SHUTTLE CAPITALISM : An Ecuadorean Indian Community Turns a Traditional Craft Into a Tool for Cultural Survival and Takes It to the Street Corners of the World.

Daybreak in Ecuador’s Otavalo Valley begins with the crowing of roosters and a graceful overflight of white egrets. As snow-dusted Imbabura and Cotacachi--both soaring more than 14,000 feet--lose their veil of evening mist, old folk and children herd sheep to high pasture, past farmhouses warmed by fragrant, burning eucalyptus logs. In the crisp morning air, the altitude cheats the eye: The Andean peaks appear to be half as close as they really are, and the cornfields on their terraced slopes seem too finely chiseled.

In the town of Otavalo, a stronghold of the Otavaleno Indians, the humming of several hundred electric looms heralds another workday. Along with scores of other indigenous merchants, Mercedes Lito Lima carts the woolen and cotton garments her clan has woven to the great market square where tourists from around the globe will soon haggle over sweaters, ponchos, blankets, rugs, jewelry and a cornucopia of other Indian artisanry.

Some 3,000 miles and a time warp away, Mercedes’ 18-year-old daughter, Miriam Farinango Lito Lima, is lugging a similar assortment of Otavaleno goods up the elevated platform of her subway station in Queens, en route to her makeshift stand on the sidewalks of lower Manhattan. “It’s a jungle out here, and you’ve got to be strong and savvy to survive,” says Miriam, whose cherubic face seems the antithesis of New York-style toughness and guile. “What with the cops and delinquents and all the competition from the other peddlers, you never know how the day’s going to turn out.” But profits are good enough, she concedes, to let her send home several thousand dollars a year. Miriam’s older sister is also peddling Otavaleno wares while she travels in the Dakotas. And across the Atlantic, her brother is plying the streets of Amsterdam with yet more Otavaleno garments sent by his parents.

Not all of Mercedes Lito Lima’s children are in the clothing business. Recently, she visited a daughter who is in Havana completing her medical studies on a Cuban government scholarship. Mercedes brought along cotton blouses and dresses as gifts for her daughter’s teachers and friends. She may have had an ulterior motive, though. “Nice people in Cuba, but so poor,” she explains. “Someday when socialism ends and they have a bit more money, I’d like to go back. I could sell a lot of garments there.”

Over the last two decades, Otavalenos have become a familiar sight in the major cities of the industrialized world. The men, with braided ponytails trailing under their fedoras, and the women, with long wrap skirts and gilded-glass bead necklaces wound in a dozen strands, they hawk their goods on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago, Frankfurt and Munich, Tokyo and Osaka. They are the international sales brigades of an Andean capitalism that has elevated the Otavalenos to an affluence never before attained by Latin America’s indigenous peoples since the white conquest of the New World. And they have achieved prosperity without losing their ethnic identity.

“We were taught that as Ecuador’s society modernized, we Indians would disappear,” says Mario Conejo, an Otavaleno with a degree in sociology. “Well, we’ve modernized, worked within the system created by whites and mestizos, learned its rules--and it’s all helped us to maintain our indigenous ways rather than abandon them.”

Indeed, the concerns cited most frequently by the Otavalenos are the irritations of the newly affluent rather than the anxieties of the struggling poor: Are the rich failing to participate in traditional, communal tasks? Why do young people pick up such jarring fads abroad? Can university-trained Otavalenos find employment in their chosen careers without having to move to big cities, or are they condemned to work as artisans and merchants if they wish to remain in their native communities?

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There are about 60,000 Otavalenos in and around the Otavalo Valley, some 60 miles north of Quito, Ecuador’s capital. They arrived in the valley at least a millennium ago from the highlands of present-day Colombia. Conquered by the Incas, they became artisans and merchants for those Andean empire-builders. But after the Spanish conquistadors swept over Peru and Ecuador in the 16th Century, most Otavalenos were herded into obrajes --forced-labor textile operations--that appalled every foreign traveler to stumble across them. “Every workshop resembles a dark prison,” asserted Alexander von Humboldt, the great German scientist who visited obrajes during the waning years of Spanish colonial rule in the early 1800s.

Nineteenth-Century independence from Spain did little to improve the lot of the Otavalenos. Freed from the obrajes , they became virtual slaves, farming and weaving, in haciendas that dominated the Otavalo Valley. Under “debt serfdom,” a rural worker was often unable to repay credit advanced to him by the hacienda and could be prosecuted if he sought to leave the estate and find employment elsewhere. Incredibly, the system, known as huasipungo, lasted until 1964, when the Ecuadorean government abolished it to qualify for U.S. aid under the Alliance for Progress program.

