The role of indigenous women in the conquest of Paraguay was central, as the insertion of the Spanish conquistadors into the native societies of the Río de la Plata basin was based on the relationships established with them. In these matrilineal societies, women were the most prized asset of the entire community both as agricultural producers and reproducers of the labor force; through the cuñadazgo—a Guaraní institution by which caciques sealed alliances by giving women to newcomers, transforming them into brothers-in-law or sons-in-law—the first bond between the Guaraní and the Spaniards was structured. The chronicler Ulrich Schmidl described how the Cario people (a Guaraní subgroup) of the settlement of Lambaré gave six women to Captain Juan de Ayolas—the eldest eighteen years old—and two to each soldier of his troop as a sign of peace, so that they would "take care of us, cook, wash and attend to other things".
The abandonment of Buenos Aires (which would not be refounded until 1580) and the concentration of the Spanish colonization in Asunción from 1541 onwards marked a turning point: growing demand overwhelmed the cuñadazgo and gave way to the rancheadas, mass and violent deportations of Guaraní women that transformed them into objects of buying and selling, common currency in commercial transactions and merchandise exported to the Portuguese port of São Vicente. The licentious life between colonists and indigenous women was such that the famous nickname "paradise of Muhammad" (Spanish: Paraíso de Mahoma)—in reference to polygamy in Islam—arose to describe the city, coined in a 1545 letter of denunciation by the priest Francisco González de Paniagua and since then turned into an enduring literary trope. An emblematic case of resistance was that of India Juliana, a Cario woman who between 1539 and 1542 poisoned her Spanish master and was executed by order of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and who is today championed by Paraguayan feminism.
The mestizaje that emerged from these unions plays a central role in the traditional historiography of Paraguay, which locates in it the origins of the nation and presents it as a harmonious and consensual process. However, modern scholars argue that the process fundamentally involved a relationship of sexual exploitation and economic exploitation, rather than reciprocal exchange.
History 1537–1541: First pacts between the Guaraní and the Spaniards
The Guaraní are the inhabitants of the Eastern Region of Paraguay, the Central-West Region of Brazil, the Argentine Northeast and scattered settlements in parts of the Paraguayan Chaco and Bolivian Chaco. Since they had no writing system, the only way to approach the characteristics of their pre-colonial life is through archaeology. The pre-Columbian Guaraní were a semi-nomadic people who combined gathering and hunting with agriculture, migrating whenever they exhausted the resources of a site. Their social organization was based on the guaras, territorial groupings in which members lived in open community. Also called provinces by the Spaniards, the guaras were well-defined regions with cultivated areas and hunting grounds that could only be used by community members. Several scholars indicate that around 1500, six guaras inhabited what is now the Eastern Region of Paraguay: the Carios, the Tobatí, the Guambaré, the Itati-Guaraní, the Mba'everá and the Paraná-Guaraní. For their part, the Jesuits identified fourteen major groups at the time of their arrival: Carios, Tobatines, Guarambarenses, Itatines, Mbarakayúenses, Mondayenses, Paranáes, Ygañáenses, Yguazúenses, Uruguayenses, Tapes, Mbiazás, Guairáes and Chandules. The Cario people inhabited the area between the Manduvirá, Tebicuary and Paraguay rivers, with particular importance given to the zones of the Ypacaraí Lake, the area of Quiindy and Acahay. To the northwest—in the Chaco region—they bordered other nomadic and warlike ethnic groups, including the Guaycurúes.
The Carios were the first Guaraní group to come into contact with the Spanish conquistadors. The first Spanish expeditions to establish settlements in the Río de la Plata basin arose from the mistaken belief that the region was rich in minerals, especially gold and silver. The suspicion that the Río de la Plata concealed an undiscovered treasure grew after the Spaniards obtained great wealth from the capture of Atahualpa, and from the accounts of Sebastian Cabot, an explorer who traveled to the region and encountered survivors of the previous expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís, who "confirmed" that there were large deposits of gold and silver there.El Jaber (2011), p. 13 Spanish attempts to settle in the Plata basin began in the 1530s, starting with the construction in 1536 of the fort of Santa María del Buen Aire (or Buenos Aires) on the banks of the Río de la Plata, founded by Pedro de Mendoza, the first adelantado of the region. A year later, on 15 August 1537, the conquistador Juan de Salazar y Espinosa—a member of Mendoza's expedition—founded the fort of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción on the banks of the Paraguay River, in Cario territory.
Despite an initially conflictive encounter, the Spaniards—with their firearms—managed to subdue some of the main caciques, later establishing an alliance with the remaining caciques around Asunción. Mendoza sent the explorers Juan de Ayolas and Domingo Martínez de Irala to sail upriver along the Paraná in search of resources, while he himself settled in Buenos Aires. In 1537, having no news of Ayolas or Irala, Mendoza decided to return to Spain, naming Ayolas as adelantado and Francisco Ruiz Galán as governor of Buenos Aires before his departure. Irala was at a natural harbor known as La Candelaria—a short distance from where Fort Borbon stands today—awaiting Ayolas, who was seeking a route to Peru. As Ayolas never returned from the expedition, Irala returned to Asunción in 1538, where he was elected by his companions to take command in Ayolas's absence.
