Development Studies: Socio-economic Development from an Interdisciplinary Perspective Saleha Erdmann |
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
History History of the Guarayos The Guarayos are descendents of Guarani immigrants from Paraguay. It is unknown when the first Guarayos arrived from Paraguay, but it is possible that they were the 30,000 indigenous people that Nuflo de Chavez brought to Bolivia in 1564 from Paraguay. Originally they immigrated to the Gran Chaco region and later moved to Santa Cruz and the Beni. The Guarayo were always one nation, unlike their neighbors the Chiquitaneos who were “reduced” by the missionaries from several different tribes. (To describe a group as a “reduction” means that several different groups were combined into one group, this was a common tactics of missionaries when establishing missions among several different tribes.) The Guarayos did not have a central government. In their decentralized patriarchal system each family group had a chief who gave advice during peacetime and led during wartime. The Guarayos were nomadic and warlike people who depended on hunting, fishing and gathering inside the rainforest of the Oriente region of Bolivia. It is difficult to know what Guarayo culture was like because the historical sources are missionaries and other Europeans who considered the indigenous people savages. For example, the Franciscan missionary Jose Cardus described the Guarayos as follows in his book published in 1886:
The condescending tone and racist tendencies of Cardus’ writing are obvious, but we can still extract a certain amount of truth from this paragraph about the old Guarayo culture. Other authors confirm that the Guarayo people were not shy but very social and open. An important figure in the Guarayo cosmovision was the Abuelo (Grandfather), who helped create the world and was the lord of the forest. Cardus describes with disgust the Guarayo customs to honor the Abuelo even within the era of the missions. But the explorer D’Orbigney describes their religion fondly, although still with a certain degree of condescension:
The Guarayos had sporadic contact with the Jesuit missionaries before the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries, but not enough to significantly influence them. The Jesuits evangelized the Chiquitaneo towns, the neighbors and enemies of the Guarayos. Cardus describes a few cases in which the Guarayos ate their Chiquitaneo captives. It was the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries that changed and erased the majority of the old Guarayo culture.
The missionaries’ new structure ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Guarayos and changed the organization of native society. The Franciscan missionaries were expelled from Bolivia in 1938 by the government. Control of the Guarayo towns passed into the hands of the white administrators who became the civil authorities. The secularization of the missions resulted in the conversion of the Guarayos into peons on the white haciendas (plantations), a form of life more or less equivalent to slavery. The Guarayos suffered a lot at the hands of the white authorities.
The organization of Apoyo Para el Campesino-Indigena del Oriente Boliviano (APCOB) estimates that before the Spanish conquest there were a million indigenous people in the Tierras Bajas (low lands) of Bolivia; now their numbers have been reduced to 220,000. It is certain that indigenous populations, such as the Guarayos, have seen significant changes in recent centuries. Today the Guarayos are “sedentary people and practice slash and burn agriculture…they are fundamentally indigenous campesinos [farmers].” The Guarayos still maintain some aspects of the old culture.
They have also conserved some traditional values, like reciprocity. A young person explained to me the concept of minga (or pota in Guarayo), which is the idea that one helps another to work his chaco. It seems that today the largest threats to modern Guarayo culture are not the Franciscans, but factors such as the introduction of television and deforestation. History of the Missionaries In the first decades of the 19 th century, Father Gregorio Salvatierra began his persistent efforts to evangelize the Guarayos and establish permanent towns. He founded some towns, but every time the indigenous inhabitants abandoned them to return to the forest after a few years. In 1823 the Franciscans of the Colegio de Tarata were charged with the Guarayo missions and thus began to help Salvatierras to establish missions. Between 1827-1900 the Franciscan missionaries established six Guarayo missions: Ascencion (the capitol), Yaguaru, Yotau, San Pablo, Salvatierra and Urubichá. Urubichá was founded in 1862. The Franciscans introduced the agricultural system of the chaco, carpentry, weaving and knitting, cattle, schools and, of course, the Catholic religion. Cardus writes that
Like the Jesuits in the Chiquitaneo towns, the Franciscans brought Western music to the missions as a tool of conversion and an important aspect of mass.
