The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 by Bridget María Chesterton (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2015 always read to North American audiences as “Marxist”—as Cohn points out, modernist literary techniques that were widely used by “boom” writers like Gárcia Márquez were associated with anti-Communist politics in the United States, though not in Latin America. But Cohn’s book is an important and rewarding study that should be of interest to scholars from multiple disciplines, and even to those outside Latin American studies who work on Cold War institutions. She has succeeded in making the politics of the boom simultaneously more complex, and more intelligible. Patrick Iber Lecturer in International and Area Studies University of California, Berkeley THE GRANDCHILDREN OF SOLANO LÓPEZ: FRONTIER AND NATION IN PARAGUAY, 1904–1936. By Bridget Marı́a Chesterton. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013, p. 179. Bridget Marı́a Chesterton’s book examines how Paraguayan leaders, intellectuals, and foreigners attempted to incorporate an isolated and resource-barren geographic territory, the Gran Chaco, and its native inhabitants into national projects during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By explaining how the idea of the Chaco frontier—the region was never effectively colonized—contributed to the resurrection of a proud Paraguayan national identity, Chesterton advances historians’ understandings of how frontiers inform state-making and nationalism in twentieth-century Latin America. The book analyzes ideas about the Chaco frontier and Paraguayan nationalism in the context of three historical events or periods: the 1904 coup that ended Colorado Party rule and brought the Liberal Party to power; the Chaco War (1932–1935); and the 1936 Febrerista Revolution that ended liberal rule. Engaging ideas from Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat, Chesterton describes how Paraguayan thinkers and leaders coped with the “loser” status Paraguay acquired when it suffered defeat in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). In the period after the Liberal Party came to power (1904), elites debated the role that Francisco Solano López, the former president of Paraguay and instigator of the War of the Triple Alliance, would play in the nation’s history. While a few Lopistas praised the deceased president as a strong leader, anti-Lopistas dominated national historical narratives and virtually erased López from history. But the experience of the Chaco War served to vindicate López, and under the Febrerista government, the former president was enthroned as an historical hero of the nation. The book’s analysis of the debates about what it meant to be a Paraguayan foregrounds an exploration of the Chaco frontier. If eastern Paraguay was defined by its population of Catholic, mestizo 92 Book Reviews soldier-agriculturalists, what made the Chaco and its peoples Paraguayan? Newspaper articles, scientific journals, and ephemera from the first three decades of the twentieth century provide evidence that nationals were exploring the nation’s relationship to the Chaco. As the Bolivian military pushed into disputed territories claimed by Paraguay, the Paraguayan military increased their troop presence in the region. After a Paraguayan lieutenant named Adolfo Rojas Silva was killed by Bolivian troops in 1927, the warmongering increased, diplomatic relationships fell apart, and by 1932 the two nations were at war in the Chaco. One of the puzzling questions the book seeks to clarify is why an economically poor country like Paraguay defended its territory in the Chaco when it contained no discernable resources. Chesterton argues that “nationalism motivated a generation of men to fight . . . in a vast frontier with few, if any, cultural ties to eastern Paraguay and a region essentially barren of natural resources and economic potential” (2). As the descendants of Solano López’s army—his “grandchildren,” as it were—Paraguayan soldiers in the Chaco War fought “to redeem the honor of the nation—and Solano López—after the insulting defeat in the War of the Triple Alliance” (6). There is no disputing that nationalism informed politicians’ and soldiers’ participation in the Chaco War, but there were certainly other factors that go unexplained in the book. While other histories have overemphasized the influence of oil companies on the two belligerent nations, the only mention of this potential cause is relegated to a footnote. More importantly, when dealing with the...