Kichwa Indigenous Youth from Ecuador

Resumen

Various aspects of the dynamics in the configuration of the youth agency are analyzed through the changes of the indigenous communal society in the context of capitalist modernization, with an emphasis on the role of school as an institution, and of significant milestones in the history of indigenous peoples and nationalities, such as the Agrarian Reform. Just as it has happened in Latin America and different regions of the world, indigenous peoples have undergone changes and transformations of different kinds in which young people are positioned as one of the main agents that drive community and generational ruptures and continuities. The data and information obtained through qualitative research processes show that the sociocultural practices of indigenous youth have become, as a generalized trend, individualistic and de-communalized, distancing themselves from some of the traditions of their territories. However, there is sufficient evidence that the lines of sociocultural continuity have not been extinguished and function as strategies of re-adaptation, and culturally differentiated integration, both in their territories of origin and in cities, where their capacity of agency is expressed in practices of economic subsistence, professional training, in their political participation and, in certain cases, of artistic production.