Los funcionarios subalternos de justicia en Mendoza, 1820-1852: entre el control comunitario y el disciplinamiento social

This paper focuses on the subordinated judicial institutions of a regional city from the former Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, which as well as its equals, began after 1820, a process of legal and political reorganization. We will focus on the decuriones, who were government employees emerged during the revolutionary process, and on the commissioners, their immediate superiors, who created a novel step in the judicial and police hierarchies of the province. The choice of such perspective “at ground level” has to do with the fact that this civil servants were the arm of the governmental power that was closest to the population. In fact, the most relevant aspect that contributed to decide their designation, was their integration into the community. This, we believe, provides a key methodological interest to these young judges, which allows to gauge the legitimacy experienced by the post-revolutionary political and social relations, while observing the limitations of the liberal order that the elite from the province of Mendoza allegedly sought to impose. In this way, the apparent stability in local politics would have been crossed by deep tensions connected not only with the continuity of an indian order, but also with the burden of the revolutionary heritage, that in the case of Mendoza included the stamp of the management of San Martín