Speaking for a State: Standardized Kichwa Greetings and Conundrums of Commensuration in Intercultural Ecuador

Abstract

Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.

Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? How are traditionally marginalized peoples using Indigenous languages in employment in state offices? This article examines how greetings are one of the primary ways that speakers showcase or make visible their languages, and Indigeneities, for others. Greetings have now become central to state politics, and they indicate the promise and peril of speaking Indigenous languages on behalf of state institutions.

Ecuador’s intercultural bilingual school system demonstrates a major gain in state recognition. Speakers of Kichwa (who are often called “Kichwas” in Spanish, a more precise name based on their region, or runa in Kichwa) constitute the largest Indigenous nacionalidad (nationality) in Ecuador and have long been skilled mobilizers against repressive policies and institutions. In 1988 Indigenous activists pressured the president to establish a public school system over which they would preside, calling it educación intercultural bilingüe (intercultural bilingual education; hereafter EIB). Those who run the school system have since made decisions about hiring colleagues, administering a budget, and authoring curriculum for what would become a system of more than 2,500 schools that teach Spanish and Ecuador’s approximately 14 Indigenous languages, especially Kichwa.¹

Nonetheless, 30 years later, the most widely spoken family of Indigenous languages in the Americas (called Kichwa in Ecuador and Quechua in Bolivia and Peru) is increasingly being replaced by Spanish.² There are approximately one million speakers of Kichwa varieties in Ecuador and around 8 million Quechua speakers throughout South America today (Haboud 2010, 96).³ Decades of cultural genocide have left many speakers embarrassed to speak Kichwa. Many have also migrated to cities, and children now tend to be proficient in Spanish and not speak much Kichwa. Schools have also struggled to teach historically oppressed languages in Ecuador and elsewhere and often lack pedagogies for teaching Kichwa as a second or heritage language. Even as Indigenous languages are now recognized as “official” in constitutions throughout the world, Ecuador included, and increasingly planned for by Indigenous peoples who themselves work as state policymakers (Mortimer 2016; Zavala 2018), large-scale language shift continues apace (Haboud 2004). This scenario results in part from years of repression from the very institutions that now recognize and prominently feature the language family.⁴

In Ecuador, standardized greetings, instead of consisting of “traditional” speech styles, make Kichwa analogous to Spanish as used in institutional settings. Throughout the world, Indigenous language speakers commonly use curtailed ways of speaking like greetings to demonstrate speakers’ presence while carrying out other functions. For example, Aboriginal Australians “perform difference” in speeches by greeting as hosts (Merlan 2014, 302), and Native-identifying Californians use greetings to invoke Indigeneity despite no longer being fluent in their languages (Ahlers 2006). Another example is how Native-identifying Californians may also, in contrast, use abbreviated speech styles in Indigenous languages to establish intertextual links to their ancestors, prompting the construal of ensuing talk in English as Native (Ahlers 2017, 47). I build on research to show that, despite the fact that greetings indicate a simplification of linguistic diversity, there is vast complexity to their use.

Directors of the school system, whose jobs include the promotion and reclamation of Kichwa, now work within the Ministry of Education. These Kichwa activists-turned-state agents routinely use standardized greetings for “public speaking” as they speak on behalf of the state, which brings Kichwa to state-sponsored communication and marks the Ecuadorian state as intercultural. Such greetings, further, uphold the parameters of institutional talk in maintaining conventions of “respect” through adding Kichwa use to conversational openings. Yet, their use also yields dissent from Kichwa-speaking audiences. Standardized Kichwa greetings are widely disliked for how they simultaneously entextualize or set apart one Kichwa variety from other ways of speaking. Such greetings have become a style emblematic of a state-sponsored register of discourse and, further, associated with state-authorized citizens who use them.

By entextualizing standardized Kichwa from other ways of speaking and enregistering a particular speech style for use in intercultural bilingual education, greetings carry out state recognition in public address. This claim contrasts with how scholars have seen greetings as inconsequential or as small talk that builds social relationships (Malinowski 1923; Bach and Harnish 1979) but of little importance in terms of referential content or meaning (Searle 1969). Unlike much academic work suggests (Duranti [1997] is a major exception), I show here that the referential content of greetings is important because their equivalency with Spanish makes them amenable for use in Spanish-dominant public speaking. Indeed, greetings carry out interactional “recognition” or acknowledge interlocutors and orient a conversation to a participatory framework (Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Duranti 1992; Hillewaert 2016), but, in this case, the similarities of such greetings across languages make Kichwa acceptable for those who do not understand the language family. While transgressive in light of decades of state repression, such ways of speaking are simultaneously divisive.

Standardized Kichwa openings consist of lexicosyntactic hybrids in how they are Kichwa words yet often translate Spanish grammar, reference, and use into Kichwa and replace more incommensurate local ways of speaking. Moreover, their use tends to occur with extensive non-Kichwa (i.e., Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Kichwa state agents thus risk angering other Kichwa-speaking listeners and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts. However, they encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for those who self-identify as mestizo (Ecuador’s racial majority) and may even trigger anxiety or censure from ministry higher-ups. Their predicament of greeting is one of many double binds that they experience with their employment that depends upon adapting Indigeneity for national state institutions.

For example, Juan, a high-ranking planner in EIB lamented how even in his role in the Ministry of Education, he seldom used Kichwa beyond the act of greeting.⁵ Typically unflappable, late one evening, Juan was frustrated after dealing with contrastive expectations from Spanish-speaking bosses, bilingual peers, and a range of teachers. His red poncho had accrued the wrinkles of a day’s work at the office. As Juan explained to me:

As Juan implied, the goal of “strengthen[ing]” Indigenous languages in intercultural bilingual education was constrained by how he and his colleagues used Kichwa on a daily basis as employees in state offices, even as their jobs focused on getting people to speak Kichwa. As Juan lamented about coordinating EIB, he and his colleagues tended to mainly speak Spanish for several reasons beyond their control. First, all senior EIB officials speak Spanish but not all speak Kichwa, making communication in Spanish more expedient and, ironically, inclusive. Second, those who do speak Kichwa grew up speaking Spanish in schools and now live primarily in the capital city, Quito, where Spanish is predominantly spoken. Most routinely speak Spanish more than Kichwa. Third, Kichwa does not currently have the technical vocabulary needed to carry out job requirements like budget making, personnel management, and textbook authorship. Directors of EIB have to invent words to describe many of these activities (or borrow them from Spanish). Though Indigenous languages are experiencing an era of linguistic prominence, language planning must contend with historical alterity and racialized domination that shape the patterns of and possibilities for language use and reclamation.

