Juan García

Juan García is organizing Afro-Ecuadorians to preserve their oft-ignored and threatened culture and defend their environment, which has been damaged by coastal industries.

Juan García addresses a knot of cultural and environmental losses among the Afro-Ecuadorians, who make up five percent of the country’s population. Nearly all of them live in Esmeraldas Province, along Ecuador’s northern coast, and are the descendants of both escaped slaves who made their way to the remote province and the survivors of slave ships wrecked on the coast. Their physical environment has been heavily damaged by commercial use of the forest and coastline of the province. They are subject to the most severe racial discrimination faced by any minority group in Ecuador, and their sense of community has been weakened by hardship. Juan is organizing the community to retrieve its cultural birthright, based on the conviction that without a sense of identity people are unable to be true citizens.

Juan is a master community organizer: he is uniting disparate groups who have been resistant to cooperation with each other into Ecuador’s first Afro-Ecuadorian movement by encouraging them to learn about their cultural history. He builds the community’s strength through innovative educational, legal, and economic projects. He is preparing them to qualify for the territorial privileges that Ecuadorian law grants to other indigenous cultures, to fight together for the legal establishment of Afro-Ecuadorian territories in Esmeraldas, where they can conserve both their environment and their traditions.

Afro-Ecuadorians comprise five percent of Ecuador’s population, yet their situation, cultural heritage, and contribution to Ecuador’s traditions have long been obscured by the attention focused on Andean indigenous groups. “The problem,” according to Juan, “is the government and Ecuadorian society’s denial of the historical and cultural presence of Afro-Ecuadorian groups.” However, a painting survives in a Spanish museum of three black Esmeraldeños arriving in Quito in 1598 to receive the “Pax Hispánica”, their cacique or leader status revealed by ruffed and brocaded robes and the spears the three held in their hands. And an Irishman among the Spaniards, William B. Stevenson,
compiled the only written history of colonial Esmeraldas in 1825 and described its character as wholly black. Though the country’s blacks have essentially been squatters in Esmeraldas since the late sixteenth century, they have not been officially acknowledged as having rights to their land, in contrast to the government’s policy of granting territorial ownership of land to the major indigenous groups, such as the Quechua.

Contemporary economic development of Esmeraldas has contributed to the disappearance of the Afro-Ecuadorian culture by depriving people of their homes and subsistence livlihoods. The coast has been stripped of vegetation and converted to shrimp farms by outside interests. The dense forests of the province have been heavily logged. Landless Afro-Ecuadorian families migrate to urban ghettos. Once in the cities, they find that mainstream Ecuadorian culture diminishes the value of their own. Often they lose sight of their roots and identity.

Juan believes that the dominant Ecuadorian culture is racist in its practices but that a national Afro-Ecuadorian movement could change this racist nature. An important part of that process would be facilitating an understanding between the cultures that does not yet exist.

To build greater cohesion among Afro-Ecuadorians, Juan is cultivating cultural and political awareness in a number of ways. He has devised several strategies to galvanize an Afro-Ecuadorian movement, all of which are based on the idea that culture is the Afro-Ecuadorian people’s greatest asset.

He travels around Ecuador to identify and enlist Afro-Ecuadorian social, labor, and community groups: he encourages them to “promote their organization using our own historical perspective and ancestral cultural elements such as tales and legends that speak of the unity and history of the Black community.”

Juan is working with the government to enhance the voices of Afro-Ecuadorians in the national government and secure for Afro-Ecuadorians the same privileges and protection that Andean ethnic groups receive. Among those privileges would be the establishment of traditional territories in the Northern Esmeraldas region.

Juan envisions the territories as not only a place in which Afro-Ecuadorians can preserve and perpetuate their traditional practices but also as a basis to prevent further exploitation by commercial interests. In addition, the area could provide a source of valuable information about environmental conservation. Traditional Afro-Ecuadorian practices use
the forest resources sustainably and could provide other groups with a model for sustainable development of forest areas. For example, Juan spearheaded an income-generating project for forest areas that utilizes tagua, the ivory-like seed of a forest plant that can be carved. The tagua provided a renewable resource for earning income without devastating the forest. The tagua project provides a valuable lesson for people working to save forests throughout Latin America.

Juan also seeks to improve relations between Afro-Ecuadorian and non-black people by making information about Afro-Ecuadorian culture accessible. He has published a series of small books on Afro-Ecuadorian popular culture that he plans to distribute via black domestic workers who will sell copies to their non-black employers. To produce these books, Juan has drawn upon a vast body of information he gathered between 1980 and 1987 while collecting oral histories of more than 200 elderly Black people across Ecuador.

Finally, Juan plans to travel around Ecuador enlisting different groups of Afro-Ecuadorians in the effort to galvanize a national Afro-Ecuadorian movement. Juan believes that by raising awareness among disparate Afro-Ecuadorian groups, he can generate the momentum necessary to launch an effective national movement.

Juan grew up as the second of eight children in the Esmeraldas province of Ecuador. His family’s economic situation forced him to start working at the age of seven. Although he could not continue his formal education through high school, he learned about the African diaspora and Black Consciousness political movements in the United States and other countries through his own reading. This ethno-political awakening led him to work on an oral history project, uncovering and preserving the richness of the Afro-Ecuadorian culture. Soon after this, Juan received a scholarship to complete a master’s degree in history at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Since then, he has authored several publications and directed various projects linked to problems facing the Afro-Ecuadorian community. Today Juan is a leading researcher of Afro-Ecuadorian issues and an invaluable resource to all Ecuadorians.