Movima

The Movima are an Indigenous people of the Llanos de Moxos in Beni department, Bolivia, concentrated around the town of Santa Ana del Yacuma and dozens of communities along the Yacuma, Rapulo and Apere rivers. Their language is an isolate with no demonstrated relatives, notable among linguists for its unusual phonology and rich compounding; although nearly 19,000 people identified as Movima in the 2012 census, active speakers number only in the hundreds, most of them elderly.

Heirs to the pre-Columbian earthwork-building societies of the Moxos savannas, the Movima passed through Jesuit missions in the colonial era and later through the rubber and cattle economies of Beni. Households today farm rice, maize, cassava, plantain and citrus on river levees, and round out the year with fishing, hunting, gathering and ranch labor in a landscape shaped by annual floods.

The people are organized in the Subcentral del Pueblo Indígena Movima and hold a titled communal territory. Bilingual education programs and locally produced teaching materials aim to pass the language to new generations, a race against time given the small number of fluent elders.