“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

They obtained testimony establishing that although Pedro was baptized in the Estado
Oriental, he had in fact been born across the border in Brazil as the Azambujas claimed.
Having successfully undermined the written evidence supporting his Uruguayan citizenship,
officials turned to his familial connections. The investigators obtained evidence from
members of Pedro’s family that the former slave was not Catalina’s son, but in fact her
stepson. He had been born in Brazil to another women and then moved to the Estado
Oriental with his Brazilian father. 28 The testimony was certainly damning — particularly so,
given that Brazilian officials maintained the position that regardless of other evidence, the
nationality of the father exclusively determined that of his children. 29 It is less clear whether
it was truthful. With authorities now questioning individual family members from an
admittedly vulnerable minority, it is entirely possible that officials used threats or even
violence to construct the record they wanted. Moreover, it technically should not have
mattered. Because Pedro had fled Brazil prior to the 1851 invasion, he was not covered
under the terms of the Extradition Treaty and, therefore, legally free. Regardless, in the end
the renewed investigation had effectively pried Pedro from his web of familial connections.
It had rendered him isolated and vulnerable to reenslavement. Based on this evidence, local
officials ordered Pedro returned to Cándido as a Brazilian slave.
Pedro’s case reveals the complex manner in which slave citizenship claims and
borderlands legalities intertwined. Pedro and his family developed sophisticated strategies to
assert their membership in the Uruguayan political community and clarify its boundaries.
Yet by attempting to propel the process of state formation and national identification
forward in the service of personal freedom, they invited a response from their purported
28 Información relativa al negro Pedro, reclamando como esclavo, 13bis-14.
29 Prado, "Las Representaciones del Brasil," 165-98.
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