Repertoires and resources of struggle of the Afro-Ecuadorian people for the construction of an Intercultural State in Ecuador: the frame of the Afro-Ecuadorian movement in the context of the New Constitution (2008).

Abstract

The present academic work has a qualitative methodology and proposes to see the Afro-Ecuadorian organizational process as a social movement capable of deploying frames, repertoires and resources with the aim of erecting a plural, diverse and intercultural State, which goes beyond the corporatist vision that sees organizational processes reduced to interest groups moved by the establishment or as simple groups in action (Laraña 1996, 27). On the contrary, as Lao (2007) argues, it is intended to understand the expression of subaltern groups that propose to take anti-hegemonic and decolonial turns, as is the case of the Afro-Ecuadorian Social Movement (MSAE) in search of building an intercultural State, a proposal that has great advances reflected in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008. This essay presents a potentiality and a clear missing element. The strength is based on pointing to the MSAE as a movement and a long-term process; However, this phenomenon is not linear, but rather irregular. With the methodology used, long-term analysis can allow a better understanding of the ways in which resources, frameworks of meaning and, especially, repertoires are constructed in Afro-descendant social movements. Consequently, the cycles of protest, with ruptures, permanence’s and continuities, with heterogeneous repertoires of collective action, that have been sown within the MSAE, allow us to conclude that its process is far-reaching, and that, diachronically, there are ruptures in its objectives and strategies. Its permanence in time and space allowed it, as a movement, to be relevant in the Theory of Political Opportunities (EOP) opened by the 2008 Constitution in Ecuador.