This panel will grapple with the notion of informality within Latin America. Historians of law have recently paid growing attention to it as part of their endeavors to conceive of the law beyond legislation (or law as written norms) and to consider social practices and lived experiences as forces through which the law emerges and is transformed. The informal economy occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the written official law: sometimes fully outside its scope, but at other times, partially within its domain. The papers in this panel will explore how the complex and ambiguous legalities of the informal sphere were lived, contested, and transformed by a broad range of social and political actors in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the study of the history of Latin America, scholars have increasingly turned their eyes to the legal phenomenon. Historians and jurists have realized that the "traditional" version of legal history, based only on written laws, to explain the legal phenomenon is only one form of making legal history. In this sense, new research seeks to understand phenomena like legal pluralism, "informalities", and other ways of deciding, often outside, but also sometimes inside the Judiciary. This panel aims to analyze these new experiences. Focusing on the modern period of the region, it intends to study how law, in the history of Latin America, was lived and experienced. The idea is not just to contradict the law and "its application" but to show how the legal phenomenon was complex and sometimes contradictory. By expanding the sources beyond official sources and, in particular, problematizing official sources, we intend to understand how legal experiences in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru can connect and show that, despite the differences, the diverse and complex use of the "law" can be a common dialogue between countries, and between jurists and historians.