Quando todos são Guarani: a guaranização indígena em escritos do século XVI nas Províncias do Rio da Prata

Abstract

This work describes and analyzes written sources produced during the sixteenth century that bring information about the Guarani of the colonial period. These historical sources were conceived by chroniclers who witnessed the first contacts and who lived among indigenous peoples of the Provinces of the River Plate, and also by chroniclers who wrote from their offices, subsidized by oral reports, transmitted by New World explorers, by official documents of the Spanish administration and by other written papers dealing with indigenous peoples. The purpose of the descriptions and analyzes is to demonstrate by the bias of Cultural History, by the methods of Etymology, that some writings of this historical period bear an idea that we consider to be guaranization. For this work, the guaranization idea that we are proposing does not necessarily happen through the way of contact between different peoples, but mainly in the narrative field. Therefore, guaranize is to diffuse a generic view, intentionally or not, that the colonial Guarani was a people that occupied demographically wide geographical space, reproducing homogeneous sociocultural characteristics in different places and different temporalities, that submitted other peoples, due to its capacity warrior, superiority of their culture and influence of their language. Therefore, guaranize is to exalt one people to the detriment of another, is to make a native sociocultural plurality invisible in the name of a sociocultural singularity. The sixteenth-century chronicles that traced the first contours that we identified as guaranization, and which influenced the writing production on the Guarani, developed in later centuries, were produced by Luiz Ramíres, Sebastião Caboto, Cabeza de Vaca and Juan Lopes de Velasco. These authors have printed in their narratives the marked presence of colonial Guarani in different spaces and their strong influence in the context of interethnic relations.