The new Guarani reductions: aftermaths of collective titling in Northern Paraguay

ABSTRACT

This paper documents aftermaths of Indigenous collective land titling in Northern Paraguay, drawing on participant observation, interviews, and archives involving Indigenous Guarani, private landholders, NGO partners, and campesinos. While collective title attempts to safeguard Indigenous land, I argue that land available for Paĩ Tavyterã Guarani livelihoods was reduced, with sometimes violent sociopolitical impacts and challenges to land control. I contend that the unfinished, hegemonic process of land titling is contested through Guarani communities' sociopolitical creativity, where the Paĩ creatively adapt their ways of life on land reduced. This contributes to debates on territorialization, land titling and rights, and political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective land title
• territorialization
• indigeneity
• livelihoods
• Paraguay
• South America

Acknowledgements

This paper began at the panel ‘Land-titling Triumphs and the Aftermath: Paradoxical Geographies of Power and Violence;’ I thank my co-conveners Monica Hernández and Shanya Cordis, as well as Tania Li for her insightful discussion and comments at the 2017 American Association of Geographers conference. Irina Wenk, Esther Leemann, Jennifer Bartmess, and Micah Fisher also moved our conversations on post-titling forward. Aguyje to my Paĩ and Paraguayan interlocutors. Finally, the two anonymous reviewers and JPS editors provided excellent guidance and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I include many terms in Guarani following the anthropological tradition of introducing ‘non-Western’ concepts into the ‘Western’ canon, such as potlatch, minga, or kula. Reading and incorporating these terms is a small decolonial shift in Western epistemology which I believe is worth the potential ‘clunkiness’ in reading.

2 A tekoha is the physical and spiritual place where the correct and good way of Guarani life can be carried out, and where direct kin groups live together connected by footpaths. From teko (reko/heko): way of life/customs, and the suffix –ha denoting place.

3 The Guarani in Eastern Paraguay are composed of Paĩ Tavyterã, Mbya, Avá, and Aché, each with different titling histories. The Paĩ Tavyterã Guarani are likely descendants of the Itatin Guarani, composed of those who went back to the forest and those who resisted reduction (Sušnik 1965). Indigenous groups in the Chaco region face different challenges.

4 The Proyecto Paĩ Tavyterã was a collaboration between applied anthropologists from the University of Bern, Switzerland and indigenists (Grünberg 1988).

5 Paĩ Tavyterã use Paĩ for short to refer to themselves.

6 Land titles are housed at the National Institute for Rural Development and Land (INDERT), the Paraguayan Indigenous Institute (INDI), and regional archives, all of which are incomplete archival records.

7 Key to my data reliability is achieving what in grounded theory has been called ‘saturation’ (Strauss, and Corbin 1998), where ethnographic data is collected iteratively and coded, and further research reveals no new variations.

8 See Hetherington (2011) for a detailed ethnography of how incomplete archives have been used to gain campesino title. State officials have also been processed for locking files in their desks, impeding next steps.

9 Land was sold to foreign companies such as CAFE, Industria Paraguaya; see Folch (2010) and foreign nationals such as Carlos Casado and Clarence Earl Johnson.

10 This amount is for Indigenous communities east of the Paraguay River.

11 For example, one former president of the Paraguayan Indigenous Institute (INDI) was sentenced to 10 years prison for selling Indigenous land.

12 Liquor.

13 I observed that communities with poor road connectivity must rely less on purchased goods and tend to have a wider variety of cultivated foods. This is also likely because they were established in the 1990s, have more land, and were able to build up seed stores.

14 The concept of finding happiness and belonging for oneself in a place is expressed in Guarani through the terms ‘vy’a’ or translated roughly as hallarse in Paraguayan Spanish. This couple simply said ‘ndorovy’ai’ (we weren’t happy/we didn’t find belonging) to explain why they had left the other community.

15 ‘La tierra es de quien la trabaja’ was born of the Mexican Revolution and figures prominently in many campesino movements across Latin America.

16 ‘Ñande Paĩ reko ha ñande ka’aguy’ in Guarani.

17 Pseudonym.

18 See Schmundt (1997) for an in depth article on the nuances of the differences between political and spiritual roles of leadership. Paĩ reko katu/marandu is the path toward perfecting Paĩ values, practices and knowledge.

19 I highlight capital at these two scales as it circumscribes rural peoples’ opportunities by ensuring that some accrue lands, capital, access, and the continuing ability to carry out their livelihoods, while others are neglected and evicted. This follows Harvey’s (2009) analysis of accumulation by dispossession.

20 A permutation of ‘The Title and the Rifle’ (Grajales 2011).

21 This is a Guaranization of the Spanish for private property.

22 I thanked them for their invitation and said I hoped the young men enjoyed my present of bananas and fish. The ceremony ends in a lip-piercing and the young men eat soft foods for a month afterwards.

Additional information

Funding

Grants from the University of Arizona, Inter-American Foundation, US Department of Education [P022A159946], National Science Foundation [1558558], and P.E.O. Foundation provided funding for different phases of this project.

Notes on contributors

Cari Tusing

Cari Tusing is an Assistant Professor at the Temuco Catholic University, Chile. She holds a PhD in SocioCultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona and an MA in History and Memory from UNLP, Argentina. She has conducted ethnographic research on urban women’s memories of the Chilean dictatorship and land titling in Indigenous and campesino communities in Paraguay. Her current research documents Mapuche Lafkenche foodways in southern Chile (Lafkenmapu). She focuses on landscapes, political ecology and settler colonialism in South America through feminist and collaborative methodologies.