Huasipungo did leave one positive legacy for the Otavalenos. “It gave them long experience with mechanized looms and production weaving,” says Lynn Meisch, a Stanford University anthropologist who has studied them for the past 20 years. “Instead of weaving one article at a time the way so many indigenous groups will do, they were producing thousands of yards of textile.” The proximity of the Otavalo Valley to Quito, the capital and the country’s second-largest city, gave the Otavalenos another advantage. And enough Otavalenos survived during the Spanish colonial and hacienda eras as itinerant peddlers to keep their ancient merchant tradition alive. The combination of weaving skills and commercial daring proved explosive. Otavalenos first tested the markets in Quito, then the capitals of neighboring countries, and eventually summoned the courage to venture into the cities of North America, Europe and Asia.

Recalling her first visit to Otavalo, nearly a decade after the end of huasipungo , Meisch describes a people still reeling from prejudice and poverty. “They were always sent to the back of the bus, or made to get up for a white person,” she says. “They weren’t allowed in restaurants and hotels. Now, they own restaurants and hotels. And they ride in their own cars instead of buses.”

The Otavalenos, asserts Meisch, “are a model for other indigenous groups who hope to control their own destiny. They have entered the money economy on their own terms.” Other indigenous groups--from Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia--have tried emulate the Otavalenos, but they don’t range as far afield, and they are nowhere near as economically successful.

Indigenous peoples make up about a third of Ecuador’s 11 million inhabitants, with mestizos accounting for about half the population, and whites for most of the rest. Surveys of households with refrigerators, televisions, radios, watches and other non-perishable consumer goods suggest that over the past three decades the Otavalenos have scored greater economic gains than any other social group in the country, which has struggled in recent years with high inflation and low growth. And Otavalenos are riding the new capitalist wave in South America better than most of their white and mestizo compatriots.

“In Otavalo, it’s the Indian who has the economic whip hand nowadays,” says Humberto Muenala, a 40-year-old Otavaleno garment merchant with a university degree in education. “We’re as well educated as most mestizos and whites. It isn’t even unusual to see them working for Otavaleno employers.”

Most observers don’t dispute Muenala’s estimates that two-thirds of Otavalenos are middle class by Ecuadorean standards. But pockets of poverty exist throughout their valley, mainly among people who failed to make the leap from subsistence farming and weaving to commerce.

Rafael Guajan, a farmer-weaver in Guananci, just north of Otavalo, is one of the stragglers. His village, carved out of the remains of a hacienda, lies a mile off the Pan American Highway at the end of a dirt path used more by livestock than motor vehicles. Guajan, a former huasipunguero, or debt serf, lives in the same one-room, thatched-roof adobe hut he inhabited when he was still under the hacienda’s yoke, and it rests at the top of a hill steep enough to fatigue a mountain goat.

Guajan, who is illiterate and speaks only the Quichua language of the Otavalenos, owns five acres of the hillside, and somehow coaxes a crop from the dusty, shallow soil. The corn has been reaped, and half a dozen sheep are nibbling at the sun-bleached stalks while he scrapes kernels off a bushel of cobs on his porch. He wears tattered blue pants and a matching shirt, and his calloused feet look hard as stone. His face is barely wrinkled, and his hair is flecked gray only at the temples, but the lethargy of his movements betrays old age. How old he is, he can’t say. “Look into my eyes and you tell me,” he suggests. I gaze into the faded black irises and guess 75.

Traditionally, the Otavalenos divide themselves among those who are considered weavers first and farmers second, and those who give priority to tilling the land. Guajan clearly fits the latter category. Only now that the harvest is over does he turn to weaving. Sitting on the dirt floor of his porch, he straps a loom around his back and tethers its other end to a horizontal post just above his feet. His right hand works a stick that raises and lowers the wool threads he is fashioning into a scarf, and the fingers of his left hand deftly guide new strands through the fabric in a motion that mimics the plucking of a harp. He is weaving as Andean artisans did at least 3,000 years ago.

On a good day, Guajan can finish five scarfs, which he sells for about $2 apiece to Otavaleno middlemen, who then dispose of them for three times that price. Back in the era of his serfdom, the scarfs brought in enough to let him pay the hacienda owner for the right to till the land. “I’m as poor as I was in those days,” he says, “but now at least I work for myself.”

