“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

figures in the mid-19 th century such as Bartolomé Mitre. Writing from the perspective of
national centers, these men saw the borderlands as strictly delaying the creation of the
nation-state. They understood themselves as not only providing order, but also acting as a
check on the “savage democracy” that had produced tyrants like Rosas. In this story, the
borderlands are regions to be tamed in the service of national destinies. 13 While obviously
offering a more nuanced version of this relationship between the periphery and national
cores, Tulio Halperín Donghi provides perhaps the best contemporary expression of this
view. In his telling, provincial federalism in the contested interior stood as a powerful
roadblock to the consolidation of national institutions and structures. 14
This is not to suggest that the historiography of the Río de la Plata’s tumultuous 19 th
century has failed to move beyond the nationalist projects at the heart of traditional liberal
dichotomies of law and lawlessness. The work of José Carlos Chiaramonte in particular has
reframed peripheral resistance in terms of an intense constitutional struggle between Buenos
Aires and its rivertine hinterlands over the distribution of economic and political power. 15
Other scholars have also substantially reinterpreted the initial turbulent decades following
independence, finding a great deal more order than previously supposed. 16 By way of
example, Noemí Goldman has argued that even Juan Facundo Quiroga, Sarmiento’s
archetype for lawless “barbarism,” derived much of his legitimacy from the operation of
13 Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de Belgrano y de la Independencia Argentina, vol. 4 (Buenos
Aires: Ed. Estrada, 1947), Sarmiento, Facundo.
14 Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y Guerra: Formación de una Élite Dirigente en la
Argentina Criolla, 2. ed ed. (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Argentina, 2005).
15 José Carlos Chiaramonte, Mercaderes del Litoral: Economía y Sociedad en la Provincia de
Corrientes, Primera Mitad del Siglo XIX, 1. ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991),
———, Ciudades, Provincias, Estados: Orígenes de la Nación Argentina, 1800-1846, 2d ed. (Buenos
Aires: Emecé, 2007), ———, "Acerca del Orígen del Estado el el Río de la Plata," Anuario
IEHS 10 (1995).
16 Examples include, Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Poder, Conflicto y Relaciones Sociales: El Río de
la Plata, XVIII-XIX (Rosario: Homo Sapiens Ediciones, 1999).
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