“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

operate throughout the borderlands and between states to protect commercial sinews and
vindicate legal rights. This peripheral order not only permitted traders and landowners in
the borderlands to survive the political turmoil around them, but also enabled the creation of
vast new forms of personal wealth for men like Justo José Urquiza. Urquiza in particular
used his growing economic status and his military acumen to expand his political power,
providing a counterweight to state-centered projects flowing from the coastal capitals
beyond the borderlands.
After looking at the strategies employed by borderlands traders to create commercial
chains, this chapter then drops down to the local level to examine the legal practices and
institutions that played a critical role in sustaining them. Local legal norms and trading
relationships complimented each other. While personal reputation, reciprocal ties and
political connections proved vital to cross-border commerce, the declaration and
enforcement of these relationships occurred in local courtrooms throughout the region.
To prevail in these diverse local fora, litigants assembled the testimony of prominent
local elites. The testimony of honorable vecinos in support of a judicial claim simultaneously
accomplished two things. First, it provided the main source of evidence to support
individual legal rights. The frequent absence of written records in particular made local
knowledge critical to delineating property rights and disentangling commercial claims within
trading communities. Second, it publicly expressed the system of personal allegiances rooted
in reputation and reciprocity that formed the basis for commercial relationships throughout
the borderlands. Within this framework, litigation became about much more than the mere
recovery of property or money. It served as a key moment in which borderlands traders and
landowners, as well as their local allies, could make the often-tacit connections and
understandings sustaining their commercial and political associations explicit to the broader
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