“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

how the legal demands of the large Brazilian population in the Uruguayan borderlands
triggered reforms that led to the consolidation of state-centered sovereign models. 38
Yet even these sophisticated studies have tended to view the courts in rather passive
terms. They have seen the courts as places where preexisting notions of rights, citizenship
and state borders are articulated. What they have neglected is the active role courts played in
defining and shaping the alternative legalities operating in the contested spaces between rival
national projects. The decade-long legal struggles described in this dissertation attest to the
fact that the courts were important locations for clashes between factions over fundamental
questions of not only the content of borderlands legalities, but also membership in the local
and cross-border communities that determined their content. The stakes in these court
proceedings were high. Their course was often tightly intertwined with violence. The
conflicts swirling around borderlands courtrooms in turn sharpened factional affiliations and
political identities. In the process, local legal struggles opened up spaces for nation-states to
enter into the fray and work through webs of borderlands legalities to secure their own
authority. By focusing on the courts as active spaces where borderlands legalities blended
with efforts to forge national boundaries and identities, this dissertation can explain how the
strands of the state formation process intertwined with the lived-experiences of peripheral
actors. It also provides a way to look at how borderlanders influenced the contested process
of forging the region’s state system.
38 Benton, "The Laws of This Country." Other colonial scholars that have focused on
the courts include: Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest:
Huamanga to 1640, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), Sergio
Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in the Eighteenth-Century
Southern Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Serulnikov’s work in particular has
reframed the courts as important sites for indigenous resistance to the colonial state,
particularly in connection with the Túpac Katari and Túpac Amaru rebellions in the 1780s in
the Bolivian highlands.
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