Meet the Narrators

Keep scrolling to learn more about the narrators featured.

Rosa and Lucio

Rosa and Lucio are married, and have lived in the region of Guaranda, Bolivar, Ecuador for all of their lives. Rosa was born in 1944 and grew up in San Simon, next to Santa Fe. Although she attended school in her early years, she was unable to continue and began dedicating herself to household tasks and agriculture in her family’s 15-block farm in San Simon. Lucio was born in 1933 in Santa Fe,and grew up studying and helping his father in the family farm in Santa Fe. Rosa and Lucio married, and Rosa had their first child, Doris, at 18. To earn more income, Lucio became a bus driver and purchased plots of near the Ecuadorian coast in Babahoyo and lived going back in forth between there and Santa Fe as Rosa took care of the farm in Santa Fe. Lucio received the family home where they farm today as an inheritance. The growing family lived there until Doris began high school in Guaranda. With the growing needs of the family to be in a more populated area for the education of their children and as the fields became more isolated and subject to robberies, the family moved to Guaranda.

Today, they have 3 children, 6 grandchildren (including me), and a great-grandaughter. They live in Guaranda, and although they now rent out the fields in Babahoyo due to their age, they continue farming in Santa Fe to this day.

Doris

Doris is Rosa and Lucio’s eldest daughter, and she is my mother. Doris was born in Santa Fe in 1964, and grew up going to school and helping her family with tasks in the home and farm. Her parents valued education greatly, and since Santa Fe did not offer high school education, Doris would spend weekdays with relatives in Guaranda to attend school there. Noting the stress of a long commute for their children, the family decided to move to Guaranda. Doris left the farm to attend university in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, where she studied education. She was able to get a job there as a teacher, and stayed beyond her graduation. She married in 1993, and raised her two children there (including me). She would visit Guaranda with her family on most weekends. As her husband gained a job opportunity in the United States, they decided to move the family to New York City in 2002 with their children. Although Doris misses Santa Fe and her family in Ecuador, she was excited to move to New York. Today, she is a head start teacher, and visits Ecuador as often as she can every 2-3 years. She continues to connect to her agrarian roots through her small garden in her Queens, New York home.

Johnny

Johnny is Rosa and Lucio’s youngest child. Because of their parents’ value in education, Johnny completed his education through high school, but dropped out of college to his parents’ dismay. He pursued a life in agriculture and purchased lands with his wife in El Chimbo, a region close to Guaranda, where he grew mostly maize. However, with a few years of crop failures in early years, he did not see agriculture as a financially viable option to support his family and his daughters’ education. He pursued a taxi business which ultimately failed. He returned to agriculture but increased inputs by getting expert advice from professionals on plagues, fertilizers, and other methods to keep his crops as resilient as possible.

Today, he runs a small fast food restaurant he created out of the family house’s garage, and continues a life in agriculture that he sees as very uncertain.

Holger

Holger is a farmer from the Tambillo region of the Bolivar province, an isolated agrarian region far from main roads. Holger is the furthest narrator out of the Guaranda region for this project. He lives deep in the mountains with his family, mostly planting different varieties of potatoes along the slopes and selling milk from his cows. Because of his distance from major trading towns, Holger’s investment in a truck to transport his goods was a game changer to his profits. To pay off the loans he had accumulated as a result of bad harvests in previous years, he began to participate in a program from a local non-profit in San Simon called Fundacion Su Cambio Por El Cambio ,where they purchase the milk directly from him and other local farmers to make cheeses that they sell.

Miriam

Miriam is a farmer in Atandahua, Bolivar, a region close to Guaranda but who belongs to the parish of Guanujo, right outside of Guaranda. Miriam has been dedicated to agriculture her whole life through her parents and continues to this day. She is a catechist at the Parish of Guanujo, and works as a land caretaker in a local church further out of Guanujo, where she maintains the lands for agriculture and plants and harvests the block of land the church owns. Miriam has noticed patterns of health issues with friends of hers who are in agriculture and heavily use pesticides. As a result, Miriam tries to care for the land as much as she can through organic fertilizers and crop rotation so that the soil never reaches the point of needing chemical fertilizers, to protect her health and the health of the soil she works with.