Guaraní, Eastern Bolivian
Years: 100 - 2215
The Eastern Bolivian Guaraní, or Ava Guaraní, are an Indigenous people formerly known as Chiriguanos or Chiriguano Indians.
Noted for their warlike character, the Chiriguanos retain ttheir lands in the Andes foothills of southeastern Bolivia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by fending off, first, the Inca Empire, later, the Spanish Empire, and, still later, independent Bolivia.
The Chiriguanos are finally subjugated in 1892.
The Chiriguanos of history nearly disappear from public consciousness after their 1892 defeat--but are reborn beginning in the 1970s.
In the twenty-first century the descendants of the Chiriguanos call themselves Guaranis, which links them with millions of speakers of Guarani dialects and languages in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.
The census of 2001 counts eighty-one thousand and eleven Guaraní, mostly Chiriguanos, over fifteen years of age living in Bolivia.
A 2010 census counts eighteen thousand Ava Guarani in Argentina.
The Eastern Bolivian Guaraní language is spoken by thirty-three thousand people in Bolivia, fifteen thousand in Argentina, and a few hundred in Paraguay.