Most relevantly, however, Juan’s comments show how Ecuador’s case of language shift has implications for state politics. On the one hand, greetings have become key speech acts for bringing Indigenous language use to state spaces (“an event”) from which it was formerly restricted. On the other hand, not only is “a pair of greetings” “plainly and simply” less significant in comparison to how directors of EIB speak Spanish, but moreover, according to Juan, his and others’ use of greetings has made “strengthening” Kichwa “impossible.” For example, one of the most common greetings in this context is alli puncha mashikuna (good morning, colleagues), a phrase routinely criticized by other Kichwa speakers for contrasting with local ways of greeting. While it uses Kichwa words, the expression is a translation of a Spanish greeting common to office life (buenos días compañeros).

I order the sections of this article around the telling and analysis of a historical and ethnographic story of how such greetings are used and how they indicate a larger predicament of language shift, state recognition, and intercultural citizenship for Kichwa speakers. This article builds on research on greetings by analyzing standardized greetings’ use in Ecuador, tracing the ideologies that they uphold and the conundrums they depend upon and entail. It focuses on how standardized greetings challenge common academic assumptions about state discourses and commensuration more generally. After elaborating theoretical implications, I trace how modernist language ideologies have been integral to gaining state recognition of the school system; spell out how intercultural Kichwa use has been reduced to that of greetings; show what speech forms change or are erased through the use of greetings as described in a conversation with teachers; analyze an event in which marginalized peoples who do not speak an Indigenous language struggle to gain moment-to-moment acknowledgment in state events; examine how illegible and extensive Kichwa use by one director of EIB yielded rebuke from a Ministry of Education higher-up; and describe how extensive Kichwa use in an intercultural exchange becomes a transgressive act and a critique of intercultural bilingual education. The use of greetings may alienate others who would comprise a social movement to encourage Kichwa use, raising questions about the transformational potential of Indigenous languages in state institutions.

This consideration of greetings in language politics is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador from 2011 to 2013, as well as continued follow-up work. Over the two years, I divided research between three main sites: the Ministry of Education offices where EIB is coordinated and two EIB schools in Quito. I also routinely traveled with employees to workshops and conferences. For several months of the project, I lived with an employee of the office and his family. Methods include participant observation, semistructured interviews, and audio recordings of events such as international endangered language conferences, national planning meetings, and classes in schools.

Nation-State Logics, Kichwa(s), and Intercultural Ecuador

The case of standardized Kichwa greetings in Ecuador demonstrates a trajectory of how state-sanctioned ideologies about communication are derived from modern linguistics, a field that, in seeking universal forms of grammar, is often at odds with local ways of communicating. Standardized Kichwa greetings illustrate—model or put into practice—a one nation, one language ideology: that languages are emblems that coincide with single language communities. The “one nation, one language” ideology promotes a pure and ordered version of that language and, further, attempts to align the chosen variety with a domain of speakers (Silverstein 1998; Jaffe 1999; May 2007; Moore 2011).

As Blommaert (2008, 292) writes, such ideologies are modernist in holding that “the fantastic variation that characterizes actual language in use can … be reduced to an invariable, codified set of rules, features and elements in order to be the ‘true’ language that can qualify as an object of linguistic study.” Gal (2006), for example, shows how standardization involves making and “naming” languages through codifying norms, seen in grammar books, dictionaries, and literature. The use of standardized Kichwa greetings shows several new contours of this ideology, such as how the official recognition of Indigenous languages is increasingly about a standardized register of that language and not the language more generally.

In language standardization, linguistic forms of state-sanctioned talk, despite occurring in another language, may actually translate or reproduce much of colonial languages into emergent registers of historically marginalized languages. In other words, conceptualizing languages as “things,” as homogeneous varieties that can be written down in books like dictionaries across all languages, often even drives efforts to “save” endangered languages (Moore et al. 2010) and, moreover, may actually stifle the very goals of linguistic recognition and reclamation by leading to language shift in more subtle ways.

Indeed, anthropologists have shown a linguistic challenge in how rights and state recognition often premise the importance of a distinct, representative language that illustrates group difference, even as such a frame can be essentialist and colloquially inaccurate (Duchene and Heller 2007; Viatori and Ushigua 2007; Muehlmann 2008). When activists and intellectuals emphasize using “their own” language and not that of colonizing populations, how they do so can yield a path for state recognition but also a contested politics of indigeneity based on linguistic proficiency and use (Cojtí Cuxil 1996; Viatori 2009; Urla 2012).

For instance, Graham (2002) argues that in Brazil and Venezuela, Amazonian directors encounter the predicament of balancing Indigenous language use to signal their identities with the need to convey messages to international audiences, which requires the use of dominant languages. When they speak Portuguese or Spanish, respectively, others question their indigeneity, presenting a dilemma of incompatible expectations. Viatori (2009, 10, 45–46) argues that for the Zápara, a small Ecuadorian Indigenous group who formerly spoke Zápara but have now shifted to speaking Kichwa or Spanish, some leaders received thousands of dollars in aid to present Zápara as linguistically pure and illustrative of their Indigenous identities, even though few remaining elders speak the language. Those advocates, in turn, questioned the “authenticity” and “purity” of rival Zápara leaders who do not speak Zápara.

Kichwa planners and coordinators in Ecuador encounter a similar tension, with Kichwa now widely recognized as an emblem of group membership. Their Indigenous language use “performs Indigeneity” (Graham and Penny 2014) but also now does state recognition. Similar to the cases that Graham and Viatori examined, Kichwa use in this context brings up questions about who the intended audience is, which can stymie the maintenance of a united social movement for teaching Indigenous languages. In this case, however, their challenge involves intralinguistic difference within the Kichwa language family. Standardized Kichwa greetings are examples of enregistered styles because they link a routine co-occurrence pattern with shared values among users (Agha 2007, 186). In other words, recurring tokens of standardized Kichwa have become the acceptable forms of intercultural communication for those who speak for the state. Greetings exemplify a larger pattern of how recognition initiatives bring a politics of commensuration to the forefront of the struggle of traditionally marginalized peoples (see also Povinelli 2001, 2002; Rappaport 2005), including ways of speaking Indigenous languages, even as other Kichwa speakers may reject them.

