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The Guaraní and Their Missions
A Socioeconomic History
By Julia J. S. Sarreal STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8597-6
CHAPTER 1
Founding and Early Years
The Guaraní and Jesuits underwent great hardship and sacrifice in order to lay the foundations for the missions' later success. During their initial encounters, the world as they knew it turned almost entirely upside down for both parties. The Guaraní abandoned their homes and relocated to large, compact towns shared with various other groups of Guaraní. They had to live with new people and submit to new authorities. They gave up much of their former freedom, encountered strange new rules, and were compelled to restructure many aspects of their daily life. The Jesuits tried to force foreign and incomprehensible cultural practices upon them, and many of their longstanding beliefs and customs came under attack. Underlying all of these changes was a new hierarchy, in which the Jesuits envisioned an inferior and subordinate role for the Guaraní. In the face of such pressures, nonetheless, the Guaraní also exerted influence and shaped the missions by maintaining various aspects of their precontact practices and beliefs.
While in many respects the missionaries gained the upper hand in implementing their vision for the missions, the first Jesuits experienced great difficulty, danger, and uncertainty. Early missionaries left the relative familiarity, security, and comfort of their colleges and residences for the unknown. Many even left their country of origin. They traveled for extended periods through difficult and dangerous terrain filled with venomous snakes, jaguars, and other unfamiliar and frightening creatures. The missionaries did not know if the Indians would be friendly or kill them. Even after founding a mission, the Jesuits wondered if the Indians would turn against them. In addition to facing hunger, deprivation, and poverty, the missionaries also had to adopt new cultural practices. They learned a new language or languages and ate foods that they found to be foreign and strange. At least as frustrating to the missionaries, the Jesuits found that even with their religious zeal they could not stop all of the Indian practices that they found to be sinful and immoral.
Why did the initial missionaries seek to establish missions, given the great risks and personal discomfort? Why did the Guaraní agree to join the missions if they had to sacrifice so much? This chapter seeks to answer these questions. The missionaries' motivations can be explained by the founding principles of the Jesuit order; their religious zeal played a key role in spurring them to make such sacrifices. The reasons why the Guaraní joined the missions were more varied and complex. Even before the Jesuits' arrival, contact with Europeans had radically altered life for the Guaraní. Disease, kidnapping, slavery, and coerced labor threatened the Indians' way of life. Given these upheavals, many Guaraní saw the mission as a place for survival. For many, material goods and the ability to shape mission life, both with and without the Jesuits' consent, made the missions tolerable.
THE GUARANÍ
At the time of European contact, the Guaraní numbered some two million or more and lived in the region stretching from the Paraguay, Uruguay, and Paraná Rivers to the Patos Lagoon on the Atlantic Ocean. The Guaraní sustained themselves through agriculture, hunting, fishing, and gathering. They were a semisedentary people who moved every couple of years as soil fertility declined. They planted corn, manioc, legumes, peanuts, squash, and sweet potatoes and sometimes grew a few tobacco and cotton plants for ceremonial purposes. Forest products supplemented cultivation; they often consumed heart of palm in October, when there was little manioc and corn. Subgroups of Guaraní often followed subsistence patterns in accordance with their particular environment. For example, Jesuit missionaries frequently commented about how the Guaraní living in the Guairá region (roughly the same as the present-day Brazilian state of Paraná) consumed tubers—manioc, potato, squash, and the like. In contrast, missionaries highlighted the cultivation of corn, beans, and manioc by the Guaraní closer to the Paraná River. Furthermore, the Paranaguaýs and others who lived close to rivers depended more on fishing than did inland subgroups, who focused more on hunting. The characteristics of each natural environment largely explain these differences.
The Guaraní organized their labor primarily on the basis of gender. Men cleared the fields for planting, while the women did the rest of the agricultural work. All of the farming was done by hand with a digging stick. In addition to the day-to-day agricultural tasks of planting, caring for, and harvesting crops, women did domestic chores—preparing food and caring for the children. They also raised ducks, transported water, made pottery, spun cotton, and wove baskets and hammocks, and they collected wild fruit, roots, grubs, and honey in the forest.
Most of the men's work entailed leaving the village. According to the Jesuit missionary José Sanchez Labrador, Guaraní men trapped boars and a large animal called borebí by digging and then concealing deep holes. They caught rabbits and similar animals in smaller traps and placed lassos in trees to catch birds. They fished using strong wooden hooks with worms or insects on the end. Men also left the village to engage in warfare. The Guaraní held masculine activities in high esteem because of the danger associated with them; warriors faced threatening enemies and hunters faced mysterious, malicious forces that lived in the forest.
