Diego Carrasco Espinosa

Diego Carrasco is empowering indigenous and rural groups to confront poverty and political disenfranchisement by creating a traveling school of traditional native and rural arts to recuperate cultural heritage, build self-esteem, and create economic opportunities.

Diego Carrasco believes that using and appreciating traditional art forms can create a cohesive sense of identity and increase self-esteem among indigenous and rural groups, enabling them to participate more actively in the political and social decision-making processes that shape the development of their communities. The recuperation of traditional art also provides an economic opportunity for communities to market their creative products. Therefore, Diego has designed a traditional native art school that promotes civic participation, cultural identity, and economic opportunities for indigenous and rural communities in Ecuador. The school is staffed by a multi-disciplinary group of academics, both mestizo (mixed-race) and indigenous community leaders, and respected artisans. The staff conducts research on traditional artistic forms and indigenous cultural practices and travels to various rural communities to teach traditional methods of pottery, socio-cultural performance, painting, and other arts. They advocate innovations like mixing traditional art forms with new methods to create new and marketable products. With Diego's supervision, the academics and indigenous community members work together to create the curriculum, teach classes, and develop channels for distributing the products participants make. The educational model will become part of the curriculum at Ashoka Fellow Máximo Cuji's University of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazons.
Diego's school also represents an alternative educational model in which the quality of the end products and creative expression is given more importance than the quantity of hours spent in the classroom. Students's individual paths of instruction, therefore, will be determined by their personal capabilities in each field. Still, the school strengthens the community because students of all levels work together and learn from each other. The training focuses on indigenous cultural identity as a source of pride. Diego will use this strengthened identity to promote participation in electoral, social, and economic processes, and ensure a significant role for indigenous and rural communities in Ecuador in the new millenium.

According to Diego, a society's culture, technology, art – as well as its forms of production, organization, and distribution – are a direct response and adaptation to its environment. The indigenous inhabitants of Latin America possess a deep understanding of their environment that has allowed them to create effective responses to their needs. However, 500 years of colonization in Latin America and the imposition of European values and organization have paralyzed indigenous social organization and sustainable production, and the majority of rural and indigenous populations live in conditions of economic and cultural depression and despair. In Ecuador, for example, indigenous people represent 40 percent of the population and overwhelmingly reside in rural areas, but the rural population continues to live at the same standards they did in the 1970s. Forty percent of all of Ecuador's income is in the hands of the wealthiest five percent of the population, and the gap between the distribution of wealth between the Ecuadorians of European descent and the indigenous population continues to grow. Austerity measures implemented by the government have caused inflation on many products, while open markets and greater foreign competition have reduced prices for agricultural products, the main source of income for many of Ecuador's indigenous groups. Furthermore, economic adjustment and currency depreciation in the 1980s and 90s have led to major decreases in the real value of social spending, causing further development problems for the poorest sectors in Ecuador.
Young people in particular suffer from a lack of cultural identity. They often abandon their rural homes for urban areas where they believe they will find more opportunities. As a result, urban migration has steadily been rising. Rural populations feel despair and powerlessness when dealing with the political, social, and economic issues that affect their communities. Their feelings of hopelessness inhibit their participation in these important processes.
Though many experts acknowledge high levels of education and culture to be important indicators of social development, these areas have typically been underestimated for their importance in solving social problems. Ecuadorian authorities have invested relatively little in education and culture, especially in indigenous regions. The same may be said of Peru and Bolivia, neighboring countries with large indigenous populations. Indigenous groups and people living in the countryside have no access to training in the arts. What creative work they do is not valued as art by the dominant society.

