1. Libro de conocimientos, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Tapachula (hereafter AHMT), Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 12, año 1877.

2. From the document, it is unclear whether Dávila was an alcalde (chief municipal councilor and magistrate), judge of first instance (juez de primera instancia), justice of the peace (juez de paz), or rural judge (juez rural). He calls himself judge in one of the contracts contained in the libro, but is otherwise unidentified except as the signatory of almost all the entries. Entries in the libros, as I will discuss later, use the terms alcalde and juez almost interchangeably.

3. The numbering of subsequent libros de conocimientos in fact does not suggest that this was the twelfth libro of this particular sort; 1878's libro de conocimientos was No. 21.

4. In Spanish, courts and judges “conocer” acts in the same way that, in English, courts and judges hear cases.

5. Latin American legal historians engaged with the idea of juridical culture assert the importance of understanding these processes, especially when looking at the slow transition from colony to nation-state. For an overview of this literature, see Garriga, Carlos, “¿La cuestión es saber quién manda? Historia política, historia del derecho y ‘punto de vista,’” Historia política y historia del derecho 5 (2012): 89–100Google Scholar.

6. See, for example, Font, Mauricio A, Banqueros en conflicto: estructura financiera y economía peruana, 1884–1930 (Lima, Perú: Centro de Investigación, Universidad del Pacífico, 1989)Google Scholar; Gootenberg, Paul, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maurer, Noel, The Power and the Money: The Mexican Financial System, 1876–1932 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Barsky, Osvaldo and Djenderedjian, Julio, Historia del capitalismo agrario pampeano (Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno editores argentina, 2003)Google Scholar; Hanley, Anne G., Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riguzzi, Paolo, “Sistema financiero, banca privada y crédito agrícola en México, 1897–1913: ¿Un desencuentro anunciado?” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 21 (2005): 333–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salvucci, Richard J, Politics, Markets, and Mexico's “London Debt,” 1823–1887 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Levy, Juliette, The Making of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850–1900 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Summerhill, William R., Inglorious Revolution: Political Institutions, Sovereign Debt, and Financial Underdevelopment in Imperial Brazil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. This is largely a matter of access to sources. Small-time credit exchanged between households, neighbors, and friends is what Danièle Dehouve has referred to as “invisible credit” in that it almost never appeared in public records. This is in part what makes the libros so intriguing. Danièle Dehouve, “El sistema de crédito al día en los pueblos indígenas durante el siglo XVIII,” in Prestar y pedir prestado: relaciones sociales y crédito en México del siglo XVI al XX, ed. Marie-Noëlle Chamoux, Danièle Dehouve, Cécile Gouy-Gilbert, and Marielle Pepin Lehalleur (México, D.F: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 1993), 93.

8. This is a large and growing literature. For some key examples, see Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Hilda Sábato, The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Peter F. Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Karen Caplan, Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Ivan Jaksic and Eduardo Posada Carbó, Liberalismo y poder: Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX (Santiago, Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011); and Timo H. Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

9. Erika Pani, “Introducción,” in Nación, constitución y reforma, 1821–1908, ed. Erika Pani, (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010): 11–19; María José Rhi Sausi G., “Derecho y garantías: el juicio de amparo y la modernización jurídica liberal,” in Nación, constitución y reforma, 1821–1908, ed. Erika Pani (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), 121; Mirian Galante, “La historiografía reciente de la justicia en México, siglo XIX: perspectivas, temas y aportes/Current Historiography on Law and Justice in Mexico, 19th Century: Perspectives, Issues and Contributions,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América; Madrid 37 (2011): 93–115; Daniela Marino, “Ahora que Dios nos ha dado padre…El segundo imperio y la cultura jurídico-política campesina en el centro de México,” Historia Mexicana 55 (2006): 1356–58; and Charles Cutter, “El imperio ‘no letrado’: En torno al derecho vulgar de la época colonial,” in Justicia, política y derechos en América Latina, ed. Juan Manuel Palacio and Magdalena Candioti (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2007), 169–80.

