Southern Borders and Territorial Transfiguration: genesis and permanence of the stigma of foreigners attributed to the Guarani in Brazil

Abstract

Through this article we will analyze historically how Brazil attributed the stigma of foreigners to Guarani. We found that the employment of this xenophobic category in the twentieth century is triggered at specific times, in general when the Guarani intensify actions for guaranteeing land. However, this same process is not perceived with the same intensity in other cases of cross-border peoples. We note that both the Guarani and the territory they occupied was the object of colonial geopolitical disputes between the Iberian crowns, and between settlers, São Paulo mercenaries and religious of the Society of Jesus. We also identified that, during the 19th century, Brazil exalted the Guarani as the founding hero of the nation, but in its passive, subjugated and voluntarily killed version, to bring about a new nation, white and western. However, this place occupied by the Guarani gradually fades, especially with the Triple Alliance war, when Paraguay is identified as the “Guarani Nation” and, with the end of the war, Brazil definitively abandons the Guarani, whether in the ideal is the duty to protect these people. Guarani will now appear in the anthropological literature as the “integrated Indian”. The Indianist movement also abandoned Guarani and started to consider Tupi and its anthropophagy, the new face of a modern Brazil.