Waqha

Waqha is the name the Vilela people give to their own language, better known to outsiders as Vilela; together with Lule it forms the small Lule-Vilela language family of northern Argentina. Its speakers called themselves Wakambabelte, meaning people who speak Waqha.

By the fifteenth century the Vilela lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in what became the provinces of Tucumán and Santiago del Estero, but after the Spanish conquest they withdrew east into the Gran Chaco. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the horse-riding Guaycuru peoples pressed them farther east toward the Paraná River.

Jesuits founded missions on Vilela lands, San José de las Petacas in 1735 and Nuestra Señora del Pilar and Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo in 1763, but all were dissolved when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 and 1768.