The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata - Softcover

Ganson, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804754950 ISBN 13: 9780804754958

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America―that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guaraní were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent “children” of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Río de la Plata region. The Guaraní responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Ganson is Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University.

From the Inside Flap

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America--that of the Jesuit missions to the Guarani Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guarani were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent "children" of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Rio de la Plata region. The Guarani responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Guaran Under Spanish Rule in the Ro de la Plata

By BARBARA GANSON

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5495-8

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..........................................................................................xiIntroduction.............................................................................................1Part One: The Invasion from Within1. Early Encounters......................................................................................172. The Footprints of Saint Thomas........................................................................303. Daily Life............................................................................................52Part Two: The Invasion from Without4. From Resistance to Rebellion..........................................................................875. The Guaran in the Aftermath of the Expulsion of the Jesuits..........................................1176. Our Warehouses Are Empty: Guaran Responses to the Reorganization of the Missions.....................1377. Guaran Cultural Resiliency and Reorientations........................................................164Appendices...............................................................................................191Glossary.................................................................................................205Notes....................................................................................................207Bibliography.............................................................................................257Index....................................................................................................285

Chapter One

Early Encounters

AN OUTLINE of pre-Columbian Guaran political, economic, and social organization, gender roles, and religion serves to establish a framework for illustrating the processes that demonstrate how the Guaran, an agricultural people, were incorporated into the Spanish Empire in the mid-sixteenth century. These historical processes included military alliances, the forming of kinship relations through intermarriage and cohabitation, Indian slavery, rape, the encomienda, and missions. At the same time, the chapter will highlight the patterns of interactions that show how the Spaniards and their mestizo offspring adopted many elements of Guaran culture, including their language, diet, and material culture, to survive in this new environment. Together the Guaran and the Europeans, willingly or unwillingly, created the beginnings of a new hybrid culture prior to the arrival of the Jesuits in the Ro de la Plata during the late sixteenth century.

The Cultural Landscape

The Tup-Guaran-speaking peoples were central Amazonian in origin, although they evolved independently of one another during the past 1,500 to 2,000 years. According to the archaeological record, the spread of the Amazonian Polychrome Ceramic Tradition correlated with the migration of the Tup and the Guaran from central Amazonia. This migration must have started at least by 200 B.C., a conservative estimate. Among other tropical lowland native peoples, the Tup occupied most of Brazil, and the Guaran established villages in southern South America, along the Paran, Uruguay, and Paraguay Rivers and their tributaries. The Guaran also occupied the subtropical forests, hills, and grasslands of Guair, Tape, and the area of Lagoa dos Patos in southern Brazil, as well as the island of Martn Garca and the area east of the Tigre River delta in the Ro de la Plata. The Av-Chiriguanos migrated from the region east of the Paraguay River and settled along the eastern mountain ranges of the Andes in present-day Bolivia. Cario, Guarambarense, Itatn, Mondayense, Paran, Uruguayense, Tape, and Mbaracayense were among the principal guras (regional-ethnic groups) of the Guaran. Together the various Guaran communities may have numbered approximately 1.5 million in 1500 A.D. at the time of the first European contact.

The Guaran usually referred to themselves as ab (men) or ande ore (all of us). According to their mythology, Tup and Guaran were brothers whose wives fought with one another over the ownership of a large colorful parrot. Following the dispute, Tup, the older brother, and his wife remained in Brazil, while the younger brother, Guaran, and his family left to establish new villages in the subtropical lowlands of the Ro de la Plata River systems. The native peoples mentioned as Guaran in Spanish and Portuguese historical documents spoke different dialects of the Tup-Guaran language. Guaran, which means "warrior" in their language, was the more common name the Europeans in the Ro de la Plata used to refer to these people, a name evidently acceptable to the Guaran themselves because it appears as a self-reference symbol in one of their texts. The Guaran rarely referred to themselves as Indians, a European category.

Approximately 2,000 years before Christ, bands of Guaran hunters and gatherers learned the slash-and-burn method of agriculture. Both men and women used the branches of the trees, along with straw, to build their long houses. These were usually one or two large straw-thatched huts where multiple families resided under the same roof in villages often surrounded by wooden palisades. These settlements of five or six long houses usually had two to three hundred inhabitants, but never had more than a thousand. Every three to five years, when their soils were exhausted, the Guaran abandoned their villages and selected new sites to plant their crops and build long houses.

The division of labor was predominantly based on gender. Men engaged in intermittent activities. When not hunting, fishing, or burning or clearing the fields, they made fish nets and small wooden benches, prepared for and engaged in warfare, and visited other villages. Women always were more burdened than men were, at least from the perspective of sixteenth-century Europeans. Female activities included all the planting and harvesting of manioc, corn, beans, peanuts, squashes, and sweet potatoes using digging sticks, as well as the collection of roots, fruits, and cotton. Women also transported water, gathered honey and palm hearts, made pottery, spun cotton, wove baskets and hammocks, cared for the children, did domestic chores, and prepared the food. In addition, using their saliva to ferment corn, native women made a mild alcoholic beverage called canv, canouin, or cagu (maize beer) in large earthen vessels, a common practice among many Amerindians in South America.