At the center of Diego's model is the idea that promoting cultural activities in a community helps solidify the identity and raise the self-esteem of community members. Increased confidence empowers people to take part in critical decision-making processes that can contribute to positive social changes. This renewed identity increases self-reliance and helps people re-establish consumption, organization, production, and distribution habits appropriate to their environment and culture.
Diego's idea begins with the creation of a multidisciplinary team of researchers and artists who represent both indigenous and mestizo communities. Together they investigate indigenous and rural art techniques and receive training in teaching methods so that they can share their skills. These educators will travel to communities throughout Ecuador to teach the history of indigenous art as well as specific techniques. The school will employ community members and coordinate with local leaders to determine the scope, schedule, and location of the classes. These same leaders promote the classes to their communities, particularly to young people, and secure room and board for the traveling faculty. Within the classrooms, learning is based on sharing and active participation instead of lectures. More advanced students work with beginners. After learning about the history and traditional meaning of the artwork, the class participants create their own artwork, based on traditional methods but incorporating new ideas.
Staff will teach the importance of the cultural heritage and the need for active indigenous participation in social, political and economic decision-making processes. They will work with the class participants and indigenous leaders to promote problem-solving and analytical skills and to encourage civic participation. For example, the school worked in two communities with an annual tradition of coming together in a ritual battle. For the victorious town, winning the battle forecasted prosperity in the upcoming harvest. Due to the battle's violence, the local government had banned the event and confiscated valuable ancient weapons. People from the two towns felt that their cultural identity was being treated with disrespect and that their crops suffered as a result. Diego and his colleagues worked with townspeople to come up with a creative solution to the problem. They decided to create a dramatic re-enactment of the battle without the violence. This enabled participants to regain control of their own valued traditions, gain the municipal government's support for the performance, and recuperate important cultural artifacts.
Diego plans to use one educational center as the administrative nucleus of the program. A network of centers in each community will serve as hubs for native and rural art. They will host classes, video screenings, art exhibitions, and performances for a broad audience. The center will also hold symposiums and art conferences to solidify the links between the national network of centers. While they will communicate important cultural knowledge to the outside world, these centers will also ensure that the indigenous communities themselves know about their own cultural inheritance and its importance for the development of their society.
The final purpose for the centers will be to house art-based micro-enterprises. The center itself will be a place to display, market, and distribute the community's art products, not only to the community and those who visit, but also as part of the broader national and eventual international network of cultural and artistic centers. Diego will work with community members to identify and develop distribution channels for their products. They will use the network of centers to sell their products, and use videos, photographs, and the Internet to advertise their art work. Community members will be responsible for managing these centers, thus ensuring that they have control of their own economic destinies and can rely on their own traditional way of managing production and distribution.
Diego is establishing a "mixed fund" of public, private, and community contributions to finance the school's initial operations. He works in conjunction with the municipal governments of Azuay, Cuenca, and Loja, and the Central Bank of Ecuador to provide seed funding for the project. Several private companies have demonstrated their interest as well. The communities themselves will contribute to the project by providing housing, meals, transportation, and venues for the schools. When community members begin to sell their own products and generate incomes for themselves, they will add to the mixed fund to keep the program self-sustaining. The cultural centers will generate further revenue by selling their educational and informational materials, in the form of reports and videos, to academic institutions and other interested organizations.
Diego works with the University of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazons, under the direction of Ashoka Fellow Máximo Cuji. He will create an autonomous Arts and Culture department within the school's existing structure. Until now, the university has focused only on science and agricultural technology. Through his contacts with the International Painting Conference, Diego has secured the support of two art specialists from Cuba and Argentina who help him develop program content and spread the model in their countries. Impressed with the need to address the issues of development and production, the most important indigenous organizations in Ecuador, the Confederation of Amazon Indigenous Ecuadorians, and the FOA, in the largely indigenous region of Azuay, have also expressed strong interest in promoting Diego's idea.

Though Diego was raised in a middle-class family, his father, a progressive intellectual who was very involved in social movements, encouraged Diego to consider the plight of his country's poor. Diego grew up in close proximity to indigenous communities in the countryside. Exposure to these communities and his father's work inspired him to work directly with rural groups when he was in high school. Through these experiences, Diego developed a deep appreciation of indigenous communities and an understanding of the cultural and economic problems they face. At the University of Cuenca, he studied education and culture and participated in various artistic activities both in the city and the countryside. Working together with mestizos and indigenous groups strengthened Diego's interest in utilizing cultural tools to resolve social and economic problems.
Diego later received a distinguished scholarship to study anthropology and theater in Cuba, where he learned about the role that culture can play in development and government policy. His interest in anthropological theater deepened as he met and worked with others from all over Latin America who shared this interest. When he returned to Ecuador, he began to work with researchers and artists who collaborated with indigenous and rural groups. For a brief period he managed the Cuenca Department of Culture, but frustrated with this organization's inefficiency in responding to the indigenous and rural communities's cultural and social needs, he left his position. Subsequently, Diego started fine-tuning his ideas about how to use the rich artistic and cultural traditions of Ecuador's indigenous and rural groups to recapture traditional art forms and simultaneously promote economic and social development among these groups. Though he has many opportunities to teach in various universities and has received lucrative offers to run municipal cultural departments, he is committed to working with indigenous groups and creating a dynamic network of cultural centers and enterprises to promote their well-being.