Tsáchila

The Tsáchila are an indigenous people of the western foothills of the Andes in Ecuador, around Santo Domingo de los Colorados. Spaniards called them Colorados for painting their bodies with red annatto dye. They speak Tsafiki (“true word”), a Barbacoan language, and are held to descend from the Yumbo of the northwestern forest.

The name Colorados first appears in 1542, when governor Gil Ramírez Dávalos recognized chief Cristóbal Tusasanín as lord of the Colorados, Niguas and Sigchos. Oral tradition remembers a smallpox epidemic that nearly destroyed their early settlement of Cocaniguas, leaving two families.

A Jesuit reduction founded at Angamarca in 1593 withered by the late eighteenth century, while missions around Consacoto met passive resistance. The transfer of Jesuit missions to secular clergy in 1706 sparked a crushed rebellion; many fled into the forest, leaving the Tsáchila country largely isolated from the Audiencia of Quito.