The missionaries also used songs in mass and translated many songs to the Guarayo language. Through the process of evangelization (which was a form of colonization, although much more peaceful than the conquest by civilian Spaniards) much of the old Guarayo culture was lost. In 1886, Cardus wrote that the Guarayos
The Franciscans were expelled in 1938, but now have returned to Bolivia. Father Walter Neuwirth arrived in Urubichá en the 1970’s and there had been at least one other priest before him. Mother Ludmila Wolf also arrived in the 1970’s, some years after the Father. The people of the town give Father Walter a lot of credit for the work that he has done in Urubichá. In many informal conversations various people told me that Father Walter built the majority of the town; he built houses, the church, the Institute, and more. He is well loved by the people of Urubichá. History of the Old Music here (edit first) The History of the Instituto de Formacion Integral de “Coro y Orquesta Urubicha” and of SICOR In January of 1989 Father Walter attended a festival in the town of El Puente where he observed a young man playing violin in a procession from the church to the plaza. This young man was Ruben Dario Suarez Arana, an eighteen-year-old music student. Father Walter had been worried about the loss of music in Urubichá. When he heard Ruben’s music Father Walter invited Ruben to come to Urubichá to teach in the parroquia. These first visits by Ruben were to develop musicians to accompany the mass. Ruben brought his friends to help teach in Urubichá, including Arturo Molina, the current director of SICOR. In 1992 Ruben and Arturo prepared a Christmas opera to present with the Urubicheno musicians. With seventy-three participants they presented the opera in San Javier. Father Walter wrote: “The success was great!” In 1996 the Asociacion Pro Arte y Cultura (APAC, the Pro Art and Culture Association) created the first Festival Internacional de Musica Renacentista y Barroca Americana “Misiones de Chiquitos” (International Festival of American Renaissance and Baroque Music of the “Chiquito Missions”) and invited Ruben Dario and the musicians of Urubichá to participate. In three months they prepared everything for the festival. Some of the musicians already knew how to play or sing, but others did not. My friend Juan Carlos, a graduate and teacher at the Instituto, told me how Father Walter had announced during mass that they needed musicians for a choir and orchestra to perform in a festival. Juan Carlos responded to the announcement and began to learn to play the cello, in three months time he and other new students learned enough to be able to be part of the choir and orchestra.
After the festival the question was, now what? There was no structure in place nor resources to continue with musical instruction. They had only prepared for the festival. Groups outside of Urubichá offered to help address this lack of resources, for example, the prefectura offered to pay the salaries of three teachers and some individuals wanted to donate instruments. However, to receive these donations they needed an institution. Together Ruben Dario Suarez Arana, Arturo Molina and the Mother Ludmila created the Instituto de Formación Integral de “Coro y Orquesta Urubichá” (Institute of Integral Formation of the “Choir and Orchestra of Urubichá”). The Institute included music, weaving and wood working programs, although the name seems to imply that the Institute is only for music. At first there were no teachers, so the experienced music students began to teach the new musicians. Juan Carlos began teaching when he was fourteen years old and has continued since then. After the success of Urubichá some Chiquitaneo towns asked Ruben Dario to start similar programs in their own towns. But there weren’t enough people or resources to create more programs. That’s why Ruben came up with a plan to empower the students at Urubichá so that they could go out to other towns to initiate new music programs. At first this new program was called Proyecto Formando Músicos en la Amazonía de Bolivia (Project Forming Musicians in the Amazon of Bolivia), now it is better known as SICOR (Sistema de Coros y Orquestas; in English, System of Choirs and Orchestras), but the complete name of the institution is SICOR Formando Músicos en la Amazonía de Bolivia. Today there are fifteen music programs—one Guarayos (which is Urubichá), four in Santa Cruz and ten in Chiquitanea. Although SICOR coordinates the fifteen music programs, Urubichá and the program Hombres Nuevos (New Men) in Santa Cruz are the foundations of the umbrella institution. Urubichá and Hombres Nuevos have the two symphonic orchestras. The other orchestras are made up of string instruments only. The Urubicha and Hombre Nuevos programs are also the academic centers of SICOR, but Urubichá is the only one with a school. That is why all the other programs work in relation to Urubichá and the musicians in the other programs are required to attend workshops there. Today there is a team of forty-five teachers that work with the SICOR programs. picture of the brass Arturo Molina explained to me that SICOR wants to provide sources of work inside of the communities instead of drawing young people to the city. “We don’t want to depopulate the towns,” he told me. In Urubichá the Institute currently has three hundred musicians and an orchestra of eighty members. The students can begin the program as young as eight years old and there is no age limit. With its human resources SICOR somehow manages to maintain its program with few material resources. There are not enough instruments or stands for all the musicians and many of them are broken. I experienced the effects of a shortage of cello strings when one morning we only had two cellos with a full set of strings for a class of three students (however, there were at least three other cellos that were missing strings). The lack of resources invokes creativity in the members of the Institute. For example, if there are not enough A strings, the solution is to “peel” a C string. In recent years the leaders of SICOR have dreamed of something more in Urubichá. The parroquia has given them four hectares of land on which to build a large conservatory in Urubichá. The plans are ambitious and in need of significant funding. However, the Institute and SICOR have always had ambitious dreams that today function with fame and success. next: Identity back to senior project page Viceminesterio de Cultura de Bolivia, 2002. Cardus, 1886: 135-141, neuwirth, 2000: 1. Cardus, 1886: 142, Neuwirth, 2000: 1, SICOR. Cardus, 1886: 65, Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 172, Hermosa Virreiria, 1972: 75, Neuwirth, 2000: 1, Viceministerio de Culturua de Bolivia, 2002. Viceministerio de Cultura, 2002. Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 172. Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 174, Hermos Virreiria, 1972: 77. Cardus, 1886: 62, Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 172, Neuwirth, 2000:1. Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 172. D’Orbigney, cited in Ibarra Grasso, 1985: 404. Cardus, 1886: 86-87, Neuwirth, 2000: 1. Viceministerio de Cultura de Bolivia, 2002. Hermosa Virreiria, 1972: 76, 97. Carvajal Carvajal and Plaza Martinez, 1985: 172. Viceministerio de Cultura de Bolivia, 2002. Anonymous 1, 30 November 2005. Anonymous 1, 30 November 2005, Cara Mondori, 2005.
|
|||||||