The University of Arizona Press
April 15, 2019
At this year’s Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies, Rachel Corr was honored with the council’s prestigious Judy Ewell Award for Interwoven: Andean Lives in Colonial Ecuador’s Textile Economy.
The Judy Ewell Award honors the best publication, book or article, on women’s history or written by a woman, that began as a RMCLAS presentation.
Interwoven focuses on the lives of native Andean families in Pelileo, a town dominated by one of Quito’s largest and longest-lasting textile mills. Rachel Corr reveals the strategies used by indigenous people to maintain their families and reconstitute their communities in the face of colonial disruptions.
In the award ceremony, the committee said, “Interwoven is a tactile, resonant work that exposes the ties that bind the global to the local and reveals how the textile economy impacted indigenous families. Most crucially, Corr argues that despite the horrendous conditions that shaped their subjectivity, the “obraje Indians” of Pelileo found ways to forge connections with one another and create a semblance of community. This study will be required reading for all of those interested in indigenous labor, community, and ethnogenesis.”
Rachel Corr is an associate professor of anthropology at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador since 1990. She is the author of Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes.
