The Valley - Awake! In 1946, John Collier, Jr. and Aníbal Buitrón wrote The Valley of Awakening, telling the story of a social miracle that occurred in Ecuador, in the valley at the foot of the Tiata Imbabura. (1, cover) In 1993, forty-three years later, I set foot in that same area and discovered a valley, not awakened, but awake! My son Matt and I were traveling by bus, north of Quito, headed to Colombia. (4) We had been recommended to be in Otavalo on a weekend to experience the famous market. Little did we know that this trip would evolve into many other trips and special relationships with the people who live in this valley, high in the Andes. Ecuador, among the smallest and most pristine nations in South America, owes its name to its geographical position. - straddling the equator. (6, p. 59) The Andes are divided in Ecuador into two parallel chains: the western and the eastern, which run like twin vertebral columns from north to south. The valley in which most Ecuadorians live and where most mountain agricultural products are grown extends about four hundred kilometers in between. About thirty volcanoes surround the valley on both sides. The deep river valleys (hoyas) are home to agricultural communities whose lifestyle appears to have remained unchanged for centuries. (6, p. 64) A book written by Linda A. Newsom, Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, and reviewed by Mary AY Gallagher, (2) begins with a study that occurred at the time the Ecuadorian sierra began to collapse or just before. be incorporated into the Inca Empire (ca. 1460). It describes in great detail what can be deduced about the pre-conquest population of the regions of Ecuador: Sierra, Coast, and Oriente. He then describes the disastrous impact of the Inca penetration and partial conquest of Ecuador, and of the prolonged wars still fought there when the Spanish abruptly ended Ecuador's early colonial period and began a new series of invasions that subdued and "reduced" the indigenous people. population for several years. This history, intertwined with the invasion of the Incas and the Spanish, had a great impact on this small country.