Os processos de expansão territorial das igrejas evangélicas, pentecostais e neopentecostais, e as mobilizações sociopolíticas Guarani e Kaiowá na reserva indígena Te’yikue e nas retomadas Pindo Roky, Te’yi Juçu e Itagua

Abstract

This research analyzes the sociopolitical mobilizations of the Guarani and Kaiowá peoples of the Te’yikue Indigenous Reserve, located in the municipality of Caarapó (MS), in the context of the expansion of Evangelical churches and their effects on the reorganization of community, territorial, and spiritual life. The study is based on the understanding that missionary presence in the village is not limited to the religious field, but directly affects the organization of territory, Indigenous schooling, leadership structures, and the Guarani and Kaiowá territorial and ethical geography of teko, tekorã, and tekoha. The investigation is grounded in prolonged fieldwork, including interviews with ñanderu, ñandesy, Indigenous pastors, teachers, community leaders, and youth, as well as participation in community meetings and the analysis of institutional documents, pedagogical projects, and oral records produced in everyday community life. The research seeks to understand how religious practices, disputes over political and religious leadership positions, and institutional mediations are articulated with processes of re-tekoization and reterritorialization, resistance, and the continuity of reko, within a context marked by territorial confinement, religious pluralization, and external pressures from the State and non-Indigenous society. The analysis highlights that the Indigenous school emerges as a strategic space of territorial mediation, where calendars, forms of knowledge, moral discourses, and future projects are negotiated, with the active participation of ñanderu, ñandesy, community members, and Indigenous educators. Although Evangelical churches introduce new forms of sociability and belonging, they also generate tensions with traditional spirituality and collective modes of organizing the tekoha. In this scenario, Guarani and Kaiowá sociopolitical mobilizations are not expressed only through direct confrontation, but also through political, religious, social, cultural, and territorial negotiation strategies. These strategies involve care for collective well-being, mediation of community, family, and institutional conflicts, the strengthening of the word (ñe’ẽ), the defense of territory, and the preservation of ancestral memory. The study concludes that, in Te’yikue, processes of evangelization do not result in mere cultural assimilation, but rather constitute a complex field of disputes, overlaps, and resignifications, in which Indigenous subjects face ongoing challenges to exercise protagonism in the production of their own territorialities and in the affirmation of their political autonomy, identity, language, economic production, territorial governance, Indigenous education, Indigenous school education, and spirituality.