Doña Eufracia and don Pijachi's Chagra

An indispensable requirement for autonomy: producing your own food on your own land. The chagra, or traditional plantation, essential in Amazonian cultures, guarantees abundance and exemplifies how to use nature without depleting it.
Doña Eufracia takes advantage of the afternoon hours to weed and plant her chagra.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 215 of Cáñamo magazine, November 2015. 
Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi wake with the dawn, dress quickly, and set off on foot. They leave behind the last houses of the Indigenous community of San José, six kilometers from the city of Leticia in the Colombian Amazon, and cross a landscape where the traces of human presence are sadly visible. The primary rainforest gave way to a cattle ranch, now abandoned to vegetation that will never grow beyond sparse grass littered with disposable diapers, rusted cans, broken glass, batteries, papers, and plastic waste… The municipality of Leticia does not provide garbage collection services to the surrounding Indigenous communities, even though it uses them as a lure for the region’s flagship economic project: ethno-eco-tourism. 

As Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi walk, they recall that three decades ago, the same dirty, stagnant streams they now avoid teemed with fish; that they didn’t have to walk far to find game; and that instead of this young, degraded vegetation, there stood pristine forest that provided construction materials and medicine. After twenty brisk minutes, they reach their beautiful stream, which they have carefully preserved by planting dozens of canangucho palms—a species that helps maintain wetlands. After crossing the small watercourse, they arrive at their plot: three hectares where they practice each day the cultural knowledge that underpins any society—the production of food. From their modest home, they bring out cooking pots and fetch water from the nearby spring to prepare breakfast for those taking part in the minga—the communal work party that, on this hot Saturday morning, will begin the establishment of their new chagra.
 The first step in establishing any chagra: clearing the forest.
fundamental TRADItion
The chagra is one of the most important cultural expressions of the vast majority of Amazonian Indigenous societies (with the exception of nomadic hunting and gathering cultures, now sedentary). The foods produced there make up the most significant and consistent part of the diet and, consequently, require the greatest investment of labor—usually by women. Chagras are established using the slash-and-burn system: production would be impossible under the dense jungle canopy, which prevents light from reaching the lower strata. In addition, Amazonian soils are, in a strange paradox, extraordinarily unproductive due to their acidity. Thus, clearing the forest allows sunlight to enter, while burning purifies the area of weeds and undesirable insects, and the ashes enrich the soil temporarily. After two or three years, once the nutrients are depleted and yields decline, a new chagra is opened elsewhere. This rotational system, far from harming the forest, actually reinforces its biodiversity: alongside essential crops with annual maturation cycles, Indigenous people plant fruit trees which, over time, will feed both humans and a multitude of forest creatures—an advantage that hunters use to easily locate prey. 

To create their chagra, Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi have called for a minga, a form of communal labor essential in Indigenous society. While most productive activities are carried out individually or within the family—without many people or complex specialized and hierarchical structures—there are occasions when a larger group's collaboration is necessary. Establishing a new chagra is one such occasion, in which extended family and close neighbors are invited to help. There are no bosses or money, no obligations or contracts—only those who feel like spending some time working in good company show up. There is no monetary payment, only reciprocity: today for you, tomorrow for me. There is no money, but food is a must, which is why the minga begins with a hearty breakfast. Upon arrival, participants are offered caguana made of pineapple (a drink thickened with cassava starch), casabe (a flatbread made from cassava flour), and fish broth with tucupí (a spicy sauce also derived from cassava). Hosts who fail to treat their guest-laborers generously may be considered stingy and would likely have trouble attracting help for their next minga

Most of the guests are neighbors from the community of San José, a multiethnic mix where the influence of the city of Leticia—home to nearly forty thousand people—is notable. Few neighbors have their own chagra, which represents a regrettable kind of cultural amputation: a permanent loss of autonomy, another push toward dependence on the market. Perhaps for this reason, they arrive cheerfully and gladly receive their traditional breakfast. Then, with full bellies, they set to work amid jokes and gossip, skillfully wielding machetes to remove underbrush, shrubs, and saplings: this is the roza or zocala, the task for today. At a relaxed pace, pausing whenever they please, replenished by more caguana attentively served by Doña Eufracia, the machetes swing expertly. One hectare can be cleared in a single morning. The workday ends at noon. The workers are given a casabe cake and a smoked fish to take home, and they are invited to the next minga, where, axe in hand, they will bring down the larger trees. 
Casabe, a flatbread made from cassava flour, cannot be missing in the minga as a gift to the people who collaborate.
Atrocious rubber
Like most of their guests at the minga, Doña Eufracia Kuyuedo, from the Huitoto ethnicity, and Don Arsecio Pijachi, from the Ocaina ethnicity, were born far from Leticia. They come from the Igará-Paraná river, in the interfluvial region between the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers, the two great parallel rivers that cross the Colombian jungle from west to east and that already in Brazilian territory flow into the Amazon. They are people with a joy that can withstand anything. At first glance, it is difficult to see how genocide, the Horror, has marked the thoughts and actions of the descendants of the Huitoto, Bora, Muinane, Ocaina, Andoque, Nonuya, and Miraña—ethnic groups related and classified by anthropologists under the name “the People of the Center of the World.” 

