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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Making Popular and Solidarity Economies in Dollarized Ecuador: Money, Law, and the Social After Neoliberalism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xx5n43g Author Nelms, Taylor Campbell Nahikian Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Making Popular and Solidarity Economies in Dollarized Ecuador: Money, Law, and the Social After Neoliberalism DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Anthropology by Taylor Campbell Nahikian Nelms Dissertation Committee: Professor Bill Maurer, Chair Associate Professor Julia Elyachar Professor George Marcus 2015 Portion of Chapter 1 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All other materials © 2015 Taylor Campbell Nahikian Nelms TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: “The Problem of Delimitation”: Expertise, Bureaucracy, and the Popular 51 and Solidarity Economy in Theory and Practice CHAPTER 2: Saving Sucres: Money and Memory in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador 91 CHAPTER 3: Dollarization, Denomination, and Difference 139 INTERLUDE: On Trust 176 CHAPTER 4: Trust in the Social 180 CHAPTER 5: Law, Labor, and Exhaustion 216 CHAPTER 6: Negotiable Instruments and the Aesthetics of Debt 256 CHAPTER 7: Interest and Infrastructure 300 WORKS CITED 354 ii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1 Field Sites and Methods 49 Figure 2 Breakdown of Interviewees 50 Figure 3 State Institutions of the Popular and Solidarity Economy in Ecuador 90 Figure 4 A Brief Summary of Four Cajas (and an Association), as of January 2012 215 Figure 5 An Emic Taxonomy of Debt Relations (Bárbara’s Portfolio) 299 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every anthropologist seems to have a story like this one. It begins with a research project conceived at home and ends with one that comes upon the anthropologist while in the field. Along the way, the ethnographer stumbles, seemingly miraculously, onto “what’s important,” as if stumbling into a clearing in the forest, or into a Balinese courtyard. It’s a rite-of-passage story that reaffirms anthropology’s ultimately empirical commitments to the experience of fieldwork and to the people and stuff of the world encountered through it. I went to Ecuador for the first time in 2004; shadowing my conversations that year and the next, when I returned to conduct research for an undergraduate thesis, was the adoption of the U.S. dollar, hastily undertaken by the Ecuadorian government several years before. When I began preparing for my dissertation research, I suspected that dollarization, nearly a decade old by that point, was linked up with ongoing political changes in Ecuador stemming from the election of Rafael Correa to the Presidency in 2007, the rewriting of the national constitution in 2008, and a broader set of regional shifts in Latin American state politics over the past ten years or so. After several months of preliminary fieldwork in 2009 and 2010, I resolved to stretch my investigation of dollarization and Ecuadorian state transformation across several sites in and around Quito, Ecuador’s capital city high in the Andes. Those sites included a marketplace in the city’s colonial downtown; the homes, workplaces, and communities of participants in several family- and neighborhood-based savings and credit associations (known as cajas); and the offices of relevant state agencies, including Ecuador’s Central Bank. Early on in my fieldwork, I arranged to attend a small caja meeting in a working-class periurban neighborhood called Palacios Ponce.1 I met María Laura, the caja’s organizer and president, at a busy intersection just south of the smoggy sector of Quito called La Marín, where traffic from the north and south of the city funnels together. We boarded a bus that took us out of the city’s centro histórico [historical center] and into the foothills on its eastern edge. We disembarked by the side of the highway and walked down a steep hill into the neighborhood. As we walked, I struggled to clarify what I hoped to accomplish in my research. María Laura remained puzzled. “But why the caja?” she asked. I explained that I wanted to see how people managed their money after dollarization and whether their attitudes towards money, finance, and the state had changed over time, and that I thought the caja would offer a useful context to explore those questions. There was a pause as María Laura stopped and turned to me. “I know what you’re studying,” she said, a realization dawning. “You’re studying the community economy [economía comunitaria].” She paused again. “Or the solidarity economy [economía solidaria]. That’s what they call it.” I had never heard of the “solidarity economy” until María Laura mentioned it to me. But it struck me immediately as opening up a series of compelling questions—not least of which was the intersection of “economy” and “society”—and once I started looking for it and using it in conversation, it became clear that the term had more than a little purchase in contemporary Ecuador. It had become an important plank in Correa’s proposal to transform the country’s economy and the state’s role in it; in fact, just a few months before I had arrived in Quito, it had been the object of an important piece of legislation guiding a set of state-level institutional and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Like nearly all of the names of places and people in this dissertation, this is a pseudonym. Public officials are referred to using their real names when their statements are part of the public record; some toponyms are also real, either by necessity or because their inclusion does not threaten anyone’s anonymity. iv regulatory reforms. I thus stepped into a set of ongoing debates, which circled around this alternative economic imaginary of the solidarity economy and which folded together, as I had hoped, dollarization and Correa’s so-called “revolution” as intertwined projects of state and social transformation. My choice of field sites was also fortuitous: Market vendors and members of local financial organizations were both caught up in this process, as state and non-state actors turned to new and long-standing forms of “popular” economy for inspiration in conceptualizing and institutionalizing what they called a “popular and solidarity economy” [economía popular y solidaria]. These efforts prompted questions parallel to, and inflected by, those precipitated more than a decade before by dollarization. As we will see, those questions are not only about specific issues related to money and economy or law and the state, but also cross-cutting problems of trust, durability, and form. I am indebted to María Laura for her initial intuition that my interests dovetailed with those of others in Ecuador, that people like her were already caught up with one another in a vision and project of social change much broader than I could have imagined. I am indebted to María Laura as I am to all of my friends, colleagues, and interlocutors in Ecuador, most of whom I cannot name here except by pseudonym, but all of whom—details of their particular gifts to me and contributions to this project aside—graciously let me enter into their lives and shared and continue to share with me their thoughts and experiences, anxieties and aspirations: the many current and former state and city officials who took the time to meet with me (especially those I call Javier, Jefferson, and Tomás, as well as Carlos, Danny, Fredy, Patricio, and Rocio); the merchants in the San Mateo market, who embraced my research and tolerated my constant pestering (especially Ana and Nelly; Bárbara, Doña Gracia, and Don Francisco; Manuela, Don Marco, María Ofelia, Mercedes, Ruth, and Víctor); and those involved with the family and neighborhood cajas, who so generously opened their homes to me (including Alba, Emilia, and the members of the Toctiuco caja; María Laura and the members of the Palacios Ponce caja; Sonia and the Álvarez family; and Jessica and the Mendoza family). They are not the only ones to whom I owe thanks. Research in Ecuador was supported financially by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, as well as by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), Intel Labs, and the UC Irvine Department of Anthropology. I benefited greatly from my affiliation as a Visiting Researcher at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito; thanks to X Andrade for arranging the affiliation. In Ecuador, thanks also go to Carlos Andrés and Susana, Javier Félix, Céline Andrés, Tania and Carlos, Doña Ángela and her family, Iralda and Mónica, and my dear friend Fanny. I appreciate the time taken by Alberto Acosta, Jose Luis Coraggio, and Pedro Páez to help me understand dollarization and the solidarity economy; thanks as well to Carlos Cartagenova and Patricio Freire at the Biblioteca Económica del Banco Central del Ecuador. Lori and Juan Miguel provided steadfast support, not to mention a Spanish language education and a place to stay during my first summer of fieldwork; Brad, Carlos, Chad, Clara, Jed, Juan Carlos, Marcia, Doña Mari, María Isabel, and Will offered camaraderie early on. Dom and Amira gave me a beautiful home in La Floresta, as well as great travel help and emergency wardrobe assistance. Carla and Lourdes, always quick with a laugh or a note of encouragement, have become faithful accomplices. To Caty, Cintya, Cristina, Carlos, Jaime, Juan, and the Fonfoné crowd, thanks for the café, the locro, and the palabritas. The insights I gained from my interactions with all these people were invaluable. I was also extremely fortunate to have a close cohort of friends and fellow researchers while in the field, including Robin Fink, Julie Gamble, Nicholas Limerick, Thea Riofrancos, María v Pía Vera, Maria Amelia Viteri, Nicholas Welcome, and Anna Wilking.