The bicentennial of Spanish America’s wars of independence has sparked renewed interest in the meaning and historiography of these formative events. And as the title to this edited volume suggests, the process of interpreting this formative time period comes with an inherent set of historiographical challenges, particularly in understanding the roles played by subalterns and rural societies during the war and subsequent processes of state formation. These are precisely the gaps that the authors of these essays attempt to bridge as they relate to the Río de la Plata region (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay).In their introduction, the volume’s editors, Raúl Fradkin and Jorge Gelman, claim that until the 1970s historians had relegated popular and subaltern movements to inconsequential political revolutions with little to no social impact. They credit Tulio Hal-perin Donghi’s Revolución y Guerra (1972) for identifying urban versus rural political inversions that he coined the “ruralization of power” (pp. 9 – 10), or the formation of rural, political elites that marked an important shift in the region’s history. Desafíos al Orden represents a continuation of Donghi’s book insofar as it affirms subalterns as pivotal actors in the revolución, but the contributors cast a wider net. The authors employ examples from a variegated pool of participants across regional and social spectrums to unravel the historical logic behind the mobilization of these participants.The contributors, all of them political historians versed in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, make interrelated arguments that support the book’s overarching points. They highlight that the challenge facing nations born out of protracted independence movements lays in incorporating the contributions of multifaceted and oftentimes competing political projects into cohesive founding narratives. The contributors also suggest that the revoluciones provided subalterns with a unique opportunity to challenge and reorder colonial hierarchies of privilege and legitimacy emanating from the urban spheres, be it a provincial capital, Buenos Aires, or Madrid. Moreover, the contributors demonstrate how you could not have a true revolution without the support of the popular sectors, and that you could not rule after independence without their input.This attempt to reorder existing social frameworks is perhaps best seen in Gustavo Paz’s chapter “ ‘El orden es desorden,’ ” which traces campesino mobilization in Jujuy. Paz explains how members of the landless and laboring classes reinvented themselves as gaucho combatants by claiming military exemptions (fueros) that freed them from paying rents and removed them both from social obligations to their overseers and from the legal jurisdiction of the Jujuy cabildo. The landless joined the insurgent army of Martín Güemes in droves, oftentimes flaunting their newfound status long after the war’s end. Sara Mata reaches similar conclusions for the nearby Salta region. Driven by tensions over land tenure and a desire for a more just social order, subalterns in Salta adopted liberal terminology such as patria and libertad to denote a degree of personal autonomy as well as an allegiance to their benefactor (Güemes) and home communities. Mata also finds that the war created a “new and interesting negotiating space” (p. 80) wherein lower- ranking officers such as cabecillas (gang leaders) played important and understated roles as power brokers and purveyors of influence (p. 71). But as Valentina Ayrolo points out, this emergent liberal discourse and these fluid negotiating spaces could also lead to violent episodes of anarchy, as was the case in the frontier regions between Córdoba and Santa Fe. In her essay, Ayrolo identifies the politicization of existing tensions as responsible for the fragmentation of traditional allegiances and the formation of new factions, including the proliferation of montonero (rural insurgent) operatives. Political anarchy, in turn, opened avenues of power for caudillos such as Juan Manuel Rosas, who promised to restore order but would come to dominate Argentine national politics until midcentury as a Federalist dictator. The remaining contributors explore similar themes for Uruguay and the Banda Oriental (Beatriz Bragoni and Ana Frega) and Buenos Aires and Santa Fe (Raúl Fradkin and Silvia Ratto). All of the essays are solidly grounded on meticulous research and supporting archival sources.The only real shortcoming of note involves the collection’s limited regional focus. Political discourse articulated in other regions found in the former Viceroyalty of La Plata, such as Paraguay and Alto Perú (Bolivia), for example, provide important congruities as well as contrasts to the themes at hand, but they receive little to cursory treatment by the authors. And despite the arguments advanced here, readers may still come away with the impression that the motives behind subaltern participation remain muted in the wars’ historiography in comparison to elite mobilizations. Yet this collection makes a strong addition to the literature on independence in the former Río de la Plata provinces of South America. It represents an important step in recovering the subaltern voice and suggests that it may yet take decades of research before we gain an accurate understanding of the politics that eventually forged independence.