The case of greetings in Ecuador adds to discussions of state politics and indigeneity by refining the commensuration of Indigenous language use as two more specific semiotic processes. First, greetings carry out entextualization (Briggs and Bauman 1992; Eisenlohr 2010; Gershon 2012) in how, as “openings,” they represent Kichwa as a text, or a cohesive and performable discursive strand, that can be detached from particular contexts and circulated in others; and, second, enregisterment, or how diverse types of speech or behavior are made known to others and, in their coherence, become indicative of particular roles and identities (Agha 2005; 2007, 55; Gal 2017). With greetings, for example, speakers can entextualize tokens of standardized Kichwa from the vast ways of speaking the language family through foregrounding them in the communicative roles of the state. They increase Kichwa’s presence but, also, in repeated use enregister greetings as prime examples of Kichwa as standardized, the intercultural state, and even how state-authorized Indigenous persons should speak. Others can quickly reuse the greetings, increasing Kichwa’s salience while also changing how Kichwa is heard and seen in conducting national politics.

Though the use of Kichwa forms—especially those that are analogical to how they perceive standardized Spanish—is not complete or all-consuming, the forms repeatedly appear that way. However, by entextualizing and enregistering Kichwa as different from how many Kichwa listeners view the language (and perhaps even how they themselves would speak in other circles), many teachers, parents, and others focus on how Kichwa language use in official contexts is out of step with Indigenous cultural categories and local expectations for appropriateness. The use of greetings is one disagreement that has divided Ecuador’s Indigenous movements, which have long been regarded as some of the most effective in the world (Jackson and Warren 2005, 551).

As the particular Kichwa greetings sanctioned for use in state events represent standardized language use, they indicate how a politics of state recognition preferences certain ways of speaking and includes intralinguistic shift from one register to another (see also Gal 2015). Scholars emphasize the vast range of morphological, syntactic, and phonetic variation in regional varieties of Indigenous languages (Mannheim 1991; Romero 2015; Luykx et al. 2016). Though this range of difference is often noted for Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua(s), there is also significant variation in Ecuadorian varieties of Kichwa that can challenge intelligibility (King 2001), especially between Highland and Lowland varieties (Uzendoski 2008; Wroblewski 2014).⁸

Like Cerrón Palomino (1987), Haboud (2004, 70) further divides Highland Ecuadorian varieties of Kichwa into those of the Northern Andes (provinces of Imbabura and Pichincha, where Quito is located), Central Andes (including provinces of Bolívar, Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, and Tungurahua), and Southern Andes (provinces of Azuay, Cañar, Loja). Amazonian varieties, too, have further regional divisions (Grzech et al. 2019), and Montaluisa (2019) divides them into North, Central, and South, as well. Based on years of experience working with intercultural bilingual employees from across Ecuador, Montaluisa notes that, though fewer differences appear in linguistic studies, most Kichwa speakers perceive major differences in ways of speaking. Those questions of intelligibility are also asymmetrical, and speakers of Central Highland varieties understand speakers of other registers well but not vice versa (Montaluisa 2019, 205). This range of variation is essential for how some speakers contest their representation.

There is, further, erasure inherent to describing any language as a neatly bounded grammatical whole (such as “the Kichwa language”) that corresponds with a discrete and stable “culture,” a pervasive notion that repeated use of standardized greetings perpetuates. In addition to intra-Kichwa diversity, Kichwa is not representative of all Indigenous groups in Ecuador. Different Indigenous nationalities and their members speak other Indigenous languages besides Kichwa and still others now speak only Spanish. Linguistic variation exceeds the static image that greetings present, as Juan mentioned above with lamenting “a pair of greetings.” That standardized Kichwa greetings are translations from Spanish exacerbates this essentialism.

As the primary route to cultural recognition in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru (and elsewhere in Latin America), activists and planners have drawn upon interculturalidad (interculturality), which emphasizes equal dialogue across groups (Hornberger 2000; Postero 2007; Gustafson 2009; Whitten and Whitten 2011, 118). State agents have sometimes presented interculturalidad as a critique of multiculturalism (Rappaport 2005, 5). However, state recognition initiatives across the three nation-states have similarly made interculturality a means for managing some forms of difference instead of radically reworking state institutions. García (2005, 3) describes interculturality in Peru as “a practice of multiculturalism” that involves citizens engaging with one another in a “democratic community.” Gustafson (2009, 7) writes that interculturality in state recognition in Bolivia was similar to multiculturalism elsewhere by focusing on inclusion at the expense of alterity. Similarly, in Ecuador, Guerrero Arias (2011) upholds this point in writing that interculturality becomes a form of multiculturalism if it is mainly about dialogue or tolerance. To be wholly different, interculturality should involve a rupture from the totalizing and universal logics of the colonizers, which the use of standardized greetings makes difficult.

Though interculturalidad focuses on communication, scholars have rarely examined how people speak in Indigenous languages as a means to recognition, even as interculturalidad’s arrival to policy was consistently linked to descriptions of Indigenous languages. “Unified Kichwa” is the variety intellectuals and planners promote for pan-Andean unity (Wroblewski 2012) and is based much on Kichwa used in the two highland provinces with the largest number of Kichwa speakers: Imbabura Kichwa, the name for registers from the Northern Highland province with the prosperous artisan town of Otavalo located approximately two hours from Quito; and registers from the Central Highland province of Chimborazo, which has the largest number of Kichwa speakers. These ways of speaking, especially those of Imbabura, have been viewed as “high prestige” and as preserving more “old Kichwa” in a number of ways (Muysken 2019, 211). Yet, preservation depends on one’s perspective, and more subtle changes, such as calquing, involve immense and systematic influence from Spanish of which language planners and academic linguists have been less mindful (see also Fauchois 1988; Gómez-Rendón 2008).

Unified Kichwa maintains lexical purity by avoiding the use of Spanish loanwords, which, paradoxically, results in a variety replete with neologisms and literal translations of grammatical forms and reference from Spanish (calques). In other standardization initiatives in the Americas, such as for Mayan languages in Mexico, planners eliminated Spanish loanwords and calques, focusing on a “pure” variety linked to a “traditional” past (Armstrong-Fumero 2009; Cesario 2014). Unified Kichwa has similarly involved maintaining lexical purity; however, the variety does not link Kichwa to a “traditional” past because its neologisms and calques are foreign to most people who grew up speaking Kichwa and because it must be acquired as another language.⁹

Modernist Epistemologies in Establishing Intercultural Bilingual Education

Unified Kichwa demonstrates a dilemma encountered by social movements as they contest and assume state power in marginalized languages. Part of the success of Ecuador’s Indigenous movement resulted from metalinguistic labor, in this case, the ongoing work to make languages and other cultural emblems relatable to others.¹⁰ Preceding Ecuador’s prominent mobilizations in 1990 (Becker 2008), in a decade of activism in the 1980s, pan-Indigenous organizers drew upon themes of language and schooling, such as in a 10,000-person march in 1980 demanding, among other things, state institutionalization of bilingual education (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2009, 11). Kichwa speakers became involved in national literacy and schooling initiatives in the 1980s, such as an Indigenous educational wing at a Quito university that authored Kichwa dictionaries and pedagogic materials, or the German-sponsored experimental bilingual education program that operated throughout the Highlands (Abram 1992, 95). Those Kichwa workers became expert planners, gaining years of experience with state officials and educational policy.

