Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in the same expressions, and calling someone an Ayoreo was meant to
designate a person who is uncouth, crude, brutish, stupid, and dirty. I was
told that if I were called an Ayoreo, “you should be offended,” and “speak
up for yourself.” In Paraguay, the same went for Moro, Indio, and Ava, a
Guarani word meaning “man.” There was a popular genre of Paraguayan
jokes, told even in the finest and most progressive homes in Asunción,
about an Indian figure called El Cacique, or chief. This chief usually goes
to the city or gets drunk. The humor arises from a situation in which chief
causes harm to himself or lets his wife be raped by a Paraguayan because
he misunderstands his social station. Similar distinctions between white
and Indian figure prominently in the plots of most “national” literature,
including the highly esteemed and often cited satire of Paraguayan cul-
ture by Helio Vera, the humor of which comes from the author pointing
out similarities between “Paraguayan culture” and the degraded culture
of Indians.
Ayoreo-speaking people were also commonly barred from restaurants
and excluded from respectable spaces of market exchange and commod-
ity consumption. If such lessons were too subtle, routinized violence clar-
ified the marginal status attributed to Ayoreo people by many
Cojñone
.
Despite having a continuous presence in
Cojñone
towns and cities for
the last half century, Ayoreo people were routinely expulsed from these
spaces by armed soldiers as threats to public hygiene.
During my fieldwork, one rancher took both a Totobiegosode woman
I knew and her thirteen-year-old daughter as his concubines. When the
husband and father protested, he lost his job and was threatened with
death. The woman and her daughter were only released when the ranch-
er's wife returned three months later. (The situation was resolved when
the rancher and his wife appeared in Arocojnadi and gave Jochade a goat.)
There are numerous cases of
Cojñone
murdering Ayoreo people such as
the man decapitated and burned near Isla Alta in Paraguay, or a group of
whites who made their hired hands dig graves and then opened fire on
them, or the soldier who killed a man and locked his wife and child up
in his house. Before he could return to rape her, the woman escaped and
walked back to the mission. In one example from the mid-1980s, an Ay-
oreo man named Jorge Chiqueno was shot by a rancher named Urbano
Cuellar in the middle of Roboré, Bolivia. He was shot in the stomach with
a small caliber rifle so death was slow. The police report mentions that
over the next eighteen hours, including part of a full business day, Jorge
crawled 156 feet through the streets of the town asking for help, knock-
ing on the doors of various houses, before he finally bled to death. No
witnesses testified against Cuellar.
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