Uakambalelte

Uakambalelté is the name the Vilela people gave themselves, meaning those who speak Waqha, their native language. By the fifteenth century they ranged over the north of Tucumán and Santiago del Estero and the east of Salta. They were nomadic hunters and gatherers who took peccary, carob pods and wild honey.

The Spanish conquest of Tucumán pushed them east into the Gran Chaco, where they lived in a number of subgroups. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the horse-riding Guaycuru peoples expanded across the Chaco and drove them still farther east toward the Paraná River.

The Jesuits, whose missions included San José de las Petacas founded in 1735 and two further foundations of 1763, worked in their lands until the expulsion of the order in 1767 and 1768.