The Guaraní did not seek to maximize production. Instead, as Marshall Sahlins argues for primitive societies in general, they tried to meet their needs rather than produce a surplus. They valued leisure and frequently interrupted productive activity with nonproductive activities such as ceremonies, entertainment, social activities, and rest. They did not try to accumulate goods for later use; they accepted that, just as in nature, there would be periods of plenty followed by periods of scarcity. Nor did they equate status with the accumulation of material goods; they valued reciprocity and generosity, and leaders shared what they had instead of accumulating personal wealth.
Guaraní agricultural practices and religious beliefs meant that they were a mobile people. Slash-and-burn agriculture (also known as shifting cultivation or swidden agriculture) caused soil fertility to decline after a couple of years, and so the Guaraní had to search for new land every two to six years. They also migrated in search of a place they called "a land without evil." In this earthly paradise, people did not die and did not have to work but spent their time drinking, feasting, and dancing. At various times before European contact, as well as throughout the colonial period and even into the twentieth century, groups of Guaraní abandoned their homes and followed a shaman in search of this land without evil. These migrations sometimes involved large-scale and far-reaching population movements and occurred most frequently during periods of crisis. The wide dispersion of Tupí-Guaraní tribes suggests numerous pre-Columbian migrations. Furthermore, the high degree of cultural and linguistic uniformity implies that such dispersion occurred relatively recently.
Before European contact, the Guaraní lived in extended families or lineage groups called teýys. Headed by a teýy-ru (father of the teýy), the ten to sixty or more nuclear families that made up the teýy lived together in one large communal house. Constructed from tree branches and thatch, these long houses varied in size depending on the availability of materials and the number of members in the teýy. In general, they tended to measure about 165 feet by 16 to 20 feet. The long houses did not have inside walls; vertical posts that supported the roof acted as dividers to separate family units. The shared living arrangements and close proximity created a high degree of interdependence among nuclear families. As a result, nuclear families were subordinate to the teýy. The teýy was the most important organizational unit for the Guaraní; each teýy exercised a high degree of autonomy and functioned as a single political and economic unit.
In an effort to collectively protect themselves against their enemies, a group of teýys sometimes joined together to form a village, or amundá. Each settlement consisted of a plaza surrounded by five or six long houses with stockades and moats surrounding the village for defense. The next level of organization—the teko'a—consisted of either a village or a group of villages and was not easily distinguishable from an amundá. The highest level of organization—a group of teko'a—formed a guará. These larger groupings of Guaraní occurred infrequently and lasted for only a short period of time. Special circumstances such as group warfare or large celebrations created conditions suitable for their formation. After accomplishing their intended goal, these larger formations often broke apart owing to the proclivity for autonomy at the lower levels of social organization, especially at the level of the teýy. Every successive organizational unit above the teýy experienced greater instability and likelihood of fissure.
According to anthropologists, each level of social organization had its own leader. A teýyru led the teýy, a tuvichá led the amundá and the teko'a, and a mburuvichá led the guará. The teýy-ru exercised the most authority; he organized both the production and consumption of goods, and the teýy functioned as a single economic unit. As the head of the teýy, the teýy-ru assigned plots of lands to individual families, directed collective labor projects, and distributed the goods. Together teýy members worked collectively in agriculture, gathering forest products, hunting, and making war. Within the teýy, the teýy-ru resolved disputes and cultivated unity; externally, he maintained relations with other teýys through warfare and diplomacy.
Guaraní leaders used marriage alliances to build social relations. Often female children married adult males. Marriage with a cross cousin—a cousin from a parent's opposite-sex sibling—was encouraged. In contrast, marriage with a parallel cousin—a cousin from a parent's same-sex sibling—was considered incest by some Guaraní. The Guaraní practiced polygamy for diplomatic purposes and as a sign of prestige. A teýy-ru built connections with other teýys by having multiple wives: uxorilocal tradition meant that a wife remained a part of her parents' teýy while living in her husband's teko'a.
Like other Indian chieftains, Guaraní leadership exhibited fluidity and flexibility. A man could become a teýy-ru by uniting approximately forty males related to him through blood or marriage ties. Leaders could either gain prestige and authority by attracting new followers or lose prestige and authority by losing followers. Loosely based on lineage, leadership positions were generally hereditary but they did not necessarily pass from father to biological son. The Guaraní did not interpret hereditary succession in a strictly vertical sense; a position could legitimately pass to a son or a nephew. The successor not only had to belong to his predecessor's lineage, he also needed to possess personal characteristics such as eloquence, generosity, and prestige gained through warfare. Jesuit missionary Antonio Ruiz de Montoya acknowledged that many Guaraní leaders inherited their position, but many also acquired such status through the eloquence of their speech.
