Pitlaxa

Pitlaxa is the autonym of the people the Spaniards called the Pilagá, a Guaycuru nation whose language belongs to the Mataco-Guaicurú family. They were hunters and gatherers of the eastern Chaco, living on the Paraguay River. The Guaraní of Paraguay named them frentones, big foreheads, from their habit of shaving the front of the head.

They first enter written records in the seventeenth century, when the Jesuit Nicolás del Techo described them in 1628 under the name zapitilingas. The Guaycuru peoples were then pushing west through the Chaco.

Spanish military pressure halted that expansion in the mid-eighteenth century and drove the Pitlaxa from the Bermejo River. By the end of the century they had settled in the marshlands between the Pilcomayo and the Paraguay, which they still held when the Argentine frontier reached them in the nineteenth century.