Cimarrona: Free Women, Free Peoples

History says that a group of enslaved people were brought to Ecuador to do forced labor on the Jesuit plantations. It was the 16th century and a wave of yellow fever had killed a large part of the conquered indigenous population that worked in them. Colonizers wanted...

Polvo de estrellas

In the Ecuadorian region of Valle del Chota there is a town where boys and girls become stars. It remains in a place that was once known as the “Valley of Blood and Death” because the indigenous people, forced to work in the sun on sugar and cane farms,...

My great-grandmother’s dangerous journey

 Karina Aguilera Skvirsky was born in the United States but is also Ecuadorian. All her life she lived in that ambiguous space: neither totally black nor totally white. Latina in her native country, gringa in the country of her great-grandparents, thousands of...