- Angela Fitzgerald: In Madison,
a small but vibrant community has been quietly planting roots,
carrying with them the traditions, stories,
and resilience of the Kichwa people of Ecuador.
- Jay Lema: The Kichwa community in Madison
dates back to around the year 2000,
when families began to arrive from Ecuador.
This was, like, our parents' generation.
So as we were growing up in the diaspora community,
we as young people felt like we wanted to visiblize our history
a little bit more, so we came together,
and a group of us formed the Kichwa Collective.
[bright music]
- Angela: Grounded in Indigenous values
of collectivity and care,
the Kichwa Collective works to preserve their heritage,
share their customs, and create a home away from home.
- Michel Campos: [speaking Spanish]
- Fabian Lema: I think the kids just felt
that they were just floating.
They didn't have any roots or anything
to really anchor their feet.
When the kids grew up,
they had a need to learn about their own culture.
I'm very happy to see that, for example, in Jay,
in looking at Jay.
He's an excellent musician.
[gentle acoustic music]
And now, my older son, he's all about farming.
- Angela: Much of that farming takes place
in their communal garden, built on the tradition of minga,
collective work that binds the community together.
- Paul Lema: So the minga is something important to us
as Kichwas.
It's something that we can share food, we'll laugh,
we'll have stories, and, you know, kind of bully each other.
- Fabian: When we invite them to our minga, they love it.
They say, some of them say that this is for mental health.
"We need this.
We need to be together, farming, getting our hands dirty."
- Angela: This land has also connected the Kichwa community
to other Indigenous nations in Wisconsin
through a shared love and stewardship of corn.
- Paul: Corn is very special out here.
We're not able to grow our own corn
that's grown from Ecuador here.
It doesn't work; we've tried.
We're trying this year as well.
But in the meantime, we're growing Oneida white corn.
I told them what we're doing with my community,
and they gave us their corn to take care of.
- Angela: Each year, the community honors these efforts
through Inti Raymi, the traditional harvest celebration
and solstice ceremony.
[bright acoustic music] [woman singing in Kichwa]
- Michel: [speaking Spanish]
- It is very important for us, because when we harvest,
we need to give thanks to the Mother Earth.
- Angela: For the Kichwa,
these traditions are more than ceremony.
Through music, farming, art, and embroidery,
they're acts of survival and memory.
- Nazka Serrano: It's a beautiful thing
to see myself represented.
It changes something in, like, your psyche and your heart
to see yourself.
A lot of our parents, they were activists themselves.
They were cultural creators and artists back home.
So what is happening now,
through, hopefully, creating a space where that can happen,
is them being able to assert that in a whole different way.
- Aída Inuca: We are not just people that come and work
and something like that.
We have our history that we bring.
We need to recognize
and be aware about that history in the present.
- Angela: It's about more than preserving the past.
It's about creating a future
where their work carries the memory of their ancestors
while planting roots for those yet to come.
- Nazka: It's remembering who you are
and remembering that there's already knowledge that you have,
that you have within, that you have in your communities,
that our communities are not people that came with nothing.
They're people that came with everything,
and we continue to share, and we continue to resist,
and we continue to carry our traditions.
We are a living memory.
We are a living collective memory.
And the way that our traditions and our identity
and our culture lives is through us.
[bright acoustic music]