Tourism has changed a great deal here — and largely for the better economically. Through the sale of handicrafts and performing music, her community has been among the few Indigenous groups in the region to genuinely benefit and grow because of it. What worries her is what that growth might be quietly costing.
Contact with tourists has nudged local values and standards toward something more individualistic, a little more Americanised, in her words. Women have become more emancipated — a change she welcomes in principle — though she's uneasy about where it might lead, including a rising divorce rate she's watched creep upward.
It isn't only foreign visitors shaping this. More Otavaleño Indigenous people now travel abroad themselves to sell their goods, often leaving children behind with relatives. In doing so, she says, they end up selling something else too — bringing foreign customs and habits back home almost like merchandise, absorbed most easily by the young.
It's about time we re-evaluate our own culture. We need to be better organised, and pay more attention to our own language, Quichua — starting at school.
The popular image of Otavalo isn't entirely accurate, she points out. Indigenous residents do hold real economic power, especially through textile exports, but that only concerns around 30 percent of the community. Culturally, the damage runs deeper than a walk across the Plaza de los Ponchos would suggest — where most vendors are traders rather than producers, and some aren't even from Otavalo or Ecuador at all, but from Colombia or Peru.
The deeper problem, as she sees it, isn't tourism itself but how the community has chosen to meet it: nearly everyone rushing toward textile and souvenir sales while overlooking things tourists genuinely find compelling — the Peguche waterfall, the Inti Raymi festival — attractions that, properly supported, would also encourage better upkeep of local culture and environment.
“Come to Otavalo,” she says, “but show a wider interest — there is more than the market alone.”