“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...
“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ... “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. 20
Bringing the courts back into the story also reveals the importance of private law rights to state formation narratives. Securing property in the borderlands involved cross- border networks of both propertied and subaltern groups. These webs of relationships operating around securing property rights in the borderlands played an important and neglected role in shaping political identities in the periphery. The act of litigating property rights, which involved the public expression of localized notions of personal status and the assembly of numerous witnesses in a particular forum, became a critical moment in which to forge factional associations in the borderlands. The Organization of the Dissertation This dissertation sketches the Río de la Plata borderlands’ transformation from colony to national periphery over the long course of the 19 th century from the initial revolutionary upheavals in the 1810s until the tentative consolidation of a regional state system in the 1870s. Adopting this periodization allows for the exploration of how borderlands legalities and the social relationships they embodied in the periphery intersected with structural shifts in the region’s economy and state institutions. The bulk of the narrative focuses on the eastern Río de la Plata basin. This includes the northern reaches of modern-day Uruguay, the western campanha region of Rio Grande do Sul and the eastern portions of the Argentine Littoral in Entre Ríos and Corrientes. It moves between a close analysis of the legal practices and politics occurring in select fora in the region, such as Salto, Uruguay, and Alegrete and Uruguaiana, Brazil and broader, political and economic narratives of transformation. The Uruguay River itself provides the backbone of this story, linking the towns along its course together. The first chapter in the dissertation begins with the collapse of the old colonial order. It examines the end of the Spanish empire in the Río de la Plata as its colonial possessions 21
- Page 1 and 2: “MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDING
- Page 3 and 4: ABSTRACT This dissertation explores
- Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii ACKN
- Page 7 and 8: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like the wandering
- Page 9 and 10: Upon returning to the United States
- Page 11 and 12: INTRODUCTION IN EARLY 1828, A FRENC
- Page 13 and 14: Juan Manuel de Rosas and Facundo Qu
- Page 15 and 16: By moving between stories of law an
- Page 17 and 18: in the continental interior. They d
- Page 19 and 20: the fluid character of borderlands
- Page 21 and 22: and geographic conceptions. Extendi
- Page 23 and 24: local legal norms and practices in
- Page 25 and 26: that has greatly expanded the space
- Page 27 and 28: along rivertine trading corridors.
- Page 29: strains articulated by men like Art
- Page 33 and 34: of borderlands leaders to negotiate
- Page 35 and 36: Removing the old colonial order, ho
- Page 37 and 38: the city remained a sparsely popula
- Page 39 and 40: smugglers and other imperial outlaw
- Page 41 and 42: Imperial Collapse and Fragmentation
- Page 43 and 44: ivers, deserts and a few vagrant an
- Page 45 and 46: defend its possessions, peninsular
- Page 47 and 48: They requested that the Junta appoi
- Page 49 and 50: manufactured products for the Andea
- Page 51 and 52: The Paraguayan government proposed
- Page 53 and 54: Montevideo in January of 1811, he i
- Page 55 and 56: Ríos. From there, he continued to
- Page 57 and 58: easoning. 25 They had rejected the
- Page 59 and 60: military headquarters along the ban
- Page 61 and 62: sovereignty rooted in borderlands p
- Page 63 and 64: Artigas’ defeat did not spell the
- Page 65 and 66: economy. By 1822, the powerful merc
- Page 67 and 68: universal laws that would further r
- Page 69 and 70: Pedro abdicated the throne in 1831,
- Page 71 and 72: CHAPTER 2 THE (RE)EMERGENCE OF BORD
- Page 73 and 74: operate throughout the borderlands
- Page 75 and 76: and staple exports instead of the o
- Page 77 and 78: Ríos in particular witnessed a dra
- Page 79 and 80: goods as far north as the cities of
Bringing the courts back into the story also reveals the importance of private law<br />
rights to state formation narratives. Securing property in the borderlands involved cross-<br />
border networks of both propertied and subaltern groups. These webs of relationships<br />
operating around securing property rights in the borderlands played an important and<br />
neglected role in shaping political identities in the periphery. The act of litigating property<br />
rights, which involved the public expression of localized notions of personal status and the<br />
assembly of numerous witnesses in a particular forum, became a critical moment in which to<br />
forge factional associations in the borderlands.<br />
The Organization of the Dissertation<br />
This dissertation sketches the Río de la Plata borderlands’ transformation from<br />
colony to national periphery over the long course of the 19 th century from the initial<br />
revolutionary upheavals in the 1810s until the tentative consolidation of a regional state<br />
system in the 1870s. Adopting this periodization allows for the exploration of how<br />
borderlands legalities and the social relationships they embodied in the periphery intersected<br />
with structural shifts in the region’s economy and state institutions. The bulk of the<br />
narrative focuses on the eastern Río de la Plata basin. This includes the northern reaches of<br />
modern-day Uruguay, the western campanha region of Rio Grande do Sul and the eastern<br />
portions of the Argentine Littoral in Entre Ríos and Corrientes. It moves between a close<br />
analysis of the legal practices and politics occurring in select fora in the region, such as Salto,<br />
Uruguay, and Alegrete and Uruguaiana, Brazil and broader, political and economic narratives<br />
of transformation. The Uruguay River itself provides the backbone of this story, linking the<br />
towns along its course together.<br />
The first chapter in the dissertation begins with the collapse of the old colonial order.<br />
It examines the end of the Spanish empire in the Río de la Plata as its colonial possessions<br />
21 <br />
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