Diaguita
indigenous people who live in South America
The Diaguita people are a South American Indigenous people native to the Chilean Norte Chico and the Argentine Northwest. Western or Chilean Diaguitas lived mainly in the Transverse Valleys that incise semi-arid mountains. Eastern or Argentine Diaguitas lived in the provinces of La Rioja and Catamarca and part of the provinces of Salta, San Juan and Tucumán. The term Diaguita was first applied to peoples and archaeological cultures by Ricardo E. Latcham in the early 20th century.
Ancient Diaguitas were not a unified people; the language or dialects used by them seems to have varied from valley to valley and they were politically fragmented into several chiefdoms. Coastal and inland Chilean Diaguitas traded, as evidenced by the archaeological findings of mollusc shells in the upper courses of Andean valleys.
According to the 2022 census, 90,794 people in Argentina self-identify as Diaguita or Diaguita-Cacano. In Chile, Diaguitas are the third-most populous Indigenous ethnicity after the Aymara and the Mapuche, numbering 153,231 in 2024. The Diaguitas have been recognised as an Indigenous people by the Chilean state since 2006.
Language
Early Spanish accounts, including Jerónimo de Vivar's Crónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile, claim the Diaguitas inhabiting the different Transverse Valleys spoke different languages.
The public source identifies “Diaguita” as indigenous people who live in South America. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Diaguita, indigenous and people.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q278944. The Library of Congress control number is sh85037513. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2024 and 2006.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diaguita” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.