348 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1957 



these vermin come out at night, descending the ropes that sustain the 

 hammocks or crawling out to the sleeping mats on the floor, and feed 

 on their sleeping hosts. It is said that the kings of France moved 

 from palace to palace as the bedbugs along with other vermin became 

 so numerous as to make sleep impossible. By the same token the 

 Guajiros are not averse to migrating in order to flee from the ravages 

 of these revolting pests, which in Brazil and in the western llanos of 

 Venezuela have been found to be the vectors of the Chagas disease, a 

 close relative of African sleeping sickness. Fortunately the construc- 

 tion of houses with cement floors and walls and tin roofs, and the 

 widespread use of DDT, are gradually diminishing this dread pest. 



The Guajira is a land of hammocks, in which people sleep, sit, and 

 spend their leisure hours, in which children are conceived, and in 

 which old people breathe their last and are buried. As soon as a baby 

 is born in a Guajiro household, it is put into its own diminutive 

 hammock; when visitors arrive at a Guajiro home, hammocks are 

 immediately hung for their comfort. Chairs are rarely seen and even 

 more rarely used. The making of hammocks in the home is a craft 

 learned early by the womenfolk and practiced all their lives. They 

 are of two types, the closely woven hamaca, and the looser-meshed 

 chinchorro, both worked with elaborate designs and gay color combi- 

 nations as well as of solid white. Some of the handsomest hammocks 

 made anywhere in the Americas are turned out on primitive hand 

 looms by these master craf tswomen. The making of a fine hammock, 

 a cooperative family enterprise, requires from one to several months, 

 depending on the number of women or girls who work on it. (PI. 6, 

 fig. 1.) As they find some spare time between their other household 

 chores, the womenfolk sit down on the floor in front of the loom, one 

 working at it now alone, now accompanied by her mother, her sisters, 

 or other female relatives. There is no deadline or fixed date on 

 which the work must be finished, and much friendly gossip is ex- 

 changed as the chore progresses and as deft fingers move so rapidly 

 at their task that their manipulations are hardly visible to the 

 naked eye. 



Guajiro women wear the manta, a kind of loose, flowing, long- 

 sleeved Mother Hubbard, formerly of coarse, homespun cotton cloth 

 and simpler cut, now usually of imported yard goods of bright hues 

 and lively patterns. Under this garment it is customary to wear only 

 a sort of bikini, a wide band of cloth held by a cirapo, a belt made of 

 many strings of beads. In former days the principal female garment 

 was a homespun cotton tunic, slipped over the head, or merely an 

 ampler breechcloth (the latter garb appearing in pictures of only a 

 quarter of a century ago) . This has given way in large part to the 

 more elaborate manta, an adjustment to the climate in many ways 