10. Garriga, “¿La cuestión es saber quién manda?”.

11. I am thinking here of William Taylor's now classic piece on Latin Americanist social historians’ approach to state and society. Taylor pushed for scholars to “examine interactions of state institutions with local society and politics at the points of face-to-face contact between people with different interests and different resources” in order to get at a “larger field of institutional expressions of social relationships that have to do with the regulation of public life.” The libros present one clear archival space in which to do just this. William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Olivier Zunz, Charles Tilly, David William Cohen, William B. Taylor, and William T. Rowe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 147.

12. In their recent volume, Ben Fallaw and David Nugent point to the contradictions between nation-building projects and the both sub- and trans-national capitalistic systems that occurred at the same time. Although national governments attempted to constitute the state as coterminous with the nation and its economy, most economic activity in Latin America was bounded by regional differences and then bypassed the nation-state to connect to international markets. The sources I explore in this article both affirm and further this argument by illustrating how national codification projects were not necessarily ignored, but rather turned to local uses. Ben Fallaw and David Nugent, “Preface,” in State Formation in the Liberal Era: Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru, ed. Ben Fallaw and David Nugent (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020), ix–xxiii.

13. Juan Manuel Palacio provides one of the few in-depth examinations of petty agricultural credit during this era that I have found, but it is based primarily on merchants’ records rather than on court registers. Juan Manuel R. Palacio, “Judges, Lawyers, and Farmers; Uses of Justice and the Circulation of Law in Rural Buenos Aires, 1900–1940,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos A. Aguirre (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 83–112; see also Juan Manuel Palacio, La paz del trigo: cultura legal y sociedad local en le desarrollo agropecuario pampeano, 1890–1945 (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004), ch. 2; Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia, 56–57; and Laura Shelton, For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico's Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 104.

14. Friedrich Katz, “Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato, 1867–1910,” in Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. V, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–81; Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Paul H. Garner, Porfirio Díaz (New York: Longman, 2001); Edward Beatty, “Visiones del futuro: La reorientación de la política económica en México, 1867–1893,” Signos Históricos 10 (2003): 38–56; and Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo and Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, El Porfiriato (México, D.F: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2006).

15. The literature on the export boom is quite large. For some key texts illustrating the variety of players at work, see Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Aldo Lauria-Santiago, An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); Emilio H. Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For more on the ideas undergirding the transformation, see Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's “Fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Sandra Kuntz Ficker, El comercio exterior de México en la era del capitalismo liberal, 1870–1929 (México, D.F: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2007); Jeremy Adelman, “Liberalism and Constitutionalism in Latin America in the 19th Century,” History Compass 12 (2014): 508–16; and Teresa Cribelli, Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a broad overview of the global changes driving this shift, see Steven Topik and Allen Wells, eds., The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil During the Export Boom, 1850–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1998); and Steven Topik and Allen Wells, Global Markets Transformed: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

16. Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, “Indios y ladinos, arraigados y migrantes en Chiapas. Un esbozo de historia demográfica de larga duración,” in Caras y mascaras del Mexico etnico: La participacion indigena en las formaciones del Estado mexicano, ed. Andrew Roth Seneff (Coleccion Debates. Zamora, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010), 221–70.

17. Casey Marina Lurtz, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

18. Lurtz, From the Grounds Up.

19. Contracts generally indicated the currency in which the transaction was being conducted, as a multitude of currencies circulated in the region. I have converted all values to the predominant currency in Tapachula, coins locally known as Central and South American pesos (therefore CySA$) or cachucas, which mostly came from Guatemala. One Mexican peso was worth one and a half cachucas. The Mexican civil code, of course, assumed that transactions would be taking place in Mexican pesos (MX$), although local officials mostly disregarded this assumption.

20. Córdova and Enriques, November 11, 1890, Libro de conocimientos correspondientes al presente año, AHMT, Juzgado municipal 2° local, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1890.

