“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

pronounce their power to determine property rights and commercial reputations. For states
in the region, ratifying these outcomes became an important part of ensuring order on their
peripheries, as well as the continued loyalty of important local actors. The relationships
between national peripheries and state centers became the dominant theme in local legal
politics. Local elites particularly sought to manipulate national judicial authorities in order to
attain their desired allocation of legal rights. In the process, peripheral inhabitants
increasingly shifted their gaze away from legal relationships in other parts of the borderlands
and towards national capitals.
Even as their world finally became “bordered,” the ability of peripheral inhabitants
to fold borderlands legalities into emerging state structures reflected the enduring power of
their alternative legal order. 1 Local practices, law and social relations remained a vital source
of order for the inhabitants of new national edges. The diverse strands of these relationships
had to be continuously negotiated within national legal systems. In the end, the prevalence
of law on the peripheries of nations did not signal the long-delayed taming of the “lawless”
borderlands. Rather, it marked the triumph of law as the dominant field of struggle over the
identities, rights and associations that now constituted the Río de la Plata’s regional state
system.
In order to explore these compromises, this chapter returns for a final time to the
courthouses in Salto and Alegrete. In each setting, local legal politics remained a central
feature in municipal life. The courthouse retained its place as a vital source of personal and
factional power. At the same time, we can equally glimpse the important role of national
judicial officials in these local legal struggles. In each forum, the courthouse became a
critical arena in which the terms of the region’s national projects were forged.
1 Adelman, "From Borderlands to Borders."
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