“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

weakness and consolidate its own hold over the borderlands. By the 1820s, no nation could
lay definitive claim to the Rio de la Plata’s contested grounds. 11
Unfortunately, as the colonial systems in the Río de la Plata and elsewhere collapsed,
the nuanced narratives of borderlands accommodations and interactions have tended to
disappear with them. Complex, layered sovereignties and spaces are followed, somewhat
seamlessly, by either the absolute sovereignties of nation-states or absolute forms of
violence. 12 The Río de la Plata borderlands appear swept along in the tide, with little voice in
the transition beyond resistance to the weak national projects attempting to fill in for
collapsed empires.
This dissertation argues, however, that the cultural accommodations, geographic
ambiguities and legal complexities that the scholarship on borderlands and imperial
sovereignties has described did not disappear into the revolutionary vortex. Rather, they
intensified throughout the 19 th century as borderlands inhabitants actively maneuvered
between competing national projects to maintain their own autonomy from any one
centralized authority. Borderlands residents proved adept at moving between rival systems.
They crossed borders along chains of commercial and political connections to escape
military conflicts and pursue economic opportunities. In the process, peripheral inhabitants
profoundly shaped how the transformation from empire to nation-state would occur in the
region. They did so at least in part on their own terms and through their own institutions
11 For a comparative history of the collapse of the Iberian empires, see Jeremy
Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006).
12 Stephen Aron and Jeremy Adelman, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires,
Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History," Ameircan Historical
Review 104, no. 3 (1999). Adelman and Aron argued that the 19 th century transition from
rival empires to nation-states throughout the Americas produced a fundamental shift in
economic, cultural, and social relationships on their peripheries. The most salient feature of
this transformation was the hardening of borders.
10