Since the promulgation of a new constitution in Ecuador in 2008, studies indicate that the Indigenous term of sumak kawsay (good living) is a potential systemic alternative. Based on the presupposition that such alternatives already exist in the margins and cracks of the system (Quijano 2000), this thesis discusses how the leading proponents of sumak kawsay, namely Indigenous peoples, enact it in daily life. In this regard, it accounts for the daily praxis necessary to construct life alternatives for the Kayambi people. Aiming to contribute to “emergent encounters” between Global South subjects, I proposed collaboratively conducting this research. Between July 2019 and March 2020 and other periods in 2021 and 2022, conviviality in the chakra, the family, and the community was the main ethnographic pathway that unfolded in different forms of collaboration. Two extraordinary events, the COVID-19 pandemic and an Indigenous and peasant uprising, altered the research development. In this view, besides discussing the struggles Kayambi people have to develop life alternatives in the territory – through advancing agroecology, facing food racism, dismantling gender inequalities, promoting Kayambi knowledge to the youth, and nationally struggling against policies of structural adjustment – I describe how engaged anthropology emerges among them. Their daily praxes enable the search for sumak kawsay by developing projects of life alternatives that prioritize a holistic and biocentric approach.