“So That the Nation Is Not Harmed in Any Way”: Enslaved Cowboys as Accusers in Paraguay’s State-Owned Ranches, 1820–50

After independence from Spain, Paraguayan governments reinvented racialized forms of labor coercion for a variety of projects, including colonizing borders, providing for the army, developing strategic industries, building roads, and policing dissent. As the state became the main economic actor in the country, as well as the largest landholder and slaveholder, it mobilized increasing numbers of tributaries, enslaved people, convicts, and drafted peasants as workers. And yet, while labor coercion allowed governments to produce state authority across the republic, it simultaneously granted poor Paraguayans unusually direct access to the national authorities—a forum that they used to promote their own ideas about the public good and to influence political decisions. This paper will center on enslaved workers in Paraguay’s state-owned cattle ranches, who raised cattle, horses and sheep, grew food and cotton, and made woolen and cotton textiles to supply the army. These workers, the paper shows, systematically denounced overseers and administrators for using the state’s resources for their own private ends. In an authoritarian republic with few opportunities for political action, establishing and policing a line between private and public property allowed these workers to challenge workplace authorities and push for an alternative understanding of how the republic’s wealth should be managed, in which workers themselves should be the main beneficiaries. Ultimately, the paper reveals that unfree workers’ efforts were not only crucial to establishing state authority after the fall of the Spanish empire, but also to creating new imaginaries of rule that effectively brought the abstract notion of the state into being.