Their experiences made Ecuador’s case remarkable in comparison to other nation-states. While bilingual education planning in Peru began earlier in the 1970s, it tended to emanate from state offices without broad popular support of Indigenous movements (Hornberger 2000, 183). Bolivia is more comparable to Ecuador in how Aymara groups in the Highlands and Guarani groups in the Lowlands organized around literacy and schooling in the 1970s and 1980s (Gustafson 2009); however, those efforts tended to be more regionally focused and with less contact with national government offices. Furthermore, the experimental pilot project for bilingual education was located on the Peruvian side of the border, not in Bolivia, so unlike in Ecuador emerging professionals left the country to participate (López 2005, 118). In Ecuador, with Kichwa as the singular language family other than Spanish (while Bolivia has three widely spoken Indigenous language families), Kichwa planning was often national, concentrated in Quito, and had representation in the Ministry of Education.

In 1988 directors of Indigenous organizations pressured the recently inaugurated president Rodrigo Borja to sponsor EIB and lobbied for Indigenous peoples themselves to be in charge of planning in what would become the school system’s administrative offices, the Dirección Nacional de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (National Directorate of Intercultural Bilingual Education), or DINEIB. Borja’s minister of education and culture asked an assessor to develop an executive decree to establish the school system, who in turn tasked Luis Montaluisa, a prominent Kichwa activist involved in Ecuador’s emerging (and now revered) Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), with the job. The president signed Montaluisa’s decree as an executive order in November 1988, legally establishing DINEIB as an entity within the state earlier than Indigenous education was institutionalized in Bolivia and Peru.¹¹ The decree was upheld for more than 20 years, despite other state actors’ efforts to overturn it. As a national school system for Indigenous students, EIB would run parallel to the principal school system.

Executive Decree No. 203 proclaims:

Esta Dirección cuyo personal deberá poseer a más del dominio de la lengua castellana el de alguna de las lenguas indígenas del Ecuador, tendrá a su cargo la planificación, organización, dirección, control, coordinación y evaluación de la educación indígena en los subsistemas escolarizado y no escolarizado.

[This directorate, whose personnel must possess, in addition to the command of the Spanish language, the [command] of one of the Indigenous languages of Ecuador, will be responsible for the planning, organization, oversight, control, coordination, and evaluation of Indigenous education in school-based and not school-based subsystems.]

The decree yielded substantial self-direction to Indigenous language speakers (“planning, organization, oversight, control, coordination, and evaluation”). Indigenous activists in Ecuador were prescient in foreseeing Indigenous language abilities as a means to state power. Yet, a modernist ideology of bilingualism was simultaneously inscribed into the legal recognition of the school system by requiring those in the directorate to “possess … one … Indigenous [language].” While exceptional in the range of responsibilities it accorded, the decree invoked the language ideology of European nation-building and modern linguistics that languages are stable, countable, equitable wholes (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Kichwa and Ecuador’s other Indigenous languages were institutionalized, literally, as possessions like a singular colonial language (manifest in the parallelism of the phrase “in addition to … the Spanish language”), a description that would gain traction in the decades that followed.

The early twenty-first century marked another salient era of cultural recognition with the 2006 election of Rafael Correa, who was first elected through the support of Indigenous nationalities and, ultimately, served three terms until 2017 (Martínez Novo 2014b). Correa and Evo Morales, who was elected president of Bolivia in 2005, ushered in progressive policies and constitutional reform in the region. Correa, who self-identifies as mestizo, would speak briefly in Kichwa in public events, signaling his alignment with Indigenous efforts. In Bolivia, Morales is Aymara-identifying, again indexing the emergence of an Indigenous state (Postero 2017).

But a number of complications arose that demonstrate the overt challenges to transforming state institutions. After Correa’s election, his relationship with Indigenous organizations soured. Directors decried Correa’s institutionalization of nondistributive water and mining projects. Evo Morales saw similar dissent in Bolivia, where policies of extracting natural resources infringed on Indigenous territories and sovereignties and led to marches and blockades (Gustafson 2014, 81). Under Correa’s tenure EIB became more regulated by the state than in Bolivia, and in 2009 he issued a decree that DINEIB would report to a regulatory office in the Ministry of Education. This led CONAIE directors to accuse him of usurping the “autonomy” of the school system (Martínez Novo 2014a, 106). Indeed, DINEIB’s offices were moved within the Ministry of Education from that time on. Furthermore, organizers decried that Correa manipulated their cultural emblems for political gain, including his use of Kichwa.¹² His administration responded to protests with repression, including the persecution of political dissidents as “terrorists,” among them Indigenous activists.¹³

At the time of this research, directors of EIB had worked in such hostile conditions for several years, leading to a range of perspectives among employees of the National Directorate office. Some were in favor of the president, his social-spending and public-works projects, and what they saw as his disruption of some Indigenous directors’ insular control of the school system. Others decried repressive policies, the dismantling of leftist political parties, and the expansion and centralization of state management. Many employees in the office had tenure and continued in the jobs they had held for more than a decade, even as they worked in contentious conditions. Ministry of Education officials forced others, including some dissidents with tenure, to retire soon after this research project concluded. Others were employed on one- or two-year contracts and tended to have a more favorable stance to the Correa administration’s policies.

Correa has since left office, and the current president Lenín Moreno, who was vice president in Correa’s first term, bowed to the pressure of Indigenous organizations, including lessening the Ministry of Education’s control over EIB. He and Correa have feuded publicly, and in July 2018, Moreno proclaimed that he was “returning” the school system to Indigenous organizations. While many employees and parents celebrated, others flagged his executive decree, which created a new higher-level office of EIB within the Ministry of Education, as simply elevating the office with fewer responsibilities and even perniciously tightening control over EIB (Muyolema 2018). It remains to be seen if or how the practices of recognition politics will change.

Before turning to data, it is worth noting that Indigenous state agents tend to be more accepted as national citizens of society than those whom they represent, making them simultaneously insiders and outsiders in their daily employment (Rappaport 2005). Far from monolithic, employees in the office were from various regions of Ecuador, though most had grown up in rural parts of the Northern and Central Highlands. Of the approximately 70 employees in the office in 2011, 15 or so self-identified as mestizos and all but five of the rest belonged to the Kichwa nationality. They had ranges of Indigenous language fluency, including some who could not speak or understand Kichwa. Their jobs included policy makers, linguists, curriculum designers, administrative assistants, and accountants. As with Indigenous professionals in Colombia (Rappaport 2005) and Guatemala (Warren 1998), employees constituted an Indigenous middle class. All had high school degrees, most had undergraduate or graduate degrees, and all received monthly salaries. Only those in the foremost positions of leadership, however, received salaries that rivaled the highest earners of Ecuador’s professional class. Most belonged to Indigenous organizations, which were also divided at the time.

