“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

faction’s standing within a given community. This equally solidified their substantive legal
rights, completing a virtuous cycle.
Local legal practices and institutions accordingly played a critical role in defining
property rights. At the same time, the lands at issue were seldom limited by local or even
national boundaries. The properties of Brazilian ranchers in particular stretched across the
Río de la Plata borderlands. They created a tightly unified economic space. As such, the
power to declare private law rights in one forum inevitably influenced the webs of
relationships stitching the borderlands together. The drive to secure property rights for allies
across the border produced renewed conflicts as factional rivals jostled to influence
litigation.
The cross-border clashes between factions in multiple courtrooms over competing
property claims in turn opened up spaces for putative national leaders to bolster their own
authority in the borderlands. Throughout the 1850s, Argentina experienced particularly
sharp conflicts between rival national projects. Bartolomé Mitre, the porteño statesman and
military commander, confronted Urquiza’s loose confederation of interior provinces in a
decade-long struggle to forge a new national coalition. To prevail, each side worked to forge
local allies throughout the borderlands. By the early 1860s, local efforts to control the
definition of private law rights converged with these continuing struggles over sovereignty to
lay the groundwork for renewed international conflict. In this way, local legal politics
became increasingly entangled with persistent clashes over national laws, identities and
boundaries.
In order to explore the relationship between borderlands legalities and sovereign
conflicts, this chapter begins by returning to the local level. In particular, it looks at the
factional legal politics that went into constructing and then ultimately undermining the
202