Welcome to
. The following is part of our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.Capital and largest city of Paraguay, Asunción is one of the oldest cities in all of South America — a fact for which she’s often called the ‘Mother of Cities.’
She lies on the eastern bank of the Paraguay River where Juan de Salazar y Espinosa briefly put in his ships on an expedition upstream in 1537. Finding the locals very friendly, he decided to found a fort which he named Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Asunción (Our Lady Saint Mary of the Assumption). The settlement soon grew to become the capital of the Spanish colonial territory, the Governorate of the Río de la Plata.
Since Paraguay’s independence in the early 19th century, the country and its capital have seen war, coup d'états, and horrific fires. The nation emerged from a 35-year dictatorship in 1989, and since then the fragile democracy has been plagued by political unrest and chronic economic problems. Hopefully, the relative stability and minor GDP growth achieved in the last few years are signs of better things to come.
I. In Art
In 1864, Paraguay invaded the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso and the Argentine Corrientes Province, setting off the deadliest conflict in post-colonial South American history. Political tensions between the newly independent nations had been rising for decades as a result of ongoing territorial disputes. In response to Paraguayan aggression, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance in 1865, and launched a counteroffensive. The war soon became a prolonged conflict with enormous casualties on both sides (total death count is estimated to be between 150,000–500,000 people).
After four years of brutal fighting, the allied forces eventually captured Asunción, driving the Paraguayan government underground to wage a guerrilla war. Though the war formally ended in 1870 when the allies managed to kill Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López, Brazilian and Argentine forces would occupy the capital for another 6 years, which is probably the window within which this etching was produced.
The war had catastrophic consequences for Paraguay, with some estimates suggesting that the country lost up to 69% of its pre-war population, primarily due to disease, hunger, and the ravages of war. Asunción itself was heavily damaged, with allied soldiers looting many of the city's buildings during the post-war occupation.
II. In Verse
The most coveted flower of the divine orchard has already wilted and its fragile stem is skin cracked dry. The children of the earth and their song and their dance have died out already forgotten.. Our First, Original Father no longer gazes upon the future...— Susy Delgado (translated from Guaraní by Susan Smith Nash & Susy Delgado), excerpts from “Our Father is Tired” (2020)
The poem from which these lines come was originally written in Guaraní, an indigenous language spoken in Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil. With 6.5 million speakers, Guaraní remains the most widely spoken Native American language across the entire Americas. In this poem, Delgado imagines a god who has grown tired of his creation, allowing it to slip into darkness and death.
III. In Cartography
Daniel de Lafueille was an 18th century French cartographer. His map of South America shows the political geography of the continent in 1706, when he first drew it. We can see the land divided up into the political subunits of the Portuguese and Spanish territories, only some of which bear resemblance to the borders of South American nations of today. The cartouche shows an imagined scene where Native Americans offer gifts to the Europeans while an ominous snake looks on. I wonder if Lafueille meant for the snake to symbolise the dangers of the continent for European colonists, but from our modern vantage point it feels more apt to think of it the other way around.
Look to the centre of the continent and you’ll see a lake that does not exist, around the edges of which appears the word ‘Paraguay’, which at this time denoted the river and the land around it (in quite a vague sense), rather than a polity. Interestingly, the map also labels the east coast of what is now Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil as the Mer du Paraguay (Sea of Paraguay), which is a term I’ve only ever seen once before: on the maps of another French cartographer, Pierre Duval (1618–1683), making me think it might be an idiosyncrasy of the French tradition.
IV. In Literature
The discovery of America opened up to Europe, and especially to Spain, opportunities for expansion of national territory and individual advancement which no epoch, either before or since, has equalled. From a cluster of small States, struggling for existence against a powerful enemy on their own soil, in a few years Spain became the greatest empire of the world. The result was that a spirit of adventure and a desire to grow rich speedily possessed all classes. In addition to this, every Spaniard in America during the first few years of the conquest seemed to consider himself, to some extent, not only as a conqueror, but also as a missionary. Now, missionaries and conquerors are men, on the whole, more imbued with their own importance and sanctity, and less disposed to consider consequences, than almost any other classes of mankind. The conjunction of the two in one disposed the conquistadores of America to imagine that, no matter how cruel or outrageous their treatment of the Indians was, they atoned for all by the introduction of what they considered the blessing of the knowledge of the true faith. It will be seen at once that, if one can determine with accuracy which of the many `faiths' preached about the world is actually the true faith, a man who is in possession of it is acting properly in endeavouring to diffuse it. The meanest soldier in the various armies which left Spain to conquer America seems to have had no doubt about the matter. [...] In Paraguay there were no mines, but there were other methods of extracting money from the Indians. At the first conquest Paraguay was not the little country bounded on the west by the Paraguay, on the south by the Paraná, on the north by the Aquidaban, and on the east by Sierra of Mbaracavu, as it is at present. On the contrary, it embraced almost all that immense territory known to-day as the Argentine Confederation, some of the Republic of Uruguay, and a great portion of Brazil, embracing much of the provinces of Misiones, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, and Matto Grosso, as well as Paraguay itself. How the little country, twelve hundred miles from the sea, came to give its name to such an enormous territory, and to have the seat of government at Asuncion, demands some explanation. Peru and Chile were discovered and occupied some time before the eastern side of South America. Their riches naturally drew great attention to them; but the voyage, first to Cartagena de Indias, and then across the isthmus, and the re-embarkation again on the Pacific, were both costly and arduous. It had been the ambition of all explorers to discover some river which would lead from the Atlantic to the mines of Peru and what is now Bolivia, then known as Alta Peru. Of course, this might have been achieved by ascending the Amazon, especially after the adventurous descent of it by Orellana, of which Fray Gaspar de Carbajal has left so curious a description; but, whether on account of the distance or for some other reason, it never seems to have been attempted.
— R.B. Cunninghame Graham, from A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 (1901)
The excellently named Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham was a Scottish writer, politician, and adventurer who rode with the Argentine gauchos before he served as a Member of Parliament in the UK. Before the first ever socialist MP founded the Scottish Labour Party, he travelled to Paraguay and wrote the remarkable book from which these passages come. In it he sketches out the lost communities which the Jesuits had established in the territory during the 17-18th centuries. He was drawn to recount the history of these missions because they had a reputation for being an example of a harmonious communal living that even the anti-clerical Voltaire described as a ‘golden age in the history of humankind’. The Jesuits had protected the Guaraní people from slave raids and the commercialism that ravaged so much else of the continent in the years before they were forcibly expelled by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1767.
V. In Photography
Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.
— Pablo Neruda
Really fascinating. That the Guarani have held on to their language with such success is truly remarkable. My first awareness of them came from the movie The Mission. Twenty years later, I sat down for breakfast in the Café Guarany in Porto, chosen at random, and then noticed the name on the menu and the murals featuring people in what is presumably traditional Guarani attire. The place was apparently a musicians' haunt when founded in the 1930s, which leads me to think that it must have been named for Gomes's 1870 opera Il Guarany, not that I've ever seen it. Wikipedia indicates that it's rarely been performed in the English-speaking world. You've now prodded me to find out what else Voltaire and possibly other Enlightenment minds had to say about the Guarani. Thanks for the impetus!
I love learning about remote places through photography, art and poetry!