: Indigenous Women and Other Ways of Political Action in the Rural Spaces of the Ecuadorian Buen Vivir and the Bolivian Vivir Bien

Abstract

In this article I attempt to identify the strategies employed by indigenous women in Ecuadorand Bolivia to empower themselves and participate politically in a context in which they are alsothe maintainers of community structures and links. By way of a qualitative approximation of twoconcrete cases in the rural townships of Cuenca in Ecuador and Sucre in Bolivia, I try to shed lighton the resistance movements these indigenous women put into practice against the roles imposed, onthe one hand, by a Westernized development of tutelage, and, on the other, by a hierarchical structureof gender within their own culture within the framing of the Ecuadorian Buen Vivir and the BolivianVivir Bien. However, their resistance strategies and political participation continue to be present inall fields and are made more and more notable in the intent to participate in the construction of adifferent development model that will privilege family unity, the bonds of solidarity, and the commongood.