21. In 1900 or thereabouts, the libros shift from recording the work of the juzgado primero to recording that of the alcalde tercero. I will examine the overlapping responsibilities of the municipal council subsequently, but, as far as I can tell, this administrative shift likely represented an expansion of the local bureaucracy that corresponded with the growing size of Tapachula itself. Functionally, the two titles were more or less interchangeable. Registers recorded officials as both juez and alcalde, and registers labeled alcaldía still listed the site of contracts being registered as the juzgado. The complete list of registers is as follows: Libro de conocimientos (Juzgado 1°), AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 12, año 1877; Libro de conocimientos del Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 21, año 1878; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 4, exp. 1, año 1881; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 4, exp. 39, año 1886; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Local, caja 5, exp. 3, año 1887; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 7, año 1888; Libro de conocimientos correspondientes al presente año, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 2° Local, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1890; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 2°, caja 5, exp. 10, año 1891; Libro de conocimientos del Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Local, caja 6, exp. 1, año 1892; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal, caja 6, exp. 3, año 1893; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 2° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1894; Conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 2°, caja 5, exp. 6, año 1898; Libro de conocimientos, Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Alcaldía 1° Local, caja 6, exp. 1, año 1899; Conocimientos, AHMT, Alcaldía 2° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 1, año 1899; Libro de conocimientos, Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1°, caja 7, exp. 3, año 1900; Conocimientos Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 3°, caja 5, exp. 33, año 1900; Libro de conocimientos del Juzgado 3°, AHMT, Alcaldía 3^a, caja 5, exp. 2, 1901; Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Alcaldía 3^a, caja 5, exp. 37, año 1902; Memorándum del Alcalde 2°, AHMT, Alcaldía 2^a, caja 6, exp. 15, año 1902; Libro de conocimientos del Juzgado 1° Local, AHMT, Juzgado 1° local, caja 7, exp. 3, año 1902; Memorándum, AHMT, Alcaldía 1a, caja 7, exp. 4, año 1902; Libro de conocimientos de la Alcaldía 3^a, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 3°, caja 5, exp. 48, año 1903; Libro memorándum de la Alcaldía 1^a (acuerdos), AHMT, Juzgado 1°, caja 7, exp. 5, año 1903; Libro de conocimientos de la Alcaldía Tercera, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 3°, caja 5, exp. 34, año 1904; Libro de conocimientos para la Alcaldía Tercera, AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 3°, caja 5, exp. 33, año 1905; Libro de conocimientos de la Alcaldía Primera, AHMT Alcaldía Primera, caja 8, exp. 10, año 1911; Libro de conocimientos de la Alcaldía 1^a, AHMT, Alcaldía Primera, caja 8, exp. 4, año 1913.

22. Dennis A. Frey, “Industrious Households: Survival Strategies of Artisans in a Southwest German Town during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” International Review of Social History 45 (2000), 115–35; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks: The Experience of Nuits St. Georges, 1756–1776,” The Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), 297; and Elise Dermineur, “Trust, Norms of Cooperation, and the Rural Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45 (2015): 485–506.

23. Lurtz, From the Grounds Up, ch. 4.

24. Enriques to Albarado, July 25, 1901, Archivo del Registro Público de la Propiedad y del Comercio de Tapachula, Doc. Privado 1894, 1895, 1899–1900: Año 1901.

25. For more on these records see Lurtz, From the Grounds Up, 93, n. 21.

26. Particularly after 1895, when many villagers began to register the sale of small parcels of land at the public registry, it is surprising that more names do not appear in both sets of records. Whether this points to a more limited urban use of the municipal court as a space for formalizing contracts or simply to the spotty nature of the record is unclear. Lurtz, From the Grounds Up, ch. 4.

27. The data do not allow me to say anything about who was most likely to lend to whom, as I only have demographic information about both participants in sixteen of the recorded agreements.

28. It is entirely possible that this, too, had been going on for years and archival loss and destruction is to blame for the lack of earlier records. Timo Schaefer's archival finds in San Luis Potosí suggest that equivalent registrations were an occasional occurrence going back to the 1840s; see Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia, 56–57.

29. Matthew C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 102–4; and Beatriz Rojas, Cuerpo político y pluralidad de derechos: los privilegios de las corporaciones novohispanas (México, D.F.: CIDE, Instituto Mora, 2007).

30. Óscar Cruz Barney, La codificación en México: 1821–1917 (México, D.F.: Porrùa, 2010), 45–47, 50.

