Nation-State, Gender and Cultural Heritage in Asunción: international context, external influence and mechanisms to decolonize public space

Abstract

The socio-historical conflicts in Paraguay, such as wars and dictatorships, produced a conflicted and weak nation-state, where local culture had the capacity to develop within the contours of state absence. The imitation of European classificatory and organizational models in the Latin American context produces anachronisms of conflicting adaptation. An example of this is the implementation of the homogenizing European white nation-state model, which structures gender roles within it. Since the French Revolution, heritage has become a tool of representation for the construction of nation-states and national narratives. Thus, within these ideological processes, colonial androcentric views have been structured that govern democracy, social life, and construct the urban space. Within these mechanisms of representation, how do we read in the cultural heritage of the city the gender roles and coloniality that persist in Paraguay? Through historiographic review and urban observation, three national monuments that are representative of an androcentric symbolic construction of the Paraguayan nation-state are analyzed: The 'National Pantheon of the Heroes and Oratory of the Virgin of the Assumption,' monument to the historian 'Juan E. O’Leary', and the monument of 'Las Residentas'.