ferreira tupi guarani

Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions ofTime and the Body

On an April morning in 1999, as I stood talking to Mariano Tupa-Mirim,an 18-year-old Guarani Mbya who works as a health agent on the Terra Indi'genaGuarani de Itaoca, in southern Brazil, I watched three-year-old Joacir, five-year-old Angelina and eight-year-old Edson play ambulance." The childrensgrandfather, karat (shaman) Henrique Firmino, watched them from the family skitchen, a large thatch-roofed construction with no walls, packed dirt floors,and a row of cotton hammocks slung across the wooden beams.

Alzira Fernandes, theabstract

Guarani children of Southern Brazil who live off gar-bage dumps subvert the tribes cultural order by turn-ing the future into the present in their role-playingacmities While the Tupi-speaking Guarani adultsbelieve that severe hunger and scarcity are necessaryconditions for the passage to the Land-without-Evil,the kids suggest that the mythic paradise can be amundane reality. Miniature vegetable gardens andtoy truckloads of rood create the "divine abundancefeatured in the promised land. Non-Indian grave-yard diggers and missionary preachers are trans-formed into Guarani warriors and prophets by youngshamans who blow tobacco on improvised dolls.The childrens critique of human society bears wit-ness that the high incidence of infant mortality cantransform the tribes apocalyptic \isions of time andthe body, because it calls for major changes in col-lective behavior, including the acceptance of the com-forts of sedentary agricultural life.

karai s wife, preparednoodle soup"—spaghetti

collected at the nearbvdumpsite cooked in saltywater—while pushingher newborn grandson,Claudinei, in a hammockby the fire. The womantried, unsuccessfully, toscare away the flies thatinsisted on cruising overthe babys body. Becausethe\ are located on thenorthernmost section ofthe reservation. Mbyahouses are only 800meters (half a mile) fromthe city garbage dump. Inanother hammock layJurandir da Silv.i, age one

Ox !,»•>•»,>! i.v Latin American \iuknptltgy "I I) '.JN 16') <.op\ right ZQC2 \nicri. an tachropotogped •Wociation

128 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

Mariana K. Leal FerreiraUniversity of Tennessee

and a half, who had just returned from the Mongagua Municipal Hospital,where he was treated for second degree burns on his back, chest and head. Analbino, Jurandirs skin could not tolerate an entire day under the sun at thedump, where both his parents scavenged for food. The child was only givensome lotion and antibiotics when I personally took him to the City Hospitalof Mongagua, after two unsuccessful visits his mother had previously made.

Dr. Pedro, the physician in charge of the office the day I took Jurandir in,said he had not paid anyattention to the bov theday before because to him'the boy did not evenlook like an Indian, butlike a mendigo (home-less)." The man went onto say that "had [he]known that the boy was areal Indian, [he] wouldhave seen him prompt-ly." Dr. Pedro was afraidthat I, as a "doctor" my-self, would file a com-plaint against him, sincethe Fundacao Nacional deSaiide (FUNASA), re-sponsible for indigenoushealth in Brazil, requiresthat Indians be given pri-ority treatment.' He add-

resumo

CriarKjas guarani vivendo em lixoes do sul brasileirosubvertem a ordem cultural do propno povo aoantecipar o fucuro em brincadeiras do cotidiano.Enquanto adultos guarani, pertencentes ao troncolingiiistico tupi, acreditam que a fome e a escassez severassao condi<;6es necessarias para transcender aTerra-sem-Mal, as crianâs sugerem que o parai'so mi'tico pode serreaJidade mundana. Roâs em miniatura e caminhoesde brinquedo carregados de comida recriam a "divinaabundancia" da terra prometida. Coveiros e missionanosnao-indios sao transformados em guerreiros e profetasguarani por jovens pajes, que assopram fumaca embonecos improvisados. A cri'tica das cnan<;as a sociedadehumana e testemunha de que a alta incidencia demorcalidade infantil pode alterar as visoes apocalipticasde tempo e do corpo guarani porque exigem mudanâsimportantes no comportamento coletivo do povo,incluindo a aceitaâo dos confortos da agnculturasedentaria.

Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Bod) 129

ed that maybe, as an anthropologist, I could help him learn "how to identifyIndians from whites, since now that they don't go naked around anymore orwear feathers, it is hard to tell."

These children, however, are indeed 21st century Brazilian Indians, asso-ciates of the largest indigenous nation in Brazil, the 38,000-member Tupi-speaking Guarani. In their play, they demonstrate a systematic response to thedehumanizing conditions under which their parents live and work on thereservation, at dumpsites, in hospitals and as cheap labor force for missionar-ies, farmers, tourists and government officials. Their games, three of which Idescribe here, interpret the everyday experiences of life in this coastal villagein the southern state of Sao Paulo through a radical re-interpretation of theGuarani religious concept of Ymy Maraey,3 the Land-without-Evil, an apoca-lyptic vision of time and the body familiar to anthropologists, especially throughthe writings of Helene Clastres (1995 [1975]) and ethnographers of the earlyand mid 1900s (Cadogan 1950, 1959; Metraux 1927, 1948, 1979[1928];Schaden 1963, 1974[1962]; Unkel 1987[1914]). In the process, they rejectthe passivity of their elders, who seem to have been bludgeoned into acceptingthe continual assaults and violations of their dignity as human beings thathave become part of everyday Guarani life in Itaoca.

In this essay, I discuss the importance of childhood agency in conditionsof social inequality. I want to understand how the Guarani Nhandeva and theGuarani Mbya of southern Brazil experience and create the world they live in,by looking at the children's critique of human society as expressed in theirenactment of daily life. I elect the autonomy of the children's universe as mybasic proposition and argue, with Hardman (1973:87) and other social theo-rists, that children should be studied as people "in their own right, and notjust as receptacles of adult teaching." A call for children to be understood associal actors, who fashion their own worlds in the midst of excruciating cir-cumstances, has been advanced by various anthropologists (Chin 1999; Hart1979, 1997; James et al. 1998; James and Prout 1997; Nunes 1997).

The kids' world appears, in these studies, not merely as a small-scale rep-lica of the adults' quest for survival, but as a relatively autonomous domain,regulated by its own sound reasoning. Acknowledging the importance of chil-dren as agents of their own destinies can show social scientists, administra-tors, policy makers and health professionals where investments can be madein order to improve the quality of life of populations confined to the bottomrung of the social ladder. The emphasis on childhood agency also brings theo-retical and methodological contributions to the social sciences, and especiallyto anthropology, where children are still seen "as a defective form of adult, socialonly in their future potential, but not in their present being" (James et al. 1998:6).


The anthropological literature about Tupi peoples—the first to be con-tacted by Portuguese colonizers along the Brazilian coast—conveys a greatdeal of information about "native" children. Children are socialized into adult-hood, and invariably defined as "miniatures of an adult world" (Fernandes1951:224) or as "small scale adults" (Baldus 1937:44). In the chapter "Indi-vidual and Family" of the classic Fundamental Aspects ofGuarani Culture, EgonSchaden classifies as "almost negligible the infant Guarani culture" (1974:60).Children's activities, including their play, are reduced to imitations of theirelders' actions, and no agency is ever granted to the little ones: they are socialonly in their future potential as grown-ups.4 Guarani culture and the culturesof other Tupi-speaking groups appear as a homogeneous whole shared by allthe children, who are only expected to learn and accept the set of traditionallysanctioned norms that determine behavior.5

The present ethnographic essay reveals that this is not true for contempo-rary Guarani children in southern Brazil. The energy of the kids' performancesaptly conveys their perceptions of the dehumanizing situation they face onthe reservation, and strategies they devise to reinvent Nhande Rekd—the as-cetic and dangerous Guarani way of life discussed by the above mentionedethnologists since the early 1900s, and other contemporary scholars (Brandao1992; Chamorro 1998; Ferreira and Suhrbier 2002; Meihy 1991; Melia 1987;Suhrbier and Ferreira 2001; Viveiros de Castro 1987). In their play, the chil-dren challenge the Guarani adults' conviction that the severe spiritual disci-pline of Nhande Reko, encompassing strict fasting, rejection of mundane plea-sures or "temptations," and intense praying and dreaming, is a necessary con-dition to reach kandire, or immortality. Kandire enables transcendence to theYwy Marae'y, the Land-without-Evil. This is where Guarani adults hope tolive the "divine abundance,"6 a place in which the land provides fruit withoutbeing sowed and where the Guarani body can achieve the same everlastingquality of the Ywy Marae'y itself {yury land, maraey indestructible).

Tupi-Guarani migrations to the Land-without-Evil were documented byPortuguese officials and missionaries as early as the first half of the 16th cen-tury. Several thousand Indians at a time were known to have abandoned theirvillages to follow a great karai who had promised them "a beautiful land whereall the things would come naturally and abundantly, without any difficultynor labor" (Metraux 1927:21). Of the 10 to 12 thousand Guarani that headednorth towards the Amazon river, only about 300 survived the journey (Hill1995:vii). Guarani karaf appear, in these writings, not only as healers, butabove all as religious and political leaders who have the prophetic power,through the use of sung and chanted "beautiful words," to lead migrations toYwy marae'y (Clastres 1995).

Tupi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body 131

These aspects of Guarani religious life, first described by anthropologistsstudying people living as horticulturalists and hunters in the coastal Atlanticforest and the savannah, who were in good health and with relatively greatcultural and political autonomy, might seem irrelevant to the lives of the chil-dren of Itaoca at the turn of the 21st century But, in fact, I found them to bekey to the kids' performances, in which such ideas both shape and expresstheir own perceptions of major transformations they are faced with today

Under the Development Plan of the 1950s, the Brazilian federal govern-ment drastically reduced the size of Guarani territories by opening the land insouthern Brazil to homesteading, and confining Guarani communities toundersized reservations. Encapsulation in diminutive lands, often shared withtraditional enemies such as the Kaingang or Terena Indians, as well as expul-sion from traditional lands strongly traumatized the Guarani, causing severedepopulation and the rise of infecto-contagious diseases (Almeida 1988;Clastres 1995; COMIN 1988; Ferreira 1998b, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 2001b;Meihy 1991, 1994; Monteiro 1984). Losing control of the land where theyhunted, planted their crops, raised their children and buried their dead meant,to various Guarani communities, the coming of a cataclysm. According toSchaden (1963) and Metraux (1948), the Guarani interpreted the white men'sstrong presence on Indian territory as a sign for the end of this earthly world.In reaction to this crisis, and previous ones, the Guarani of southern Brazilhave been known for setting off in huge migratory movements always headednorth, and having the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding reference.

