Paraguayan nationalism has puzzled scholars for a long time, yet most of them concentrate on the early independence under the dictatorship of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia as well as on the fierce resistance during the Paraguayan or Triple Alliance War (1864–70). Bridget Chesterton, however, enquires into another bloody war fought with Bolivia between 1932 and 1935 over an inhospitable and sparsely inhabited region, the northern part of the Chaco. Her main aim is to explain how the frontier region of the Chaco, which had been disputed with Bolivia for a long time, came to be considered an integral part of the Paraguayan territory. The period analysed runs from 1904, when the Liberal Party came to power, until the end of the war and the overthrow of the Liberal regime by the so-called ‘Febrerista’ revolution in February 1936. As the title reveals, however, Chesterton sees a strong line of continuity from the nineteenth-century war fought under Francisco Solano López to the Chaco War. For this reason, the book starts with a description of the debate over the Triple Alliance War and the role of Francisco Solano López at the beginning of the twentieth century. Paraguayan intellectuals were divided in ‘Lopistas’ and ‘Anti-Lopistas’, but both agreed on the mestizo identity and the agrarian character of Paraguay, which led to the idea of a healthy and vigorous Paraguayan soldier-agriculturalist as the core of the nation. The glorification of the mestizo identity also enabled the scientists, anthropologists and other explorers of the Chaco frontier to write about the nature and the indigenous populations without referring to contemporary theories about racial degeneration and barbarism. Two central chapters of the book analyse how, with the help of reports on scientific expeditions and missionary enterprises in newspapers and books, the formerly unknown and unhospitable Chaco came to be a region considered similar to western Paraguay, or at least with a potential to be assimilated. Correspondences between indigenous languages and the vernacular Guaraní spoken by the Paraguayans, potentially productive lands and strong, although not yet ‘civilised’ indigenous people made it possible to include the Chaco into the national imagination. Postcards, maps and photographs reproduced in magazines as well as in school books strengthened the image of the Chaco as part of the Paraguayan territory in the making.

Textbooks as well as the press had firmly introduced the idea of the Chaco as an integral part of the nation, when the disputes with Bolivia aggravated and finally led to the war. The Liberal government successfully controlled popular claims for military actions until the beginning of the 1930s, when internal as well as international tensions grew and finally led to the outbreak of the war. Chesterton does not intend to tell the story of the war again or search for responsibilities. Instead, she enquires into the role of the Chaco frontier and the war for Paraguayan national identity. Her main argument is that the scientists, adventurers and missionaries brought the region into the national imagination, although still as a distant frontier. During the war, however, soldiers from rural western Paraguay who fought in the Chaco, made it widely known and further strengthened the ties between both parts of the country. They counted their experiences in poems and songs, written in Guaraní and bilingual Guaraní/Spanish, which soon became very popular throughout the nation, regardless of class and political affiliation: ‘These experiences in the region reshaped Paraguayan nationalism quickly and permanently’ (p. 112). Contrary to the official liberal position, the poems and songs composed by the soldier-poets remembered the Triple Alliance War as an heroic and glorious action and claimed to fight now in the name of Solano López. The Chaco War thus led to a redemption of national honour, as well as a rehabilitation of the rural, Guaraní-speaking soldier-agriculturalists against the liberal politics of the last decades, which had seen them as obstacles to modernisation and development. Drawing on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book on the ‘Culture of Defeat’, Chesterton states that Paraguayans did not emulate the victor's model of modernisation and culture, as other countries had done: ‘Rather, Paraguayans viewed their triumph in the Chaco solely as the result of their own unique heritage. […] What did occur in Paraguay after the later victory was that the initial defeat was viewed as a success. After the War of the Triple Alliance their culture survived to rise once again and defeat the Bolivians’ (p. 5).

This is a well-written and convincingly argued book, which contributes on the one hand to our understanding of one of the last, but still under-researched frontier regions in Latin America, as well as to a slightly different path of scientific thinking and research at the beginning of the twentieth century in South America. Mainly, however, it is an important contribution to our understanding of Paraguayan nationalism and to the fact that the War of the Triple Alliance, and not the founding of the Republic or the victorious Chaco War, are still today the cornerstones of national identity. The argument of the resurrection of the soldier-agriculturalist and the Guaraní language as the centre of national identity would have been even stronger if the author had drawn a line of continuity and change to the national identity formed under Solano López. Namely the publication of propaganda newspapers in Guaraní or bilingual Guaraní/Spanish during the last years of the Triple Alliance War should have been considered as the basis which made possible the protagonism and success of the ‘clase popular’ and their language during the Chaco War.