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Comment by iguy | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, this seems pretty damning for the study.

Any significant post-1767 immigration (and especially from some of the most developed parts of the world) would easily produce bigger effects than this claimed persistence from the Jesuits.

How much do we know about the spatial distribution of such people, and their descendants? I mean not just southern Brazil, but it would be nice to see if there are clumps... especially if one was centred on where the missions were. Perhaps just filtering census data for German surnames would work? I bet this would correlate with literacy.

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I agree with you. We have a more stong Guaraní presence in Bolivia and Paraguay today, about 280 thousand people living in four countries from a study in 2017 [1], which 85 thousand living in Brazil, which is neglegible comparing to the population numbers in that regions.

The reality is that those communities are very poor, having even cases of institutionalized racism, where children were separated from their parents at their Guaraní and Kaiowá communities by the brazilian state and sent to child safety services, atrocious. [2]

[1] https://mobilizacaonacionalindigena.wordpress.com/2017/04/27...

[2] https://cimi.org.br/2018/03/racismo-institucional-justifican...

Are you saying that a majority, possibly a huge majority, of the people arrived after 1767? Or rather, that a huge majority now are the descendants of people who arrived then?

Then perhaps I should ask the reverse question, about which districts still have much Guaraní and Kaiowá presence -- is there perhaps a map? If things are as bad for them as you say (which I can fully believe, sadly) then all you would need is for them not to be perfectly uniformly distributed, to produce what this paper sees.

The paper's hypothesis then seems increasingly crazy. Did the Jesuits do something magical to the soil, so that the subsequent inhabitants of that area would be more literate?

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