The Horror, at the end of the 19th century and especially in the first decade of the 20th, was triggered by the boom of the automotive industry and its need for rubber to make tire covers. The atrocious whirlwind, unrestrained evil, insatiable greed, were personified in the Peruvian Julio César Arana, rubber baron, feudal lord of a territory larger than Portugal, who deployed his agents of evil with the strict order to collect rubber at all costs. Although it was not his foremen who entered the forest daily following trails connecting scattered Hevea brasiliensis trees; nor those who made incisions in the bark so the sap would flow; nor those who later gathered large balls of rubber. No, Arana’s foremen stayed at the “stations,” where they stockpiled and waited for the steamships of Casa Arana to ship the precious cargo to the “civilized” world. But they did something else, to ensure the indigenous people worked tirelessly: they enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed systematically and extensively, in ways so twisted and disgusting they cannot be imagined. The Horror—yes, the Horror that is unseen when admiring the magnificent opera theater of Manaus, the iron house Gustave Eiffel designed for the Plaza de Armas in Iquitos. What immense amounts of suffering for what endless absurd luxuries. 

By the mid-20th century, decades after the holocaust and diaspora, the People of the Center reclaimed their World: the territory and ancestral knowledge associated with its management. Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi, born in the fifties, listened with a grimace of horror to the stories of their grandparents. Otherwise, life was calm and abundant: territory, meat and fish, the knowledge to exploit the exuberant nature without damaging it. Don Pijachi learned to hunt and fish, build houses, carve canoes and paddles, weave baskets and sifters... Doña Eufracia learned to cultivate, process cassava in a thousand ways, gather wild foods, distinguish the medicinal properties of certain plants... Together, a man and a woman, they had the knowledge necessary to live autonomously in the forest without harming it, as it had always been. Whites rarely came to their homes, spread out over a large and sparsely populated territory, but their presence was again decisive.

Catalan missionaries had established a boarding school in La Chorrera, in the middle course of the Igará-Paraná, which attracted indigenous boys and girls from the entire basin to learn white people’s ways. Traumatic memories: Doña Eufracia recounts that speaking their mother tongue was forbidden; anyone caught doing so was gagged, except at mealtime, for a week (paradox: the oppressors communicated among themselves in Catalan while the Franco dictatorship repressed their mother tongue in Catalonia to impose Spanish). Contradictory memories: Doña Eufracia recounts the kindness of nuns who taught her to sew, of priests who gave her work in the city of Leticia when she decided to migrate. 
The rubber boom of Putumayo, one of the cruellest genocides in human history and yet largely unknown.
PLURICAPACIty
Don Pijachi is a man of many skills. He embodies what Swiss anthropologist Jürg Gasché calls pluri-capacity, an ability that allows him to handle multiple tasks with ease. His physique is tireless, his muscles Herculean, like a decathlete’s. He knows the practical uses of every plant as well as you know what can be found in every store in town; he climbs trees with astonishing confidence; crosses rivers balancing impossibly on thin log-bridges. He is an unmatched builder: he can set up a comfortable jungle camp in no time. At night, he goes hunting and there isn’t an armadillo or boruga that can resist him. He learned to hunt with his uncle as a young boy during the fur boom in the 1970s. They would spend weeks deep in the forest, hunting tigers and ocelots to sell the skins to traders navigating the Igará-Paraná River — skins that would later arrive in stores worldwide as coats, bags, or ornaments. How far removed the urban buyers’ elegance was from the environmental disaster their vanity caused. On those expeditions, Don Pijachi forged the knowledge that has made him the preferred guide for tourists and researchers wanting to explore the jungle around Leticia. What a spectacle it is to see him move through the forest! 

