Moth-Eaten Maps and Empty Wells: Augusto Roa Bastos, Augusto Céspedes, and the Chaco War Archive

Abstract

Unable to come to an agreement on where the border lay, Bolivia and Paraguay sought to define the boundaries of the northern Chaco in the 1932–1935 Chaco War. This article shows that the Chaco is a symptomatic case of the difficulty of defining borders and representing them textually. In particular, through an examination of classic Chaco War texts like Augusto Roa Bastos’s novel Son of Man and Augusto Céspedes’s story ‘The Well’, alongside lesser-studied maps from the 1929 arbitration court, the article shows the holes and gaps inherent in geographical and conceptual borders. The Chaco becomes a site where material, corporal, textual, and symbolic enclosures become undecidable. The moth-eaten maps and empty wells in the Chaco archive form the basis of a conceptual critique of enclosure in its theological, capitalist, and sovereign guises. Paying close attention to omissions, revisions, and translations, especially in Roa Bastos, the article shows that the Chaco border shows the latent undecidability of ground, which escapes bordering and definition as it becomes dis-enclosed. In this dis-enclosure, like a text read between drafts and translations, the disputed Chaco archive opens an abyssal but palpable and temporal relationship between text and reader.