Girl from Otavalo
The Otavalos are an indigenous people native to the Andean mountains of Imbabura Province in northern Ecuador. The Otavalos also inhabit the city of Otavalo in that province. Commerce and handcrafts are among the principal economic activities of the Otavalos, who enjoy a higher standard of living than most indigenous groups in Ecuador and many mestizos of their area.
Prior to the incorporation by force of the Otavalo people into the Inca Empire in the late 15th or early 16th century, the region north of Quito to near the border of present-day Colombia, an area 150 kilometres (93 mi) long by the same width, consisted of several small-scale chiefdoms including the Otavalo, Caranqui, Cayambe, and Cochasquí. These chiefdoms appear to have been similar in artistic techniques, subsistence, settlement patterns, and language, probably all speaking Barbacoan languages.
The Spanish conquered the Inca Empire in the 1530s and Spanish settlement began. The Inca and Spanish conquests and the Spanish rule of the Otavalo and other nearby chiefdoms, plus recurrent epidemics of European diseases, had a profound impact on the population. By 1582, the population of the northern Ecuador Andean region was estimated to have declined by 80 percent to an estimated 30,000. The Spanish put heavy demands on the Otavalo people for labor. One-fifth of the Otavalo were required to work, essentially as slave labor, for the Spanish, often in hot tropical climates to which they were not accustomed. Vineyards owned by the Dominican Order of the Catholic church were characterized as “fields of blood” because of the Otavalo laborers who died working there.
Location: Otavalo, Ecuador
Photographer: Michaela Noroc