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Guajan’s poverty gives some notion of the long economic road traveled by Otavalenos such as Luis Alfonso Morales. He also began life in destitution, in the village of Agato, where his father struggled as a subsistence farmer, weaver and street peddler. Morales had only one year of schooling, just enough to master the essentials of reading, writing and arithmetic. Yet at 50, he is one of the two or three wealthiest men in Otavalo. Using a score of electric looms to produce 25,000 sweaters and ponchos a year, his factory nets him the equivalent of a six-figure income in dollars, mostly from sales abroad.

Morales’ entrepreneurial vision awakened when, barely 9 years old, he noticed what goods were being purchased by the few Americans and Europeans who visited the Otavalo market in those days. “I had ideas about improving the style and technique of garments to make them more appealing to foreigners,” he says. “Even back then, when most of us were selling to local people, I knew I should look to the customers abroad.”

In his factory, Morales has assembled what amounts to an inventory of the Industrial Revolution. His oldest looms are British-made models from the turn of the century. He then added Spanish looms from the 1920s, American looms from the postwar era, and most recently, German machines--all picked up at bargain prices from textile plants in Ecuador and abroad.

His 20 employees--men work the looms, while women do the assembly and embroidering--are Otavalenos. “That’s because Latinos aren’t prepared to make sacrifices,” says Morales. “They want things to be easy--to work less for more money. They have no sense of responsibility.”

It’s hard not to smile at this frank admission of prejudice because it mirrors the disparaging comments mestizos and whites have traditionally directed at indigenous people. But the fact is that Otavalenos are a more pliant labor force, less likely than mestizos or whites to seek the protection of laws when called upon to work overtime or take unpaid leave. And Morales concedes as much. “We understand each other,” he says. “We’re like the Japanese. We don’t spend our time looking at the clock. We work according to market demand.” That means 10, 12 hours a day for months on end. And when business is slow, employees get laid off for weeks at a stretch.

Otavaleno traditions and modern affluence seem to coexist easily in Morales’ life. Growing up in his village of Agato, he lived and worked with his parents and siblings under one roof, and he is doing virtually the same thing, on a grander scale, with his own family in Otavalo. In front of his factory, separated by a lawn, he has constructed a three-story building. The ground floor is set aside for a showroom, administrative offices and sewing machines. Morales and his wife live on the second floor. And their married children, two sons and a daughter who work in the business, dwell in the apartments above.

Cesar Morales, the 23-year-old middle son, spent the last three years traveling across the United States, selling Otavaleno goods and performing in a troupe that played Andean music. He returned to Otavalo brimming with business ideas, only some of which he has been able to implement. After considerable cajoling, he has persuaded his father to purchase a fax machine, though he has had less luck with the notion of computerized accounting. “We only started using invoices a few years ago,” explains Morales, and that was because of pressure from tax collectors.

His caution extends to finances. He demands a 50% deposit from his buyers on future consignments, with the remainder to be paid upon delivery of the goods. And only about 15% of his operating costs and capital expenditures are covered by bank loans. “The bankers want me to borrow more money--they really make the paperwork easy nowadays,” he says. “But I’d rather finance the business out of profits.” And those profits continue to rise. “I’ve never had a drop in sales. Each year is better than the last.”

The secret, Morales readily admits, is marketing. No matter how lead-footed he might appear in other aspects of his enterprise, few garment-makers anywhere in the world are quicker at catching the rising scent of fashion. Otavaleno street peddlers in Europe and North America constantly send him samples of what’s hot: Guatemalan or Navajo patterns, the latest colors of Benetton and the Gap. And in as little as two weeks, Morales ships them sweaters and ponchos woven with the new designs and colored with the new dyes.

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Through middlemen, some of Morales’ garments end up being part of the inventory of Fabian Muenala, an Otavaleno street peddler in New York. Muenala, 33, arrived in the city two years ago, with his wife and son. They live in the South Bronx, in a formerly Polish neighborhood of sooty, brick-and-mortar tenements from the turn of the century. The faces on the streets are now mostly Latino, the shops have names like Bodega Jimenez and Lavanderia La Favorita, and merengue music blasts from open windows.

