The Needle and the Map: (Re)thinking Quito through Embroidery with Indigenous Youth

Abstract

Our article explores how young Kichwa people who migrated from rural territories to Quito, and whose lives are structured by Ecuador’s racialized social hierarchies, imagine the city’s future. We developed a methodology grounded in critical, feminist, and decolonial geographies. Through embroidery, a culturally significant practice in Indigenous Andean communities, we created with students from the Intercultural Bilingual Educational Unit ‘Jatari Unancha’ a collective countermap to explore their current emotional relationships to the city and their visions for its future. The process revealed that participants’ aspirations for a greener, more playful, and inclusive Quito are shaped by actual experiences of insecurity and exclusion while drawing on memories of their territories of origin. We discuss the strengths and replicability of our methodology and further examine how the knowledge generated through such engaged participatory processes can be mobilized to influence policymaking and urban planning toward more just urban transformations.