Indigenous beauty queen chosen in Ecuador

[Judi Lynn]

Indigenous beauty queen chosen in Ecuador
By DOLORES OCHOA, Associated Press | May 25, 2015



QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — There was no bathing suit or modern evening gown competition in this beauty contest.

Instead, the young Ecuadorean women competing in the event for indigenous beauties wore native costumes and headwear. Black high-heeled pumps were the only truly Western clothing on display.

Contestants for the Miss Indigenous Ecuador beauty contest on Friday had to belong to one of the country's many Indian groups and speak a native language. Eleven women from around the country participated.

~ snip ~

Amid cheers and tears, Guillin was crowned with a specially designed tiara that included a "chacana," or indigenous cross, and an aboriginal symbol for the sun.

http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/AP-PHOTOS-Indigenous-beauty-queen-chosen-in-6285830.php#photo-8045519

[Enthusiast]

1. With every passing year these indigenous people become

more precious to the world community. Preserving their traditions and language should become a top priority.

Their lives should never be compromised by outsiders, foreign religions, or, God forbid, globalization.

IMO.

[Enthusiast]

3. I don't care how it comes across to you.

[rjsquirrel]

6. That's very obvious

Also obvious that you don't care how it comes across to the native people you essentialize with your romantic racism.

[Peace Patriot]

4. I'm with you, Enthusiast!

But with qualifications:

1) The threat to Indigenous and their traditions--and to their sustainable farming practices and views of Nature--comes largely from big, bad, powerful, transglobal mining, chem/bio, oil and other corporations. These monsters--many U.S.-based--are decimating Indigenous areas with pollution and land-rape of various kinds, and one in particular, Monsanto, is actively seeking to destroy ancient farming practices such as seed-saving. As with all colonizations, the foreign religions are secondary re-inforcers of the land and resource grabs. The worst offenders, the instigators, are the vile moneyed elites committing the theft and degradation, often with violent enforcement.

2) I wonder if a "beauty contest" is compatible with Indigenous values, especially given that only 11 Indigenous women in the entire country participated. Granted it's a small country, but still. If it was truly an Indigenous event, wouldn't participation have been more widespread? Also, the very idea of a "beauty contest" seems to me something of an insult to Mother Nature--who creates all manner of faces and body shapes, in great variety, all of which are beautiful but most of which are not considered beautiful when they don't conform to our ugly, distorted, corporatized templates of female beauty--but then I'm only a very tiny percent Indigenous and don't claim any special knowledge of what most Indigenous may think of this contest.

I suspect that this was a hoked up P.R. thing, with money interests behind it, that not very many Indigenous people approved of. I don't know; I suspect. I have no objection to the Indigenous doing anything they want or need to do, including "going white" or holding hokey "white" events. I enthusiastically voted for the Native American casinos in California, for instance. God knows those of us in the "dominant" culture OWE them. If they want to become entrepreneurial, that is okay by me. But I wonder if this "beauty contest" was that kind of collective decision for the benefit of the tribe.

Maybe the tribe was just indulgent ('if the girls want to do it, okay') but not terribly approving. Or maybe they all jumped into it, and many participated, and these 11 were the winners. And could it have possibly been a feminist assertion? I happen to know that female beautification can be a very assertive activity. And I'm not the kind of feminist who frowns upon, or dislikes, female beauty and beautification. I'm just wondering whether this particular thing--a "beauty contest"--serves its stated purpose of furthering Indigenous culture. I'd rather see a Best Farmer Contest, or a Best Potato Grower Contest, or a Best Weaver Contest, or a Best Linguist Contest, or no contest at all. What is a contest anyway? Why choose one as more beautiful than another? What purpose does that serve, except a westernized, maniacal, egocentrism? "I'm better than you!"

Didn't mean to go on like this. But, as a woman, I've always been up against our cultural "beauty contest." And as a tiny partly Native American and great sympathizer with, and admirer of, Indigenous culture, something about this bothers me. Maybe it's the high heels.

[Enthusiast]

5. I'm with you on all that, Peace Patriot.

The high heels bothered me and I'm a man.

What these destructive multinational corporations are doing to Indigenous people they plan to do the same to us. We are at a crossroads of history.

[rjsquirrel]

8. God forbid

an indigenous woman should decide what shoes she wants to wear by herself without your manly condescension!

[rjsquirrel]

7. And by the way

"Foreign religions?"

A majority of the new world's indigenous people are now Christian. You're going to tell them they're doing indigeneity wrong by your white man standards?

They live in the modern world. They aren't museum specimens.

[Judi Lynn]

9. There's a possibility the only event a western AP journalist, given the broad array of events

he/she could share with the public, would be an exhibit of Native people going through the motions of an unfortunately traditional (meaning the culture hasn't outgrown them, yet), Western "beauty" contest.

I would imagine the Native people recognize this may be the only way they can invite the European-descended people to be aware of them, considering the fact that they are still shunned, mocked, hated, mistreated throughout the Americas.

Simply getting the European-descended idiots to realize they have human faces may be a real accomplishment, for people who have been subjugated to slavery, at the beginning, mass murder, torture, all of it continuing to the present, being forced to work for nearly nothing, treated like dirt, still, and openly abused, hated throughout the Americas by people of European ancestry.

[center][/center]

The AP stringer very easily could get off his/her ass and find such worthwhile material to start sharing with European-descended audiences, but he/she will happily carry the racist banner, and continue acting as if these Native people are almost like Martians to him/her, people with whom he/she feels NO NATURAL BOND.

Ah, the wonders of a right-wing world. <gag>

[Zorro]

10. You really have a cartoon view of South America

and the indigenous population.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Thanks, Zorro. n/t