Blanc has written a comprehensive people’s history of the dictatorship-era construction of Itaipu, Latin America’s largest hydroelectric dam, built into the Paraná, the planet’s seventh-largest river, where it flows between Brazil and Paraguay. Like the river fed by major tributaries, Blanc’s history emerges in a plurilinear narrative flow to reveal the unique destinies of human groups. Although divided by sociocultural identity and (in)experience with political resistance, these groups were collectively transformed by their land’s submergence. As Blanc argues, their differences shaped patterns of oppression and possibilities long before the flood let loose upon their lands and would endure the varied consequences long afterward.
The resettled Avá-Guarani, the original inhabitants of the drowned lands, joined the settlers in a struggle seeking compensation. The settlers—divided between lighter-skinned farmers with land titles and darker-skinned, landless farmers—forged a potent, although ephemeral, social movement. Politicized by Itaipu, the Avá-Guarani maintained a persistent struggle for indigenous,...