Each village or long house where the Guaran extended their cotton hammocks was headed by a patrilineal chief called a tuvich. The chiefs were responsible for governance in their communities, warfare, diplomacy, and forming marriage alliances. Guaran societies generally operated according to the concepts of reciprocity and mutual consent. Chiefdoms were hereditary offices passed on from the father to the son. In the absence of a son, the position went to a brother or another male relative. If a tuvich were an eloquent orator or a great warrior, he might rule over several villages.

The Guaran societies were patrilineal and matrilocal, according to which when a couple married, they went to live in the household of the wife and were surrounded by her family members or clan. A tuvich usually had more than one wife, a symbol of prestige, although some of the indigenous groups were monogamous. Women, unlike men, faced death if caught committing adultery. Divorce, however, was relatively easy for both men and women to obtain. Couples simply separated and went their own way. Guaran women practiced abortion, but sources indicate neither how frequently this occurred nor the reason women ended their unwanted pregnancies. As an agricultural people, they rejected infanticide because they needed their children to work alongside them in the fields.

There were few social distinctions among the Guaran. Unlike the Aztec and the Maya nobility, who wore elaborate clothing to distinguish themselves from native commoners, most Tup-Guaran did not cover their bodies, but women sometimes wore a small cotton garment called a typoi. For warmth during the winter, shamans covered themselves with animal skins or feather robes and decorations, which also served certain religious purposes.

Shamans (paj or opara'va, meaning "one that sings") played a prominent, dual religious-political role in Guaran societies. Because these shamans were the most influential individuals in society, many tuvichs became shamans to increase their power among their people. Shamans enjoyed special status in society by virtue of their link with the spiritual world and their performances in ritual dances and songs. Aside from being healers, as spiritual leaders they were in charge of all the ceremonial rituals and keepers of the tribe's oral traditions. Their rituals included the veneration of the ancestors, whose souls were believed to remain in the bones. Shamans led the religious chants and dances, used charms and amulets, and pipe-smoked tobacco, which was believed to have magical powers. The gourd rattles of the shamans were indispensable musical instruments that set the rhythm of the natives' ceremonial dances and served as links to the spiritual world. Although it was uncommon, native women could become shamans (cuambaye). If they did, they never married or gave birth to a child, so as to avoid losing any influence or respect. In this manner, they differentiated themselves from other women of lower social status, prestige, or power.

Sixteenth-century Europeans imagined that the Tup-Guaran were godless. The first Jesuit Provincial in Brazil, Manuel da Nbrega, described them in 1549 as having no knowledge of God and as worshipping nothing. Jean de Lry also observed during his visit to the coast of Brazil in 1556 as a member of a French expedition that the Tupinamb had no rituals or idols. Many early explorers and missionaries assumed that Amerindians' minds were a tabula rasa on which they could easily inscribe the Catholic faith.

Tup-Guaran religion was animistic. These native peoples believed in nature and in the importance of the sun, moon, thunder, lightning, and other natural forces. The Tupinamb in Brazil especially feared the anthropomorphic spirit of thunder, whom they envisioned to be a destructive figure. The Tup-Guaran identified their guardian spirits with good weather, abundant harvests, and the ability to wage warfare successfully against other indigenous groups. They also believed in a number of evil spirits who could cause them harm through sickness, death, defeat in warfare, and drought. Animalism, which anthropologists define as the concept of supernatural powers in animal form, was another feature of Tup-Guaran religion. Sometimes evil spirits underwent metamorphoses and became animals; or animals themselves were thought to have special powers. Birds were important symbols because they were believed to accompany the souls of the dead to the sky. The Guaran also linked birds and other animals to the development of individual personality traits. If someone touched an owl, they would become lazy, because owls do not fly much. If a pregnant woman saw parrots, she might become more talkative. Unlike the Aztecs, Inca, and Maya, the Tup-Guaran had no monumental temples or calendars to measure time but only counted the phases of the moon. They recognized two seasons: summer (Quarai puc, or long sun) and winter (ara ro'y, or the time when it is cold).

The Tup-Guaran believed that in the afterlife their human spirits resided in the mountains and danced in beautiful gardens. When a villager died, native women wailed for at least half a day (see Figure 2). The body was buried in a near-upright fetal position in a large ceramic funeral urn (yapep) or covered by these ceramic pots. If it were a respected elder, especially a shaman, he would be buried with his cotton hammock wrapped around him, along with some necklaces, feathers, and other personal belongings. Women, on the death of their husbands, inflicted great bodily harm on themselves, by puncturing holes in their bodies with pointed sticks, or crippling themselves by jumping off a cliff.