Greetings and Commensuration

Cultural recognition projects tend to set terms of engagement (Povinelli 2001; Rappaport 2005) by encouraging those of immense social difference to demonstrate commensurate traits that others can then view as sets of equivalencies across their identities (Kockelman 2016; Carruthers 2017). Multilingual talk has become key to a politics of commensuration. The use of greetings gives a cue that a particular kind of interaction is happening (Goffman 1979; Duranti 1997; Bauman 2004). In this case, greetings provide cues about the state as now Indigenous and tend to signify that the speaker will soon speak Spanish. Unified Kichwa greetings set openings apart from more widely used forms of Kichwa and enregister Kichwa as commensurate with Spanish in two ways. First, they consist of formulaic phrases from Spanish calqued into Kichwa:

This greeting reproduces the Spanish “Buenos días” in standardized Kichwa (as “Alli puncha”) followed by the named addressee (colleague + plural marker) in Unified Kichwa).¹⁵ Their hybridity—in this case, demonstrating two different languages with texts that are equivalent in lexicosyntactic form and reference—makes Kichwa analogous with Spanish, which they begin to speak soon thereafter. Such greetings are easily translated back to Spanish for non-Kichwa speakers. Second, Unified Kichwa greetings depend on the situational contexts that recur across and refer back to prior events of language use (such as settings, participant roles, and genres). Social participant roles (e.g., state representative) and genres (e.g., introductory openings) are based on routine speech in Spanish-dominant podium speeches, simultaneously enregistering standardized Kichwa forms as indicative of the speech of schooled, state-authorized Indigenous persons in institutional talk.

As an example of what calques replace, one day I was at an intercultural bilingual school conversing with teachers Ruth and Jorge, who described more common greetings. After lamenting the use of Unified Kichwa by directors of EIB, Ruth began a conversation about greetings. “For me [those greetings are] very insipid,” she said in Spanish. They continued:

Ruth and Jorge showed that there are more elaborated and common forms of greeting in their communities and that they would never use the unified greeting. Instead, they blend Spanish’s “Buenos días” into a dialogue of other greetings in a local variety of Kichwa (lines 4–9). Such linguistic blending, however, would deny Indigenous state agents from illustrating “their own” pure, commensurate language as they speak. The transcript also shows the incommensurate greetings more common to Kichwa speakers from Jorge’s region of birth, such as “Imanallatak kawsakupankichik?” (line 22) or “Tiyakunkichikchu?” (line 23). These examples demonstrate Kichwa as an agglutinative language, as various particles add up to make lengthy words, frustrating grammatical and semantic parallelism with Spanish. An entire sentence can be expressed in just one word, as the second example shows. These examples of common greetings are also more difficult to translate to Spanish in which words like “dwelling” would seem strange in a routine conversation.

A common property of greetings is their relative predictability in form and content (Duranti 1997). Here, interlinguistic norms increasingly affect the form and content of greetings in institutional spaces. Who, then, do Unified Kichwa greetings successfully acknowledge through their use? Based on Ruth and Jorge’s description, the answer is not primarily them. Standardized varieties are often seen as neutral because they are heavily planned and not directly linked to any one group or subgroup (Woolard 2016; Gal 2017), or as “devoid of an ethnic reflection” (Gal and Woolard 2001, 8). However, standardized Kichwa greetings simultaneously foreground racialized others who speak Spanish, such as those who identify as mestizo, who can follow them in the pragmatics of Indigenous language use. These greetings are forms of simplification for outsiders (Ferguson 1981). Their use indexes difference among copresent audience members even as the talk occurs in Kichwa. Such simplification helps entextualize—set apart—forms of speaking from less equivalent ones and to enregister, or make known as emblematic, standardized Kichwa over other varieties. The directionality of translation across languages matters in terms of who adapts to whom, engendering strong feelings from other Kichwa speakers and even a sense of loss.

Furthermore, common ways of speaking other varieties of Kichwa, such as Jorge’s example of hat waving across the mountain (line 21), would be harder to make sense of while speaking in an auditorium. In Kichwa, rises and falls in intonation accomplish politeness and form bonds with listeners (such “paralinguistic” features, Duranti notes, are often overlooked in greetings), as Ruth demonstrated in lines 8–9. Yet, such contours would be strange while uttering a brief standardized greeting, as evidenced in Ruth’s jocular flattening of her voice with alli puncha (line 12). Standardized Kichwa greetings thus transform disparate reference and communal norms—ruralized ones like hat waving across the mountains—into commensurate slots in Spanish speech giving, but they simultaneously sound cold (line 6), laughable (line 14), or confusing (line 14) to other Kichwa speakers. The example shows how greetings depict unusual ways of speaking as representative of Kichwa-speakers who are more peripheral to the state apparatus.

“Having a Language”

Anthropologists have shown how people adopt state discourses by repeating the words of state officials and documents, such as “terms of recognition” (Appadurai 2007), “lexicon” (Krupa and Nugent 2015, 7), “vernacular” (Scott 1998, 323), and a “common language or way of talking about social relationships” (Roseberry 1994, 361). They note that social movements may use such words to frame claims for legal advancement (Sieder and Witchell 2001; Johnston and Noakes 2005). Such efforts at self-presentation, however, also make language use contrast with its surround and, in reuse, enregister and reify invoked identities. As I show in this section, marginalized peoples may not only need to describe an emblematic form of an Indigenous language for recognition but also to demonstrate, and hence make, a modernist version of it (see also Urla 2012). In other words, speakers of Indigenous languages do not just adopt the words of the state—as anthropological theory foregrounds—but also use, bilingually, languages to demonstrate that frame.¹⁷

The First Meeting of the Andean Pueblos and Nationalities for Sumak Kawsay in 2011, a summit sponsored by various state agencies and situated within the president of Ecuador’s intercultural agenda, shows the importance of making Kichwa commensurate for recognition. Located in the cavernous auditorium of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito, representatives from Bolivia, Guatemala, and Ecuador gathered to discuss sumak kawsay (good living), a model of economic development under the Correa administration. Kichwa leaders routinely decried that a phrase that refers to an Andean philosophy for interspecies harmony and balance now describes a development project in Spanish (buen vivir).¹⁸ The audience from Ecuador included numerous Indigenous nationalities, Montubios (coastal farmers), and Afro-Ecuadorians. State agents were speaking to, for, and about cultural difference.