The Cario people established a pact of interests with the conquistadors, providing them with food and warriors in exchange for protection against enemy peoples such as the Payaguá. The Cario caciques sealed these pacts through the giving of women. The explorer Ulrich Schmidl—who traveled through the Plata basin between 1534 and 1554—recounts in his 1599 chronicles that the Carios of the settlement of Lambaré (possibly the same site where Asunción was founded) sealed peace with Ayolas through the giving of women, writing in "Chapter XXI":
Between 1537 and 1541, the giving of women to the conquistadors took place within the framework of the cuñadazgo, a concept used by Guaraní leaders to create pacts of peace and mutual benefit, since it transformed the recipient into a brother-in-law or son-in-law. The Guaraní were organized in small family-type communities called teii, which were matrilineal in character, given that descent belonged to the maternal lineage and both children and partners resided in the maternal community, with the mother's brother being the highest family authority. Through the cuñadazgo—another fundamental aspect of Guaraní culture—women linked different descent groups, thereby generating bonds of reciprocity and strategic alliances between the teii. As researcher Macarena Perusset explains:
Indeed, given that the Spaniards' treatment of the Guaraní was one of domination rather than reciprocity, their initial pacts were soon followed by indigenous uprisings, with at least three documented incidents of violence in 1538–1539, 1542–1543, and 1545–1546.
1541–1554: The rise of the rancheadas and the "paradise of Muhammad"
In July 1541, Irala ordered the evacuation of the port of Buenos Aires and converted the fort and port of Asunción into the center of the Spanish colonization of the Río de la Plata region. The first mention of indigenous women in the colonial documents dates from that year, in letters the governor left for the next expeditions coming from Spain, explaining his decision to depopulate Buenos Aires and move the center of operations to Asunción. One of them reads: "in Paraguay [...] there is founded [...] a town in which there will be [...] 400 men [...] as vassals of His Majesty the Guarany Indians that is the Carios [...] who serve the Christians [...] along with their women in all things necessary for service and I command for the better service of the Christians 300 women to serve them in their houses and in the fields." This passage shows that the presence of 300 Guaraní women in the new settlement was the decisive argument for moving the central city from Buenos Aires to Asunción. It also indicates that the tasks carried out by the indigenous women in Asunción were domestic and agricultural labor. As researcher Guillaume Candela notes, the Spaniards "after having suffered famine and disastrous living conditions in Buenos Aires, were very likely pleased at the idea of having servants and lovers. The woman in this context appears as a considerable improvement in the conquerors' lives. (...) Basically, the Indian woman is presented as the most important element in this society under construction, since the entire supply circuit of these colonists was in the hands of these women."
The depopulation of Buenos Aires isolated Asunción from every civilized center, which led to a relaxation of sexual morality in the city. According to historian Fabián Chamorro, by the time the inhabitants of Buenos Aires arrived in Asunción, the settlement already had around 2,000 mestizos as a result of the relationships between Spaniards and Guaraní women. The abandonment of Buenos Aires and the conversion of Asunción into a city in 1541 had a strong impact on Hispanic-indigenous relations. From that moment on, the supply of women linked to the regional caciques could not satisfy the demands of the growing Spanish population, causing the disappearance of the cuñadazgo and giving way to the rancheadas. Unlike the cuñadazgo, the rancheadas were violent mass deportations of Guaraní women, bypassing the authority of the cacique. The rancheadas were "techniques conceived and put into practice by the conquistadors and more specifically by the lenguas [interpreters] who could converse with the indigenous women." In a 1556 letter addressed to the Crown, the cleric Martín González denounced the practice:
Besides being presented as sexual objects and instruments of labor, Guaraní women also functioned as markers of socioeconomic power, both for indigenous people and for the conquistadors. An example of this is a 1545 indigenous interrogation in which a correlation is drawn between women and power: "asking the Agace Indians why they gave their women to the Cario Indians, they responded that it was because the Cario Indians said they were the strong ones and that they should give them their women, because otherwise they would kill them." In the interrogation of the lenguas or interpreters conducted in 1543, it was established that these officials also accumulated women as a symbol of power: the interpreter Juan Pérez declared he possessed "22 Indian women" and Francisco Rodríguez "12 Indian women." The process of the rancheadas enabled the rapid transformation of indigenous women into objects of buying and selling in the slave market, both internal and external to Asunción. The illegal trafficking of indigenous women spread to such an extent that Guaraní women came to be used as common currency, the object of more or less complex transactions, like any other commodity that could be acquired.