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The kitu kara people: Community organization, negotiation with local government and relational ontologies

Abstract:

This article shows the political articulation of the indigenous communes and communities constituted as Kitu Kara People in the city of Quito. It examines their identity as a non-migrant collective and explains the organizational mechanisms that have allowed the rediscovery of their ancestral systems of government and the appropriation of constitutional normative elements, such as community democracy. The ethnographic approach explains the ontological relationships between these ancestral systems and the municipality, demonstrating the normative contradictions between the Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 and the survival of previous legal systems.