PRODUCING AND CIRCULATING KICHWA COMMUNITY IN INTERCULTURAL ECUADOR John Stolle-McAllister University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Over the past thirty years, Ecuador’s Indigenous movement has made remarkable advances in winning rights and recognition for Indigenous peoples, and positioning themselves as important players in national pol- itics. Mobilizing discourses of community, as both ideological and orga- nizational strategies, has been a key to that success. While historically community has been connected to well-defined geographic territories and cultural practices, in recent years those seemingly immutable entities have faced serious challenges. Economic, political and cultural changes from the outside world coupled with the movement’s success in bringing un- even social mobility and increased public participation with the country’s majority White-Mestizo population have contributed to substantial re- structuring of what it means to be a community. In this article, I argue that Kichwa 1 activists and community members in the northern highland areas of Otavalo, Cotacachi and Cayambe produce their communities, by constructing political, economic, educational and communicational rela- tionships that incorporate the drastically changing social and economic structures in which they find themselves. Community is not a predeter- mined social fact, nor is it an ideal abstraction, but rather it is a continuous process of discursive production and circulation. Kichwa political actors and organizations have opted for different com- munity strategies that reflect reflect the material realities and the political possibilities of each organization and each project. Each in its own way, however, represents attempts to connect past and future, that is to build on ancestral practices and knowledge, while at the same time enacting a com- munity that accounts for demographic changes, class differentiation and national and global integration. The production of community becomes increasingly complicated as political leaders and activists often deploy an essentialized notion of community to promote a unified front in con- frontations with the state and dominant white-mestizo society. The reality of community is, and always has been, much more complicated. In every- day interactions, community often still refers to rural, geographic locations in which extended networks of families live and work, but as the Indige- nous movement creates more spaces for participation and has increased the physical and economic mobility of some of its members, community takes on a more abstract, idealized meaning as well. These articulations of community are increasingly intercultural endeavors in that although they C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 29