Vagrants and Outcasts

Vagrants and Outcasts examines the Chinese working-class in the nineteenth-century Philippines, detailing how a core class in the colonial economy became categorized as social undesirables—vagrants, insolvents, beggars, pickpockets, drunkards, homeless, idlers and unemployed individuals—who threatened the Spanish colony's political and financial stability.

In a collective history reconstructed from more than 5,000 criminal cases culled from Philippine and Spanish archives, Jely A. Galang reveals how particular state policies contributed to the precarious condition of Chinese workers. The Spanish colonial state utilized the law, police, court system, and punitive measures to define, control, and sentence putative offenders. These workers-turned-offenders, on the other hand, creatively employed various covert and overt ways to circumvent the state's judicial apparatus. Vagrants and Outcasts offers a new perspective on individuals whose lives are rarely revealed in the historical narrative. It also engages in wider debates concerning how vast populations of social outcasts in the past were created, defined, ostracized, criminalized, and subsequently punished by those in authority because of their insecure condition of unemployment, material deprivation, and sinking status.