31. Brian R. Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Linda Arnold, “Vulgar and Elegant: Politics and Procedure in Early National Mexico,” The Americas 50 (1994): 481–500; Matthew C. Mirow, “The Power of Codification in Latin America: Simon Bolivar and the Code Napoleon,” Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law 8 (2000): 83–116; and Mirow, Latin American Law, ch. 11, ch. 15.

32. For more on this transitional “middle” period, see Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Arlene J. Diaz, Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 1786–1904 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Shelton, For Tranquility and Order; and Reuben Zahler, Ambitious Rebels: Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

33. Jaime del Arenal Fenochio, “¿Un derecho sin estado? La herencia romana en los siglos medievales,” in Derecho y cambio social en la historia, ed. José Ramón Cossío Díaz, Pablo Mijangos, and Erika Pani (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2019), 22.

34. See, for example, Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); and Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

35. “Petición para prohibir que pasten el ganado bovino, caballar, y mular en terrenos del ejido,” AHMT, 1 Presidencia Municipal 1837–1853, exp. 23, año 1851.

36. Mexico's first civil code was passed by the state of Oaxaca in 1828, but it was soon overturned by a centralist government. Jorge A. Vargas, “The Federal Civil Code of Mexico,” The University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 36 (2005): 233; and Mirow, Latin American Law, 114.

37. Cruz Barney, La codificación en México, 49

38. Marcello Carmagnani, Estado y mercado: la economía pública del liberalismo mexicano, 1850–1911 (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1994); Mirow, Latin American Law, ch. 15; Marcello Carmagnani, “Vectors of Liberal Economic Culture in Mexico,” in The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, ed. Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 285–304; Osvaldo Barreneche, “¿Lega o letrada? Discusiones sobre la participación ciudadana en la justicia de la ciudad de Buenos Aires durante las primeras décadas de independencia y experiencia republicana,” in Justicia, política y derechos en América Latina, ed. Juan Manuel Palacio and Magdalena Candioti (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2007), 181–202; and Eduardo Zimmermann, “Introduction,” in Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmermann (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999), 1–7.

39. Galante, “La historiografía reciente de la justicia en México, siglo XIX,” 97–100.

40. Although drafted by a liberal government, it was first enacted by the French- and conservative-backed regime of Austrian-born Emperor Maximilian. When he was overthrown, returning liberals hastily and only lightly revised and reissued the code in 1870. This code, in turn, served as the basis for most state civil codes that followed, as did a lightly revised version in 1884 that led to a new round of adoptions. Mirow, Latin American Law, 136–37; Levy, The Making of a Market, 38; and Cruz Barney, La codificación en México, ch. 2 and 3.

41. Thus the aforementioned inclusion of phrasing indicating that individuals inscribing contracts in the libros de conocimientos were of age.

42. Código civil del Distrito Federal y territorio de la Baja-California (México: Imprenta dirigida por José Batiza, 1870), Art. 1392.

43. Ibid., Art. 1439. Contracts that required registration if valued over MX$300 included guarantees or pledges, formation of companies, and donations (Art. 1904, Art. 2357, Art. 2624); sales of properties only had to be officialized and registered if their value exceeded 500 pesos (Art. 3060, Art. 3334).

44. Ibid., Libro 3, Tít. 6; Tít. 1, Cap. 6; Tít. 3, Cap. 1.

45. See, for example, “El C. Teodomiro Palacios contra Sra Juana Merona Arteaga por reparto de ganado y ventas,” AHMT, Juzgado 1^a Instancia Caja 2, Exp. 73 (5) (10), Año 1876; “Juicio criminal contra Epitacio Anaya por el delito de rapta,” AHMT, Juzgado 1^a Instancia Caja 2, año 1881, exp. 9; “Libro de actas verbales del Juzgado 1o,” AHMT, Juzgado 1^o Municipal Caja 3; Exp. 7, Año 1877.

46. Cigarroa and Arévalo, June 3, 1892, Libro de conocimientos del juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° local, caja 6, exp. 1, año 1892.

47. Marie Eileen Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and Steven B. Bunker, Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).

