Mi Cuajara: Stories and Poems of a Girl Born in the Valley of the Rio Mira

By Lola M. Laben

The 1960s don’t seem that long ago to many of us. Given how crowded and closely connected the world of the present is, it’s hard to imagine there were places then that had been settled and cultivated for four hundred years but, as recently as the 1980’s, had no electricity, no plumbing, and very little traffic except for horses, donkeys, and (mostly bare) feet. The valley of the Rio Mira in Ecuador was such a place. Jesuit priests brought slaves - including Lola Laben’s ancestors - to farm sugarcane almost four hundred years ago. Slavery was abolished, but the work continued. Agrarian reform came, Lola’s parents became land owners, and the work continued. Lola was born in a mud house identical to the ones her slave ancestors had been born in for generations. She helped her parents farm a little farther downriver in the same manner that her ancestors had farmed. She explored her tropical paradise and wondered about faraway places and listened to the news of the outside world: the world beyond her valley and the city where the train came to and from three times a week.

Fate determined that the outside world would find her, and she now resides in the most thoroughly modern and up-to-date nation on the planet. Guess what? Her childhood was full of wonder, beauty, adventure, and freedom even though survival was less certain. This book recounts the world that Lola was born into and how her heritage prepared her to meet the challenges of her future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098072117

Book preview

Chapter 1

Where Do I Come From?

Some time ago a daughter was born to one of the many families of Chamanal, part of the former Jesuit hacienda of Cuajara. In this beautiful, colorful tropical paradise called Ecuador, she was growing up, a curious child, quick to investigate the world around her, funny. The fifth child of one of many racially mixed couples, this child wanted to take flight like the birds she used to chase in the jungle where she lived. The child used to walk to the highest hill in the village and wonder if there was more to the world other than what she could see. To her, that was her world; that was all she knew. But other people came from other places, and she heard talk of these other places on her dad’s transistor radio. So it was obvious that there was more to this world.

Many times, when she was sitting, chewing a piece of sugarcane, she heard her elders talk about other places, other peoples besides the ones she knew in the village; extranjeros they called them. When she would ask her mom what they were like, her mom would say that extranjeros would come if you were bad (which the child always was, not that she meant to be) and take you and make salchicha (sausage) out of you! She was very shy of people she did not know but could not help but go and stare and wonder at strangers (young foreign adventurers) who were stranded by the train, or autocarril, and did not look like the people she knew in her village. I was, and still am, that little Black girl full of curiosity.

As I write these words, I can’t help but feel humbly thankful and very proud of my heritage, proud to have been born in Cuajara—that dust spot in such a beautiful country; I’m proud to carry in me the blood of my ancestors. Because of what they went through, I have the opportunity to tell my story now. Our village was one of many of the Afro Ecuadorian villages that had been the big haciendas owned mostly by the Jesuit fathers. They planted sugarcane and other products, and to better their production, they used slaves. So I am a descendant of slaves. I hope that my children, who also carry in their veins the essence of Africa, have the same sense of pride and the love for the land of my ancestors, their ancestors, who lived their lives writing their stories with their sweat and blood, in the dust, sharing their hopes with the moon and the stars, because only the heavens were high enough to see the world they left behind and their reality of suffering. The moon would shine its light on their ancestral homes, the places they so unwillingly left, the people they loved and wanted to return to, the place where they belonged: Africa. I’m proud to be the daughter of Africa that happened to be born in Cuajara, Ecuador.

When we were young, we did not know we were poor. Our parents were content, resigned to life as it was, drawing their livelihood out of the earth. As far as we children were concerned, that life was all we knew; the village was our world. That was how big my world was. There were other villages; my aunts and uncles and other family lived in them, but at the time, for me, they were too far away to be part of my everyday world. There were hardly any roads, and people used horses and donkeys for transport. Three times a week, there was a train that went by, but it cost money to travel on the trains; so for some people, it may as well not have existed. Life was exciting; we were free to roam, ride horses, explore, and enjoy (after school and a few chores, of course). But life was not easy.

As children, we saw people die all around us: our grandparents, school friends, neighbors, and women in labor. It seems to me that the people that were alive at the time were in good health because the ones that had some health problem that could not be cured with traditional medicine and herbs, well, those people simply died. There were no doctors around or anything to resemble modern medicine; if you did not get better with a tea or a good rub of some sort, then there was good reason to be scared. We children were terrified of death; we wanted to live and make it at all costs. Too many of our friends died. Childhood diseases were fatal in the area. As for me, I just wanted to make it. Life and death were all around me. I was so aware of death; it felt like it was always close to me, trying to claw me. It followed me like scary shadows; all I had was hope. So I hoped, and I waited to grow up.

For my parents, especially my mom, we were all the wealth she and my dad had. My parents lost two of their children. They were irreplaceable. In the heart of my parents, there will always be empty spaces left by my brother and sister. Families were very large then. A woman I knew had twenty-two kids, and she was still young. We grew up free in the warmth and care of most of the people of the aldea. In those days; children were every grown person’s responsibility, so everybody took care of everybody’s children. With the freedom came also the responsibility to obey our elders.

