“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

neatly encapsulated the ongoing conflicts in courtrooms throughout the borderlands over
the scope of national laws and the boundaries of national political communities. On the one
hand, Cándido viewed the borderlands as a unified space in which economic necessity and
the need to discipline the rural labor force trumped national boundaries and legal divisions.
Conversely, Pedro’s argument challenged Cándido’s efforts to flatten the distinctions
between legalized slavery in Brazil and theoretical freedom across the border in the Estado
Oriental. For persons of color like Pedro and his family seeking to escape slavery in the
borderlands, borders mattered. To vindicate his legal standing, Pedro and his family
employed citizenship as a resource against their Brazilian master’s attempts to extend slavery
across the borderlands either in de facto or de jure forms.
The previous two chapters explored local clashes to control borderlands courts.
They also examined how factional struggles, particularly over property rights, intertwined
with frictions over sovereignty in the borderlands. This chapter looks at how subaltern
appeals like Pedro’s brought these various divisions into ever-sharper focus. Like the
property rights we saw in the last chapter, “slave citizenship” claims involved networks of
subalterns that stretched across borders. These webs of relationships proved vital in
securing adequate resources for judicial struggles. They also provided individual persons of
color with a means to develop reciprocal ties with elites in strategic locations throughout the
borderlands. In short, claims like Pedro’s utilized many of the familiar elements of
borderlands legalities to secure legal rights. At the same time, Pedro and other persons of
color had to work diligently to exploit the frictions throughout the borderlands to prevail in
litigation. Claims to Uruguayan citizenship proved particularly potent because they
simultaneously exploited local factional divisions and broader sovereign conflicts. In the
process, however, they further exacerbated local and regional tensions by adding issues of
259