48. Santos Sánchez, Colección de Pragmáticas… de Carlos IV (Madrid: J. del Collado, 1805), 384, 442.

49. Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial, ch. 1.

50. Sánchez, Colección de Pragmáticas… de Carlos IV, 384, 442; José Febrero, Febrero novísimo o Librería de jueces, abogados y escribanos: refundida, ordenada bajo nuevo método y adicionada con un tratado del juicio criminal y algunos otros (Valencia: Imprenta de Ildefonso Mompie, 1828), 234.

51. Chiapas, México, Colección de decretos del primer Congreso Constitucional de las Chiapas (Chiapas, La Sociedad, 1828), 174.

52. Código civil (1870), Art. 1, Art. 4.

53. México, Ministerio de Justica e Instrucción Pública , Código de procedimientos civiles vigente en el Distrito y territorios promulgado el 15 de mayo de 1884 (Mexico, D.F.: Herrero Hermanos, 1899), Libro 1, Tít. 1, Cap. 2.

54. México, Secretaría de Estado , Código de comercio de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (Mexico City: F. Diaz de Leon, 1889), Art. 33.

55. Mirow's work makes clear the centralizing power of codes as understood by politicians including Bolívar himself; see Mirow, “The Power of Codification in Latin America.” For more on provincial resentment of the liberal central government, see Brian R. Hamnett, “Liberalism Divided: Regional Politics and the National Project during the Mexican Restored Republic, 1867–1876,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 76 (1996): 659–89. Counter to this, see the number of states that adopted the federal civil code in Cruz Barney, La codificación en México, ch. 3.

56. This may also point to the libros de conocimientos being reserved for use in juicios verbales; that is, cases that could take place entirely via verbal communication and did not require the level of documentation involved in more complex cases.

57. Victor Uribe's study of the perceived colonial overabundance and Independence-Era paucity of lawyers across Spanish America demonstrates that the early Republican Era saw expanded roles for legal actors not professionally trained in the law, in part because of expanding demand for access to court spaces. Victor Uribe, “Colonial Lawyers, Republican Lawyers and the Administration of Justice in Spanish America,” in Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmermann (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999), 25–48.

58. Código civil (1870), Art. 3324.

59. Uribe, “Colonial Lawyers,” 42–45.

60. Emilio Islas, Codificación de la República Mexicana formada de orden del Sr. Secretario de Justicia e Instrucción Pública. Tomo XII Estado de Chiapas (Mexico City: Juan Flores, 1896), 133.

61. This 1896 compilation of state laws and decrees is full of documents that recognize the scarcity of qualified personnel and provide for substitutes, mostly lawyers, to serve in their stead. Islas, Codificación de la República Mexicana, 65.

62. This section draws on ideas of legal accretion and the mutual constitution of courts and communities from social anthropology. See Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); and Barbara Yngvesson, “Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town.” Law & Society Review 22 (1988), 409–48.

63. Sánchez and Andrade, June 24, 1902, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Alcaldía 3a, caja 5, exp. 37, año 1902.

64. Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 1, Cap. 2, “De la capacidad de los contrayentes,” and Cap. 3, “Del consentimiento mutuo.”

65. Nevi and Chávez, August 17, 1878, Libro de conocimientos del juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 21, año 1878; Troncoso and González, April 1, 1886, AHMT Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 4, exp. 39, año 1886; Moreno and Garcia, Feb. 18, 1899, AHMT, Conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 2°, caja 5, exp. 6, año 1898; and Cardenas and Gusman Garay, July 8, 1905, Libro de Conocimientos para la Alcaldía 3a. AHMT, Juzgado Municipal 3o, Caja 5, Exp. 33, 1905.

66. México, Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 16, Cap. 3 and 4; México, and Código civil (1884), Libro 3, Tít. 16, Cap. 3 and 4.

67. Interest was previously permitted in limited circumstances and to a limited set of lenders, but was not universally available. Código civil (1870), Art. 2824. For more on interest, see, for example, Carlos Marichal, “Obstacles to the Development of Capital Markets in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” in How Latin America Fell Behind, ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 118–45.

