Breaking Codes: Local Enactment of Civil and Commercial Codes in Mexico

The building of states in nineteenth century Latin American was inextricably intertwined with the building of economies. Order brought progress and progress brought order, as governments from Mexico to Brazil to Argentina intoned. While there are many avenues for untangling this overlapping work of fiscal activity and statecraft, this paper will look at one of the most mundane but also pervasive means by which both governments and citizens took up the task of making their countries something more. Through the promulgation of new civil and commercial codes, central governments sought to unify, regularize, and liberalize the economic and legal activities of their citizens. Through the interpretation and implementation of those codes, citizens, in turn, took up the task of making these new institutions of governance into something actionable.

Using the case of an emerging export economy in southern Mexico, this paper will show how regional actors were responsible for turning paper into practice. Those involved in the new coffee economy of Chiapas had much need for reliable commercial contracts. They found the legal tools they needed to guarantee their sales, purchases, and loans in the already decade-old language of Mexico’s mid-century civil and commercial codes. Yet they often did so with a great deal of interpretive flair, citing the codes as needed but also stretching, compounding, and conflating the legal language of various articles to create the financial and contractual apparatus they found most expedient. Whether borrowing a few pesos or selling a plantation for a few hundred thousand, market producers in Mexico’s periphery made state documents do the work that was needed locally. Even in these diverse local interpretations, though, such activities fostered quotidian interactions with state representatives that inevitably solidified the authority of the central government.