“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

economic necessities in the borderlands. As such, these borderlands legalities were
simultaneously local and international in scope. By the 1840s, these relationships had
congealed into a robust trading system along the Uruguay River and its surrounding
borderlands. These chains linked colorados like Guarch and Picant moving along their
commercial networks between Montevideo and the upper Uruguay as well as blancos and
their federalist allies like Urquiza in the Argentine Littoral together. These mutually
reinforcing systems of borderlands trade and legalities prospered because they ignored
national divisions and instead emphasized personal and factional connections.
As the system developed, the absence of national boundaries became less of a
hindrance for the borderlands trade than a precondition for its continued existence. At the
same time, problems lurked as the region became more integrated. In particular, the
borderlands legalities developed by merchants, landowners and traders to achieve
commercial success and political power in the vacuum left by the collapsed colonial order
depended explicitly on the blurred boundaries and local autonomy provoked by incessant
war. Attempts to impose national boundaries and centralized authority on these practices,
therefore, threatened the very underpinnings of the borderlands’ emerging commercial
system. As we saw in the Cabral case, the imposition of nationalized legal categories equally
challenged localized notions of justice, citizenship and status embodied by concepts like
vecindad. By the late 1840s, efforts to reconstitute state-centered authority over the region
were underway. New conflicts over borderlands sovereignty loomed
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