ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on language-in-education policies for Indigenous children in the primary school sector in Ecuador, and their relationship with the Indigenous political movement in that country. A chronological structure enables the author to trace this evolving relationship through a number of phases during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from a period when the Indigenous peoples were still living under a harsh feudal system, to the Agrarian Reform, to the introduction of Intercultural Bilingual Education with international aid, to the modernisation programme of the 2000s, and to the current regime. In each period, we see the tension between interest groups, at the levels of the state and the grassroots. As the decades progressed, paradoxically, more diversity-oriented legislation emerged even as language shift to Spanish gathered speed. The chapter provides a novel ethnographic study of Kichwa language-in-education provision among Andean migrant groups who have settled in the coastal city of Guayaquil, where their language was never previously spoken.
