Chaco Culture & Language

The Chaco’s culture is a juxtaposition that exists nowhere else.

Mennonite life

The colonies run their own schools, hospitals, insurance and cooperatives, and function almost as self-governing municipalities. Church is central, the working week is disciplined, and the settlement history is taught and commemorated. Plautdietsch — a Low German dialect carried from the Vistula delta via Ukraine — is the language of home and street; sermons are in High German and business in Spanish. The museums in each colony, with their wagons, photographs and settlement records, are genuinely moving.

Indigenous craft

Bags, nets and hammocks woven from caraguata, a bromeliad fibre stripped, dried and rolled into cord on the thigh, then knotted in geometric patterns and coloured with plant dyes. Nivacle and Ayoreo work is sold through cooperatives.

Paraguayan culture

The harp and guitar tradition travels into the Chaco with the ranch workers and soldiers: polca paraguaya, fast and syncopated across two rhythms at once, and guarania, the slower melancholy form invented in the 1920s, both played on the Paraguayan harp — a light diatonic instrument with no pedals, played with the fingernails.

Living apart and together

The three populations share the region without merging. Colony institutions employ indigenous workers and run schools and clinics that serve them, which has produced both genuine cooperation and long-standing disputes over land and wages. Cooperative membership, language and church attendance still largely track community lines, and the region’s politics turn on that.

Terere

Cold yerba mate drunk from a shared guampa through a metal straw, all day, by absolutely everybody.

Spanish is the official language and is what you will use with most people.

Guarani is also official and is spoken by the large majority of Paraguayans — uniquely in the Americas, an indigenous language spoken by most of the non-indigenous population. The everyday mix of the two is called jopara.

Plautdietsch is the home language of the Mennonite colonies, with High German in church and school. Older colonists may prefer German to Spanish.

Indigenous languages — Nivacle, Ayoreo, Enlhet and others — are spoken in the communities.

English is rare outside a few guides and younger colonists.

Useful Guarani: mba’eichapa for how are you, aguyje for thank you.