Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The mission of San Ignacio, however, proved ill fated and short lived.
18
Jesuit records show that San Ignacio remained the smallest of the Chiq-
uitos missions throughout the late 1730s, with the population listed as
648 in 1742, 666 in 1743, 679 in 1744, and 683 in 1745.
19
Droughts,
attacks by hostile Indians, and tensions between various Ayoreo-
speaking factions led the Jesuits to question the viability of the mission.
Finally, “afraid for their lives,” the priests burned the sacred oils, bur-
ied the sacred objects, and abandoned San Ignacio de Zamuco on Octo-
ber 24, 1745. This decision was at least partly due to the stated desire of
the Ayoreo-speaking neophytes to return to their “primitive life of sav-
ages in their old camps.”
20
From these Jesuits, the Ayoreo learned their
word for the Christian God:
Dupade
, adapted from
Tupã
, the Guaraní
name for the sun god.
After the Jesuit expulsion in 1767, references to the various Zamuco
groups described by the Jesuits largely vanished from history. It has been
shown that after the hurried Jesuit expulsion (in which they commonly
burned all the records they could not take with them), colonial admin-
istrators, Franciscan priests, and neighboring Indigenous groups substi-
tuted other labels and names for Jesuit categories of place and peoples,
including the Zamuco groups.
21
Various names applied to them after the
Jesuit expulsion include
Yanaigua
(lit. “wild man,” a derogatory term for
Ayoreo-speaking people from the Chiriguano),
Guarañoca
(a derogatory
term from the Chiquitano that became widespread on the eighteenth- to
nineteenth-century Bolivian frontier),
Pyta Jovai
(lit. “claw foot,” used by
Guarani peasants in Paraguay to the present day), and various Spanish
names like
Moro
(“moors”),
Empelotudos
(“naked ones”),
Bárbaros
(barbar-
ians), or even, at times,
Guaicuru
. That is, after the expulsion of the Jesu-
its, all Ayoreo-speaking groups were once again labeled barbarians and
the site of their former
reducción
resignified as an untamed wilderness in
need of moral and economic colonization.
The Sediments of History
Colonial administrators aimed to exploit the salt of Echoi, regardless of
the kind of Indian living nearby. Indeed, under colonial laws Zamuco,
Toba, or Guaicuru were largely indistinguishable by the colonials: “wild”
or “savage” Indians were not capable of possessing land or property. In
1795, the newly arrived Franciscan priest of Santiago de Chiquitos, a
small mission located some one hundred kilometers northeast of San
