Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
bought secondhand and sold at top-shelf prices, inflated for the poor. Old
Indian couples, their faces carved by the sun and disease and hard work
and bad food, gathering empty beer cans early in the cool morning. Indi-
ans in the few patches of brush left on the margins of the town, stretched
out in the shade. Indians blackout drunk in the afternoon sun. Indians
bathing in the town's water reserves, crouched behind buildings, living
behind metal shops, baking bread, shoveling gravel, stacking wood, trim-
ming roses, driving tractors, waiting for work, asking for change. Invisible
Indians murmuring in the brush. Indian families gathering
algarrobo
fruit
for miles along the highways. Hundreds of Indians lined up quietly on an
open flatbed trailer behind a tractor in front of the huge air-conditioned
supermarket on payday. Young Indian men stacked into cattle trucks and
hauled off to a ranch, two dozen on a single tractor, riding on the scoop
or hood. Indians looking in through the windows. Indians watching.
Like they were trying to figure something out.
The constant vigilance was palpable, especially, it seemed to the Men-
nonites. It was audible in the whispered fears commonly heard in Filadel-
fia, White man to White man, about an Indian uprising, lustful Indian
desires for young white girls, their savagery. As one South African man
told me, “We tried to do it here like we did it back home. But the Indians
are worse than the blacks. They're so lazy, they don't want to work at all.
They could improve themselves, but they just don't. Do you think they
like to be dirty?” These anxieties were purged from time to time in bruises
and semen and blood.
There were many different kinds of Indians in Filadelfia: Nivaclé,
Guaraní Ñandeva, Enxet, Manjui. But Ayoreo-speaking people were the
most conspicuous of all the watchers, dressed like pirates or refugees,
prominent bones and flamboyant clothes, the poorest, the loudest, the
boldest, the least furtive. Barefooted children with brazen eyes and gentle
voices and shy smiles and hair dyed with peroxide or bleach, designs
drawn with lipstick on smooth cheeks. Ayoreo, in general, asked you for
what they wanted. They didn't fawn or playact or awkwardly grovel. As
if they wanted you to know that they knew the score. In 2008, there was
an Ayoreo camp in Filadelfia called Casa Pasajera that has since been
bulldozed on the order of Mennonite officials and its replacements bull-
dozed in turn. Three hundred people crowded under plastic tarps in an
abandoned lot of sandy grit with no access to running water or electric-
ity, denied by the colony because they thought it would discourage them
from staying. At night under crackling plastic around a fire listening to
quiet jokes and stories, it could seem almost peaceful. A place where old
warriors came to work, starve, and die—where young men fought with
