The people of the Gran Chaco and those of the Paraná Plateau were culturally very different but for most of three centuries were tied together by the mutual hostility of the dominant peoples of each area. These Native American groups and their native and European allies and dependents fought with each other periodically, and warfare was the normal relationship between these two culture regions in the late sixteenth century. This chapter looks at the people of the Chaco in their aboriginal cultural state, as they got the artifacts that enabled them to make the changes that revolutionized their lives, as they chose missions when the culture of the mounted warrior no longer served their needs, and as they returned to the Chaco when the mission system fell into ruins. It also looks at the culture of the Guaraní as they adapted to the early Spanish settlers’ demands for labor and women, as they moved into nucleated settlements that Europeans helped them to build – including Franciscan reductions, encomienda towns, and the Jesuit missions. It finally traces developments after the departure of the Jesuits and after independence.

THE PEOPLES OF THE CHACO

A flat alluvial plain sloping from west to east, the Chaco lies north of the Río Salado between the Río Paraná-Río Paraguay system to the east, the foothills of the Andes to the west, and the current Paraguayan-Bolivian border. In the 1500s nonsedentary, band-level peoples speaking Guaycuruan languages dominated much of the Chaco. The peoples whose descendants would later be known as the Abipon, Mocoví, Toba, and Pilagás inhabited the plains and scrub forests of the southern Chaco, while the ancestors of the Mbayá toured the northern Chaco above the Río Pilcomayo. They were first known to their Spanish and Guaranf enemies by a variety of names such as Mepenes or Frentones and Guaycurú, which often reflected their appearance or style of dwelling. In the southeastern Chaco, Abipon peoples developed three major subdivisions by the 1700s that corresponded to bands: plains dwellers, forest dwellers, and a riverain people, once separate, who identified themselves as the Abipon after conquest. The Mocoví at contact lived along the western Río Bermejo, although some bands migrated eastward toward Santa Fe (Argentina) in the early 1700s. The Toba, often allied with the Mocoví, recognized three major subdivisions in the seventeenth century.