“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

others have examined the ways in which subalterns exploited elite conflicts in the decades
following independence to compel their inclusion within emerging national political
communities and “use state institutions for their own ends.” 31
In the Río de la Plata, José Artigas embodied the radical possibilities created by the
fissures among colonial elites in the wake of independence. Important works by the
research team of Lucía Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre and Julio C. Rodríguez in
particular have brought the social revolution underpinning Artigas’ military campaigns and
land distribution programs to the fore. 32 As they made clear, this revolution, like others
throughout Latin America, created spaces for radical, popular demands to influence state
formation processes. Yet, as the uncertainty in the decades following independence gave
way to more established state structures and systems of elite domination, subaltern groups
have tended to disappear from narratives of citizenship and state formation. Crushed by the
Brazilian invasion and the subsequent counterrevolution in the Banda Oriental, Artigas’
subaltern supporters struggled to retain the vestiges of their short-lived agrarian revolution in
the emerging Uruguayan and Argentine states. 33 Yet, as this dissertation shows, the radical
31 Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism During the Age of Revolution,
Colombia 1795-1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), Peter F. Guardino,
Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), ———, Total Liberty in Casting Our Ballots: Plebes, Peasants,
and Elections in Oaxaca, 1808-1850 (Pittsburgh: Latin American Studies Association, 1998),
Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish
South America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). Important other examples
of the literature exploring the contested processes of state formation, particularly from
below, include Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and
Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), G. M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent,
Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
32 Lucía Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre, and Julio C. Rodríguez, Artigas y Su
Revolución Agraria, 1811-1820, 1a ed. (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978).
33 Nelson de la Torre, Julio C. Rodríguez, and Lucía Sala de Touron, Después de Artigas
(1820-1836) (Montevideo: Ediciones Pueblos Unidos, 1972).
18