Military Recruitment and Legal Sovereignty in Early Republican Mexico, 1820s–40s

This paper explores the role of military recruitment in the construction of legal sovereignty in early republican Mexico. Across the country, recruitment was carried out by municipal authorities and doubled as a measure of social control: recruits were ‘idle’ or ‘immoral’ men, deemed harmful to local society. The result was ambiguous. On the one hand, recruitment protected, not so much the republican legal order but its foundation in masculine labor and domestic virtue. On the other hand recruitment committees made their decisions in violation of common standards of due process: they judged not deeds but character and demanded that those brought before them present proof of their innocence, rather than proving their guilt. The paper interprets recruitment as a form of police violence by which local agents of the state exceeded as well enforced the law as a way of continuously asserting the validity of one particular legal order against all possible others.