Experiencing Nhande Reko and envisioning apocalypse has thus increas-ingly meant subjecting oneself to tremendous suffering and humiliation onreservations, banana and sugar cane plantations, hospitals, and garbage dumps.Guarani children make clear that they realize that sickness and prematuredeath impair the ability to transcend the finite existence of humankind onYmy Mbaemegua—this bad, destructible world—to the infinitude of the YwyMarae'y, the Land-without-Evil (Clastres 1995:76). This earthly realm is im-perfect because doomed to future destruction, while the heavenly domain ischaracterized by unlimited opulence and leisure, no work, and denial of allprohibitions. "This amounts to say that evil—labor, law—is the society. Theabsence of evil—the Land-without-Evil—is the counter-order" (Clastres1995:56).

In their play, the children reveal how they have chosen to battle inequal-ity, recreate reciprocity and reinvent Guarani apocalypse. Fr6m their perspec-tive, unless the idyllic qualities of the mythic paradise are reproduced here andnow on this wicked world, they will not attain kandire, but die prematurelyand end up in the Cemite'rw da Igualdade. This is the municipal cemetery inMongagud—a small beach resort located on the southern coast of the state of


Sao Paulo, 80 kilometers from Sao Paulo City—where Guarani kids are bur-ied in cardboard coffins cemented side-by-side in cubby holes in an eight-footwall. They die of starvation and dehydration, tetanus, typhoid fever, leptospiro-sis and tuberculosis, but are nevertheless buried "without discrimination," asone of the cemetery's keepers put it in 1999. "They should be grateful," theman added, "they have a place to drop dead" {devem ficar felizes por ter ondecair mortos). The performances presented in this piece reveal that the littleones want to achieve kandire without dying, and illustrate the ways in whichthe children have transfigured Nhande Rek6 in order to remain well and alive,recreating the abundance of the Ywy Marae'y here and now, rather than in anunapproachable overseas eternity.

While play may be a complicated matter because its politics are oftenconsidered ambiguous, it is not only in their daily play and work that Guaranichildren reveal an impressive comprehension of, and propose creative solu-tions to, the painful and complex issues they face today. The children at Itaocaextend their political commentaries on reality through their songs, in or out-side of the opy or prayer house, as will be seen, as well as through their graphicrepresentations of the world they experience. In their drawings, Guarani chil-dren and young adults also suggest that the Land-without-Evil can be an earthlyreality. The barren, infertile reservation land is transformed into a lush andthriving territory, covered with plentiful vegetable gardens and rich huntinggrounds. The immediacy of the cities' dumpsites, banana farms and cemeter-ies is smothered out of the portraits. Sickly, famished children often material-ize as xondaro— warriors whose bodies have achieved the immortal essence ofthe mythic paradise. The aesthetic quality of small-scale representations ofGuarani social life draws its value from the dimensions of a changing worldthe youngsters are trying to create and convey through the work of art, andplay. In these drawings, too, the younger generations elaborate their politicalcommentaries on reality, such as in the drawing presented below, produced bythe Mbya teenager Celso Benite in 1999, when I asked him to draw about hisvida (life) at Itaoca. The drawing depicts, as Celso explained, Guarani chil-dren at work, cutting brush and planting corn, while others are on the road tovisit their parents. At the bottom, the artist added the following words:"We had lots of woods. The white man entered, fenced [them] in and cutdown lots of woods" (Ferreira and Suhrbier 2002; Suhrbier and Ferreira2001).

The ideas conveyed in these drawings, as the ones expressed in role-play-ing activities, are not immature, nor do they lack an understanding of what"really happens." Neither are the Guarani children's critique of human societymerely an "inversion" of the ideas contended by their parents and other adults,


asToren (1993:463) proposes.More and more attention hasbeen paid to childrens percep-tions of the world, becauseideas that traditionally trick-led down from the ruling ormiddle classes are now ema-nating from the bottom—from teenagers, preteens, andeven younger children (Hart1997). Escalating economicwoes in many poor nations,such as Ecuador, Colombia,Rwanda, and Zambia, havespurred the formation ofchildrens councils, a majormovement that is takingmany different forms in vari-ous countries (Wright2000:2)

Three role-playing activities selected for this piece, performed in 1998and 1999 by children between the ages of two and 12, illuminate the rel-evance of childhood agency in recreating Tupi-Guarani apocalyptic visions oftime and the body. The performances, presented ahead as texts describing therole-playing activity or game event itself, are (1) the singer, the cook and thetin can gatherer; (2) the doctor, the Indian and the ambulance driver; and 3travelers, missionaries and Guarani warriors. Ethnographic, empirical researchamong children has the power to reveal 'a completely different world, so dif-ferent that we seem to be confronted by a different order of being Reynolds1974:34).

I was able to observe and talk to Guarani Mbyi and Guarani Nhandevachildren at the Itaoca Indigenous Land, in the city of Mongagui, and nearbysites on the southern coast of the state of Sao Paulo, between March 1997 andOctober 1999. Boys and girls were observed and interviewed at spaces theypredominantly play and work: water spigots where they actually wash familyclothing, but with make-believe foam because ver\ rarely can the\ afford realsoap; house patios in which they cook scraps of food from the Mongaguidumpsite, while dreaming it is their much awaited feijoada (black beans withpork), frango assado (roasted chicken) and churrasqutnho (barbecued meat);barren, sandy fields phgucd with ants and other insects where the kids plantminiature gaidcns and sometimes pretend to harvest basketfuls of juic\ man-

134 .journal of Latin \merican Anthropology

gos, tangerines, avocados and bananas; and the opy or prayer house in whichthey sing and dance to the sound of violins and drums played by young sha-man apprentices. These are the few spaces over which the children have somedegree of power and control, and where the choices they make impact firstand foremost their present situation, and also yield predictive power over thefuture.

I was also able to follow the children around in hospitals, health centers,banana farms, and at the city of Mongagud's garbage dump and cemetery. Thedump and the cemetery are located side by side on the northernmost borderof the Ita6ca Indigenous Land, in the municipality of Mongagud. The varioushealth facilities and banana farms are situated in what is known as the BaixadaSantista—the metropolitan and the suburban areas located near the city—and the Port of Santos, advertised as "the door to the main Latin Americanmarket" by the Brazilian government.

Two of my own children, Pedro and Djuni, who were eight and 13 at thetime they accompanied me to the Itaoca Village in 1998-99, helped me envi-sion intricacies of Guarani role-playing activities by pointing out to me thatthe kids were frequently "playing" hospital, ambulance, cemetery, burial, andmissionary, and by showing me their toys. We were initially struck by a four-year-old girl carrying a small Guarani basket with its usual geometric decora-tions, filled with used antibiotics containers and a few syringes she collectedat different health care centers in Mongagua, after being treated for spiderbites, bronchitis, scabies, diarrhea, pneumonia and various undiagnosed tu-mors on her head. When the girl's "babies" cried, she gave them a shot, be-cause she didn't want them to "die." While at first the activities seemed to bemake-believe performances in which the Guarani children were fantasizing or"just playing," it later became clear that they were also busy at work, engagedin a worldmaking process informed by, among other things, their very ownperceptions of the dangers and risks they face today in a situation of what isnow called "globality" (Albrow 1996). In the state of globality, the deregula-tion of world markets adds to the vulnerability of a large portion of the world'spoor.

In Brazil, now the seventh largest economy in the world, the increasinggap between the rich and the poor, and widespread corruption in governmen-tal agencies—including the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI (FundacaoNacional do fndio), as I have shown elsewhere (Ferreira 1998c)—have thrownthe Guarani and the majority of the country's 216 indigenous peoples into asituation of extreme poverty. To make matters worse, the Guarani look likepoor peasants, rather than Indians. They do not wear body-paint, feather head-dresses or other stereotypical Indian ornaments. When compared to the tall,strong and bold Ge-speaking Kayap6, Xavante and Suya of central Brazil, for


instance, the Guarani appear less attractive due to their low stature, emaciatedappearance and shy attitude. Ge populations of central and northern Brazil,who have realized the political possibilities of dress and undress, and the ad-vantages of wearing body ornamentation to look like "real" Indians (Conklin1997), have received considerably more attention from FUNAI, anthropolo-gists, national and international NGOs and the broader Brazilian society.Because the Guarani, as well as the Kaingang and Terena of southern Brazil,do not look or act like Indians (performing "war dances," for instance), theirsituation as boias-frias or neo-slaves—who either take or are given antidepres-sants (including Prozac) to tolerate the 12-hour day, six-day workweek onsugar cane plantations (Ferreira 2001, in press), or who work as garbage col-lectors on the coast—does not cause much indignation. As the white, middle-class teenager who set Galdino Pataxo on fire as he slept on a bench in Brasilia,the country's capital, explained in 1996: "I didn't know he was an Indian, Ithought he was a mendigo (homeless)." Had Galdino been wearing a head-dress or some other bodily ornament, he might not have been killed (Conklin2000; Ferreira 1998b).

In sum, the agonizing situation of the Guarani people in Southern Brazil,who are confined in diminutive reservations, receiving little or no institu-tional support from FUNAI, from the municipality of Mongagua where theyreside, and very little popular sympathy is a historical product in which globalityand the distorted and romanticized image of the "real," authentic Indian playmajor roles. Because the Guarani are poor, and because they refuse to con-form to stereotypes of cultural authenticity, they are qualified as mendigos, orless than human, and are thus denied access to basic human rights. Today, thedesire to be viewed as Guarani, rather than poor peasants, has lead Guaranichildren and young adults to decide to incorporate certain alien features (featherheaddresses, for instance) to their cultural repertoire, especially when display-ing themselves in public. Luiz Karaf, the young headmen of the Itaoca village,wears a head ornament at important business meetings among non-Indians sothat, as he put it in July 1998, "the white folks listen to what I have to say."Luiz Karaf, 24 years old in the year 2001, represents a generation in which wecan clearly see Guarani children and young adults as agents of their own destinies.

The Guarani Population in BrazilIn Brazil alone, the total population of the Guarani nation has been esti-

mated at 38,000 individuals, divided into three subgroups: the Guarani Kaiowdor Pai Tavytera, located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul; the Guarani Mbyd,located in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Espfrito Santos, Parana", Santa Catarinaand Rio Grande do Sul; and the Guarani Nhandeva, also known as Avakatuete'and Chiripd, who live in Mato Grosso do Sul, Sao Paulo and Parani (ISA


2001:11). The largest Guarani populations outside of Brazil can be found inParaguay, where approximately 25,000 Kaiowd live (ISA 2001:11), followedby Argentina with 10,500, and 5,000 in Bolivia (http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/sa, 5/16/01). In the state of Sao Paulo, where the Ita6ca Indigenous Land thatinterests us is located, there are currently 1,307 Mbyd distributed in 13 terri-tories (whether officially demarcated or not), and 445 Nhandeva living inthree indigenous lands and two coastal shantytowns in the cities of Itanhaemand Mongagud (Ferreira 1999d).

