Today the Wichí live mainly in Argentina, specifically in the western part of the province of Formosa, in the eastern part of Salta. In Bolivia, the Wichí communities are located in the Department of Tarija.
Wichí means 'person' in their language.

The 2010 national population census in Argentina revealed the existence of about 50,500 Wichis throughout the country. There is no definite data on the Bolivian side.

The Wichí language, Wichi-hlamtes, is the most speaken indigenous language in Argentina. Depending on the area, it has different dialects. This language remained oral until the arrival in 1911 of the Protestant missionaries of the South American Missionary, who dedicated themselves to evangelising the Wichi communities. In fact, the first Wichí/Spanish grammar and vocabulary was written by Reverend Richard Hunt in 1913. In 1986, bilingualism was allowed in the region's schools.

The Wichí are “an ethno-linguistic group without a centralised political organisation where kinship ties and alliances constitute the structuring axis of social relations" (Montani, 2017).

The Wichì are uxorilocal and bilateral groups. Their ancient proximity to the border of the Andean ethnic groups gave them cultural traits such as monogamy, family ownership of territories and prosperous agriculture with surpluses, which led to sedentariness. Women cultivated small pumpkins and harvested bananas, carob beans, green beans, prickly pears, honey, etc., all seasonally.

Their calendar was organised in a circular fashion, following the rhythm of nature. The beginning of the year, celebrated in August, is the season known as nawab, "moon of flowers", followed in November by yachup, "moon of the carob tree", at the end of the southern summer there is the season of lup, "harvest moon", followed by fwi yeti, "moon of frosts".

As early as in the 16th century, the Wichí adopted an almost completely sedentary lifestyle with settlements by river banks. They formed kinship communities, each administered by a chief elder and a community council. Their dwellings were huts built of 2-3 meter-long branches. The family was generally monogamous although the caciques (chiefs) had more than one woman. The Wichí belief system was included by anthropologists in animism and shamanism: they worshipped the beings of nature and had the notion of a superior being (Tokuah or Tokuaj) who governed the world.

In the second half of the 19th century, the Wikì began to decline in number as they were violently incorporated as labourers into sugar cane, cotton and sawmill plantations. They were finally politically annexed to the Argentine nation between 1870 and 1911 through military campaigns.

In 1915, the Algodonal massacre took place not far away in Bolivia, when a group of soldiers rounded up a group of 200 Wichí chiefs and shot them. Over the past 100 years, Wichí lands have been invaded relentlessly.

In 1998, a study based on satellite photo research conducted by Clark University (Massachusetts) showed that between 1984 and 1996, 20% of the natural environment had disappeared. Since then, loggers have continued to cut down their forests, and settlers to raise cattle. The herds have not only turned the land taken from the Wichis into an arid desert but have also encroached on the small plots of land the Wichis managed to keep, destroying their crops. What was once bush or savannah has been greatly degraded by deforestation, the introduction of cattle and, more recently, soya cultivation.

The Wichì live in deprived conditions in a devastated territory. They have organised themselves into small, predominantly sedentary, homogeneous communities located in rural areas. They live in what they call a 'mountain' (tahnyi) and their economic, political, ecological and medical situation is critical. To survive, they have come to rely on casual occupations offered often by those who have defaced their homes.

Even where land has been returned and the Wichí hold some entitlements, deforestation is massive, transgenic soya crops loom large, malnutrition and obesity are widespread and Chagas disease remains endemic. Some of them have migrated to urban areas, where they usually live in slums.

With the aim of gaining recognition of their territorial rights, several Wichí communities have formed associations and joined together legally. Their main claims are in two large areas of public land east of Salta, known as Lot 55 (approximately 2,800 km²) and Lot 14. The Wichí's rights to this land have been recognised by law, but there are still no practical measures to enforce it. After months of complaints, legal battles and a campaign sponsored by Greenpeace, on 14 October 2005 the National Parks Administration and the Salta government signed an agreement to create a new national protected area. The indigenous rights organisation, Survival International, has been campaigning for years for international support for the demands of the Wichí associations.

In 2016, the Wichì community of Salta, Argetina, reported that the owners of soybean fields had been appropriating thousands of hectares of farms, using armed men to evict families, violating rights to land, health and education, and condemning children to death for lack of medical care.