State by proxy: Race politics, labor, and the shifting morphology of governance in highland Ecuador

This dissertation is a study of the political form of economic relations. It examines labor as a total social system constituted through moral claims made upon persons, and by class structures built as formations of political rule. It focuses on the high Andean region of Cayambe, Ecuador, where a capitalist plantation complex growing roses for North American and European markets has expanded into indigenous territories since the mid 1980s to become one of the most significant cut-flower export zones in the world. Here, capitalist expansion occurs less through territorial occupation than by forming thick relational webs into quasi-autonomous indigenous life-worlds, constructed primarily around labor (indigenous wage-earners), but flushed out with the exchange of services (health centers, day cares, infrastructure, protection) for cooperation. I compare this political-economic formation with that of the hacienda which dominated the Cayambe highlands from the mid 1600s to the mid 1970s, emphasizing how the model of those relations, based on constructing each hacienda as a mini-sovereign state, perdures today in the capitalist plantation, albeit adapted to more neoliberal modes of market-centered statecraft. In both cases we find the public functions of governance absorbed into the private realms of agrarian enterprise, with the dominant class relations of production engulfed by political relations of administration, governance, and affective citizenship. It is around these political-economic structures that new racial identities and race politics are being forged in Andean Ecuador; my detailed ethnographies of work processes show labor to be a paradoxical experience for indigenous laborers, a practical and ethical arena that at once ascribes a use-value to their racial identity (as eternal agricultural 'experts' and low-wage earners) and demands a post-racialized subject of them, particularly as the category "Indian" in Ecuador has come to signify a location in the national political imaginary defined as disruptive, anti-neoliberal, and threatening to the security of private capital. The dissertation concludes by tracking the micro-political maneuverings (involving new land mapping technologies and property taxation systems) that allowed the municipal state in Cayambe to claim an abstract bureaucratic power over the region, resulting in pro-capitalist riots against an unprecedented indigenous-state coalition.