The three Guarani subgroups—Mbya, Kaiowa and Nhandeva—are af-filiated with the Tupi-Guarani linguistic branch. The first two, Mbyd andKaiowd, speak the Guarani language with slight dialectal variation, and sharecultural knowledges and practices about apocalyptic time, transitory space,and the ideal of the indestructible human body (Brandao 1992; Cadogan1950, 1959; Chamorro 1998; Clastres 1995; Meihy 1991, 1994; Melia 1987;Schaden 1974; Unkel 1987; Viveiros de Castro 1987). Historical perspectiveson the migratory movements of the Guarani show a concentration of Kaiowain the area of the Paraguayan Chaco migrating towards southwestern Brazil(what is now Mato Grosso do Sul), while large groups of Mbya were initiallycontacted by Spanish conquistadors in Argentina and southern Brazil (Brandao1992; Cherobim 1986; Metraux 1948; Monteiro 1984).The third Guaranisubgroup, named Nhandeva by anthropologist Egon Schaden (1974:2), iscomprised of remnants of various Tupi-speaking groups, such as theApapokiiva, Avakatuete, Tanhygua and Chiripa. These nations were almostentirely decimated by Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors, and ended upforming small contingents of people in Sao Paulo, Parana and Mato Grossodo Sul who are basically Portuguese speakers today. The extent to which theNhandeva share the cultural repertoire of the other two Guarani groups is notclear. Early studies about the Nhandeva categorized them as "acculturated"Indians inevitably headed towards extinction (Cadogan 1950; Me'traux 1948;Schaden 1974).

It is important to note, however, that Guarani self-identification differsfrom the ethnic designations coined by anthropologists. The GuaraniNhandeva identify themselves as "Tupi-Guarani" or simply "Tupi." This isthe case, for instance, of the 150 individuals living in Aldeinha, a shantytownin Itanhaem, 30 kilometers south of Ita6ca. Headed by Catarina Guarani, thegroup founded the Awd Nimbonjeredju Association of Tupi-Guarani Indi-ans, representing the Tupi-Guarani Indians (or Nhandeva, according toSchaden) of the southern coast of Sao Paulo. The Nhandeva designation, inturn, is claimed by both the Mbyd and Kaiowd, because they are all related toNhande Ru, the Guarani Creator. When I asked Mbyd elders if the Tupi werealso Nhandeva, they agreed, but added that the Tupi were not Nhandeva Hete'i,


or "real" {verdadeiro) Nhandeva. Candido Ramirez, the oldest living Mbydkaraf in Sao Paulo (88 years old in 2001), now living in Itadca, explained thevarious ways in which the Guarani designate themselves and one another:

Candido: We are all Nhandeva, because we are the sons ifilhos) of NhandeRu. But only we are Nhandeva Hete'i because we are Nhandevaverdadeiros. The Tupi are Nhandeva, but not Nhandeva Hete'i becausethey are mixed people {gente misturadd). "Mbya" is the exact translation{tradugao exatd) for Guarani, and Mbya Hete'i is the real Mbya, the onewho visits relatives {aquele que visita os parentes). Because, see, we arepeople who are always traveling, moving from one place to another. Sowhen someone from another village comes to visit us but we don't knowwho he is, we call him "Mbya." We know he is Guarani, that's all. But wedon't know his family, if he is Hete'i or not. So we call him Mbya. AllGuarani are Mbya because we are always visiting each other. But when wetalk {conversar) and discover who that person is, we call him "Nhandeva'e."We know he's our relative, related to Nhande Ru {parente do Nhande Ru).Later on we talk some more and that person may become "NhandevaHete'i" because we know he is not mixed.

Mariana: How about women, is it the same for them?

C: Yes, it is the same. A woman visiting from Pindoty [a village near thecity of Cananeia] is "Mbya" until we know her, and then she becomes"Nhandeva'e" and "Nhandeva Hete'i."

M: How about the Kaiowa, are they also Nhandeva?

C: Yes, they are. When they visit they are also "Mbya." But their languageis a little bit different.

The differences between Guarani modes of self-identification and an-thropologists' nomenclatures for each of the subgroups account for some ofthe disparities in demographic information about the people, and generatequite a bit of confusion. This is especially the case when authors do not clarifywhat they mean by Mbya, Nhandeva, or Tupi-Guarani. Most scholars todayuse Schaden's (1974) definitions—Mbya, Kaiowa and Nhandeva—althougha few, like Helene Clastres (1995), use the term "Tupi-Guarani" to talk aboutthe different Guarani societies and do not attempt to differentiate amongthem. Others, like Mauro Cherobim (1986), get caught between Schaden'sclassification, now officially adopted by the Brazilian government and NGOsin Brazil such as ISA (2001), and the Guarani's explanations, and coin yet a


third (usually very confusing) classification. According to Cherobim, whowrites about the Guarani of Sao Paulo, "The Nandeva [sic] consider them-selves 'guarani' and the Mbiia, 'tupi'" (1986:26). Due to the lack of "recipro-cal acceptance" of these definitions, the author then chooses to work with thedistinction "indio" versus "civilizado" (1986:27).

In this study, I follow the classification advanced by Schaden (1974) anduse the term Mbyd to designate the Tupi-speaking adults and children wholive in Itadca and who identify themselves as "Guarani verdadeiros" or "Hete'i,"and "Nhandeva" to distinguish Portuguese-speaking individuals who identifythemselves as Tupi or Tupi-Guarani. The two groups do not interact in asystematic way on the Ita6ca Land—there is a different headman for each ofthe two separate cluster of households, and the daily activities, such as cook-ing and cleaning, and planting are not shared. Mbya houses are organizedaround the opy or prayer house, while the Nhandeva do not have an opy andtheir houses are scattered on the reservation. There are also various Nhandevafamilies living in plywood (or any other material they can find) shacks inmarshy areas or on the margins of highways on the outskirts of different citiesin the Baixada Santista. These families, as well as the 150 Nhandeva in Aldeinha,Itanhaem, are not recognized by FUNAI as "Indians," and do not receive anysupport from the government.

The Terra Indigena Guarani de ItaocaThe Aldeia Itaoca (Itaoca Village), as the Terra Indigena Guarani de Itaoca

is known in the area, was created in 1991 by a small group of Mbya whomigrated north to Sao Paulo from the states of Parana and Santa Catarina,and a few Nhandeva families dispersed on the coast of Sao Paulo, looking fora place to live. In April 2000, the land was officially delimitada (its officialboundaries identified) after a series of clashes between local landless peasants,drug dealers, and the Indians.8 The Aldeia Itaoca, however, is still not physi-cally demarcated (no visual boundaries have been set up), and neither is itpart of the city of Mongagua's "Plan of Urban and Touristic Development,"designed by city officials in 1999. Because of this, the Guarani do not haveaccess to any utilities (potable water, electricity, sanitation), and the city'sdumpsite actually invades some of the territory and contaminates small streamsthat run into the land, posing severe health problems to the Indians.

The small plot of land (533 hectares or approximately 1,304 acres) issurrounded by tourist summer houses, a banana farm, an evangelical church,a cemetery and the garbage dump—where tourists' household waste, hospitaltrash and industrial chemicals are routinely dumped. These are the sites towhich Guarani children graduate when they become teenagers and adults:boys pick bananas at the farm and mow the priests' lawn, girls clean tourist


houses, and adults excavate piles of garbage for food to eat and tin cans to sell.The cemetery—ironically called "Cemetery of Equality" (Cemite'rio daIgualdade) is the end of the road for the worldly existence of the children andyoung adults who were not able to achieve the marae'y quality of the Guaranibody: life expectancy is less than 45 years for men and women alike at theAldeia Ita6ca (Ferreira 1998b).

Before being summoned to work, the Mbyd and Nhandeva children atItaoca entertain themselves trying to make sense of the brutal reality withinwhich they are born. Everyday life feels like war: the children have to fight forfood, wood and water. The houses they live in are infested with rodents, fliesand cockroaches, and it is not easy to hide bits of stale bread and crackersfound in the dump from the equally starving animals. Drinking water is un-available near the houses, and the water the kids use to try to relieve their dry,parched skin covered with scabies, mosquito and even cockroach bites is filthy.For breakfast, there is usually nothing to eat: the lucky ones have cafizinho, ashot of watery coffee loaded with sugar; eventually, when the families can pickup old bread from the local bakeries on Sundays, the kids suck on dry breaddipped in coffee. This is considered "good food" {comida bod). The adultsexpect the kids to help them collect scraps of food at the dump on Tuesdays,Thursdays and Saturdays, when the trucks bring garbage from Mongagua andother nearby cities, and at street markets on Fridays and Sundays. When theadults have something to sell at the street markets, such as hearts of palm ororchids, the children are expected to find or beg for food and money. Ondifferent occasions, I witnessed Guarani children running back to Itaoca withempty bags, explaining to me that they were going back to try to set a trap forbirds and other small animals such as armadillos, because "a gente nao gostade comer comida do lixo" (we do not like to eat food from the garbage).While catching an armadillo in a trap, for instance, is rare, the kids oftencapture small birds, which they roast over miniature fires while pretending itis came de vaca (beef).

Most Guarani children thus refuse to follow their parents to the dump,and scavenge amidst piles of rotting rubbish, twisted metal pieces and brokenglass. Those kids who cannot escape what most adults see as inevitable fate—because suffering is part of the ascetic lifestyle necessary to migrate to theLand-without-Evil—try to get the best out of the rest: sling shots and smallbows and arrows are specially carved to fight off vultures and horses that alsocompete for food at the dumpsite. Once mining grounds are clear, the kidspull out special scavenging hooks to minimize the risk of sharp cuts andwounds. Most infected lesions the Guarani carry on their bodies are inflictedat the dump. Tetanus is a major cause of death for children and adults alike.


Daniela and Diego da Silva show scavenging hooks they use at the dumpsite, 1999-

As if the grotesque scenery of the dumpster were not enough, the kids'favorite distractions in their home village reveal how tenuous their hold onsurvival is. In their play, the children mimic the solitude experienced at hospi-tals, burial rituals of loved ones, and the fanaticism of proselytizers. But histo-ries of suffering are emblematic of something other than tragic and prematuredeath (Farmer 1996:227). Amidst the tragedy, the children are proposing con-crete and creative solutions to ameliorate the life of the people.

