“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Aparicio to resist state control. Able to coerce peripheral elites to recognize their authority,
central governments now equally offered them mechanisms to secure their political and
personal positions at the local level. For borderlands power brokers, this combination of
carrot and stick meant that loyalty to some form of a national entity was no longer in
question. But this still left open questions raised by Urquiza and others over just how the
balance between peripheral autonomy and national authority would be struck. As we will see
in the final chapter, borderlands courtrooms played a critical role in reconciling borderlands
and centralized legalities together within a single national system.
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