A theme that emerged at the event was that the predominantly Spanish-speaking, marginalized groups lacked moment-to-moment acknowledgment in the speeches of state agents. For example, a mestiza-identifying, Spanish-speaking official had begun by thanking groups from Ecuador and other nation-states who made the journey when she was suddenly interrupted by yells from the audience about an omission. She corrected herself by adding, “And, of course, the pueblo Montubio is present,” acknowledging those who demanded not to be forgotten. As the event continued, audience members were invited to take the microphone to comment. A Montubia woman criticized the individuals running the event, highlighting the difficulty of gaining here-and-now nation-state support:

Nosotros creemos en la necesidad de visibilizar los íconos de la historia de los pueblos montubios. … También nosotros, compañeros, somos excluidos y también hemos sido invisibilizados, nosotros estamos en la constitución. Tenemos derechos y creemos que se deben respetar esos derechos o si no nosotros mismos los vamos a hacer respetar, porque en este mismo evento, compañeros, ha venido la ministra de cultura y sin embargo nunca nombró a los montubios en su exposición.

[We believe in the necessity of making visible the icons of the history of the Montubio pueblos. … We also, comrades, are excluded, and we have also been made invisible. [But] we are in the constitution. We have rights, and we think that those rights should be respected, or if not, we are going to make them be respected. Because in this very event, colleagues, the minister of culture has come. However, she never named the Montubios in her exposition.¹⁹]

I spent the event sitting in the audience next to Gloria Yungaicela, a Kichwa woman and one of the highest-ranking officials of EIB. At that moment, Gloria looked at me and shook her head, saying quietly in Spanish, “It’s hard for them. It’s that they don’t have a language” (Es difícil para ellos, es que no tienen una lengua).

Gloria and other Indigenous state agents have come to understand that languages are prime emblems for invoking and enacting recognition. Others don’t “have an [Indigenous] language,” she noted, in a description similar to the bilingual requirement inscribed in the founding of DINEIB and to notions of universal ownership in modernist ideals.²⁰ Successful state recognition in Ecuador is not cast from constitutional citation alone, as the Montubia woman mentioned in her rebuke. Though the woman noted that her community had visible “icons” for recognition, Gloria acknowledged a distinct language as the one that the Montubios lacked if they are to count for the state. Hearing the frustration of other marginalized groups for being ignored at the event, Gloria’s answer, as one of the most senior Indigenous state agents, was that they lacked a comparable, showcase-able version of Kichwa.

Gloria and others have seen the benefits of “having a language” for bilingual education in promoting and entextualizing the modernist (and nationalist) view of Kichwa. Away from the noise of the auditorium the following week, I asked Gloria about her comment. “We’ve done a little bit of analysis,” she responded. “In intercultural bilingual education, the National Directorate is for pueblos and nationalities because it is characterized by language and culture. So they have to have a culture, they have to have a language, in order to be attended to. In that case, [I meant] so that they also have access to everything.”²¹

Gloria delineated groups as “we,” Indigenous individuals who gain cultural and linguistic recognition, and “they,” those who do not “have” “a language” and “a culture.” “They” will struggle, since they have no marked, recognizably distinct language. In other words, they are marginalized anew. By describing Kichwa this way, Gloria also muted widespread ideologies about linguistic difference within the language family. In the early days of research for this project when I told people in the office that I was interested in how they spoke Kichwa, they would frequently laugh, “Which Kichwa?” I soon gathered that for people from various parts of Ecuador, finding a common way of speaking and understanding depended upon years of practice speaking across varieties and sometimes necessitated use of Spanish. Kroskrity (2010, 197; 2018) notes that a key tenet of theorizing language ideologies is that they are multiple because of the “divergent perspectives of group membership” based on “the meaningful … sociocultural divisions within sociocultural groups.” “Having a language” indicates that such views are not only reflective of social difference, but a strategy in its management. Interculturality has involved offering and building on the recognition of Indigenous languages. Greetings remind of this recognition and make it hearable. As the next section shows, their use also preempts negative reactions of others who are non-Kichwa speakers, including bosses, which indicates another way in which they are comparatively state-authorized.

Maintaining Order

The use of greetings indicates and manifests the uncomfortable relationship between marginalized peoples, their emblems (like “a language”), and the state apparatus and its employees. Directors tend to use commensurate, and as this section shows, curtailed forms of speaking since extensive and incommensurate Kichwa speech can provoke the ire of non-Kichwa-speaking bosses and other audience members. In an era of increased acceptance and tolerance, how one speaks Indigenous languages can determine “safe,” instead of “dangerous,” forms of difference (Lomawaima and McCarty 2002). Speakers of marginalized languages in public spaces routinely risk that their language use will be seen as threatening (Hill 1998), and commensurate forms of Kichwa aid in managing the reactions of others. In this case, greetings also fit Kichwa use to public speaking conventions. Like conversation analysts have long argued, “openings” function to maintain orderliness in how they follow conventions and build rapport (Schegloff and Sacks 1973, 73). The recurrence of standardized greetings in openings functions to make Kichwa recognizable and, hence, non-threatening, in particular, for non-Kichwa-speaking bosses who make decisions about their employment. The abbreviated use of greetings that others interpret as an opening similar to a speech in Spanish, and not more, is one of their key functions.

Marlon Muenala, a senior director of the school system, recounted the limits of speaking Kichwa at events.²² In a public ceremony for DINEIB’s anniversary, his boss, the non-Kichwa-speaking mestizo vice-minister of education, was present. Marlon, Gloria, and the vice-minister each had speaking roles and were seated on stage. A newspaper article had recently criticized the Correa administration for the persecution of Indigenous organizations and, according to Marlon, the vice-minister had asked to personally review the content of his and Gloria’s speeches for any possible backlash. They both acquiesced and sent speeches with Kichwa listed solely as openings and closings. Gloria, however, went off-script, Marlon recounted, his voice rising: “In the event itself, she almost spoke more in Kichwa than in Spanish!” As the vice-minister became increasingly dismayed, he asked Marlon, “What is it that she’s saying?!” Bosses can reproach speakers and, with enough discontent, remove them from leadership roles. If they do not have tenure in the office, they risk being ousted from national employment.

Marlon’s speech responded to the vice-minister’s admonishment. His address began with alli puncha tukuylla (good morning, all), in Kichwa. He addressed “children” (wawakuna), “teachers” (yachachikkuna), and “leaders” (apukkuna) and then suddenly switched to Spanish.

