Eastern Bolivian Guarani

The Eastern Bolivian Guaraní, or Ava Guaraní, are an Indigenous people formerly known as Chiriguanos or Chiriguano Indians. Noted for their warlike character, the Chiriguanos retained their lands in the Andes foothills of southeastern Bolivia from the 16th to the 19th centuries by fending off, first, the Inca Empire, later, the Spanish Empire, and, still later, independent Bolivia. The Chiriguanos were finally subjugated in 1892.

The Chiriguanos of history nearly disappeared from public consciousness after their 1892 defeat -- but were reborn beginning in the 1970s. In the 21st century the descendants of the Chiriguanos call themselves Guaranis which links them with millions of speakers of Guarani dialects and languages in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

The census of 2001 counted 81,011 Guaraní, mostly Chiriguanos, over 15 years of age living in Bolivia. A 2010 census counted 18,000 Ava Guarani in Argentina. The Eastern Bolivian Guaraní language was spoken by 33,000 people in Bolivia, 15,000 in Argentina, and a few hundred in Paraguay.

The common name for the Eastern Bolivian Guaraní since the 16th century has been variations of the name "Chiriguanaes", a word of Quechua origin which refers to lowland-dwelling peoples, possibly with the pejorative meaning of "people who die from freezing." In the late 16th century, the Quechua term was Hispanized to Chiriguanos. Although Chiriguanos usually refers to Guarani language speaking peoples in eastern Bolivia, the Spanish sometimes applied the term to all Guarani peoples and other lowland people speaking non-Guarani languages living in the eastern Andes and the Gran Chaco region.

The Chiriguanos called themselves "ava," meaning humans. The Guarani people are believed by archaeologists to have originated in the central part of the Amazon rainforest and migrated southward at an uncertain date. Equally uncertain is the date they arrived in eastern Bolivia. The majority of archaeological sites in the Andes foothills are dated from 1400 to 1500 CE, but one graveyard has been dated as early as 200 CE. It seems likely that different groups of Ava-Guarani, later known as Chiriguanos, arrived at different times, slowly displacing, enslaving, and assimilating the Arawak-speaking Chané living there. The historical Chirguano were a synthesis of the Chané and the Guaraní.

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