Abstract

Indigenous Kichwa communities in Ecuador’s Otavalo region have long participated in local and transnational markets, historically as mindalaes, specialized traders of the northern Andes. Yet in recent years, international development-oriented NGOs have framed entrepreneurship education as newly necessary for economic development. These approaches emphasize individualized narratives of vision, self-reliance, and growth, often characterizing Indigenous peoples as lacking entrepreneurial skills or the appropriate mindset. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth, mothers, and teachers at Saminay–El Legado, an agro- technical, intercultural bilingual secondary school (UECIB) in the parish of San José de Quichinche, this article examines how entrepreneurship education intersects with grounded understandings of sumak kawsay, or “living well.” Whereas sumak kawsay has been institutionalized nationally as an Indigenous alternative to development, I analyze how it is articulated and negotiated in everyday life as a relational, materially situated moral framework. I argue that development-oriented entrepreneurship education becomes misaligned when it privileges upward mobility over collective obligation and overlooks the structural constraints shaping Indigenous futures. What educators describe as mentalidad anclada—an “anchored mentality”—misrecognizes culturally mediated relational pragmatism, shaped by historical conditions of inadequate infrastructure, unstable markets, and migration, as a psychological limitation. By grounding sumak kawsay in ethnographic practice rather than political abstraction, this article reframes entrepreneurship not as individual escape or accumulation, but as economic action embedded within relational responsibility. In doing so, it offers a rethinking of entrepreneurship education that expands agency without obscuring the material and relational realities that define a good life.

Degree

College and Department

Family, Home, and Social Sciences; Anthropology

Rights

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