Towards the City of the Whites

Before the coming of white men, Chaco was an unspoiled region covered by forest. Fourteen indigenous ethnic groups inhabited there. They lived by hunting, harvesting fruits, honey and medicinal plants, free to move from a place to another following the rhythm of seasons and rainfall cycles. A complex mythology explained very precisely how to maintain this perfect balance between nature and mankind.

The first colonization took place in the early 30’s by a group of Mennonites coming from Russia. A few years later, Chaco became the theater of a war between Paraguay and Bolivia and a violent smallpox epidemic brought by soldiers killed almost half of the indigenous population in less than a month. At the end of war, Mennonites were well established: they occupied the strategic water access points and built enclosures to mark their own landed properties. All at once, different groups of missionaries arrived in Chaco to spread their own religion and civilization, and to bring the natives out of the forest. In the late 50’s, after twenty years of cultural and territorial resistance, most of the indigenous communities had been baptized and had left the forest to embrace the colonizers' lifestyle.

During the last decade, the rise of meat world market converted the region in one of the most important world producer of cow, exported mainly in Russia and Chile. Natives have been displacing and dwell onto reservations far from their ancestral territories which have been mostly deforested and intended to the cattle extensive farming. Forced to become sedentary and confined within an "Indian reservation", native communities lost all their traditional livelihoods, so that to survive they must work as laborers for the landowners. The oral transmission has been interrupted since all their knowledge was strictly connected with a natural world that is disappearing. Without the chance to experience the forestry lifestyle nor shamanism, young generation are even more attracted by the western costumes that have been introduced massively in their daily life, gradually erasing all traces of their ancestral civilization.

Toward the City of the White focused on the cultural side effects of globalization. Expropriated from their owns territories due to the economic interests over natural resources, aboriginal civilizations, ever connected with nature, risk to be extinguished in favor of modernity.