From the real paternalism of justice to the void of peripheral justice to be built: Scholarships and mobility of lawyers from the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico (1808-1848)

Abstract

The “army of lawyers” mentioned in articles on the history of nineteenth-century Mexican education is contrasted by a series of archival evidence and works on the history of law that do not mention this historiographic logic materialized in the states or departments that made up the country between 1824 and 1848. On the contrary, the country was not defined based on a centralized and homogeneous model of legal practice in its origins. Through one of the most renowned New Spanish colleges, San Ildefonso de México, we can observe the family strategies of the regional elites to transmit their privileges to their descendants through educational mechanisms. The transmission is observed in the scholarships that continued beyond the period of independence and into the second half of the nineteenth century. New Spanish privileges, transformed into republican rights, were present in the training of lawyers until the second decade of the nineteenth century. The examples to be shown come from other regions of the country, which will allow us to show the educational and then political mobility that existed in the country for some groups in the first half of the 19th century. The sources come from the Colegio de San Ildefonso, kept in the Historical Archive of the IISUE, which is located in the national library of the UNAM.