Talk:Tapeba

Comment

It is highly unlikely that Tapeba was ever a language, even in a proto-linguistic sense. The Tapeba people (who number about 5,400) are a polyethnic, so-called "post-traditional" Indian group who live on federally demarcated indigenous lands in Caucaia, Ceará, in the Brazilian Northeast. They claim descent from four Tupi-speaking groups that once inhabited the area, but who were drummed into extinction before the turn of the 19th century. In addition to indigenous blood, most Tapeba have significant European and, to a lesser extent, African racial heritage. Before their official recognition by Brazil's Foundation for the Indian in the 1990s, they had little history as a coherent indigenous identity. It was through prodding by Fortaleza's Archbishop Lorscheider, who was moved by their wretched poverty, that they organized in the 1980s and sought state recognition, which in Brazil often comes attended by lands demarcations, legal eviction of competing land occupants, and privileged access to healthcare, education and other state services. Before 1980s, there are no historical registrations of a "Tapeba" people anywhere in Brazil. They adopted this indigenous moniker to further authenticate their ethnogenesis.

To contextualize this, the Tapeba are one of about fifty groups presently living in Brazil's Northeast--where Indians are generally thought to be extinct because of this region's early colonial incursions--that have reemerged as political entities since the 1970s. Without exception, these groups seek official recognition and legal recourse to a better material existence, at the center of which are almost invariably violent turf wars with white landholders. In fact, many such groups in Bahia, Sergipe and Alagoas are racially Afrobrazilian (Jan Hoffmann French's 2009 book, "Legalizing Identities" is a fascinating anthropological study of two of them). In all cases, they are phenotypically indistinguishable from the local population that surrounds them.

As for the Tapeba, while they have significant indigenous blood ties and have for generations been an agricultural society threatened by the urban growth of Ceará's capital, Fortaleza (which now subsumes Caucaia in the western outskirts of its metropolitan area), they also are acculturated Portuguese-speakers with a long history of variably peaceful and violent interactions with white Brazilians. Before the 1990s, they were classified as caboclos (mixed-race peasants), a stigmatizing mark of non-citizenship in Brazil, and deemed to be squatters along the Ceará River and nearby mangroves. Converting their identity to that of Indians has reduced that stigma, provided a coherent identity that has been instrumental in raising youth consciousness within the community, and most importantly, brought legal access to material resources they would otherwise lack. Additionally, some of their expressive traditions, the best-known of which is their Toré dance ritual, can be said to be recent cultural adoptions (some might even argue they are inventions in the Hobsbawmian sense), intended primarily to further their indigenous identity claims.

The only known surviving indigenous language in the Brazilian Northeast region is Yatê, spoken by the Fulni-ô people of Pernambuco. In light of the Tapeba's particular ethnic history, there can no line in the linguistic past leading to a distinct Tapeba language, even one theorized to be extinct. The ancestors of the Tapeba spoke a variety of Tupian languages, Portuguese, and probably to a far less important extent, West and Central African languages that survived for a short time in Brazil after the Middle Passage. Rconner1967 (talk) 08:20, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Moved most of this to the article, which is now about the people. There's no sense in having an article about a language which discusses how it doesn't exist. — kwami (talk) 10:33, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Considering that Tupi was used (rather than Portuguese!) as a lingua franca in Brazil as late as the 18th century, it would be completely unremarkable if the ancestors of the Tapeba had spoken it and say nothing about their origin. They could still be 100% Afrobrazilian or European with no indigenous admixture at all (although that does not seem likely, either). The assumption that they are descended of a haphazard mixture of various Afrobrazilian (former slaves?) and indigenous groups and perhaps also lower-class white Europeans – much like Lumbee in the US – is sensible. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:27, 13 October 2012 (UTC)