Within Guaraní society, teýy-rus shared power with shamans. Rather than competing for power, each generally served a different function. While a teýy-ru maintained human relations, a shaman was responsible for relations with the spiritual world. Shamans were thought to have magical, healing, and weather-forecasting powers. They performed ceremonial rituals, preserved oral history, and communicated with spirits. Shamans were very influential in Guaraní society. Sometimes the distinction between a shaman and a teýy-ru blurred: a teýy-ru could become a shaman and vice versa. Such a combination of spiritual and temporal powers depended on the ability to successfully build networks and attract followers.
CONTACT WITH EUROPEANS
For many Guaraní, their way of life had already been disrupted well before they came in contact with Jesuit missionaries. Europeans began infiltrating the region almost a century before the founding of the first Jesuit mission. Even though the first explorers did not establish permanent settlements among the Guaraní, contact between the two peoples definitely occurred. The first European to reach Paraguay was the Portuguese explorer Aleixo Garcia and his men. After being shipwrecked in southern Brazil in 1516, Garcia and several shipmates traveled west with several friendly Indians to Paraguay in 1524. There, they joined with a large army of Guaraní allies and made their way to the outskirts of the Inca Empire. Upon returning to the shores of the Paraguay River with Inca treasure, the Indians killed Garcia but spared his mestizo son. Over a decade later, Europeans began settling in Paraguay permanently; in 1537, Europeans founded the city of Asunción.
Many Guaraní hoped that an alliance with Europeans and access to European weaponry could give them an edge against their rivals, but they soon found the costs of such an alliance too great. According to Guaraní practices, Indian women cemented alliances. From Guaraní wives and concubines the Spaniards not only received sexual pleasure but also gained Guaraní labor; women did most of the agricultural labor among the Guaraní. Spaniards took advantage of this practice to accumulate a large labor force. In most cases, a Spaniard did not limit himself to a relationship with one Guaraní woman; the first Spanish governor, Domingo Martínez de Irala, had at least seven Indian concubines.
The Guaraní expected that such ties would lead to kinship, but the Spaniards did not act as the Guaraní anticipated. Even though relationships between Guaraní women and Spanish men often resulted in mixed-race children, the Spaniards did not treat the Guaraní as relatives or friends. Instead, they capitalized on these associations to make excessive labor demands upon the Guaraní. Moreover, the Spaniards did not respect Guaraní gender roles: they wanted Guaraní males to work in agriculture, performing tasks that the Guaraní considered women's work.
In the eyes of the Guaraní, the Spaniards did not treat them as allies but as slaves. Within several years, some Guaraní began to refer to the Spaniards not as relatives but as thieves, adulterers, and scoundrels. Yet despite such complaints, relationships between Spanish men and Guaraní women continued. In 1541, the first Spanish governor, Domingo Martínez de Irala claimed that seven hundred Guaraní women served the Spanish population. Even in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the fact that women outnumbered men by about ten-to-one in Asunción suggests that settler men continued to have multiple Guaraní concubines.
Further eroding collegial relations between the settlers and the Guaraní, royal officials issued encomienda grants to Spanish settlers. The encomienda was a coercive labor structure that entitled the recipient of an encomienda (an encomendero) to collect tribute in the form of labor or goods from the Indians assigned to him. In return, the encomendero was obligated to teach the Indians Spanish and Catholicism. According to Governor Martínez de Irala, in 1556 he divided an estimated 20,000 Guaraní among 320 or more Spaniards. These Indians had to work for their encomenderos for several months each year. Many encomenderos took advantage of and overworked their Indian charges: Guaraní males often had to work longer than the allotted period of time, and women, children, and the elderly often also had to participate even if they were formally exempted from encomienda labor obligations. Royal officials issued various ordinances to moderate these and other abuses; the repetition of such regulatory efforts suggests their ineffectiveness and that abuses by encomenderos continued.
The encomienda was only one form of forced labor; the Guaraní also faced outright slavery. Spanish settlers enslaved Indians under the pretext that the Indians had mounted or were about to mount an armed attack. More frequently, the perpetrators were Portuguese adventurers accompanied by mestizos, Tupí Indians, and Africans. Originating from São Paulo, these Paulistas or bandeirantes conducted slave raids that reached far into Spanish territory and took thousands of Indians as captives. The bandeirantes then sold the Guaraní into slavery for agricultural, domestic, and plantation labor in Portuguese territory. These slave raids flourished and continued to threaten the Guaraní during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Even for those Guaraní who successfully avoided encomienda and slavery, life did not remain the same. Guaraní communities did not exist in isolation. Certainly most were aware of the Europeans or at least heard rumors of their activities. In an effort to maintain their freedom, the Guaraní turned to such strategies as greater mobility, relocation, restructured communities, and new alliances—changes that altered their way of life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Guaraní and Their Missions by Julia J. S. Sarreal. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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