The Muenalas occupy a four-room, ground-floor apartment in a freshly painted brownstone, next to several abandoned buildings on a high-crime block. The Andean strains of an Otavaleno music group emerge softly from a new Sony stereo system in their living room and a fax machine purrs with a message from Ecuador.

It’s a troubled time for Fabian Muenala, a slight man with wire-rim glasses and a wispy mustache. His wife had a difficult pregnancy, and their second son, born three months prematurely, is in the intensive-care unit. Fabian, who has not worked for more than a week, must leave his wife in the company of her sister and resume his peddling. At noon, laden with a bloated backpack of woven goods and trinkets, he takes the subway to his favorite mid-Manhattan sidewalk location.

This is his second sojourn abroad. As a teen-ager, he spent four years peddling in Barcelona, then returned to Ecuador to study linguistics, and worked briefly in a government ministry. What most bothers him about New York, he says, is the absence of camaraderie among Otavalenos. “The only interest is in individual survival,” he explains. “There’s a fear that the other fellow is in direct competition with you. When I first arrived here, I expected my companeros to tell me the best places to sell, and give me some practical advice. But they never did.”

Instead, Muenala learned the hard way. Once, in his first winter in New York, he sold 10 woolen vests, grossing $300 in less than two hours, in front of a busy record store. He returned early the next morning with two heavy bundles of vests, thinking he’d make a bigger killing. But his very first customer turned out to be an undercover cop. The policeman appropriated all of Muenala’s vests and wrote him out a summons for peddling without a license, something virtually impossible to get in New York. “My friends later told me I was stupid to give my real name and address,” Muenala says. “When I went to court, I was fined $600.”

On another occasion, he was peddling near Chinatown when a policeman kicked over his stand and ordered him to surrender his goods. Muenala refused and put up such a fuss that a crowd gathered and started taunting the cop, who let him go with a warning. “Man, I could write a book about my experiences on the New York streets,” says Muenala, as we arrive at his destination.

His spot is midway between a college and hospital, with a constant flow of pedestrians. He loiters for about 20 minutes to make sure there are no cops, uniformed or undercover, in the vicinity. Then he spreads out his wares--leather coin pouches, key chains, bead bracelets, reed flutes, sweaters and embroidered knapsacks--atop a black piece of cloth on the pavement. His first customers are a young Latino couple, who purchase a knapsack for $15. When two blond students ask the price for the same article, Muenala quotes them $20, and then lets them haggle him down to $15. White people like to feel they’re streetwise, he explains, while Latinos expect cheaper prices. “Everybody ends up paying the same,” he shrugs.

The main suppliers for Otavalenos, most of whom are here on business visas, are their families back home, who make part of the consignment themselves and purchase the rest from big producers in Otavalo. Goods are also sometimes bought from middlemen in large foreign cities. Profits for the peddlers typically amount to 50%. Thus, for example, a sweater-vest is bought at wholesale in Otavalo for 16,000 sucres, or about $8, packaged and sent to New York for another $3, and sold on the streets there for $20 to $22. That’s a profit of $9 to $11 for the peddler, and about half that if he bought the item from a middleman.

Farther downtown, on the edge of Chinatown, Elsa Conejo, another Otavaleno, works the souk-like environment of Canal Street, where hundreds of peddlers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East congregate on weekends. Even among this exotic array of competitors, the handsome Otavaleno woman, dressed in her Inca-like costume and holding up her most colorful weaves, has no trouble drawing the suburban tourists who are the mainstay of her trade.

Thieves are her biggest concern. “You can’t get angry with them even if they steal because it will just make matters worse,” says Conejo. “We try to befriend them, and if they like us, they’ll warn us when the police are sweeping through,” she adds, describing what sounds like a veiled protection racket.

Every Tuesday morning, about a dozen members of New York’s 300-member Otavaleno contingent gather at the American Indian Community House in Greenwich Village. It’s an effort to overcome the isolation Muenala felt when he first arrived, an opportunity to socialize, gossip, listen to Otavaleno music and practice traditional dances. It’s also a place to network with North American Indian groups and wangle invitations to sell goods at their powwows around the country.

On this particular day, most of the Otavalenos are young women--young enough to address Muenala as Don Fabian. The presence abroad of large numbers of Otavaleno women is a phenomenon of the past decade. They are under 25, unmarried and determined to return home with sizable savings. “I cried when I first went abroad,” says Muenala. “These women, though, are fearless--absolutely confident.”

