Working Girl

Natural History, April, 2001 by Lynn A. Meisch

For many young girls in Andean Ecuador, life involves labor. For Rosa, the tradition continues--with some adjustments.

Rosa was another blessing and another pair of hands when she was born in 1988. Her home was an adobe-and-thatch structure with an attached cooking shed, set on a slope of Taita (Father) Chimborazo, the 20,702-foot snowcapped Andean volcano that dominates Ecuador's Chimborazo Province. Like most of the families living in small mountainside communities nearby, hers scratched a living from allpa mama (mother earth) through hard agricultural labor and the sale of surplus barley and potatoes at the weekly market in Riobamba, about fifteen miles away.

By the time Rosa turned five, she was rising at five A.M. to cook and clean for herself, her mother, and two younger brothers. After school she washed clothes; helped her mother plant, weed, and harvest potatoes and other crops; and found time to do homework and to play. She also cared for her youngest brother (the other was making himself useful in the fields). Within a few years, however, Rosa's life, although still governed by the tradition that young indigenous girls are expected to work and help their families, veered from its expected path.

In the Ecuadorean Andes, I have watched a four-year-old girl weed the garden with a baby sibling strapped to her back and I have held my breath as a two-year-old boy carried a knife across the room to his father. Children in these communities are given many responsibilities at an early age, and parents are confident in their sons' and daughters' ability to carry out what are, to us outsiders, dangerous and difficult tasks. Every family member is valuable. "Children bring joy," I've been told. They also contribute to the maintenance of the household.

The Andean concept of childhood as being useful and productive is not of recent origin. When the Inca conquered Ecuador in the fifteenth century, they introduced the Quechua language (which Rosa speaks at home) and imposed a tax system in which payments were made in human labor. The First New Chronicle and Good Government, a 1,200-page manuscript written and illustrated by the Andean writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, portrays life in the Inca empire before and after the Spanish conquest. Completed in about 1615, the book includes a description of the Inca's division of both males and females into ten categories, based on the capacity for work. Adults in the prime of life were the most important group, not only for reproduction but also for their labor. Adults might spin and weave for the state, maintain roads and bridges, or farm the lands set aside for the benefit of Inca rulers. Some adult males left home to serve in the Inca army or to work on construction projects for a specified time.

According to Inca dictates, gifts between the ages of twelve and eighteen--called "short-haired gifts"--owed help in many forms to their parents and communities. They were expected to spin and weave, pasture llamas and alpacas, work in the fields, gather firewood, make chicha (corn beer), cook, and clean the house. One of Guaman Poma's drawings shows a teenager carrying out three tasks at once: with a load of firewood strapped to her back, she spins while herding llamas (see page 74).

Girls between nine and eleven were called "gifts who gather flowers" because they collected flowers and plants for dyeing yarn and also picked edible herbs and plants. They were assigned these tasks, Guaman Poma observed, "so they would not be lazy." Indeed, the Inca's three commandments were "Don't steal, don't lie, don't be lazy"--admonitions repeated in indigenous communities today.

The eighth category consisted of girls between five and nine. These children were called "gifts who go about playing," perhaps a misnomer from our point of view, given how much work they did. According to Guaman Poma, "They served their mothers and fathers by bringing firewood and straw for thatching. They began to work, spinning delicate yarn, and collecting aquatic plants, and they helped make chicha, care for younger children, and carry infants on their backs." Rosa's early childhood resembled the Andean model in many respects, especially in terms of the amount and kinds of labor she did for her family and the reciprocal relationships of work and caring.

Anthropologists and historians have long noted that reciprocity, both between humans and between humans and supernatural beings, lies at the core of Andean values. Each summer when I arrive in Ecuador to conduct research, I bring gifts of clothing for my godchildren; they and their parents greet me with gifts of food. During Inca times, humans made offerings to the earth in return for a good harvest. Such offerings are still called "paying the earth" In exchange for their labor tax, communities received food from Inca storehouses in times of famine, and indigenous families whose adult males were away working or fighting for the Inca state were fed at public expense.