“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

As the Iberian colonies in South America entered their final decades, the eastern Río
de la Plata borderlands remained a contested region between empires. It also represented a
space where its residents could use those conflicts to secure limited room for maneuvering
in the face of elite commercial incursions, and where peripheral military officials balanced
conciliation and coercion to sustain their tenuous authority. In short, the experience of
escalating imperial frictions occurring in the Río de la Plata until the outset of the 19 th
century and the practices of the indigenous and subaltern groups taking advantage of them
echo many of the themes in the historiography focusing on borderlands regions throughout
the Americas and beyond. Groundbreaking studies by Richard White in the Great Lakes
region and David Weber in the southern and southwestern territories of the United States
have explored the conflicts and compromises that imperial weakness made possible in the
zones of friction between them. 7 These stories of the “middle ground” reframed the
borderlands as places where the inability of one group to project definitive power produced
a great deal of space for creative negotiations between diverse groups. Borderlands,
including the Río de la Plata, began to be thought of as “zones of historical interaction” that
fostered a host of complex social relationships, pacts and accommodations instead of lawless
spaces beyond imperial control. 8
The observations of this earlier borderlands scholarship have also led to increased
attention to the geographies in which these convergences occurred. The work of Stephen
Aron in particular has focused on the role of rivers in his “American confluence” to capture
7 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), David J. Weber, The
Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
8 Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, ed. Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on
the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1998), 10.
8