Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
she often went hungry and old people were dying of it—the hollowed
trunk of the death tree—all around her. More than the money she was in
it for a husband, a
Cojñoi
husband—no lazy poor Ayoreo would do. She
was sure it would happen soon, he would take her to the city, buy her a
house, maybe even one with running water. She would be happy and if
not, at least she would have a baby of her own, a pale one more beautiful
than a brown one.
She told us about the men she knew, the good ones (who bought her
things) and the bad (about whom she said little). My friendship with her
began when she speculated aloud about all the perverse things I must
have done in my country to be sent to that shitty village in the middle of
nowhere, where there was no Coca-Cola or ice or tinned meat, and how
mentally deficient I must be to stay there for so long. She didn't have a
place to spend Christmas because her mother was gone, eight years in the
city, a working woman too, first on the streets, then the rougher work
on the trucking lines.
Iodé had met Jochade's daughter in Filadelfia, and they became friends.
In 1931 Filadelfia was known by its Plattdeutsch name of Fernheim and
it was a sleepy grid of thatched huts and pale Mennonite farmers from
Prussia, wracked by cholera and clinging to faith, the end of the oxcart or
railroad for these people who were looking for peace and sovereignty. In
2007, Filadelfia was a frontier boomtown, flush with cash from opening
a raw wilderness with bulldozers and cattle and land prices that surged
wildly. A town of six thousand people with a handful of churches and
forty tiny clapboard stores, each one selling six hundred empanadas and
eighty roasted chickens a day, they couldn't cook them fast enough. The
city of fraternal love and the far away home looked like a town from rural
Kansas in the 1960s, straight wide dirt roads, neat square brick houses
hidden behind rows of dusty flowers blanched by the intense light. Fancy
trucks and brick mansions and rusty bicycles and mud huts and blonde
teenagers on Chinese motorcycles and slender girls and smooth muscled
men up from Minas Gerais or the east, to start out or start over.
It may have been a Mennonite colony, but in those days Filadelfia was
an Indian town, a modern day
pueblo de indios
. It was a place where no
one was out of the stare of an Original Inhabitant for very long. Indians
in the sun-baked dirt streets, stepping off the sidewalk in deference to
pink-skinned, thick-bellied white men. Indians in dozens of businesses
with names like El Indio, the Native, or Casa Adelia, dedicated exclu-
sively to supplying Indians with the goods they liked or were expected
to like—bright floral print skirts, oversized neon soccer jerseys, cheap
cotton baseball caps, bland high-carbohydrate foods, alcohol. Everything