All Ecuadorian citizens, Marlon suggested, including Spanish speakers and the vice-minister, needed to understand the message. This model of interculturality involves not making the majority feel excluded or uneasy through extensive talk in Indigenous languages, though Marlon would “love to keep speaking in the mother tongue” (lines 3–4). His speech, by giving the message in Spanish and curtailing Kichwa use, was tailored to non-Kichwa speakers—in this case, mainly self-identifying mestizos—and hailed them as addressees. An especially important member of “everyone” (line 7) was the vice-minister, who five minutes earlier had become upset over Gloria’s unsanctioned Kichwa use. Hence, Marlon spoke Kichwa briefly, switched to Spanish with a phrase that signals he finished something (line 1 “well okay”), and named the vice-minister as he began to speak Spanish.

As research on codeswitching has shown, people can speak in marginalized languages to increase feelings of solidarity for listeners who know those languages while making those who do not understand feel more distant (Woolard 2005). Such speech can be strategic, such as how Rapa Nui–speaking political leaders, who more routinely spoke Spanish, used only Rapa Nui in a visit with Chilean senators to bolster their difference from their Spanish-speaking audiences (Makihara 2008), though they did not seem to be worried about being interpreted as threatening. In this case, directors of intercultural bilingual education speak on behalf of the national state. They risk upsetting bosses and other Ecuadorian citizens through extensive Kichwa speech. In response to the minister, Marlon limited Kichwa use to a standardized variety that fit within the genre of an “opening”—similar to most speech-giving in EIB—and showed that difference was present, yet curtailed, compartmentalized, and therefore, in his view, “respect[ful]” (line 7).

Compartmentalization or purism does not necessarily constitute modernist or state ideologies that play out in discourse. In other Indigenous languages, for example, speakers routinely carry out ceremonial and even everyday speech by compartmentalizing or wholly separating each language as a means to demonstrate and draw from comparatively local ideologies about a lexically pure form of their language as linked to a purer Indigenous identity (Kroskrity 2000a, 2009, 2018). However, compartmentalizing Kichwa and switching to Spanish is a drastic change for most Kichwa speakers today since they would more routinely blend Spanish words into everyday Kichwa speech. Their use of purist and compartmentalized Kichwa, as scholars have shown has occurred elsewhere (Irvine and Gal 2000; Das 2016; Tomlinson 2017), erases or minimizes remarkably different ways of communicating in Kichwa, as the teachers lamented. In the aftermath of the vice-minister’s concern, Marlon’s “respect” for all audience members in his use of Spanish returns the speech to nonthreatening.

Kichwa, Audiences, and Images of Citizenship

Anthropologists have shown how speakers of Indigenous languages use genres to reproduce or transform cultural traditions. For example, speakers use storytelling to carry out a number of actions relevant for public speaking, such as establishing a speaker’s ceremonial authority (Bauman 2004). Indigenous state agents as public speakers tend to utililize a genre, openings with Kichwa greetings, to depict interculturalidad. Greetings model pure, discrete, and commensurate languages, help enregister them as such, and carry out intercultural talk. That they occur in combination with self-descriptions in Spanish, such as “Indigenous pueblos” in harmonious coexistence in the nation-state, bolsters this point.

In 2011, the Ministry of Education and other government agencies sponsored an “intercultural exchange” with two Canadian First Nations teachers. Attendees filtered into the conference room of a Quito hotel dressed in their finest ponchos, hats, and embroidered shirts. Representatives from the Canadian Embassy and the two Canadian guests were seated prominently to the left of two DINEIB officials and one mestiza-identifying representative from the Ministry of Education. Other guests, mainly directors from Ecuador’s regional EIB planning offices, all of whom would be described as Indigenous, were seated at onlooking tables. A closer look at Esteban Chuqui’s speech (the highest-ranked director of EIB) shows how greetings demonstrate “the Kichwa language” with talk that does intercultural recognition. He spoke Kichwa for longer than other speakers at the event, yet still compartmentalized it to an opening.

After uttering those thirteen seconds of Kichwa, he paused. He then began to speak in Spanish, regreeting non-Kichwa-speaking guests in a three-minute speech:

With his speech forms, including his use of greetings, Esteban made Kichwa and Kichwa speakers commensurate with Spanish and mestizos in several ways. First, he produced a here-and-now image of state recognition that “We [Ecuadorians] are opening the doors … to do what our constitution of the republic manifests” (lines 16–17) and “to live at the peak” (line 26), “do[ing]” such constitutional “liv[ing]” through his presence and speech. He named different groups in Spanish—such as the previously neglected Montubios—doing further momentary “official” recognition as an example of “what the constitution has sent us” (line 26). He thus paid closer attention to the here-and-now acknowledgment of all marginalized groups than the state agent at the Sumak Kawsay event, even as these words use modernist characterizations to depict groups, such as with the bounded “goodness that each one of the cultures has” (line 29). He further mentioned interculturality and plurinationalism (lines 18–19), two designations listed together in the 2008 constitution that he in turn cited (line 26).²³

Second, beyond adopting the state’s terms for Indigenous emblems and peoples, Esteban’s speech in sequentially ordered co-occurring languages put intercultural recognition into practice. Since most of his talk about state recognition occurred in Spanish, he showed which language has more communicative import. Also, his bilingual speech forms demonstrated the modernist ideologies of interculturalidad that hold cultures as equivalent and clearly bounded in lexical bilingualism. For example, he maintained lexical purity between Kichwa and Spanish even as he used Kichwa calques, as in line 1, alli shamushka kapaychik ‘please be welcomed’, and line 6, napayta chaskipaychik ‘please receive a greeting’. “To send a greeting” is a common phrase in formal Spanish and even the word napay ‘greeting’ sounds strange to many Kichwa speakers. Kichwa was also confined to the genre of “opening,” ordering Kichwa around norms for speeches in Spanish. His orderly separation between languages entextualized Kichwa as a commensurate language to Spanish in use. His juxtaposition of Kichwa and Spanish illustrated the “plurilingual country” (line 32), one with the cooperation of Indigenous individuals, since it co-occurred with his descriptions of Ecuador as a nation-state. Yet, he spoke far less in Kichwa. While the languages reflected equivalency, they were not given equal time.

