How Pedro Quiñonez Lost His Soul: Suicide, Routine Violence, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Paraguay

Abstract

Abstract This article uses judicial records of suicide cases from mid-nineteenth-century Paraguay to explore how inhabitants of the country experienced postcolonial state formation. The Republic of Paraguay, founded in 1813, was a marginal, autonomous state in South America, forged from a former Spanish colonial frontier province and dominated by autocratic regimes until its near destruction in the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870). Conventional historical wisdom suggests that unlike other countries in Latin America at the time, matters of nationhood and state sovereignty in Paraguay were largely resolved. Stable autocratic regimes, muted social inequalities among a common peasantry, and ethnolinguistic bonds born of the indigenous-origin vernacular Guaraní allegedly provided for this resolution. However, this article disrupts such received wisdom and finds that state formation in Paraguay by the mid-nineteenth century was still very much an unsettled, ongoing affair, especially in the intensely local contexts of the countryside. Its narrative follows the 1865 suicide of the retired militia officer Pedro Quiñonez and what a local judge did and wrote to condemn his soul. In fact, this and dozens of other cases of suicide reviewed in the article reveal a social world of servitude, racialized denigration, and routine violence that were part and parcel of everyday people’s incorporation into ñane retã—the Guaraní-language expression for the nation-state—and the consequent slippery ambivalence that Pedro and others manifested in their relation to this polity.