NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS ...

woman after first noting that the huili fish had been scared off by some frightening presence. She
found the woman emaciated and pale and groaning and shaking as if she were about to die. Her
scalp, back, and feet were infested with worms and one toe had completely rotted away, possibly
from snakebite. After recuperating some, she recounted how a boy that resembled one of her
teenage grandsons led her “half-way” (“chaupicamalla”) to the underground city that she called
“Quito.” She later commented to her relatives that this city was beautiful and opulent like “the
real Quito” (“Quitu causana llacta”).
Like the vision of “El Dorado” that took Spaniards to the Amazon in search of a city of
gold, the waterfalls that the Runa encounter in the forest are portals that lead to the game master
metropolis –an opulent city that the Runa refer to as “Quito.” Indeed, the Ecuadorian capital has
become the Runa’s own “El Dorado.” In Ávila, Quito has become a potent image for the utopi-
an spaces of the game masters. How did this come about?
In the early colonial period there was a concerted effort on the part of residents of the
Quijos region, including the ancestors of the Ávila Runa, to convince Spaniards to build a “Quito”
in the Amazon. In 1559, as part of peace negotiations with Spaniards, leaders from this region
met in Atunquyxo with the governor of Quito Gil Ramírez Dávalos. They supplicated him to,
“make another city like Quito” (Ramírez Dávalos 1989 [1559]: 50, see also 39). Their reasoning,
it seems, was economic. They were, “so impressed by the gifts that the Governor gave them that
they asked him to found in their territory a Christian settlement like Quito, where they would
gladly serve, given that through it, commerce would improve tremendously” (Oberem 1980: 74-
74).
Of course, this “other” Quito was never founded in the lowlands and, to the continuing
chagrin of local inhabitants, the region remained an economic backwater –isolated, for the most
part, from broader networks of trade. To this day, the descendents of the Quijos lords that met
with Ramírez Dávalos lament about this “failed Quito” in the Amazon. In Oyacachi, for exam-
ple, a cloud forest village, that once formed part of one of the Quijos chiefdoms (Oberem 1980:
248