Third, Esteban invoked indigeneity not just in Kichwa use but also in differences in whom he greeted across languages, further showing how he spoke on behalf of the state in bilingual communication. In Kichwa, he moved from greeting Indigenous peoples in Ecuador to those from Canada, while in Spanish, he started with international outsiders (Canadian Embassy employees), then Ministry of Education employees more generally, and then others affiliated with EIB (lines 7–11). Thus, he named and prioritized listening audiences differently. These lists show for whom he was speaking in his use of “we”: in Kichwa (line 2, “we”), he addressed “friends” for “having come” (lines 3–4) to “our called meeting.” “Our” refers to Indigenous national state agents who organized the meeting, as he named and thanked attendees separately. He then welcomed the Canadian visitors in Kichwa, shifting “we” to include all Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples at the event (lines 5–6). On the other hand, in Spanish, understood by all present, his use of “we” referred to all Ecuadorians, those who “continue to work in our pueblos … and our country,” (lines 13–14), including nonindigenous groups who “band together” to “arrive at what the constitution has sent us” (line 25). The “we” in Spanish was inclusive of everyone—mestizos, Montubios, all Indigenous peoples (line 24), while the Kichwa “we” includes solely Indigenous peoples. Esteban’s Spanish enumerated publics called into existence by their address (Gal and Woolard 2001; Warner 2005)—there were no Montubios present—and allowed him to describe the intercultural state. However, while his use of Kichwa greetings indexed Kichwa speakers as national state agents and others, the greetings also foregrounded mestizos in the room in curtailment and commensuration. Those differences were duly noted and contested by some Kichwa-speaking audience members, as the following section shows. As the animator of the speech (the utterer of words), he and other Indigenous state agents who give speeches link such language use to state-centered forms of Indigenous persons, which Kichwa-speaking addresees may problematize.

Contesting Greetings

Predominant ways of presenting information are often challenged in interaction (Goffman 1974; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Carr 2009), such as the use of Kichwa as standardized greetings that depict the language family as equivalent with Spanish. Kichwa-speaking addressees can, in turn, become speakers (animators), such as in question and answer sessions. The following example shows a “disruption,” what Goffman (1974, 350) describes as one person’s breech of expectations for unfolding communication that is so great that other participants’ involvement is also interrupted. After Esteban spoke, participation was extended to the various representatives present. Esteban coached the Ecuadorian Indigenous audience members in Spanish to mention “de qué nacionalidad son y cuál idioma hablan” (which nationality you belong to and what language you speak). Another Kichwa-speaking national state agent clarified (again, in Spanish): “Give a greeting in your language.” Each participant began by speaking Kichwa or another Indigenous language, usually their name, where they were from, and greetings for those running the event. Speakers then switched to Spanish to ask a question. The carefully delineated openings with greetings were repeated by person after person, helping to enregister such speaking styles as representative of Kichwa and the importance of Indigenous languages to the intercultural state. The English-speaking Canadian guests watched attentively, even though there was no translation to English for the Kichwa segments but instead only for Spanish.

Then there was a rupture of convention by a regional director named David. As he was called on to speak, David began to talk in Kichwa using the convention of standardized greeting (“Thank you, colleagues, to everyone I send a greeting of ‘good morning’”), but he did not then switch to Spanish. As he passed 20 seconds of speaking Kichwa, other Kichwa speakers in the room began to look around at one another. David offered that he and his peers in Ecuador had gotten “further ahead” with state recognition than the Canadians. He wanted to know if the visitors had other examples that would help his Ecuadorian colleagues. In the meantime, other Kichwa speakers fidgeted. As David neared the two-minute mark of speaking in Kichwa, Esteban waved his hand at me. He whispered in Spanish, “Go over to the microphone and translate! The man is speaking for a long time.” The paid interpreters spoke only Spanish and English. Kichwa was no longer curtailed, nonthreatening, and commensurate but, rather, provocative in extended use.

In the end, David spoke for over three minutes lexically in Kichwa except for a few words, such as “Canada.” His extensive talk made other Kichwa-speaking officials uncomfortable as a clear violation of the norms of state speech. When I later spoke with David, he said that the school system was “weakening” Kichwa, in particular, with “greetings” (affirming Juan’s earlier point that greetings made it “impossible” to “strengthen” Kichwa). He wanted to “obligate” other directors to make Kichwa more important. His reference to the need for obligation conveys his frustration with the routines of how state agents like himself speak Kichwa. Paradoxically, extensive Kichwa speaking in a language reclamation movement becomes a subversive act. David’s reaction shows how Kichwa speakers question whether intercultural talk prioritizes them and their understandings of how Kichwa is used.

Conclusion

Silverstein and Urban (1996, 11) propose that institutional politics involves “a struggle to entextualize authoritatively,” that is, to offer and increase the adoption of some presupposable texts over others. State planners are especially consequential spokespeople for marking difference, promoting interculturality through select and commensurate Kichwa use, and getting others to adopt this format. For Kichwa-speaking state agents, others’ recognition and reuse of curtailed, commensurate, and modernist expressions depict state power as inclusive of Indigeneity, bringing the presence of Indigenous languages and their speakers to formerly restricted spaces. Recognition depends not just upon legal precedent as written into “official” documents but also on everyday metalinguistic work to gain awareness for Indigenous languages.

Yet, what does institutional success look like? Standardized Kichwa greetings have become pervasive forms of public speaking but when used by directors, such greetings also function to demonstrate an ideology that their language is unitary, pure, and commensurate with Spanish. This sort of language ideology marginalizes some people anew: oppressed peoples who do not “have a language,” state agents who speak in Kichwa more than is sanctioned, and Kichwa speakers who speak other varieties or blend their language with Spanish. The predicament of greetings sheds light on current recognition initiatives in Central and South America: interculturality is inclusive even as the onus continues to be on Kichwa speakers to change. Indigenous language use becomes as much about Kichwa speakers acknowledging non-Indigenous-identifying audiences as about the Ecuadorian state acknowledging Kichwa speakers, yielding a conundrum in how to be inclusive while demonstrating difference.

As in many parts of the world, recognition initiatives have opened spaces for the presence of traditionally marginalized peoples (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), and research has recently begun to consider how one represents Indigeneity for outsiders (Graham 2002; Peters 2016). While intercultural politics elevates some minoritized populations into positions of power (as the egregious Montubio counterexample showed), ongoing work in such positions depends upon the nuances and repercussions of discursive struggle and comes with conundrums and double binds. Legislation does not necessarily mean displacement of a status quo, since inclusion of Indigenous language use parallels the forms and norms of modernist languages.

Furthermore, each time a director uses Kichwa to speak for the state, the pattern of solely greeting in Kichwa becomes more routine. For Kichwa speaking, this routinization has double-edged implications: Kichwa is heard and recognition is reinscribed, yet the context of acceptable use is further constrained and concretized, creating an emerging problem for those who run Indigenous movements. Ecuador’s Indigenous organizations are currently struggling and leading scholars to ask, “Is the cultural project of the Indigenous movement now in crisis?” (Martínez Novo 2014b). The politics of intercultural recognition reinforces constraints on when and how state representatives can expectably speak and whom their language use acknowledges.