GUAJIRA PENINSULA — CRIST 355 



ment. Most of the basic items of their material culture have been 

 introduced. Yet over the centuries the elements of their nonmaterial 

 culture seem to have suffered almost no change. We must look to 

 cultural factors for an explanation. 



Whereas in Western society a patriarchal and patrilinear system 

 prevails, the family consisting of father, mother, and children, with 

 the father acting as head of the household, Guajira society is matri- 

 linear, the family consisting of the mother and her children and the 

 blood relations on the mother's side of the house, the father being 

 but loosely attached to the group, and a maternal uncle serving as 

 head. The husband controls his wife, but not the disposition of her 

 children, except that the bride price of the first daughter belongs 

 to him. Children have relatively few obligations toward their fathers, 

 but they are an integral part of the closely knit, nuclear, and extensive 

 family of their mother, and they take their mother's name. They 

 live the most impressionable years of their lives in a cultural climate 

 that is strictly Guajiro, they become imbued with the culture of their 

 mothers — Guajiro culture. The children of Guajiro mothers, whether 

 their fathers are Indian, Negro, zambo, white, or mestizo — and a 

 considerable amount of intermarriage occurs — for the most part 

 grow up Guajiros. Some Guajiros, mestizos as well as purebloods, 

 that have been educated in Maracaibo or Barranquilla, Caracas or 

 Bogota, are happy to return to the land of their childhood, put on 

 Guajiro dress, and assume the way of life they lived as children. 



Guajiro society has thus been able to absorb new racial strains, and 

 new elements of material culture, such as domestic animals, without 

 the loss of any of the essential characteristics of Guajiro culture. It 

 is not a question of whether "blood will tell," but rather of whether 

 culture will tell, and in the case of the Guajiros we have a textbook 

 example of a societal organization in which the cultural factor has 

 outweighed by far the racial and economic factors. Perhaps with- 

 out the matrilinear family and the solidarity of that culture-conscious 

 unit no society capable of putting down roots in the refractory 

 Guajiro soil would have evolved, much less survived to achieve a 

 sociohistorical continuum. No such tenacious and long-lived in- 

 digenous culture grew up among the Indians on the Paraguana 

 Peninsula, for instance, or in what is now Falcon. 