We grew up running around free in the jungle, enjoying what nature had to offer, discovering, wondering about things. Life for us was so, so special; we were thankful for every day we woke up, we got out of bed, and we were breathing—unlike some of our friends and schoolmates that had died too young. We learned at an early age to be grateful for every minute of every day. The circumstances also taught us humility, compassion, and love. We were happy and thankful for what we had. People in the aldeas depended on each other for survival.

In Cuajara, as in the other villages in the valley, only some kids went to school; for others, it was just a dream. Most of the young people attended school up to the third grade. A few of the girls and most of the boys finished grade school. My dad attended school through third grade, but he wanted me to finish grade school. The story goes that my aunts, my dad’s sisters, went to school long enough to learn to write their names; more than that was a waste of time. Besides, if girls learned to read and write, they’d start writing letters to their boyfriends.

Like girls everywhere, we wanted to be stylish and elegant. But folks did not care much for a young lady that was self-centered or ostentatious. I loved dancing. My mother did not care for dancing; she did not have time for it, but she understood that I loved to dance and move to the rhythm of the music. She understood that dancing was part of me. She wanted us to be ourselves, enjoy life, and work hard. Her life now was filled with farm and family chores; life was hard enough without having to worry about things like those frivolities. But I liked to dance a lot, and I dreamed of the day when I would be a young lady. It was a joy to be and to feel alive and to feel the wind on our faces, the tropical sun on our skin. I remember going to my mother crying because a little friend called me names. She would kneel so she could speak to me looking directly into to my eyes, and she would tell me, Remember, Lola, in life not everybody will like you. Keep this in mind, for everyone that does not like you, there will be ten people that will like you. And she was right. There was another thing that Mom always asked me when I came crying to her. She would say, Are you dead? I would say no, and she would say, Well then, if you did not die from it, it will make you stronger. Then she would clean up my face with her hands, and off to play again I went.

The valley of the Rio Mira (also known as the Rio Chota farther upstream) is where some Black slaves ended up, brought by the Jesuit priests to work in their sugarcane fields. Cuajara was one of the many haciendas the Jesuits had, and long ago, my father’s ancestors were brought there and worked the fields as slaves until the midtwentieth century even if they were emancipated the century before. They continued to work under the same conditions as slaves for the rich families to whom the haciendas were passed on after the Jesuit fathers (who arrived in Quito in 1586, fifty-two years after its founding) were thrown out of the country in 1767. My father’s family is a direct descendant of those slaves. When my mom and my dad married, she was already a widow for nine years with two children: Gulnara and William. My parents eloped to Ibarra, got married, and returned to Cuajara. How dare my dad get married to a widow that was not Black instead of marrying the girl they (his family) had chosen for him, and worse yet, my mother had somebody else’s kids. They would talk about things later, poking fun at their decision. And it was not all that bad after people got to know my mother, because people were really sincerely friendly and my mother was a beautiful, experienced, and hardworking person. Her head was in the right place (except when marrying my dad as she used to laugh about it). After they got married, my dad’s family welcomed my mother and children into their family; they got to love my older sister and brother as their own. My mother and all her sisters married handsome Black guys from the valley; mixed-race marriages happened all the time.

I am the fifth child of the seven my mom had. The first three were born in Cuajaja, the next in Nacederas, and the last in Collapí. All of us were born in the beautiful valley of the Rio Mira. When I was a baby my sister Gulnarita would carry me on her back and do housework, fieldwork, herd and milk the goats and the cows. I guess I only went to my mom to be breastfed, as was the custom. Gulnarita and William went to school to the third grade; that was enough to read a little and write their names. Later William learned more reading and arithmetic from his younger brothers after they started school.

My sister Gulnarita was a beautiful girl. I was about five months old when she got asked for marriage. She hardly knew Daime, her husband, as his family lived in another village, but the families knew each other. The young man fell head over heels when he saw her. From what I’ve heard, he was on vacation visiting his grandfather who was a well-known personality of their village. Daime was his grandfather’s adoration. He lived in the capital city. He’d seen my sister by the railroad station with me on her back. When he first saw her, he asked a friend that knew both families about her as most everyone in the region either was related or knew of one another. He wondered if she was already married because she was carrying me. Later that night, he was very excited and talked to his grandpa about this beautiful young girl he had seen by the railroad station. He wanted to marry her. Grandpa asked who this girl was and what family she came from, and there was not much to say. His grandson wanted to marry her, and Grandpa knew her family. Immediately they communicated to my parents of the situation, and they set up a time to talk about it and ask for her hand in marriage. The marriage happened, and she started her life and family of her own.

As you will see, people left the Rio Mira Valley for various reasons. One way or another, some people perceived that situations were better elsewhere for either the individual or the family. Of course, there was no way of knowing what the future would bring.

I should point out that one reason for leaving the valley includes a dark side to the culture of the valley. Some girls from our villages, as soon as they were big enough, would be sent to the big cities to work as domestic workers—maids, nannies, cooks, or what have you. Some situations had horrendous consequences. For some parents, girls were like a commodity that could be traded for "easy