Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
trunk. Our grandfathers and their grandfathers always went there. They
were happy there.” He paused, and looked away down the road where we
were sitting after a hot afternoon's work in his garden.
“But in my opinion we cannot go back there. Many people killed each
other in that place later. There was a lot of blood. The soil there, in that
place, it swallowed up the blood. It swallowed up all of our blood. That
blood is still there, in the earth. We cannot go back. We have lost
that place. It is like Cain and Abel. When one brother killed another, he
could never go back. The blood is still there.”
“Do you understand?” he asked.
Journey to Echoi
After months in the field, I began to suspect that I had missed my elder
teachers' fundamental point all along. Echoi was a constellation of bi-
naries that refused coherence. It ultimately defied all of my attempts to
give it a stable, singular form. As soon as it was evoked in one register,
it slipped into its opposite. This was the source of its power, its ghostly
presence, and even, perhaps, its real political potential. It was uncanny
because it mirrored precisely the fragmentation of a meaningful Ayoreo
past and turned contradictory desires to find a redemptive history against
one another.
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Even so, I still yearned for some kind of closure. I thought that visiting
the former site of Echoi might offer a sense of order or magic that eluded
me in the disrupted rhythms of everyday life. A friend and I decided to
make the long trip, and we invited several people from Arocojnadi to
come along.
Traveling north from the Mennonite colonies in central Paraguay, the
road was worn by cattle trailers and oil trucks into deep ruts and
arenales
.
It passed a hundred miles of land stripped bare, pastures for estancias
called Betty's Ranch or Light to the Moros. It went by several Ayoreo and
Manjuy Indian villages, the mud huts and people waiting in shade, and
then Last Drink, a clapboard shanty with a hand-painted sign that sold
cold Brazilian beer.
The road forked at Madrejón. Sixty years ago it was headquarters for the
Pure Oil Company. In 2007, it was a wooden store with canned peaches
and gingham tablecloths and a compound of brick buildings where
tourists to the Defensores del Chaco National Park could sleep on dusty
foam if they ever arrived. We followed the narrow double-track to the
west and north where a string of contacts were made in the 1950s and
