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This dissertation centers on a geographic area comprised of Paraguay, southern Brazil, eastern Bolivia, and northern Argentina, which I term the “Traditional Guaraní Frontier.” The term “frontier” is deployed due to its polysemy; it connotes a zone of cultural contact and a drawing of geopolitical borders. While the political, linguistic, and cultural legacy of the Guaraní frontier has led it to be dismissed as an exotic exception in the field of Latin American cultural studies, this dissertation examines a diverse breadth of cultural production to demonstrate that rather than an exception to larger patterns of cultural production in the region, the Guaraní frontier represents an intensification thereof.
In order to understand popular belief on the Guaraní frontier, this dissertation approaches cultural production through the interrelated terms of play, performance, and ritual. The first chapter analyzes of how the ritual-like act of collection produces discourses in both museums and textual collections from the Guaraní frontier. The following four chapters deal with the remediation, collection, and adaptation of three objects of popular belief on this frontier: the vernacular saint Gaucho Gil, the Pombero (a Paraguayan folk monster), and the yvy marãe’ỹ (land without evil) mytheme.
By looking at texts from within and without Paraguay and from a wide variety of media and genres, this dissertation provides a new reading of the Paraguayan and Guaraní frontier culture that sidesteps nationalist and officialist appropriations of popular and folk culture and raza guaraní ideology. This new reading is especially pertinent due the cultural and linguistic heritage of the region, which has often been dismissed as a backwater.