Then again, when Muenala first lived overseas a dozen years ago, he had no support group of family or friends. The vast majority of itinerant Otavalenos nowadays, especially the women, move in with siblings or cousins who preceded them abroad and can offer them emotional comfort, practical advice and financial aid while they become acclimated to life in a foreign setting.

“We have American friends--and we like to go out on dates, to dance, to gossip,” says Viviana Quinche, 21, who lived three years in Paris before moving to New York. “But they know there’s a limit beyond which we won’t go. That’s the way we were brought up by our mothers and grandmothers. It doesn’t matter where we are or with whom--for everything there’s a limit.”

Quinche’s best friend, Miriam Farinango, gets more specific. “There’s not enough respect for moral values here,” she says. “Even kids know about sex--children as young as 10 talk about it. You don’t see that back home. My American friends know that’s the way I feel and they accept it. Otherwise they wouldn’t remain my friends.”

Otavaleno men are far more prone to experiment with Western lifestyles. Dressing in loose jeans and cowboy boots, piercing their ears, learning disco dancing and having a foreign girlfriend--all seem part of the rite of their expatriate passage to adult life.

Both Farinango and Quinche intend to return to the Otavalo Valley within the next few years after saving enough for dowries and university expenses. “Everybody thinks of Otavalenos as street merchants,” says Farinango. “But most of us here intend to become professionals of one sort or another.” She is planning to study nursing and work alongside her sister, the Cuban-trained doctor. Two other siblings are engineers in textile plants. In all, she has nine brothers and sisters. “That’s usual for my mother’s generation,” she says. “I’ll stop at two kids myself.”

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Otavalenos estimate that about 10% of their community--some 6,000 people--live abroad at any time as itinerant salespeople, but few become permanent expatriates. Fabian Muenala’s older brother, Humberto, returned to Otavalo after four successful years as a peddler in Germany. And their younger sibling, Alberto, spent five years learning cinematography in Mexico, yet declined to stay on despite much greater filmmaking opportunities there than back home. What most bothered him about Mexico, he says, was the conventional wisdom that “Indianness” was a stage to be overcome on the way to economic and social progress. “When I told people I was an Ecuadorean Indian, they would often say, ‘Hey, that’s great--my parents were also Indians,’ ” recalls Alberto.

Over a succulent, spicy meal of roast guinea pig--splayed like a road-kill--he explains that his main interest as a cinematographer is to create a film archive of traditional Otavaleno customs. One of his favorite works is a video he made of a recent wedding, and it’s a particularly revealing look at the way Otavaleno culture endures, despite absorbing and adapting newer elements. Before a Christian marriage ceremony, the bride and groom submit to the ancient “water basin” ritual: Relatives take turns washing the couple’s face and arms with flower-scented water, while plying them with advice--and they in turn are washed by the bride and groom as a sign of gratitude.

The minga, or collective work project, is another Otavaleno practice that has adapted modern aspects. A decade ago, Otavaleno elders would use word of mouth to convoke an assembly to deal with an emergency or community project. Every able-bodied adult would be assigned a task. But some months ago, when a landslide destroyed the pipes and canals of the water system in the village of Iluman, the minga took on new touches. People were alerted to the assembly by photocopied circulars. And when the repairs were carried out, the richer community members hired workers--some of them not even Otavaleno--to take their place.

But modernization and economic success have not undermined the appeal of an indigenous way of life. The small but growing ranks of university-educated Otavaleno professionals are among the most zealous guardians of their culture and tradition--sometimes out of regret for having strayed from the fold when they were younger.

Mario Conejo, a 34-year-old with a sociology degree, is one such case. He spent much of his childhood in neighboring Colombia, where his father had set up a weaver’s workshop. “My brothers and I grew up wearing Western clothes and short hair because my parents wanted to shield us from prejudices toward Indians,” he says. “And we ended up embracing those same biases. We used to walk well behind or in front of my parents because we were so ashamed of their Indian dress.”

The Conejos returned to their native valley after the father had purchased two electric looms in Ecuador and was unable to import them into Colombia. To save his investment, he moved his family and enterprise back to Otavalo. Forced to wear traditional clothing for the first time in his life at age 12, Mario Conejo rebelled. “I remember being taken to my grandparents’ home where I was dressed in a hat, white trousers, a poncho and sandals,” he says. “When we walked down the street, I was sure everybody was staring at me, and as soon as I could slip away, I ran home and changed back into Western clothes.”