The Singer, the Cook and the Tin Can GathererTo 'play singer is a favorite diversion for Diego, Daniela and Angelica da

Silva, Guarani Nhandeva siblings who are nine, seven and three years old,respectively. The first time I watched the performance, in October 1998, Di-ego informed me he was imitating Chitaozinho, a popular country musicsinger in Brazil, while Daniela cooked and little Angelica gathered tin cans.The three children played on the muddy hillside next to their 12- by nine-foot shack, built out of scraps of wood, plastic, and old blankets and coveredwith palm tree leaves and asbestos tiles. Daniela used water from a stream thatflowed a few feet away, visibly contaminated by the neighbors pigpen. It is thesame water they drink when they are thirsty. It is the water supply that SueK,the kids' mother, relies on to cook, bathe the little ones and wash the family'sclothes.

Diego sang his first choice "I Gave Up Being a Cowboy for Her {Detxeide ser cowboy por eld), using a wooden microphone he himself carved out of


"caixeta" {Tabebuia cassinoides)—light white wood used by the adults to carvesmall animals to sell to tourists on the beach. He especially liked the song, heexplained, because his father had done the same thing: exchanged his "whitelife" {vida de branco) in the city for an "Indian life" (vida de indio) on thereservation with his Guarani mother. Meanwhile, Daniela prepared a feijoada,a typical Brazilian dish made out of black beans and pork, mixing leaves,sticks, dirt and water in a small aluminum pan, secured on top of three smallrocks and a small fire. This is where Suely prepares the kidss daily meal withthe scraps of food she brings in from the city's dumpsite. It was noon, how-ever, and the children still had not eaten. Diego went on to say that "singerslike good food, especially feijoada."

Little Angelica, in turn, was neatly arranging bottle caps in a small plastictruck and driving it around—mimicking the Guarani's main economic activ-ity as tin can gatherers at the dumpsite. Diego said Angelica "wanted to re-main poor" {quer serpobre), and thus chose to pick cans to sell to the men atthe dump: "she likes to go around naked and live in the garbage." Her brother,however, purposely went to school, claiming, "After I learn to read and write,I'll be a singer."

Suely da Silva, the kids' mother, listened to the conversation as she hungsome clothes on the barbed wire that separated her yard from the neighbors'pigpen. "Oh no, you are not," she exclaimed. "You will be damned just likeyour father, who does not even have a place to die" {vai ser danado que nem opai, que nao tern nem onde cair morto). The boy lowered his head, and tried topretend his mother had not embarrassed him by slaughtering his fantasy.

Like all the other Guarani Nhandeva women who live at Itaoca, Suely,who is 36 years old, is a single mother. She now shares the shack with Aldair,a 27-year-old "white," or branco, as she refers to him. As an indigenous woman,the mother of seven, and illiterate, Suely, who is in fact the head of the house-hold because Aldair is disabled, meets all the criteria to be considered in asituation of "extreme poverty," according to the 1991 Brazilian Census (Lemeand Biderman 1997). Under these conditions, Suely and her children are mostvulnerable to the consequences of malnutrition, hunger, and poor health: ris-ing levels of morbidity and mortality, according to the Pan American and theWorld Health organizations (Harrison 1997:452). All of the Guarani Nhandevahouseholds on the reservation are female-headed, giving women the majorresponsibilities to make ends meet out of virtually nothing. The family's high-est monthly income—100 reais or the equivalent of 40 U.S. dollars in 2001—is only achieved in the summer, especially during Carnival, "when the touristsdrink a lot of beer and make the dump fat," according to Suely's companionAldair, whom the kids now call "father."


Aldair had never mentioned to me he made a living out of the dump. Fora whole year the man made me believe he ran errands for construction work-ers in a tourist neighborhood, buying them cigarettes and cachaga (sugar canealcohol) at nearby stores and delivering it to them with his carroga, a woodenwagon pulled by his "most precious belonging," his horse Dourado or"golden"—perhaps an allusion to what he would rather be mining for. Aldair'syoungest brother "became a millionaire," as he likes to put it, mining for goldfor a few years in Mato Grosso. But this is something that Aldair regrets notbeing able to do. Untreated tuberculosis has crippled his lungs and legs, andhe can only push himself on the ground with the help of his hands and el-bows. Much like his companion and her kids, Aldair's teeth are taken over bycavities and his body is covered with scabs. Small mosquitoes fly around hiseyes, infected with chronic conjunctivitis. None of them own clothes, otherthan the ragged outfits they carry on their bodies, nor do they have shoes.Because the family manipulates deteriorated food, pieces of glass and metal,and eventually chemical residues, Diego, Angelica, Daniela and their parentsand other relatives at the Itaoca village are exposed to tetanus, typhoid fever,leptospirosis, scabies, gastro-intestinal diseases and tuberculosis (Ferreira1999c).

Both Aldair and Suely were disconcerted by the children's revealing per-formance, because they had never mentioned to me they searched for scrapsof food at the dump. Suely started weeping and I followed her inside thehouse. We hugged, as she pointed to a few ripe tomatoes, three oranges and afew wheat buns in a plastic bag that Aldair, with the help of Diego, was able toscavenge at the garbage lot. Like his sisters, Diego suffers from the "stigmata"of slow starvation: weight loss and wasting, edema, changes in hair textureand skin pigmentation, and abrupt mood-changes (Scheper-Hughes1992:183). The boy's stomach is swollen, he has very little hair and his skin isgray. In March 1998, Diego, Daniela and Angelica weighed 19, 14 and eightkilos, respectively, when they should be weighing at least 28, 22 and 14 kilos,according to the National Center for Health Statistics (Williams 1997:590-595).

Like other Guarani children on the Itaoca reservation and in other coastalvillages in the state of Sao Paulo, the kids' growth has been stunted by malnu-trition. Some, like little Angelica and her first cousin Joacir, also show signs ofmental retardation, a common consequence of severe hunger, according torecent research on physical growth and malnutrition among Brazilian indig-enous peoples (Martins and Menezes 1994; Morais et al. 1990; Santos 1993).Angelica is the only one in the family to possess an immunization record, butmost of her shots are long overdue. None of the children in the village havebeen immunized against tuberculosis, the greatest health problem in the area.


And very few have birth certificates. This means some Guarani children haveno civil rights, since lack of a birth certificate obstructs access to the rights andprivileges a country offers to its citizens, including basic health and education.

Although indigenous peoples in Brazil do not need documents to havetheir rights officially observed, most of the Guarani Nhandeva population inSao Paulo, including Nhandeva families in Ita6ca, is not identified by FUNAlas "Indian." This is also true for the 150 Nhandeva in Aldeinha, Itanhae'm, asit is for the 1,000 Pankararu living in two shantytowns, Favela Real Parqueand Favela Madalena, in the city of Sao Paulo, who do not appear in officialstate or federal records. Moreover, 13 Nhandeva families in Ita6ca have cho-sen to file land claims as non-Indian posseiros, or settlers, rather than demandtheir rights over the land as fndios; in this way, they can eventually receivefinancial compensation for inhabiting the reservation for ten or more years,when the area is finally officially demarcated. Because of this, and becausethere is hardly any official monitoring of indigenous birth and death rates inSao Paulo by the Fundacao Nacional da Saiide (now responsible for Indianhealth), the high rates of infant mortality among the Guarani are not ac-counted for in the country's national statistics, used by the Brazilian govern-ment to show that extreme poverty is being eradicated (UNICEF 1999).

Still bewildered by the children's revelation of life in the dump, Suelywiped her tears with the back of her hands and looked me in the eyes: "At leastthe dump is clean. Drugs are dangerous and you get in trouble. Here, every-body is clean." Suely was referring to the presence of white drug dealers atItaoca, who hide in the woods and eventually grow marijuana in the area. Ioften heard shooting near the villagers' houses and the Guarani told me toavoid walking back to Mongagua at night (a three kilometer walk from theentrance of the reservation to the highway Padre Manoel da Nobrega, wherestreet lights begin) "because the drug traffickers usually dump the people theykill on the road and it is dangerous." In fact, the local newspaper Tribuna deSantos often brought news of shootings and killings in the "poverty belt" aroundthe Mongagud beach resort and other towns such as Peruibe and Itanhaem,farther south down the coast of the state of Sao Paulo.

But when I asked Suely if she dreamed about the Land-without-Evil likeMbya men and women told me they did, she started crying again and replied:

No, there is no more hope. I guess we don't qualify anymore for that.That is something my father would talk about, the old people, but onlyfor those who lived the pure life {vidapurd). But we are all damned, thereis no way out. There is that saying that goes: "Whoever is born in thetrash, dies in the trash" (Quern nasce no lixo, morre no lixo). So we will dieright here.


Diego, her nine-year-old son, joined the conversation and replied to theimpertinent observation his mother had made earlier about his future plans:"No, mother, I will not be a tin can gatherer like my Dad. I will be a singer!And I will take you away from here!" Suely replied: "Nonsense! What an idea,a singer? Is that what you've been learning at school? God bless you! You willwork on the banana farm, much better than on the dump, hear me. But withall these worms inside your head, you are not going anywhere! You will gathercans just like your Dad!"

A few months later I walked into a small market in Mongagud looking forstrong black tobacco that karai Henrique Firmino had asked me to buy. I metSuely at the register purchasing four liters of cachaca (sugar cane rum). Thewoman was disturbed when she saw me, grabbed the bottles and left rightaway. Later on that day when she saw me through the window of her shackgoing up the hill to her sister's house, she shouted:

See, that's why we don't qualify for the Land-without-Evil anymore! Wedrink! Yes, Aldair and I are drunkards {bebados), we drink everyday! Comein and have a drink with us, so that you can understand!

I did go into her house, where I spent two days listening to her, and hertwo sisters, Nazare and Dolores, who later joined us from their homes locatednext door on the sandy hills of Itaoca. Each of them recounted life historiesfilled with emotional and physical abuse, whether as domestic servants work-ing for the rich in Mongagua and neighboring towns, or as the wives of whitemen who subjected them to domestic violence. As scholars working in otherparts of the Americas have documented,9 these patterns of violence againstwomen do not originate in the "cultural" or "psychological" traits of impover-ished populations, but rather from a concatenation of social forces that con-spire to promote extreme poverty and suffering among indigenous and otherminority populations. These include a model of development focusing onexport production, as well as rampant political corruption. At FUNAI, forexample, between 1997 and 1999, at least 13 contracts established betweenthe regional administration in Bauru, Sao Paulo and the Guarani in the BaixadaSantista were never honored, although the money was spent10; these vital con-tracts were for the purchase and distribution of seeds, tools, and other impor-tant agricultural products. The hunger and scarcity which resulted, coupledwith tremendous increases in the costs of living, brought about an escalatingincidence of child mortality, drug abuse and violence, and a general deteriora-tion in public health.

