“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

anything, Orientales.” 56 Gomez’s invocation of Uruguayan identity in response to foreign
oppression reflected a growing body of reformist literature that focused on the pressing
problem of defining citizenship. Given the large population of Brazilian ranchers who
owned nearly one-third of Uruguay’s territory in 1860, questions of citizenship in the
borderlands became intertwined with the coastal elite’s desires to secure Uruguayan control
over its putative national territory. 57 As slaves invoked Uruguayan citizenship to secure their
own rights in borderlands courtrooms, they tapped into these growing concerns over
Uruguayan sovereignty. In the process, they linked their personal fates to that of the
national political community. As the examples of Pedro’s and Fermin’s cases revealed, the
erosion of Uruguayan sovereignty threatened not only the rights of her citizens in the
borderlands, but internal order. Conflicts over slave citizenship in particular could
destabilize cross-border economic relations and touch off new rounds of factional conflict.
To solve the dual problems of sovereignty and order, Uruguayan reformers had to resolve
the problem of slave citizenship.
Even before the end of the Guerra Grande, Uruguayan diplomats had expressed
concerns that the routine practice of Brazilians enslaving black Uruguayans threatened the
country’s sovereignty. For example, Juan José Poyo, the Uruguayan Counsel for the coastal
city of Rio Grande, drafted a sharp letter to the colorado government complaining of the
continual enslavement of black Uruguayan soldiers by Brazilians in the borderlands. Poyo
wrote: “we have seen disgraced blacks covered with the wounds of [the battles of] Arroyo
Grande, the Yí and India Muerta, infamously sold by their supposed masters to other masters
56 Ibid., 14.
57 Benton, "The Laws of This Country," 505-09, Prado, "Las Representaciones del
Brasil."
283