Similar to the belief of Amerindians in North America in a happy hunting ground, the Tup-Guaran believed in yvy marane'y (a land with out evil). The foremost seventeenth-century Jesuit linguist, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, defined yvy marane'y in Tesoro de la lengua Guaran (1639) as "intact soil, where nothing stands," perhaps referring to virgin land. Marane'y alone meant "purity, innocence, or virginity." The absence of references to the concept of the land without evil in other Jesuit accounts and native texts may signify that this concept was less significant to the colonial Guaran than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or, more likely, that the missionaries did not fully understand the importance of this concept. Almost completely opposed to the notion of a land without evil, the Tup-Guaran believed in the imminent destruction of the world, either by fire or a great flood. Jean de Lry noted that the Tupinamb believed in the myth of a great flood, which reminded him of the story of Noah. Some sixteenth-century friars considered the Amerindians' belief in a deluge to be evidence that they once had knowledge of Christianity long past and now they only needed to be reintroduced to the faith.

The Tup-Guaran had the reputation of being cannibals. The Tupinamb, for example, ate pieces of their war captives' bodies, which they believed possessed symbolic or magical powers. Cannibalism among Amerindians in general has been the subject of many scholarly debates. In The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (1979), W. Arens asserts that he has been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any society. He attributes reports and rumors of cannibalism to the need of Spaniards to justify the enslavement of Indians. In the case of the Tup-Guaran, however, there is some evidence that suggests that they practiced cannibalism. A native term (avapor) for the eating of human flesh exists in the Tup-Guaran language. Archaeologists in Brazil recently uncovered skeletal remains at sites that appear to have been fractured and distributed among various households in such a manner as to serve as corroborating material evidence. However, additional studies of pre-Columbian Guaran sites are needed to validate these recent findings. Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), the son of a Spanish conqueror and an Inca "princess," also notes in his Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (1612) that the Av-Chiriguanos "ate human flesh which they obtained by raiding neighboring provinces, devouring all their captives without regard for age or sex." Garcilaso de la Vega states that the Av-Chiriguanos consumed not only their neighbors' flesh but their own people's as well. On the other hand, Garcilaso de la Vega may have been exaggerating in order to make the Incas appear more "civilized" than their indigenous neighbors. The Paraguayan anthropologist Miguel Chase Sardi asserts that the Tup-Guaran practiced cannibalism because of a protein deficiency. Garcilaso de la Vega's account provides some evidence to support his hypothesis too. The Peruvian mestizo wrote that the Av-Chiriguanos were fond of eating meat, for none exists in their own country. Nonetheless, there appears to have been adequate protein sources, such as fish, deer, capybara, birds, monkeys, wild boar, insects, nuts, and other plants and animals in the Upper Plata region, which casts some doubt on this interpretation. Like the Araucanians in Chile, the Tup-Guaran most likely used their reputations as cannibals as a form of resistance to intimidate outsiders entering their territory. The thought of being taken captive and devoured must have struck fear in the hearts of their enemies. Religion served to explain this ritualistic behavior to members of their society. The Tup-Guaran consumed pieces of human flesh to obtain the magical or symbolic powers of their captives or family members. Psychological warfare, the need to defend one's natural territory and seek revenge, along with religion, thus appear to have been primary motives behind Tup-Guaran anthropophagy.

Early Spanish-Guaran Relations

Spanish explorers, conquerors, and settlers came to the southeastern coast of South America in the early sixteenth century without prior knowledge of the indigenous peoples that inhabited this region. Lured by stories of gold and silver, they came in search of a geographical passageway that would lead them to Inca wealth in Peru. Juan Daz de Sols entered the area in 1516 and discovered the river the Guaran called Paran-guaz, the yet-to-be-named Ro de la Plata (River of Silver). Native peoples, perhaps Querend or Guaran, who resided near the mouth of the estuary of the Ro de la Plata killed him using clubs and bows and arrows. Ferdinand Magellan spent a few months there in 1520 without incident en route to the Pacific Ocean. In 1528, Sebastian Cabot traveled to the Upper Plata, where he encountered fierce resistance from the Payagu, a Guaycuruan tribe that dominated the Paran and Paraguay rivers. Unable to "reason" with these nonsedentary Indians, his men fired on them using cannons, harquebuses (a firearm having a matchlock operated by a trigger and supported for firing with a hook),and crossbows. The Payagu returned their fire with bows and arrows. In 1536, Pedro Mendoza's expedition to the Ro de la Plata had to be abandoned because of starvation and attacks by the nomadic Pampas Indians. Unable to adapt to the environment in the sparse pampas, the Spanish explorers under the command of Juan de Ayolas traveled more than one thousand miles upriver, where in 1537 as many as twenty-four thousand semisedentary Cario-Guaran resided (see Figure 3). Led by their cacique, Lambar, the Cario-Guaran greeted the Spaniards with a shower of arrows. After two days of intense fighting, the Spaniards succeeded in subjugating the Guaran warriors. The Spaniards proceeded to establish an outpost called Nuestra Seora de Santa Mara de Asuncin.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Guaran Under Spanish Rule in the Ro de la Plataby BARBARA GANSON Copyright © 2003 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804754950
• ISBN 13: 9780804754958
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304