I asked another Guarani Nhandeva woman, Iraci Fernandez, to tell mewhat she sees or feels like when she goes without eating for hours or days at atime. The woman replied:


When I don't eat I see things, like a huge mountain of food.. ..So I pray Ican get to the dump on time to meet the big trucks that bring the goodfood from the supermarket. Last month my sister made it there on time:she got three whole cans of evaporated milk, bread, beans, spaghetti, youname it! So you've got to eat good once in a while, otherwise you diewithout ever being able to fly that high.

Iraci was referring to the hope the people who live off the dump hold onto, that they will be there when the cargo trucks from local supermarketsbring food with expired validation dates to the dump. But in Mongagua" thisdoes not happen very often, since major supermarkets are located in neigh-boring and much larger cities of the Baixada, such as Santos and Sao Vicente,30 to 35 kilometers north from the Itaoca reservation. One of the biggestdumps in the area is located in Sao Vicente, but during a few months in thesummer, because of the high influx of tourists in the area, the companies alsouse the smaller Mongagua garbage lot. When UNICEF (1999) was surveyingthe situation of children looking for food in dumps in 1998, the companiesalso used the smaller Mongagua site, afraid of the negative publicity they wouldget if caught dumping goods that could have been donated to needy familiesbefore the expiration date. This keeps the Guarani's hopes up, and some fami-lies eventually travel to Sao Vicente during the summer, quando o lixo estdgordo (when the garbage is fat).11

This same striking analogy between safe/clean garbage and dangerous/dirty drugs was drawn by another Guarani woman from the Itaoca Village,but from the Mbya group. Sonia also referred to her life on the dump, as Iwatched her cook some spaghetti her oldest son had been lucky enough tofind in a heap of trash:

I pray we can still make it to the Ywy Marae'y. At least the dumpyard isclean. I don't do drugs, I don't drink, and I don't have sex with white men.So I guess I still qualify for Ywy Marae'y.

Unlike the Guarani Nhandeva households, which are in the hands of thewomen because the men have "disappeared"—they have either been killed bydrug traffickers, in alcohol-related accidents or else are trapped in a web ofeternal debt on sugar cane plantations and banana farms—the Guarani Mbyahouseholds, located on the other side of the Ita6ca reservation, are headed byGuarani men. As the Mbyd like to put it, "we don't mix," which means thereare no marriages outside of the extended patrilineal families, and sex betweena Guarani and a non-Guarani is strictly forbidden. These are "temptations"one should avoid in order to qualify for migration to the Land-without-Evil.

According to karaf Henrique Firmino, the use of drugs and alcohol ham-pers the passage to an altered state of consciousness. An altered state of con-sciousness is a prerequisite to transcendence that can very effectively be ful-


filled by fasting. While drugs are considered "dirty" because they hinder one'stranscendental abilities, the dump is considered "clean" in spite of all the filth,since it embodies scarcity and thus provides for the state of hunger that isnecessary for spiritual transcendence.

The Doctor, the Indian and the Ambulance DriverUnlike the Guarani Nhandeva on the southernmost part of the Ita6ca

reservation, who only speak Portuguese, the Mbyd children communicate ex-clusively in Guarani. The Mbyd community maintains tight kinship ties, andsolidarity among family members is strong. Young indigenous leaders such asLuiz Karaf, who became the headman of the Ita6ca Village in 1997, have justbegun supporting community projects such as vegetable gardens and com-munal kitchens, with the food still coming from the dump, in most cases. ButLuiz Karaf—whose last name is an indication of his status as a shaman and aprophet—plans to get everyone out of the dump because, as he says, "thiskind of suffering cannot get us to Ywy Marae'y, only to the cemetery." Theyoung leader belongs to a generation born in the 1970s and 1980s whichbegan realizing, in its teens, that unless the conditions of life featured in theLand-without-Evil become a mundane reality, the Guarani world will bedoomed to destruction.

Back to the ambulance performance, presented in the opening of thisarticle, which karaf Henrique Firmino and I watched from the family's kitchen.Mariano Tupa Mirim, an 18-year-old Guarani Mbya who works as a healthagent on the reservation, sat by my side and helped translate some of the kids'idiomatic expressions into Portuguese. Stretched on a banana leaf out in theyard lay Joacir, who was then three years old and who weighed only ten kilos,rather than at least 14. Joacir was "very sick," according to "doctor" Angelina,his five-year-old sister, who pretended to give the little one a shot. Joacir fakeda faint cry. The "ambulance driver," eight-year-old Edson, ran around theopy—the ceremonial house, located right next to the kitchen, pulling the leafon the dusty ground, while reproducing orally the disquieting sound of thevehicle's siren. Suddenly, Angelina transformed herself into the boy's mother,and sat on the banana leaf to accompany her son to the hospital.

Edson, the driver, did not agree with her decision and tried pulling heroff the ambulance and away from her son. The girl insisted, hugging littleJoacir. At that moment Edson began throwing dirt on top of them. Angelinalet go of her son and ran towards her grandparents' house, followed by Edson.Joacir wiped the dirt off of his face and dashed through the doorway of theopy himself.

According to Mariano Tupa Mirim, their performance was only a nhewaga, in Guarani, or brincadeira, in Portuguese. That is, the kids were only"playing," nothing else.


£s6 brincadeira, nhe waga. They are going to the hospital because the boyis sick. The ambulance usually comes to the reservation to pick up sickchildren and take them to the Mongagud Hospital. If the child is not toosick, the doctor gives him a shot and sends him back to the village. If thechild is dying, he is hospitalized, that's all.

The ambulance driver Edson, however, brought to light dramatic detailsof the children's role-playing venture when we talked about it that evening.The performance was not mere fantasy, but an enactment of how the kidsinterpret the constant pilgrimage from one hospital to another, since vacan-cies for the poor are rare. The boy said they often played ambulance, and thathe would be a "real" (ete) ambulance driver himself when he was old enough,to make sure "all the Guarani get a ride."

Angelina, clarified the boy, did not want her "son" Joacir to ride alone inthe ambulance, because otherwise "she wouldn't know which hospital theytook him to, and would go crazy {ficar louca)" Edson then explained why hethrew dirt on Joacir: "If you go to the hospital, you die. If you don't go, youdie, too. So I was burying him at the cemetery already." "And what were yousinging?" I asked the boy. "I was singing Xekyvy'i." Mariano Tupa Mirin trans-lated the words:

Xekyvy'i Xekyvy'i My little brother, my little brotherEreo rire You have goneEjevy voija'a agud Come back soonJa'a mavy So that we can go togetherJoupive'i Venerating GodPara rovai jajerojy To the other side of the ocean.

The children performed under the impact of the recent death of theircousin Adilson da Silva, who was only 14 months old. He died of malnutri-tion and dehydration at the city hospital, three days after he was hospitalized.Like most of the 48 Guarani Mbyd children up to 12 years of age on theItaoca reservation, when I last saw Adilson a few days before his death, the boypresented signs of severe malnutrition. He was underweight (less than six ki-los instead of 11 or 12), had a protruding abdomen, dry, flaky skin, and thesoft spot on his hairless head was sunken in—a dangerous sign of dehydra-tion. We rushed him to the nearest Pronto Socorro (emergency unit) that sameday, but all the physician on call ever did was give his mother a hydratingpowdered solution (basically salt and sugar) to prepare at home, despite thefact that the water on the reservation is polluted.


fldilson da Silva

Luiz karaipoints to the grave ofAdilson da Silva, at the Cemite'rio da Igualdade, 1999.

Much like Edson, Angelina and Joacir, Adilson was recovering from amyriad of diseases that plague the reservation during the rainy season: inter-mittent fever, vomiting, diarrhea, plus a variety of skin and intestinal para-sites. These ailments are caused by hunger, proximity to the garbage dump,and lack of medical assistance. The incidence of these diseases is so high thatthe Guarani themselves do not identify the occurrences as "health problems."They are just 'part of life." When asked about someone's health or a certainchild's sickness, the elders will invariably say tudo bem (all is well), unless thesymptoms are so severe as to include high temperature followed by prostra-tion, strong pain, breathing difficulties or seizures.11

Among the Guarani of the Itaoca and neighboring villages, most childrenare stunted they are 50 percent below the average weight and 30 percentbelow the optimum height for their age. Some, like Samuel Benites, a five-year-old boy who weighed only 18 pounds rather than the expected 40, alsoshow signs of mental retardation: slow, unintelligible speech and lack of mo-tor coordination. Samuels mother, Arlinda Gomes, who has nine kids and isa widow—her husband was run over on the interstate in 1998—hopes that,like many other children, her son can migrate to the Land-without-Evil veryshortly: "I know he is sickly, and can't play with the other boys. But he will befine in the Ywy Marae'y."

The Guarani children's performance delineates a tragic reality. Angelinaembraced her son" Joacir, who awaited transportation on the banana leaf,because she was afraid of the separation. She might not have seen him again.

1\ipi-Guarani Apocalyptic Visions of Time and the Body 149

The girl knows parents are not allowed to accompany their kids in the ambu-lance. She is also aware, out of personal experience, of the invariable "treat-ment" that awaits them at local hospitals: a painful (600-milligram) shot of"Benzetacil," a powerful antibiotic13 that I myself saw being injected on alloithe 17 kids I drove to the Agenor de Campos Hospital in 1999. According toa local physician, Dr. Roge*rio Tabet, "Benzetacil is the best medication be-cause the Indians' main problem is lack of hygiene." Never did I see Dr. Tabetperform the trial test that should precede the administration of the drug toprevent side effects, such as the collapse of circulatory function that can leadto respiratory and cardiac arrest, then death. Dr. Tabet did admit in 1999,however, that he did not visit the Itaoca Village because he was "afraid ofbeing infected by the Indians."

Last but not least, we need to consider the drama of the chronic lack ofhospital vacancies represented in the children's performance. In real life, thekids are forced to wait alone in unfriendly corridors, hooked up to intrave-nous fluids, for a vacant hospital bed. Parents are not notified about the littleones' destinies, and there are at least four different hospitals the children canbe taken to.14 Government officials from different organizations in the state ofSao Paulo blame one another for the anarchy of the health care system, andthe tremendous amount of bureaucracy involved in the process obstructs com-munication with the Indians. The children suffer. Guarani health agents atItaoca who should be, but are not paid by the Fundacao Nacional de Saude,spend precious time trying to locate the missing children so that relatives canvisit. Sometimes the information comes in too late: a death notification andburial authorization at the Cemetery of Equality.

