Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
open sewers, the threat could be palpable. The unsmiling whistles, the
mocking shouts, the ones who followed silently in the shadows.
The violence against Ayoreo-speaking people continues even while
recent political developments in both Paraguay and Bolivia are often pre-
sumed to have ushered in a new era of social movements and Indigenous
rights. But those tainted few not eligible for the protections afforded to
“the Indigenous” are still considered
Bárbaros
. The local idioms of sav-
agery and barbarism, long used to justify the slavery and genocidal ex-
termination of Ayoreo-speaking people along the Chaco frontier, come
back into focus on Ayoreo to the degree they are believed to embody an
essential lack of social personhood. Being shorn of politically authorized
culture does not only remove Ayoreo-speaking people from history; it
strips them of humanity.
It is no coincidence that the “post-multicultural age” is marked by
amplified violence against Ayoreo-speaking people, and young urban-
dwelling women in particular. The teenager cut from vagina to chin in
one long rip. The girl whose dismembered corpse was thrown into a va-
cant city lot in Santa Cruz. The young woman whose intestines were
cut out and strung for ten yards along a fence line. The fifteen-year-old
girl stripped naked and gang-raped by rich teenagers from the city who
took pictures of it on their cell phones. The five-year-old girl sexually
abused and beaten to death in a small Bolivian town. Two years later
her fourteen-year-old sister, a part-time sex worker just elected as the
2012 “Queen of Carnaval” by the Ayoreo
barrio
in Santa Cruz, was found
stripped, strangled, and mutilated in the trash behind a bar. Her corpse
was only recognizable by the homemade tattoo of a heart on her arm.
22
(Indeed, some young urban Ayoreo say, with a laugh, that they get tat-
toos precisely so their corpses will be recognizable.)
Hypermarginality
The increasingly robust protections afforded to culture as a collective
right in Latin America coincide with a legal definition restricted to some-
thing like a Herderian notion of bounded, stable difference or even cos-
mological alterity, as in recent legislation of “uses and customs,”
usos
y costumbres
, in Colombia; “particular forms of life,”
formas peculiares
de vida
, in Paraguay; or egalitarian administrative structures in Bolivia.
23
Together, such developments constitute a culturalization of legitimate
Indigenous life—a neocolonial reduction whereby the state gains new
moral authority to police Indigenous populations through granting the
