Guaraní

Guaraní country runs from eastern Paraguay into southern Brazil, the Argentine province of Misiones and the Bolivian Chaco, forest and river land farmed in clearings and threaded by wide kinship networks. Paraguay's 2022 Indigenous census counted 140,049 Indigenous people across 19 peoples, with the Guaraní family of peoples much the largest at 76,506; tens of thousands more live across the borders in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, thousands of Guaraní built and governed the mission towns of the Jesuit reductions, La Santísima Trinidad, São Miguel and their sister towns, now World Heritage ruins, a chapter that still shapes the region's memory. Expulsion, war and the plantation frontier followed; Guaraní communities held on through all of it, and in Brazil the Guarani-Kaiowá land struggle remains one of the continent's hardest-fought.

The language did something no other Indigenous American language has done: it became a whole country's speech. Guaraní has been co-official with Spanish in Paraguay since 1992, and about two in three Paraguayan households use it, alone or alongside Spanish, while the Indigenous Guaraní peoples themselves continue to fight for land and recognition within the nation their language names.

This is an introduction, the first layer. A full collection, like the Mapuche collection that opened this atlas, follows as research and review are completed for each people.