Big Water

With ten essays that are both scholarly and engaging, Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay achieves its goal of making the Triple Frontier a new area of historical scholarship. The book shows how the confluence of indigenous peoples, three nation-states, and an interdependent river system shaped the region and set it apart from other borderlands. In doing so, Big Water overcomes and transcends national history without ignoring the relevance of the nation-state. Chapters by Frederico Freitas and Daryle Williams, on the formation of the Iguazú National Park and the Jesuit-Guaraní missions as United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage sites, are particularly effective in showing how the nation affected borderlands and vice versa. Big Water also transcends the nation-state in its choice of contributors. While published by a North American press in English, the volume includes six authors trained in the United States, two trained in Argentina, and two trained in Brazil. It is also interdisciplinary, with contributors from history and anthropology.Big Water is refreshing in the attention it pays to Paraguay and indigenous peoples, in addition to its broad time frame. In the historiography of South America, Brazil and Argentina are often discussed together as dominant countries, and their smaller neighbor, Paraguay, is frequently omitted. In contrast, this book moves away from the large cities of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro to the remote Triple Frontier and to rural Paraguay. Coherence is maintained throughout the volume, as each essay addresses all three countries. Attention to indigenous peoples is another common thread throughout the volume. The colonial-period chapters by Shawn Michael Austin and Guillermo Wilde, along with Evaldo Mendes da Silva's present-day essay, focus exclusively on native peoples, while other contributions note indigenous land conflicts. The broad time frame is also a plus as the Guaraní and their missions shaped the region and are critical for understanding the present. Together, the volume shows both continuity and change over time.Although the book makes an important contribution to the study of borderlands and the Southern Cone, the title Big Water is a bit of a misnomer. A reader expecting a focus on water or environmental history will be disappointed. While waterways shaped the region, water is treated unevenly in the volume. The topic is addressed most directly in Jacob Blanc's essay on the Itaipú hydroelectric dam, Freitas's essay on the national park associated with Iguazú Falls, and Bridget María Chesterton's essay on Friendship Bridge, over the Paraná River. Of the chapters that do not focus specifically on water, Christine Folch's essay on Ciudad del Este and Silva's essay on the Guaraní are most effective at drawing connections to water. The “Environment” section of the book is limited by its focus on territorial settlement patterns.The introduction provides a convincing explanation for the book's thematic rather than chronological organization, along with useful summaries of each chapter. In the section titled “Adaptation,” Austin argues that Spaniards, Portuguese, and Catholic priests competed over Indian labor and souls rather than territory, while Wilde discusses the simultaneous creation of a homogenous mission identity and a diverse regional identity during the colonial period. By recounting how specific Indians experienced this frontier region, both authors enliven their chapters and demonstrate findings based on deep archival research. In the second section, “Environment,” Eunice Sueli Nodari asserts that the endangered condition of the Atlantic Forest biome resulted to a large degree from the early colonization model, focusing on three Brazilian German colonies without addressing how these limited case studies compare with the many other colonization projects in the region. Freitas explores how the Iguazú Falls environment shaped immigration to the region, finding that conservation played a role in the Iguazú National Park's creation but that the primary motivation was the desire to settle, control, and nationalize the frontier.In the third section, “Belonging,” Michael Kenneth Huner brings to life the contested frontier of nineteenth-century Paraguay with the attempts of a regional caudillo to maintain power based on public office, personal bravado, and clientelism. Williams highlights the twentieth-century tensions between local inhabitants, provincial entities, the federal government, and neighboring countries over the cultural patrimony of the Jesuit-Guaraní missions. In his chapter about the spatial movements of the Guaraní across the Triple Frontier, Silva tells of the experiences and beliefs of people who are often overlooked and hidden from view. In the final section, “Development,” Blanc explores how the origins of the Itaipú dam helped redefine the Southern Cone's political power structure, Chesterton uses text and images to describe how Paraguay reoriented from Argentina to Brazil, and Folch uses interviews to reinforce her explanation for the rise and fall of Ciudad del Este, the reexporting center known for contraband and its large Taiwanese and Arab merchant communities. Graciela Silvestri concludes the volume by analyzing texts from each of the three countries that make up the Triple Frontier to uncover ideas of nation.In sum, the volume contains rigorous but easy-to-read scholarship that makes for an excellent introductory text about the Triple Frontier region. It highlights the region's unique characteristics and leaves the reader wanting to learn more about this overlooked but important borderlands. Hopefully it spurs further studies that move away from the urban metropolises of the Southern Cone and transcend national boundaries

Archaeology · Ethnology · Frontier · Geography · Geopolitics · Historiography · Indigenous · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · State (computer science · History · History of Colonial Brazil · Indigenous Cultures and History · Indigenous Studies in Latin America · Law

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