Amazonian Kichwa Geospatiality and Decolonial Spatial Justice: Theorizing Runaguna Jatun Llakta

Latin America is one of the world’s most urbanized regions, with over 80% of its total population projected to be living in urban areas by 2050. Amazonia, often associated with images of remote, mostly rural spaces, has not escaped this trend. In recent decades, Amazonian cities have grown, prompting Indigenous people to assert that urban centers are an integral part of how they historically imagined Amazonia from within. Amazonian Indigenous people are typically assumed to make their home in rural frontiers and remote hinterlands, far from the dense urban conurbations that characterize Latin America. In emerging cities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Kichwa Indigenous people are actively shaping urban spaces and planning processes while confronting exclusions and violence from the neoliberal government, settler society, and extractivist companies.

My research explores the Kichwa epistemic and material practices that contribute to producing a new urbanity in Ecuadorian Amazonia. I draw on the Kichwa concept of Runaguna Jatun Llakta (people-urban space relations) to show how the Kichwa people produce the city through the confluence of Rina Shukllaktama (mobility and migration), Jatun Yuyayta Shayachina (place-making), and Runa Yachay (epistemologies and ontologies). Reflecting the embodied, gender-based relationships between people and space that characterize Amazonian Kichwa geography, I argue that the concept of Runaguna Jatun Llakta illuminates an emerging Amazonian urbanity by re-centering Indigenous geographies, Indigenous planning, and Indigenous technologies (systems to create cultural and environmental changes).

In my research, I work with 5 Kichwa women-run organizations, all of which are responding to settler-colonial urban power using their institutions, resistance actions, and Indigenous planning praxis in strategic ways. I integrate archival, geospatial, ethnographic, and participatory mapping methods informed by Indigenous and feminist geographic theory from the Global South. The goal of my feminist-Indigenous geo-ethnography is to center South-North scholarly dialogue in support of underrepresented peoples’ struggles while furthering a relational and ethical approach to Indigenous knowledge co-production in mobility and gender studies in Indigenous Amazonia. My community- based research has also included training and knowledge co-production with Kichwa women in geospatial research to bring diverse epistemologies to bear on urban development in Amazonia.

Based on my lived experience as a Kitu-Kara woman and my longstanding partnership with the Amazonian Kichwa in Ecuador, as well as my rigorous academic training and international planning practice in Latin America, I am committed to advancing research and teaching rooted in Kitu-Kara and Kichwa standpoints. By bringing together theories and methodologies from gendered ethnic communities in the Global North and South, I seek to contribute to healing a historically exploited, wounded, and divided region and contesting socio-spatial injustices in urban development.

The long-term goal of my research is to develop the Kichwa Life Course Geography (KLCG), a geospatial platform designed to visualize Indigenous urban geographies and mobilities in cities of the Amazonian tri-border region of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. Based on documentation collected through the mixed methods approaches of feminist-Indigenous geo-ethnography, the KLCG will facilitate geovisualizations and place-based, participatory policy and planning work, grassroots research, and academic research. The KLCG will also advance collective self-determination by reducing digital and geospatial barriers to participation in city and regional planning and foster training and knowledge co-production with Kichwa women in transnational geospatial research.