“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

strains articulated by men like Artigas and his followers continued to emerge in borderlands
courtrooms, exploiting fissures in both local factions and between competing sovereigns to
carve out important spaces for subaltern resistance. 34
The importance of local courts throughout the borderlands demonstrates a pressing
need to include them in the list of sites where peripheral and subaltern groups negotiated
social relations and actively sought to influence and at times resist the imposition of state
control. 35 As Sarah Chambers has noted, although courts were important sites for historians
of the colonial period, post-independence studies have generally neglected them as places
where subalterns and the state negotiated the meanings of honor, citizenship and freedom.
Chambers persuasively argued that the courts were critical arenas in the struggle to define
the social rights at the heart of emerging national projects in the wake of independence. 36
Similarly, Carlos Aguirre has looked at slaves’ use of the courts to secure legal rights in early
republican Lima, Peru. 37 Lauren Benton has also returned to the courts in order to explore
34 In this sense, this observation draws upon the careful analysis of republican
discourse and subaltern identities under Juan Manuel de Rosas explored in works by Hilda
Sabato and Ricardo Salvatore. Hilda Sabato, ed. Ciudadanía Política y Formación de las Naciones:
Perspectivas Históricas de América Latina (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico: Fideicomiso
Historia de las Américas, 1999), Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos.
35 In making this point, I am building upon the growing scholarship that sees the law
and courts less as strictly institutions of state control and more as, to use Elizabeth Schmidt’s
phrase, “contested terrain” in which competing values and social practices are negotiated and
challenged. Elizabeth Schmidt, "Negotiated Spaces and Contested Terrain: Men, Women
and the Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1939," Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 4
(1990). For an example of the contested nature of the law in 19 th century New York City, see
Hendrik Hartog, "Pigs and Positivism," Wisconsin Law Review (1985): 899-935.
36 Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa,
Peru, 1780-1854 (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
37 Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de Su Propia Libertad: Los Esclavos de Lima y la Desintegración de la
Esclavitud, 1821-1854 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993).
19