Travelers, Missionaries and Warriors

Donations of second-hand clothes, toys and furniture from tourists andmissionaries, as well as leftover bread from local bakeries and even cattle bonesfrom nearby butcheries are common at Itaoca. The arrival of a truckload oflollipops and toys, brought in by Protestant missionaries of the EvangelistChurch Assembly of God, caused major excitement among the Guarani chil-dren in March 1999. I witnessed the distribution of goods to the kids, whowaited patiently in line and thanked the preachers for the candy with an auto-matic "God bless you" (Deus Ihe pague). Following the offering, the kids weretold to sit in a circle and sing "Grateful Rain" {Chuvas degrafa), the openinganthem of the book Christian Harp.

After singing, adults and children alike scattered throughout the village,carrying home the valued gifts. I remained seated in front of Zeferina andAntonio Fernandes' house, watching the couple's kids—Mizael, age seven,


Florcntina, four, and Izacl, two—handle the candy and plastic toys along withtheir cousins Dirceu, 11 and Kitia, ten.

Florcntina and Izael filled up three small trucks with candy and pushedthem in circles around an extinguished bonfire, used by the children's grand-mother to cook some beans. Florentina recited: "Tembi'u ma owae ma!" (foodis coming!). As Izael noticed I was watching them, he brought me a lollipop.I asked him what they were doing, and the boy responded: "We're visiting ourrelatives."

Other children joined in. Dirceu and Kitia, the oldest ones, sucked lolli-pops and hummed evangelical carols, while undressing plastic dolls. These arethe cheapest dolls you can get at local supermarkets: three reals (U.S. $1.20)for six blonde-haired, blue-eyed flimsy dolls dressed in pink and white mini-skirts and blouses. The naked figures were placed on the ground, and the kidsexchanged candy from one truck to another. Mizael came out of hisgrandfather's house smoking tobacco in a traditional pipe and singing in theGuarani language. The boy spit twice on the ground and began blowing smokeon the unclothed dolls. The children observed Mizael attentively and startedhumming the same tune. Two months earlier I had seen Guarani kids fromthe neighboring Aguape'u reservation proceed in a similar way, blowing smokeon improvised dolls—that time handmade out of old socks, shoelaces andother materials—at the Cemiterio da Igualdade. (One of the kids told me hewas blowing smoke on Ilson, the graveyard digger, but I did not have thechance to carry on the conversation because of a funeral for another Guaranichild being held at the spot.) At this point, Mizael's mother, Zeferina, steppedoutside her doorway and reminded the kids it was time for the xondaro okaygud,the daily singing and dancing cerimony Guarani kids dedicate themselves toat the opy.

Everyone wrapped the candy in their clothes and dashed up the hill to-wards the opy. Zeferina explained:

They practice xondaro, which is part of the Guarani religion. It bringsstrength and health to them, and they learn about Nhande Rek6. Butxondaro really is the name of a warrior. A long time ago we battled andkilled our enemies. Today, the kids are learning other things related toxondaro, so they won't forget the culture.

I asked Zeferina if many Guarani were interested in the missionaries' evan-gelical teachings, to which the woman replied:

It means we respect other peoples' religions. We allow the missionaries tocome here, sing and give us presents. But the Guarani religion is sacred,we will never let it go. The kids just adore xondaro. When they sing Chris-tian tunes, they are just playing (nhe waga).


Meanwhile, tribal leader Luiz Karaf invited me to watch the xondaro per-formance at the prayer house, where 15 children between two and 14 years ofage danced and sang in Guarani for almost two hours; they were accompaniedby the violin of Sflvio Karaf, the brother of Luiz Karaf and one of the villagesyoungest healers. They sang about Nhande Ru, the Guarani Creator; NhandeReko, the Guarani way of life; and Ywy Marae'y, the Land-without-Evil, lo-cated rovai jajapura, across the ocean. Political themes have also been incor-porated into the villagers' musical repertory, as expressed in the followingsong chanted by the children about the historical process of Guarani landexploitation by Portuguese colonizers. Here, as in other instances of their play,the children are producing a political commentary about their current livingsituation:

Peme'e jevy peme'e jevy Give back, give backOreyvy pera'a va'e kue The land that you stoleRoiko'i hagua From usPera'a va kue roiko'i hagud. So that we can keep on living.

When xondaro was over, I asked the children who had been handling thecandy and toys earlier to explain to me what they had been doing. Katia, the12-year-old, said she had been "playing missonary" with the plastic dolls. Mizaelinformed me that he blew smoke onto the dolls to find out "what sacred placethey came from" {mamo tetaguireju). The boy wanted to transform them intoGuarani xondaro, warriors. Little Florentina remarked that she was "takingfood to her relatives at the Pindoty Village," near the southern coastal town ofPariquera-acu, because "they are very hungry." In fact, like the Guarani atIta6ca, the Pindoty villagers have also been surviving off garbage dumps.15

When asked about the importance of xondaro, Mizael clarified that "xondarocan help go to the other side of the ocean, where there is plenty of food."

Later on that month, however, I saw Mizael and some other boys plantingsweet potatoes on the hillside behind the boy's house. I was surprised becauseZeferina, Mizael's mother, had told me not long ago that "the Guarani do noteat sweet potatoes because it is dirty food." "Why is it dirty?" I replied, andthe woman answered: "The physician at the Pronto Socorro told me thatIndian people need to eat strong food {comida forte), like bread, rice, beansand meat, and not dirty food {comida suja) like sweet potatoes, manioc and allthose other filthy tubers {raizes nojentas)."

Mizael wearily asked me if I liked sweet potatoes, and I replied that "mykids and I frequently eat yellow, orange and purple sweet potatoes, becausethey are tasty and very good for our health." Feeling reassured, Mizael smiled,looked straight into my eyes and said:


I am so hungry, I cannot wait for Ywy marae'y I want to be a strongxondaro here, at Ita6ca.

Mizael and other young leaders like Luiz Karaf reaffirm the hope thatimmortality can be reached without dying, challenging the widely held beliefamong early chroniclers and ethnographers of Tupi-Guarani societies, as wellas present-day government officials and the general population, that Chris-tianity stands behind Guarani "beliefs" in the Land-without-Evil (Clastres1995:5). As Luiz puts it,

The missionaries around here say death is the way to the paraiso (para-dise). Do they want us to die? I can see my people dying because they aresick and have no food, so I tell them the world has changed, that we can'tgo without eating because we are weak, we are not marae'y (indestruc-tible). And we can't wander around so much because we are not free likebefore.

Unlike the older karaf of his village—his own father, Onorio de Souza,and shamans Candido Ramirez and Henrique Firmino, Luiz Karaf, a youngprophet himself, calls for a rejection of an austere, painful, and dangerousnomadism in favor of the comforts of sedentary agricultural life. Can thephenomenon of nomadism originate within societies that no longer considerthemselves free? Moreover, unlike the Christian perspective of death as themeans of resurrection, Guarani religious rites are governed by the belief thatman can reach kandire, that is, attain immortality without undergoing theordeal of death (Cadogan 1950:50; Clastres 1995:79). "When the Guaranicjie," explained Luiz, "e ofim (it is the end)."

Land, Reciprocity and Nhande RekoWithin the recently established arena of social studies of children, an-

thropologists in Brazil have started turning their gaze towards indigenouschildren's participation in the making and remaking of the world experienced.Crianga Indigena. Ensaios Antropoldgicos (Lopes da Silva and Nunes 2002)represents the awakening of Brazilian ethnologists' concerns with children asagents of their own destinies. Xavante, Xikrin, Guarani, Macuxi, Assurini andother indigenous children who are currently trapped within the apparatus ofthe world system increasingly demand to be heard as they devise novel strate-gies that can provide them with ontological security. The children in south-ern, northern and central Brazil make very clear which dangers and risks theywant to take and which ones they want to ignore as they genuinely participatein recreating their own culture and social environment.


While childhood agency is not an invention of either modernity orglobality, it is precisely because Guarani children live today in a situation ofextreme inequality that decisions they make about their own destinies havethe potential to promote social change. Their efforts at visionary liberationare not overwhelmed by the solid Mbyi, or rather loose Nhandeva constitu-tions of the Guarani family. Neither are their efforts at liberation significantlyhindered by the highly authoritarian structures of FUNAI. First, studies onindigenous education in Brazil have shown that indigenous children in gen-eral have greater liberty and autonomy in their daily lives than non-IndianBrazilian children (Lopes da Silva, 1987; Lopes da Silva and Ferreira 2001,2002; Melia 1979, 1989; Monte 1996). Second, because childhood agency isintrinsically tied to forms of social organization, particularly forms of politi-cal organization (Hart 1997; James and Prout 1997; Lopes da Silva and Nunes2002), structural transformations in kinship systems16 and the current par-ticipation of Guarani young adults in indigenous movements in Brazilhave greatly empowered children to demand that their voices be heard andtheir rights respected. Third, in spite of FUNAI's and other governmentalagencies' highly authoritarian and paternalistic structures, the fact that theGuarani are not really considered "Indians," but mendigos, paradoxically grantsthem quite a bit of freedom.

The situation of the Guarani and other indigenous children in Brazil isstrikingly different from that of the modern child in "first world" countries,such as the U.S., Canada, England, France, Switzerland, among others, wherechildren have become the focus of innumerable projects that purport to safe-guard them from physical, sexual and moral danger (James et al. 1998:7).Unlike African American children in the United States, for instance, whereincreased autonomy is often hampered by increased surveillance (Chin 1999),Guarani children are faced with the paradox of being neglected by the state,but enjoying a greater degree of freedom because they are under less scrutinyand control. The perverse relationship established between the Brazilian stateand its children is well captured in the videorecording Ilha das Flores or Islandof Flowers (Goulart et al. 1990), a bitter film about Brazilian values, the foodchain, and the human condition. Poor peasants who live in the Ilha das Flores,in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, are given the chance toscavenge for leftover food after the owner of the garbage dump feeds his pigs.As Goulart et al. put it, this vicious situation stems from the fact that "thepoor have no owner, no money, and are free."

