The Daily Grind: Ethnic Topographies of Labor, Racism, and Abandonment

The chapter focuses on Ecuador’s postcolonial dynamics of development to discuss how global policy approaches to certain dimensions of social difference are reworked and institutionalized in hierarchical national discourses and practices. The chapter examines policy thinking about social diversity as the outcome of coloniality’s relational and qualitatively significant constitution of embodiments of race, gender, and class and argues that social heterogeneity is coproduced with spatial heterogeneity in uneven development. Ecuador’s postcolonial history is sketched in to provide the necessary background to understand the country’s broad parameters of exclusion and the specific policies introduced. The chapter ends by discussing the two prime examples of “single issue development”: (1) gender and development, and (2) ethnodevelopment. The chapter closely examines Ecuador’s use of these global development templates for thinking about social difference, demonstrating how their implementation in Ecuador drew powerfully on colonial readings of the differential value of social groups.