Unlike much of the existing literature on Paraguay’s early national era, Michael Kenneth Huner’s Parishioners of Sovereignty centers on common folk, culling their attitudes towards the state from an impressive number of manuscript civil and criminal records, a varied corpus of Guaraní-language sources, and a miscellany of state and ecclesiastical records. Huner builds on recent political and social histories from Paraguay and the region to show that an unusual church–state apparatus cultivated a nationalism nourished by the Guaraní language, but he is intent on showing how national bonds were fluid and contested.

The book is organized chronologically into three parts: (1) early state formation under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia from circa 1800 to 1844; (2) the expansion of church–state institutions under Carlos Antonio López, including a robust standing army under the latter’s son, Francisco Solano López (1844 to 1865); and (3) the War of the Triple Alliance (1865 to 1870). The nuanced story of the emergence of the Paraguayan republic revolves around early leaders’ “tactical silence” (44) regarding independence from Spain to avoid power grabs from Peru or Buenos Aires, among others. Ironically, Francia’s enduring tyrannical regime evolved from several highly democratic congresses: the 1814 congress included one thousand delegates, selected by an electorate that included virtually all adult men, from literates of property to illiterate and barefoot monolingual Guaraní-speakers. The territorial ambiguity of the early state is evidenced by its relative lack of power vis-à-vis Mbayá confederacies on the northern and western borderlands and by its brutish dealings with indio pueblos of the Entre Ríos region whose political loyalties were in play.

The back-to-back López regimes continued to build on Francia’s use of the church and repurposed discourses on celestially centralized power to congeal into what Huner calls “divine-right republicanism.” Important state agents in this formulation were the nation’s bishop and his small army of clerics. From 1845 to 1868 the López presidents oversaw the ordination of more than a hundred priests—a handful with last names of Indigenous origin—who preached in the language of the common citizen.

Questioning the strength of the church–state rallying cry, Huner challenges previous historiography that presumed a primeval ethnolinguistic nationalism to explain the continued loyalty of the army and its citizenry during the continent’s deadliest war, with case after case of individual disloyalty. A good amount of this narrative is told through desertion trial records; the last chapter is, in fact, built around a single and spectacular case. To avoid imposing the political motives implied by military desertion on his subjects, Huner employs the term “whims,” quoting his subjects’ own word—sometimes recorded in Spanish (antojo), sometimes in Guaraní (potareí?)—to explain their slide to desertion. Given how often caprice is invoked, this emic analytical tool could have used some additional philological background which, I suspect, would further illuminate interesting Indigenous and early modern Catholic cultural sediments of Paraguayan culture.

In his treatment of the war years, Huner shows how religion was manifest in all kinds of belligerent and patriotic discourse and actions: the monolingual Guaraní propaganda outlets’ deification of López, voluntary war donations from matrons and other women as pious works, and the racist anti-Black and anti-African language embellished with devil imagery that caricatured Brazil’s army. The homefront newspaper, Cacique Lambaré, and the frontline newspaper, Cabichuí, were the first publications to showcase Guaraní as the national language, and it is in his reading of these texts, in particular, that Huner’s skill with the Guaraní language shines. Especially lucid is the description of Cacique Lambaré’s “indianesque nationalism” (see Rebecca Earle 2007), perhaps the earliest Paraguayan iteration of the myth of the “mestizo nation” in the Guaraní language, a myth that would be fully developed in nationalist histories by the first postwar generation of intellectuals (see Ignacio Telesca 2010).

The prose of Parishioners of Sovereignty is colorful and energetic with much of the polemical commentary in the footnotes, making it an excellent option for undergraduate and/or graduate courses. Scholars of nationalism and state-building will appreciate the book’s rich archival base and find a fascinating addition to the history of the rise of modern republicanism in Latin America.