"Somos como la paja del paramo si estamos solos el viento lleva lejos, pero todos juntos en un costal, nada hace el viento, bamboleara pero no nos hara caer." Dolores Cacuango Quilo was born in 1912 in San Pablo Urku in the canton of Cayambe. She is a pioneer in the fight for indigenous and farmers rights in Ecuador. Dolores was an outspoken Communist and was imprisoned many times for her activism. She was also one of the first activists for Ecuadorian feminism.She is the founder of the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios. Her parents were Indigenous laborers and during her childhood and she lived in a shack made up of straw and mud. She did not attend school so, she did not know how read or write. She was a servant to an hacienda owner at a very young age because her parents had a debt. Her lack of education inspired her to improve indigenous education and to learn Spanish. She viewed Juan Albamocho as one of her political influences. He was an indigenous man who would dress up as a begger and ask for money outside of a lawyer's office. While he was pretending to ask for money, he would ease drop on the lawyers. He gathered important information that would benefit the indigenous people and would tell them so, that they could defend themselves against the church and landowners. Dolores in 1930 was one of the leaders of the historic workers' strike at the Pesillo hacienda in Cayambe. This event was pivotal to indigenous and workers rights and later on appeared in Jorge Icaza's novel Huasipungo. During the Ecuadorian Revolution in May 1944, Dolores led an assault on a government military base. During her lifetime she helped with educating indigenous kids and established the first bilingual indigenous schools. Teaching in both Quechua and Spanish, she established these schools in 1945 in the Cayambe region. Her schools were running for 18 years however, the military junta closed them all in 1963 since they thought the schools were communist focos. However, the schools continued without any help from the Ecuadorian government. The people were the ones fighting for that education their kids so rightfully deserved. "We are like the straw from the fells of the Andes, while you pull it out, it grows again. And with the straw from the fells we shall cover the world."

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