His cultural conversion came much later. After high school, he ran a small cafeteria in Otavalo for five years but was encouraged to continue his education by a visiting Swiss scholar doing research on Ecuadorean Indians. Conejo enrolled in the sociology department of the Catholic University in Quito. It was only during the second semester that he decided to start dressing like an Otavaleno. That almost led to his departure, when a professor ordered him to remove his fedora in class. “I told him I’d sooner resign, and he backed off,” recalls Conejo.

In the eight years since he earned his sociology degree, Conejo has never practiced the career he studied for. This is a dilemma common to most Otavaleno professionals who choose not to leave their native valley for Quito or large cities abroad. “We do have one great advantage,” says Conejo. “Because of our artisan and commercial traditions, we’ll never be without a job. I make far more money selling ponchos and sweaters than I would teaching at a university.” He sends most of the garments to friends and relatives in the United States and Europe.

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The rapid economic strides of the Otavalenos have created increasing resentment among mestizos and whites. A dozen years ago, the town of Otavalo was clearly a white and mestizo bastion, with Otavalenos largely confined to some 70 small villages scattered across the valley. But their booming businesses have forced Indian merchants to move to Otavalo itself, to take advantage of electricity, phones, transportation, import-export agencies and other support services. Nowadays, about a third of the town’s 20,000 inhabitants are Otavalenos, twice the proportion of only two decades ago.

With some justification, Otavalenos point out that they have given Otavalo a more cosmopolitan, prosperous veneer than any other town of comparable size in Ecuador. Thanks largely to their taxes, the main avenues are asphalted, and the dirt side-streets have been covered by cobblestone. Whites and mestizos have invested in profitable travel agencies, export houses, tool and machinery stores and all sorts of other businesses to cater to the needs of Otavaleno merchants. And no one--least of all hotel and restaurant proprietors--would deny that the thousands of foreign tourists who have put Otavalo on the South American travel circuit are here because of the Otavalenos.

But whites and mestizos grumble they can no longer afford houses--an ironic contrast to the usual complaint that Indians moving into a neighborhood depress real estate prices. Cars owned by Otavalenos have been vandalized. “Indians are subhuman” is a sample of the graffiti on town walls. And assaults are not uncommon. “All of us have been beaten up for no good reason at one time or another,” says Muenala, the filmmaker.

An effort has also been made to exclude Otavalenos from some fields of enterprise. The taxi business--run by whites and mestizos--is a glaring example. Asked why there are no Otavaleno cab-owners, a mestizo driver, Raymundo Hernandez, shot back: “Because they own everything else in Otavalo.”

In an incident last year, cocaine was found in an Otavalo merchant’s shipment that was destined for the United States. But even after charges against the merchant were dropped and the police shifted their investigation to an airline employee, many mestizos and whites continued to assert that narcotics were the real source of Indian wealth. The doors of leading Otavaleno business establishments were painted with phrases like “Narcotraficante Numero Uno. “ “My campaign posters were plastered with accusations that I was the candidate of the narcotrafico, “ says Mario Conejo, who ran unsuccessfully for the municipal council.

Relations are particularly strained among youths. Quite naturally, young mestizo men are envious of those Otavalenos who are well-traveled, dress in the most current foreign fashions and are versed in the latest music from abroad. And foreign women do seem to find Otavaleno youths more of an exotic attraction than the local mestizos and whites. Tensions are such that at the leading disco, the Havana Club, Otavalenos and mestizos often prefer to show up on alternate nights. This wasn’t the case, though, on a recent weekend evening. Several Otavaleno men, back from an extended sales foray in Holland, were dancing to hip-hop music with several blonde Dutch tourist women. When a group of mestizos snarled at them and belittled their dancing skills, the Otavalenos shouted back epithets. The burly, pony-tailed bouncer stiffened and drew in his breath, a man inhaling trouble. But the mestizos quieted down, and the Otavalenos and their dates shuffled back to center floor.

The next day, at the outdoor market, I came across one of the Otavaleno dancers helping his Dutch girlfriend bargain for sweaters. At the edge of the plaza, a half-dozen young minstrels in ponytails, white pants, ponchos and sandals were playing traditional Otavaleno songs, dancing to the music and passing a hat. When he saw them, the Otavaleno, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, doubled over in laughter.

“Don’t you get it?” he asked his girlfriend and me, both of us looking perplexed. “They’re mestizo. Mestizos trying to make a living by pretending to be Indians.”