Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Ayoreo-speaking people but they also establish that Ayoreo have held
deep cultural ties and aboriginal title to the area of Echoi for, at the very
least, the past three hundred years.
Jesuits, keenly aware that this area was an important geopolitical link
between their increasingly besieged missions in eastern Paraguay and
those in the Chiquitania area of eastern Bolivia, began an ambitious cam-
paign to contact all Zamuco groups and reduce them to a mission, the
southernmost of all Chiquitania.
15
Archival sources indicate that, despite
several attempts in which priests were killed and many disputes over its
precise location, the mission of San Ignacio de Zamucos was founded
in 1723 near Echoi. The first inhabitants were two bands of “Cucutade”
who were “fleeing from the Ugaraños” and “ill with the plague.” Father
Agustín Castañares undertook most of the contact work in the early years
of the mission.
16
Abandoning his initial plan to turn Zamuco groups into
sedentary agriculturalists, Castañares lived as a seminomadic forager
alongside his congregation for the next five years, always in the vicin-
ity of the Salinas. Eighteenth-century maps based on Jesuit sources thus
invariably link the salt lakes, Zamuco groups, the mountain labeled Yoi-
bide, and the mission of San Ignacio de Zamucos, albeit in slightly differ-
ent configurations.17
17
An anonymous Jesuit, perhaps Jaime Aguilar, makes the same link
between San Ignacio and the Salinas in an unpublished 1741 account en-
titled “Relación de San Ignacio de Zamucos.” In his account of surveying
the mission site two decades earlier, it is clear that salt was an important
factor in the placement of the mission and that the salt marketed by San
Ignacio came from the same Salinas controlled by the Ayoreo-speaking
group called Zatienos:
[for the fathers] one thing was missing at this location, a thing absolutely necessary,
salt. This country had been until that point lacking any salt lakes, but there was some
vague suspicion that these could be found in the lands of the Zatheniens. A large
number of our Indians [Chiquitanos from san Jose] wanted to find out and clarify this
fact. After having traveled through all these woodlands without having discovered
any indication that there was salt, one of these Indians went up on a small height
to see if he could discover from there what was so dearly wished. he saw in the not-
too-far distance a lake of colored water, surrounded by low brush. Because of the hot
weather that day, he decided to cross through these low scrubs in order to bathe. While
entering the water, he noticed that the lake was covered with some sort of glass [
verre
],
which he took in his hand and found it was half-formed salt. satisfied, the Indian called
his companions, and the missionary, having been informed, took measures to make a
road to that place and to put it under the care of the idolizing barbarians.
