Besiro

Besiro, better known as Chiquitano, is the language of the Chiquitania savanna in the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz, with speakers reaching into Brazil; the people call themselves Monkox and their speech Besiro, while the Spanish named them Chiquitos. Its wider family is disputed, treated as an isolate or a branch of Macro-Je.

The Chiquitos had held out against the Spanish since the founding of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1559, until Jesuits opened the first reduction at San Javier de los Pinocas in 1692. They built mission towns in which Besiro became the common tongue of nearly fifty gathered tribes, numbering some fifty thousand people.

When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767, the mission network dissolved: some villagers fell into unfree ranch labour, while others withdrew into the forest, carrying their language with them.