For the Guarani children of Ita6ca, imagining and investing in the cre-ation of a better world are powerful and meaningful actions that end up un-dermining, to a large extent, the legitimate authority of their parents to con-trol them and the illegitimate authority of the Brazilian government to pro-


tect them. "Illegitimate" because the Brazilian state has not followed up on itscommitment to respect and promote the basic premises of the Convention onthe Rights of the Child—the most widely accepted human rights instrumentever, protecting the rights of more than two billion children worldwide—ofwhich Brazil is a signatory. While I agree that it is necessary to distinguishbetween the liberating or transformational potential that is imagined and insome way created by children's play episodes and the realties that bracket andeven squelch that potential (Chin 1999), Guarani children do exercise theircompetence at making the world a better place for the reasons outlined above,as well as through their ability to learn from one another. In other words,autonomy and strong peer interaction among Guarani children account forthe development of their competency in dealing with an increasingly riskyand cruel world.

The profound impact of this potential for social change can be clearly feltin the actions of young adults (aged 18 to 25) at Itaoca and especially in theMbya community, represented by Luiz Karai, the current political leader, healthagent and teacher; Silvio Karai, shaman's apprentice and musician; MarianoTupa Mirim, health agent; and Basilio Silveira, the first secretary {primeirosecretdrio). Since 1998, when these young men took over the leadership of thevillage, replacing a Guarani elder who had a reputation for drinking and in-volvement with "white women," considerable changes have taken place atItaoca. I was able to follow very closely the reasoning behind the activities ofthese young adults during mathematics and health workshops they attendedbetween 1997 and 1999 that I organized through the Secretaria Estadual deEducacao do Estado de Sao Paulo (SEDUC). During the annual commemo-ration of the Dia do fndio, on April 19, 1999, rather than sponsoring theusual "Indian dance" at the central plaza in Mongagua, the Mbya communityinvited city officials to a "Guarani ceremony" at Itaoca. The highly politicalspeech delivered by Luiz Karai and Basilio Silveira to their guests during theopening ritual of the event reveal the leaders' intent to inaugurate a new erafor the Guarani people, based on the young generations' transformative energies:

Good morning senhoras e senhores, you are here today to learn many thingsabout the Guarani people, to learn the truth about us. Pay attention.First, we have chosen a Guarani name for our [Mbyi] village, and that isTeko Wya Pyau, which means Nova Esperanga (New Hope). As the newleaders of this village, we want to change many things in here. We wantour children to grow healthy, we don't want them morrendo que nem moscas(dying off like flies), eating off the garbage dump. ... We were also kidsyesterday and we refused to do that. We are not animals to eat trash, weare human beings.


We know this is hard, to change things around here, so that is why weneed you to learn the truth about us. We have the right to learn to readand write, to know our numbers and to speak Portuguese well, not be-cause we want to be integrated into your society, but because we need todefend ourselves from the people who want to take our land away fromus. How can we draw a map of our land if we don't know how to write, ifwe don't know your mathematics? How can we talk to the doctors in thecity if we don't speak Portuguese? How can we write our own books withthe true history about the Guarani?

Yes, we are starting to plant our gardens, even if the land you gave us isfull of sand. The children are happy, they are planting, too. We want ourkids to grow healthy, so we need tools and seeds, because FUNAI doesn'tgive us anything. We don't want to end up in the hospital, that's why weare learning how to use your medicine for the diseases that you contami-nated us with....So we are fighting hard {lutando duro) to change thisworld....Our biggest fight now is to demarcate the land, so that we canprevent all the invasions, and get this reservation included in your cityplan. Most of the reservations in Sao Paulo are demarcated, so why aren'tthe reservations here in the south [of the state of Sao Paulo] demarcated?This is my question, and this is what we want you to think about: Weneed our land demarcated as soon as possible.

During the following months, Luiz Karai and his "secretaries," as he likesto refer to his young assistants, met with government officials in the BaixadaSantista, in Sao Paulo City, and in Bauru, where the FUNAI headquarters forthe state of Sao Paulo are located. In April 2000, Itaoca was official delimitedby the Ministry of Justice, almost six years after being initially "identified" asindigenous land. A year later, in April 2001, the children and young adults ofItaoca walked the dusty road that leads to the entrance of the reservationholding signs that read: "Queremos a demarcacao de Itaoca ja!" (We want thedemarcation of Itaoca now!), while singing in Guarani the songs they practicein the opy. Of an estimated 60 Mbya who participated in the demonstration,at least 40 were 18 or younger, and the rest were young adults between theages of 19 and 25.

Final RemarksIn this piece I have attempted to show that Guarani children's perfor-

mances are not mere "games" or "play" but entail, instead, a critique of humansociety. The kids' criticism also embodies what they consider to be desirable


solutions to their most pressing problems. A reconsideration of Tupi-Guaraninotions of time and the body are at stake because in this earthly world, thebody is considered a perishable entity, prone to sicken and die. The capacityto endure hardships and suffering is desirable, however, because it is part ofthe transformation of the body into an inviolable and resistant (marae'y) en-tity, which cannot be destroyed. This is the ultimate quality that all things,material or symbolic, fully achieve at the Ywy Marae'y. Therefore, when Mizaelstates that he wants to become a Guarani warrior here in this mundane world,he is ultimately seeking the xondaro's endurance and ability to withstand abusetoday, and not in the future.

Moreover, when Mizael prophetically claims the transformation of prot-estant missionaries into Guarani xondaro, he seems to be trying to overturnthe Guarani belief in the future destruction of the world, which seems tooimminent in the face of such high rates of Guarani infant mortality and mor-bidity. The boy has been hospitalized many times, and according to his motherZeferina,

Mizael is afraid of dying. He wakes up in the middle of the night sweatingand screaming: "Don't take me, don't take me!" I ask him who and wherethey are taking him, and he says: "they are taking me to the cemetery inthe ambulance!" So I give him some chimarrao, reassuring him he will bexondaro, and he goes back to sleep.

If the life-history of Nhande Ru Pan—a mythical figure who reached theLand-without-Evil without undergoing the ordeal of death—states that it isnot possible to be both god and human simultaneously, but only successively(Cadogan 1959:59; Clastres 1995:77), Guarani children are telling us thatthe concurrent union of the human order and the divine world is not onlypossible, but highly desirable on this earthly world. Early, premature deathcan never be a prerequisite to immortality. In transforming the missionariesinto xondaro, Mizael dared to behave as gods do. By doing so, the boyhoped the gods would acknowledge him and admit him and his kin amongthem.

This apocalyptic vision of time and the body is central to the thought ofthe present-day Guarani (Clastres 1995:21), except that the cataclysms of thepast have been magnified because this bad, mundane world has become moreand more "imperfect." Avoiding cataclysms is now an extremely arduous taskwhich requires other political and cultural strategies, because the Guaranihave passed from one kind of necessity to another. Hoping to avoid cata-clysms, the children have set themselves to criticize the present cultural order,bearing witness that "there is no cultural order that does not think of itself asa transcendent order" (Clastres 1995:21).


This same perspective is also apparent in Diego's choice of being a singer,rather than a tin can gatherer like his father, or a banana harvester as hismother would have hoped. In his eight years of age, the boy can already envi-sion that in order to break free from the perverse cycle of misery that perpetu-ates hunger and scarcity among the poorest of the poor, that is, in order to betranscendent, he needs to invest in innovative strategies that guarantee a moreequitable access to material and symbolic capital.

The reflections generated by Angelina and Joacir in their ambulance per-formance also attest to the importance of children's creative thinking in at-tempting to transcend the cultural order. They turn down the ambulance ridebecause they also hope that immortality can be reached without dying, andthat if they want to make it to the place where the land provides fruit withoutbeing sowed, and where one does not die, they have to keep well and alive.Ultimately, the children are struggling to restore the foundations of the Gua-rani economy of reciprocity (Melia 1987), which guarantees the circulationof goods among the different Guarani communities, and can thus overturnthe destruction of the people and of the world. This is what Florentina's gen-erosity teaches us, when the little girl distributes her share of candy among thefolks at the Pindoty Village who are also hungry. To the Guarani, having noth-ing to eat is more desirable than having nothing to offer. Karai Candido Ramirezexpressed his frustration:

I am almost quitting my work as a healer (paje) because I have nothing tooffer anybody; nothing to offer you, nor him, nor her. How am I sup-posed to live the Nhande Reko this poor? The children cry of hunger,because they can't survive off green tea (chimarrao). We struggle but stillcan't make it. So I am passing on my duties to Henrique Firmino, who isyounger and stronger than me.

The truckload of candy sent by the children to the Pindoty Village isemblematic of their effort to renovate the Guarani cycle of reciprocity amongthe 18 different Guarani villages in the state of Sao Paulo, and thus offset thedestruction of the world. Triggering the cycle of reciprocity requires, however,an initial offering (Levi-Strauss 1969), and the children propose that theirelders accept the comforts of agriculture sedentary life as a means of guaran-teeing the circulation of all kinds of goods, material or symbolic. Howevermeager this exchange has been, with hardly any investment in agriculture,small and scant aspects of this circuit have outlasted the situation of absolutemisery that the Guarani have faced in Sao Paulo. Angelo Silveiro, the triballeader of the Pindoty Village in Pariquera-acu put it this way, in June1998:


Before moving to Pindoty, we collected leftover food {restos de comida) atthe garbage dump in Canan&a, so that everybody would have a littlesomething to eat. We shared our leftovers with our folks in the Rio BrancoVillage. Their situation is so bad! This is what the Guarani people are like:we share everything we have.

New changes have brought new inflections to the discourse of the YwyMarae'y: whereas in the past migrations were neither prompted nor accompa-nied by political or territorial claims (Cadogan 1959:50; Clastres 1995:70),today economy and prophecy have become inextricably tied together. Gua-rani reciprocity emerges here as a strategy that the children have tried to recre-ate in order to avoid a cataclysm. Their current reinterpretation of one of thefundamental aspects of Guarani religion—migration to the Land-without-Evil—in terms of the present-day situation is informed by the circumstancesof social exclusion and structural violence they experience on and around theItaoca reservation. The straightforward way in which the kids portray thesituation carries a great lesson of solidarity: even living under the predicamentof absolute poverty, the Guarani practice reciprocity. Children show each otherand their elders the importance of mutual help, by sharing the little they havewith the famished neighbor, even if this means they might not have anythingto eat the next day.

Attention to the children's world suggests that even if Guarani adults ap-parently deny it, they are hungry and have been struggling to accept what thekids have all along been telling them: that they should improve life conditionsin this domain of the cosmos if they ever want to qualify for life in the YwyMarae'y. The children believe death and sickness do not qualify as essentialconditions for migration onto a higher level of the cosmos.

