“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

solution for Bauzá and others was to enact reforms in order to finally extend laws into the
countryside.
This dissertation has challenged these notions. It has argued that beneath the
pervasive violence, an alternative order had in fact emerged in the Río de la Plata’s interior.
The collapse of imperial authority on the Iberian Peninsula tore apart the foundations of the
old colonial order in the borderlands. Sovereign frictions then combined with revolutionary
state projects in the periphery to preclude new national structures from emerging. In the
aftermath of two decades of warfare, however, peripheral inhabitants developed a set of legal
practices – borderlands legalities – that were uniquely suited to the conditions they
encountered in their contested ground. These practices drew upon elements of local
autonomy that had found a voice in Artigas’ failed revolution. They also tapped into
concepts like vecindad to express notions of personal standing in the community. Traders and
landowners used these local building blocks to develop dense webs of connections that
sustained commerce along the region’s rivertine trading arteries. They forged a world that
simultaneously operated on local and regional levels.
Contrary to Bauzá’s telling, this dissertation has argued that forms of local legal
practices did survive both constitutional changes and revolutionary upheavals in the form of
borderlands legalities. This survival in fact played an important role in the intractable
conflicts that Bauzá sought to understand. With their political and economic relationships
rooted in systems premised on integration and local legal practices, borderlands inhabitants
jealously guarded their autonomy from coastal efforts to police new boundaries. They also
struggled to control the local systems of justice and cross-border trading networks that
defined their world. Litigation secured reciprocal ties and personal allegiances that were vital
for commerce. Powerful figures like Urquiza and Canabarro arose to defend legal
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