From family to community album: portray of a Paraguayan company town

Abstract

For about one hundred years, a heterogeneous group of indigenous and non-indigenous, Paraguayan, Argentinean and European people has been working in the tannin factory of Puerto Casado (Paraguay). In this article I discuss the attempt to create a community album of Puerto Casado by combining pictures belonging to the family albums of some of the ex-factory workers. I will argue that this change in scale from family to community enables the emergence of repressed ethnic, political and economic tensions that jeopardizes the concept of a “community” of ex-factory workers and proves to be a useful methodological tool for a collaborative research process.