68. Corzo and Parlange, July 18, 1886, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 4, exp. 39, año 1886; Córdova and Ramírez, August 9, 1888, AHMT, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 7, año 1888; Sumuano and Flores, August 4, 1899, AHMT, Libro de conocimientos, Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Alcaldía 1° local, caja 6, exp. 1, año 1899; Maldonado and de los Reyes, January 26, 1900, AHMT, Libro de conocimientos, Juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1°, caja 7, exp. 3, año 1900; and González and López, March 6, 1902, AHMT, Alcaldía 3a, caja 5, exp. 37, año 1902, Libro de Conocimientos.

69. See Lurtz, From the Grounds Up, ch. 6.

70. Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 6, Cap. 1, “De la fianza en general.”

71. López and Rodas, March 27, 1877, Libro de conocimientos (juzgado 1°), AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 12, año 1877.

72. Adriano and Alfaro, July 25, 1888, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 7, año 1888.

73. See, for example, Palacios and Vásquez, Nov. 26, 1877, Libro de conocimientos del juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 21, año 1878; Córdova and Ramos, March 23, 1894, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 2° municipal, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1894.

74. This echoes the formulation that Dermineur and others found in rural European lending markets; see Dermineur, “Trust, Norms of Cooperation, and the Rural Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century France,” 497.

75. Código civil (1870), Art. 2054.

76. Código civil (1870), Art. 1428, Art. 1575.

77. Zoto and de los Reyes, May 23, 1878, Libro de conocimientos del juzgado 1°, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 3, exp. 21, año 1878.

78. México, Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 3, Cap. 4.

79. A few contracts over the years also covered the repayment of the value of an animal that had been borrowed by the debtor and died while in his or her possession.

80. México, Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 22; and México, Código civil (1884), Libro 3, Tít. 23.

81. Lurtz, From the Grounds Up, ch. 6.

82. “Liquidación judicial solicitada por la Señora Herlinda Rosales viuda de Bado,” May 4, 1899, Archivo del Poder Judicial del Soconusco, 1° Civil 1899.

83. Casarribia and Rodas, September 21, 1888, Libro de conocimientos, AHMT, Juzgado 1° Municipal, caja 5, exp. 7, año 1888.

84. México, Código civil (1870), Libro 3, Tít. 8, Cap. 1-3; and México, Código civil (1884), Libro 3, Tít. 9, Cap. 1-3.

85. Casey Marina Lurtz, “Insecure Labor, Insecure Debt: Building a Workforce for Coffee in the Soconusco, Chiapas,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (2016): 291–318.

86. Cárdenas and Madrid, January 14, 1890, Libro de conocimientos correspondientes al presente año, AHMT, Juzgado municipal 2° local, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1890; and Sumuano and Cortes, January 27, 1890, Libro de conocimientos correspondientes al presente año, AHMT, Juzgado municipal 2° local, caja 5, exp. 2, año 1890.

87. McCreery, David, “Coffee and Indigenous Labor in Guatemala, 1871–1980,” in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500–1989, ed. Clarence-Smith, W. G and Topik, Steven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Washbrook, Sarah, Producing Modernity in Mexico: Labour, Race, and the State in Chiapas, 1876–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gibbings, Julie, “‘The Shadow of Slavery’: Historical Time, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (2016): 73–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. “Proyecto de ley sobre sirvientes adeudados,” Periódico Oficial del Estado de Chiapas, June 6, 1897.

89. Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial, 59–61.

90. “Civil promovido por el Sr Manuel Beristain en representación del Sr Anselmo Muguerza, contra Francisco Lorenzo,” 1899, AHMT, Juzgado 3^a Municipal, Caja 4, Exp. 2.

91. “Juicio verbal promovido por el Señor Manuel R. Beristain, en Representación del Sr. Luis Ceballos Ochoa, contra el Sr. Juan Urena, por deuda,” 1898, AHMT, Juzgado 3^a Municipal, Caja 4, Exp. 2.

92. “Juicio verbal promovido por Diego Bate contra Don Adeodato Suarez sobre cumplimiento de un contrato,” 1903, AHMT, Juzgado 2^o Municipal, Caja 6, exp. 33.