Jerry Wilson Cooney (1940–2014)

Abstract

Jerry Cooney died on Saturday, March 1, 2014, in Longview, Washington, the victim of lung cancer. The date of his passing is significant, for to Paraguayans it commemorates the Battle of Cerro Corã and the end of the gran epopeya nacional. That in itself makes for a fitting and ironic final statement, for Jerry Cooney was for many years a primary exponent of US scholarship on Paraguay.He was born in 1940 in the tiny town of Opportunity, in the eastern section of the state of Washington, a cold desert of a locale, windswept and largely devoid of the bright green vegetation that so fascinated him in Paraguay. He had a very practical childhood that focused on farming, baseball, and the classics of Western literature. His father, who was a sometimes professor of agriculture at the local community college, impressed on Jerry the benefits of thrift, charity, and hard work, and his mother taught him to read — all of which served him well in his career as a historian.As a young man, Cooney worked as a welder and maintained his union affiliation for the rest of his life. After service in the army in the late 1950s, he entered the doctoral program in History at the University of New Mexico, where he worked with Troy Floyd and Ed Lieuwen. Though several family members had worked in Belize and the Panama Canal Zone, Cooney chose to focus his energies not on Central America but on Paraguay, a country that was very little known in the United States at that time.His was a very broad interest that in time became a happy obsession. In his doctoral dissertation he concentrated on the politics of the Francia dictatorship, and then he wrote extensively on the colonial estanco de tabacos, the guembé and caraguatá commerce, militarism in the 1830s and 1840s, the abolition of slavery during the López era, and the creation of a system of national schools and a “national” church in Paraguay. He did research in Asunción at the Archivo Nacional, in Buenos Aires at the Archivo General de la Nación, and in Seville at the Archivo General de Indias. Everywhere he went he found friends and admirers.After receiving his doctorate, Cooney worked for 25 years as a professor of Latin American history at the University of Louisville, and during that time he wrote a great many articles on Paraguayan history. His authored and edited books included Economía y sociedad en la Intendencia del Paraguay (1990), El Paraguay bajo los López (1994, with Thomas Whigham), A Guide to Collections on Paraguay in the United States (1995, with Thomas Whigham); El Paraguay bajo el Doctor Francia (1996, with Thomas Whigham); Paraguay and the United States: Distant Allies (2007, with Frank Mora); El fin de la colonia: Paraguay, 1810–1811 (2010), and El proceso de la independencia del Paraguay, 1807–1814 (2012). His last major publication was an analysis of early nineteenth-century Paraguayan politics in Las Instrucciones del ano XIII: 200 años después (2013), edited by Gerardo Caetano and Ana Ribeiro.As much as for his published work, Jerry Cooney will be remembered for all the encouragement he gave to young historians of Paraguay. He was a great friend and mentor. He would not like it, I suspect, if I were to call him the “father” of Paraguayan history for the current generation of scholars, but he was indisputably the “uncle” of us all. He cared about our development, about how we needed to write well and develop sophisticated analyses of history, and how our arguments needed to draw properly from the evidence in the documents. He helped turn us into serious scholars. And he was always generous — passing on to us useful leads, archival information, obscure papers and references he had turned up, etc. etc. There was nothing with which he was not generous and no occasion when he did not offer us a helping hand. I know of several instances when he quietly paid for airline tickets so that students could attend international congresses; he didn't want any credit for his generosity — quite the contrary — he just thought that the conferences would be incomplete if the students didn't attend. He was also one of the founders and guiding lights of the Jornadas Internacionales de Historia del Paraguay, which meets every two years at the University of Montevideo.With his death, Paraguay has lost a great friend. And so have I, more than I can say.