West Concord native heads back to Brazil for PhD research

In the years since she graduated from Triton High School in 1999 Maria Welch has probably done more traveling and had more interesting experiences than most of her classmates.

At the end of a short visit to her mother in West Concord, she said last week she has spent much of her time in South America where she has played piano in a lounge bar in Peru owned by a Frenchman, taught English in Chile, designed bracelets and necklaces that she sold on the beach at Copacabana in Brazil and worked at an international travel agency in Buenos Aires.

She is back in Brazil now, doing research for her PhD in ethnomusicology with the assistance of a Fulbright grant. When her research is finished in a couple of months, she said, she will return to the University of Chicago where she will finish up her dissertation.

Ethnomusicology, she explained, involves studying music that is not in the western tradition.

“It’s anything apart from Western European art,” she said. “We consider it the anthropology of music.”

Her work has taken her to a village of about 200 in the Brazilian rainforest where she is studying the music of the Guarani, the largest group of indigenous people in Brazil, she said, but also the least studied.

The Guarani are “coastal nomads,” she said. The first indigenous Brazilians to come in contact with the European explorers more than 500 years ago, they faced the brunt of the disease and other effects of colonization. To survive as a people, she said, they became invisible to the rest of the world. They developed a “cloak of invisibility, she said, and have managed to continue to speak their own language, have their own schools where they teach in their language.

They are still basically a nomadic people and for that reason they are now struggling to keep the village where they are now living, Welch said. The village, she said, was settled in 1971 and now has grown to a point where they do not have enough land. They currently claim about 900 hectares of land and are seeking to expand by 2,300 hectares, she said.

Because the Guarani have not stayed in one location for hundreds of years the land they now live on is not considered their land and is likely to be developed by others.

The feeling of the Guarani, she said, has been if they become more visible the authorities will look more favorably on their ownership of the village.

Although they have houses in the village, she explained, they still take trips by bus to visit relatives and Guarani throughout South America.

Being nomadic does not mean they are a primitive people, she said.

“They are living in the modern world,” she said. “The kids play video games.”

What they do, however, is retain their traditional culture in that modern