The way Don Pijachi wields the axe is another of his many talents, fully displayed during the second minga, seven days after the first, when they fell the largest trees. Although there is no longer an endless territory to move from one patch of forest to another, Don Pijachi and Doña Eufracia have managed, on their modest three hectares, to rotate cultivation areas so that the soil rests and the vegetation grows back, eventually turning into nutrient-rich ashes. These trees, falling with almost human-like creaks, will dry over the coming weeks preparing to burn. As axes split the wood, it’s easy to understand why indigenous people welcomed Spanish missionaries and Portuguese slave traders. They came bearing iron, a technological revolution so significant that, to obtain it, Amazonian peoples accepted missionaries’ conditions to concentrate in the villages they founded and follow their ritual dynamics; or they made raids to capture enemy groups to hand over to the Portuguese. A power no one wanted or could renounce; a power that allowed felling in a day what previously could take weeks with stone tools; a power that forced contact and exchange despite the catastrophic epidemics unleashed by Europeans. 

That felling trees is traditionally a male task doesn’t mean Doña Eufracia can’t do it: I have seen her wield the axe with a skill comparable to an expert martial artist with a saber. Tiger and dragon, Doña Eufracia is an extraordinary woman, with astonishing strength and determination, worthy of superlatives. Her endurance is limitless. Once, a severe blow to her forearm made work uncomfortable. In pain, she kept going (carrying, machete work, chopping). Later, an X-ray revealed a complete fracture of the radius, but it didn’t stop her pace (carrying, machete work, chopping). Another time, a motorized grater used to shred yuca caught the tip of one finger; seeing it hanging, Doña Eufracia decided it was best to tear it off herself; she tried hard but failed. Luckily, at the hospital, they managed to save the finger. Her chagra is famous in Leticia, studied by various researchers, and an attraction for ethno-eco-tourists. And the food she produces there, the food of her ancestors, is a delight that grows more prized by the day.
Don Pijachi, after finishing clearing the land for what will be his next chagra.
BURNING
Several weeks have passed since the second minga. The sun has carpeted the clearing with the ochres of dried vegetation. Don Pijachi and Doña Eufracia, torch in hand, walk around the perimeter lighting the leaf litter; the fire spreads toward the center, turning the palette of browns into a palette of grays: from white to black, every shade is present. 

The steaming ground cools for a couple of days before proceeding to sowing, a task for which only the family is called. And there come the daughters and sons-in-law, the nephews and granddaughters. The men arm themselves with hoes and turn the soil meter by meter; then the children follow, planting stakes of different varieties of yuca, undoubtedly the fundamental crop, their daily tuber. Doña Eufracia collects half-burned sticks, piles them up, and lights bonfires here and there, where later she will plant banana, always demanding in nutrients. With a thick, pointed stick, holes are opened where pineapple suckers or corn seeds are alternately planted. Over the following weeks, Doña Eufracia (planting being essentially a female task, although Don Pijachi also helps) will sow lulo, chili pepper, bell pepper, squash, yam, banana, tomato, beans, sugar cane, and an interspersed etcetera that will guarantee a delicious variety on the table; this agrodiversity, besides being tasty, constitutes a defense against the pests that frequently plague the monocultures of the “whites.”
Anitalia Pijachi, daughter of Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi, two months after the yuca planting.
EATING
One year later, the yuca is ready to be harvested and processed. Although there are varieties that can simply be uprooted, peeled, cooked, and eaten, the one preferred by the People of the Center of the World—Doña Eufracia and her kin—requires processing to make it edible. The so-called "wild" yuca contains a deadly poison (some people discovered it but couldn’t tell) that must be eliminated through specific techniques. 

This laborious processing begins on a random day when Doña Eufracia and Don Pijachi wake up early, go to the chagra, and uproot three sacks of yuca, which they patiently peel, wash, and submerge in the stream water to mature for three days. On the third day, it’s a family celebration—the festival of casabe. 

A procession of daughters, grandchildren, nephews, or aunts happily heads to the chagra. When they arrive, Doña Eufracia is already bent over the old canoe used as a basin. There she places the matured yuca and pounds it with a heavy wooden mallet. Using a matafrío or press, the water is extracted from the pulp, which returns to the basin to be pounded again. Then, the shredded pulp is passed through a fine sieve to remove coarse fibers and leave a fine flour, which is formed into cakes and toasted on a large clay plate. Ready to eat. 

All this, which may seem like a technical procedure, is both a celebration and an affirmation. While the casabe is being prepared, Don Pijachi has brought a couple of pineapples, a daughter has gathered a basket full of umarí (a delicious and substantial fruit), the cousin is roasting some tasty fish (brought from Leticia, since only small fish remain in the stream), children endlessly splash in the stream, jokes exchange for hearty laughs, and gossip for exclamations of astonishment. There is food, autonomy, identity. And there is joy.

Related content

Stay updated on every new publication

Search