counterclockwise

While at Thanksgiving this year (which was an exceptionally good party), I had the chance to go to a place in southern Paraguay called Trinidad, where the meticulously maintained ruins of an old Jesuit mission can be found.

In the early 18th century, slavers were decimating the indigenous populations of Paraguay and many other places. They justified this by saying that while they were wreaking horrible damage on the lives of the people they captured, they were really doing them a favor in the long run, insofar as their enslavement also presented an opportunity to baptise them and give them better afterlives.

The Jesuit missions were an attempt to undermine this argument by preemptively converting the indigenous people to Christianity. They were progressive, even by modern standards. The mission had an educational system, subsidized care to the poor and infirm, and cooperated with the preexisting chiefs. The angels carved onto the cathedral had indigenous features - a strange and sad sight, considering that modern Paraguayans would just about riot if the local cathedral tried the same thing.

The Jesuits got away with it all for a good while, but eventually their political enemies caught up with them and their permission to operate in the territory of Paraguay was revoked. And today the people are Catholic, bilingual, and clamoring at the gates of the foreign embassies in Asunción to get work visas for back-breaking agricultural labor and hotel maid jobs. So in the end, it’s hard to say who won.

The Guaraní word of the day is petei, meaning one. It can also be used to mean “a” or “an”, although Guaraní speakers don’t use that form anywhere nearly as often as English speakers do.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Guaraní, Pictures, Peace Corps Paraguay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.