“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

control. All of these markers of “globalization” have led to an increased awareness of the
presence of alternative legalities that exist alongside and at times in direct opposition to
state-centered laws. They offer repeated evidence of the “thinness” of the nation-state in
our world.
But the Río de la Plata’s peripheral inhabitants might correctly inquire whether these
phenomena are really all that new. Their experience throughout much of the 19 th century
suggests that states perhaps did not extend their control over their inhabitants as deeply as
we have previously assumed. The persistence of borderlands legalities also raises important
issues about using the law as a marker of national sovereignty. Rather, legal practices –
going to court – may provide a means to limit the reach of putative national projects as
much as reify them. Looking at the state and the law from the perspective of Pedro
Francisco Berro, Mathias Teixeira de Almeida, Agustín Sañudo, Agustín Guarch and others
offers a means to approach the complex and often contingent relationships between the law,
legalities and nations. Perhaps the experiences of their borderlands are quite similar to those
in our borderless world.
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