Guarani children have invested in the reinvention of the Guarani NhandeReko by using elements of the past, it is true, but fashioned in terms of thepresent. The Guarani apocalypse becomes accessible here and now, rather thanin an unapproachable overseas eternity. The children's critique of human soci-ety asserts the need for radical disruption and negation of one of the mostfundamental principles of Guarani social life: that an austere, painful anddangerous nomadism should be a necessary transcendence to the Land-with-out-Evil. What the children are showing when they refuse to survive off gar-bage dumps, when they plant their own gardens, and transform missionariesinto Guarani warriors is that the mythic paradise can coexist at the same timeand place with this secular world order. The children's performances insinuatethat the apparent tragic and melancholic Guarani conception of the worldmight very well be "a subtle mixture of hope and despair, passion and action,and its disavowing appearance conceals a powerful affirmative impetus: in the


midst of their misery, men are gods" (Viveiros de Castro 1987:xxiv). Thisdriving force would probably be the source of power conjured by Mizael asthe boy tried to transform the evangelical missionaries into xondaro, the Gua-rani warriors. Doesn't Mizael anticipate that men can become their owngods?

Finally, what do Guarani children teach anthropologists about childhoodand about the human condition? I hope this piece has shown that seeingindigenous children as individuals whose autonomy should be safeguardedand fostered is an enormous step towards making the rhetoric concerningchildren's survival, protection, development and participation in making theworld a better place a reality. The situation of Guarani children in Sao Pauloat the turn of the 21st century evolves from a specific social, political andeconomic context which also includes moral positions from the broader Bra-zilian society about who "Indians" are and what they should be like. Even ifchildhood agency still is a highly contentious topic, the current worldviewand achievements of Guarani children are, to a large extent, a product of theirown social action and symbolic fashioning. Guarani cosmological founda-tions are refashioned in view of the kids' current Guarani worldview, in itsmodern configuration. Tupi-Guarani apocalypse as a futuristic outcome ofNhande Reko is reconfigured by the children's distinctive temporal rhythms,which turn the future into the present by acting upon the world in an attemptto recreate the abundance of the promised land—and ultimately, social jus-tice.

I end with a passage from a letter sent to me by Mariano Tupa Mirim, thehealth agent at the Itaoca Village, in July 1999. Mariano wrote in response tomy queries about the situation of the children he cared daily for at Itaoca:

The children are not going to school because we still have none. But theystill play in the opy. They learn a lot with the shaman, what our ancienthistory was like: the children played, danced and worked. Then timesstarted to change, and now we need to learn how to read, write, and livedocumented, because every day we need documents.

Many children do not like to be taught in the white men's religion, be-cause we Indians need to have our own culture. Because the [Guarani]law does not allow us to forget it or put the culture aside. The childrenthink about this and disapprove. Since I arrived here-at Ita6ca, manymissionaries have tried to teach the kids their religion, but no one hassucceeded.


NotesAcknowledgments. Grateful thanks are expressed to Aracy Lopes da Silva

(in memoriam), Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Ivo Patarra, Helofsa de Almeida,Eduardo Parodi, Hector Qirko, Faye Harrison, Amir Arman, Josh Schendeland the JLAA editor and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and criti-cal reading of the manuscript. I'd also like to thank the Guarani communitiesin Sao Paulo for all their support. The research was carried out during a post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Anthropology at the University ofSao Paulo, Brazil, funded by CNPq, the Conselho Nacional deDesenvolvimento Cientffico e Tecnol6gico (grant # 301499/96) from Febru-ary 1997 to July 1998, and by FAPESP, the Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisado Estado de Sao Paulo (grants # 98/09100-6, and 99/05689-9), from De-cember 1998 to November 1999.

This essay was originally presented at the 122nd Annual Meeting of theAmerican Ethnological Society, March 23-25, 2000 in Tampa, Florida. Itembodies material originally published in Portuguese in "Divina Abundancia:Fome, miseria e lixo entre os Guarani de Sao Paulo" in Crianca Indfgena.Ensaios Antropol6gicos. Aracy Lopes da Silva and Angela Nunes, eds. SaoPaulo: Global Editora/MARI-USP (Grupo de Educacao Indfgena daUniversidade de Sao Paulo)/FAPESP, 2002.

1. All translations by author, unless otherwise noted.2. Ministry of Health, Ordinary law {Medida Provisoria) # 1.911-8, Ar-

ticle 28-B, July 29, 1999.3. Editor's note: The terms maraey and Mbaemegua, used in this article,

are properly notated using a tilde over the letter 'e' preceeding the apostrophein each case; due to typesetting limitations, the terms are printed here withoutthe usual diacritical marks.

4. Like other functionalist scholars of his period, and those who precededhim in their Tupi studies (Baldus 1937; Fernandes 1951; Metraux 1948, 1979[1928]; Unkel 1914, for example), Schaden believes that the function of in-fant creativity and innovation is to maintain and perpetuate the Guarani so-cial order.

5. The only exception in which Guarani children and teenagers appear inthe literature as having some control over their own destiny is the tragic roleplayed by the Guarani Kaiowa in their choice of committing suicide. Whetherit be in the choice of how they want to die (by hanging or ingestion of pesti-cide), or in the reflections they produce about this form of violence, the chil-dren appear, in the writings of J. C. Meihy (1991, 1994) as agents of theirown destiny. They choose when, where and how they want to die. The impos-sibility of living the Nhande Rek6 on diminutive reservations and shanty townsof the Brazilian South makes death emerge as "an appeal for life" (Meihy


1994:251). The Guarani Mbya* and Nhandeva of the southern coast of SaoPaulo, however, do not voluntarily seek death as a solution to their currentafflictions, since there are no recent (1995-2000) suicides in the communities(Ferreira 1999d). Meihy (1994) does not believe, however, that the Kaiowiare anticipating early migration to the Land-without-Evil by committing sui-cide. He says that by using a cultural "belief" to justify a perverse outcome ofthe intense social suffering the Kaiowa face on the reservations, we (anthro-pologists) are engaging in another kind of "essentialism" that keeps us fromunderstanding the transformations of the Guarani religious order.

6. "Divine abundance" was the expression used in the classic reports ofUlrico Schmidt and Alvar N. Cabeza de Vaca to describe the plenteousness ofagricultural products found in Guarani land at the time of the first contactsbetween the natives and the Spanish conquerors in Paraguay (Melia1987:2).

7. In Ecuador, where 40 percent of the country's children are malnour-ished, kids ages ten to 14 have been campaigning on the streets for betterschools, new community services, paved roads and more parks in crime-in-fested areas. Children in Rwanda began volunteering for Solidarity Camps in1996, where they made bricks for returning refugees—more than one millionof them—to rebuild homes devastated by sectarian violence. In Zambia, wheremore than 360,000 children have lost at least one parent to AIDS, kids in theAnti-AIDS Club of Chibolya began traveling to slums and rural villages twoyears ago to perform skits about protected sex. The Children's Movement forPeace in Colombia was launched in 1995 by preteens, such as Juan Elias Uribe,who at age 13 lobbied the mayor of his war-ravaged hometown of Aguachicato let the children vote on the country's 35-year-old guerrilla war referendum.One of the biggest successes of these young activists has been to draw atten-tion to the United Child, the most widely ratified treaty on human rights inhistory. But not everyone welcomes the kids'efforts. The biggest problem for"Children's Governments"—and the reason some fell apart—has been oppo-sition from adults. Some community leaders actually put pressure on parentsbecause they feel their authority is being eroded. The only countries that havenot yet ratified are Somalia and the United States, where the leadership of theSenate Foreign Relations Committee sees many U.N. conventions as a threatto U.S. sovereignty (Wright 2000).

8. On April 4, 2000, the Terra Indigena Guarani de Itaoca was delimitadaby the Minister of Justice, Portaria 292 (ISA 2001:772). The area still needs tobe physically and administratively demarcated to meet the final requirementsof the demarcation process.

9. See Scheper-Hughes (1992) on northeastern Brazil, Harrison (1997)on the Caribbean, Farmer (1996) on Haiti, and Ferreira (1998a, 1999a) onnorthwestern United States.


10. The Procuradoria Gcral do Estado dc Sao Paulo (PGESP) is currentlyinvestigating widespread corruption at FUNAI in Sao Paulo (Deborah Stucchi,technical assistant, PGESP, personal communication, 10/15/1999).

11. UNICEF (1999) estimates there are 50,000 children in Brazil gather-ing scraps of food and tin cans at large cities' dumpsites. The report does notmention indigenous populations, however.

12. On the day Adilson died, another two Guarani children, GracianoSilveira and Florentina Gabriel, who were also malnourished and infestedwith parasites, waited quietly in the lounge of the Pronto Socorro Agenor deCampos, in Mongagui, for a vacancy in one of the coastal hospitals. One-yearold Graciano, who had pneumonia, lay prostrated in his mother's arms, whilefour-year-old Florentina was covered with scabies, a contagious skin diseasecaused by parasitic mites, and had three visible tumors on her head. Starva-tion in early childhood can stop or slow down physical growth and the devel-opment of brain cells.

13. Benzetacil is produced by White House, a multinational pharmaceu-tical company. The active ingredient in Benzetacil is ampicillin, a semisyn-thetic penicillin effective against certain bacteria. It was originally used tocombat widespread syphilis epidemics among socioeconomically disadvan-taged populations in the U.S. (African Americans, Native Americans andLatinos), and has, since the 1960s and 1970s, become the preferred medica-tion used in Brazilian governmental and missionary health care centers fortreating most infectious diseases among the poor. It is widely used on indig-enous reservations in Brazil.

14. Local hospitals the Guarani children are taken to in the Baixada Santistainclude the following: Hospital Municipal de Mongagua, Santa Casa de PraiaGrande, Santa Casa de Santos, and Hospital de Cubatao.

15. In 1998, a group of 48 Guarani Mbya who had been camping nearthe Cananeia beach resort, in the southernmost part of the state of Sao Paulo,were transferred by the National Indian Foundation to a small reservationnear the neighboring city of Pariquera-acu. The land was donated to the Indi-ans by a German supporter of the Brazilian organized Indian movement. Themayor of Pariquera-acu, however, only agreed to have the Guarani within hisjurisdiction "if they stopped collecting leftover vegetables at the city'sstreetmarket, and scraps of food at the local dumpsite." The mayor neverexplained, however, how he expected the Guarani to support themselves inthe short-run on a small piece of land which consisted basically of a steephillside slope near the seashore, with sandy and thus infertile soil, and nogame. The Guarani do not eat fish from the ocean.

16. A change from patrilocal to matrilocal residence among the Nhandevaof Itaoca, for instance.


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