This article traces the history of Brazilian immigration to Paraguay and the emergence of 'Brasiguaio' communities, arguing that the enclaves are products of the development policies of each country's military dictatorship. Although Brasiguaios are currently associated with wealthy Brazilian agriculturalists in Paraguay, the majority of these immigrants have been poor workers who face constant marginalization from state bureaucracies and unequal access to land. Paraguay's eastern border region is among the most complex spaces in Latin America of cultural, economic, and national hybridity. The transformation of this borderland is predicated on a highly unequal social hierarchy that resulted largely from the evolution of Brasiguaio immigration.

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This article chronicles the fifteen-month border conflict between the military regimes of Brazil and Paraguay that occurred between March of 1965 and June of 1966 – a stand-off that paved the way for the Itaipu project that would become the largest dam in the world. In the context of the 1960s Cold War, both governments saw a large-scale dam on the Paraná River as a means to catalyse industrialisation and strengthen the political legitimacy of their respective authoritarian regimes. Yet the border crisis was not a stand-off between equal powers. Brazil was the much stronger force, and, with the backing of the United States, the Brazilian dictatorship brought Paraguay firmly under its sphere of influence while also marginalising neighbouring Argentina. The border question at Guaíra served as a springboard for Brazil's rising power, and subsequently transformed the geopolitical landscape of the Southern Cone.

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agrarian history will find it especially rewarding. Some readers might take issue with Wilcox's treatment of labour relations as 'amicable' (p. ) and his suggestion that the availability of land 'tempered' social conflict (p. ). But his story is compelling and we should take his analysis seriously. Some of Mato Grosso's exceptionalism-floodplain ranching and divisions between cowboys and ranch handswere also common in Colombia. More significantly, Wilcox's claim that Mato Grosso has been central to the intensification of Brazilian ranching since the s is provocative but hard to demonstrate in a story that ends around . For expediency, Wilcox also sidelines the politics of ranching. The connections between cattle and the 'agrarian question', however, remain important. Traditional studies of the Latin American countryside assumed that hidebound ranchers were an obstacle to national development. But if we accept Wilcox's proposition that ranchers were constrained by environmental and economic factors rather than simply backward, how does this (re)shape our understanding of the history and politics of agrarian change?