Forced Migration in The Spanish Pacific World

Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World
Nearly 4,000 Mexican troops and convicts landed in Manila Bay in

the Philippines from 1765 to 1811. The majority were veterans and
recruits; the rest were victims of vagrancy campaigns. Eva Maria Mehl
follows these forced exiles from recruiting centers, jails, and streets
in central Mexico to Spanish outposts in the Philippines, and traces
relationships of power between the imperial authorities in Madrid and
the colonial governments and populations of New Spain and the Philip-
pines in the late Bourbon era. Ultimately, forced migration from Mexico
City to Manila illustrates that the histories of the Spanish Philippines
and colonial Mexico have embraced and shaped each other, that there
existed a connectivity between imperial processes in the Pacific and the
Atlantic Oceans, and that a perspective of the Spanish empire centered
on the Atlantic cannot adequately reflect the historical importance of
the richly textured trans-Pacific world.
Eva Maria Mehl is an assistant professor of Latin American history

and World history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Under her maiden name, Eva M. St. Clair Segurado, she has published
extensively in Spain on the missionary labor of the Jesuits in China
and the expulsion of this religious order from Mexico in 1767. She
is the author of Expulsión y Exilio de la Provincia Jesuita Mexicana,
Flagellum Iesuitarum, and Dios y Belial en un mismo altar.
Forced Migration in the Spanish
Pacific World
From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811
EVA MARIA MEHL

University of North Carolina Wilmington
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C Eva Maria Mehl 2016
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and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To my boys, Richard and Alex, for all the days and nights
Contents
List of Illustrations page ix

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Intertwined Histories in the Pacific: The Philippines
and New Spain, 1565–1764 32
2 Convicts and Soldiers in the Spanish Empire 80
3 Poverty, Criminality, and the Bourbon State 119
4 Levies for the Philippines in Late Colonial Mexico 154
5 Spontaneous Requests for Deportation: Tribulations
of Parents, Youngsters, and Wives 194
6 Unruly Mexicans in Manila: Imperial Goals and
Colonial Concerns 227
Conclusion 267
Appendix: Recruits, Convicts, and Deserters Sent to Manila from

New Spain and Spain, 1765–1811 277
Sources and Bibliography 279
Index 303
vii
Illustrations
Figures
3.1 The royal decree that instituted annual roundups of vagrants
in Spain was received in Mexico City a few years after it was
published in Aranjuez in May 7, 1775. Ordenanza de S.M.
en que se previene y establece el recogimiento de vagos y
mal-entretenidos por medio de levas. Madrid, 1775.
Signatura: XVIII/494(23). Courtesy of Biblioteca Valenciana
Nicolau Primitiu (Biblioteca Gregorio Mayans). page 139
4.1 This characterization of a vagabond in the early nineteenth
century visually represents the wariness of authorities in
Mexico City of individuals who pretended to be beggars but
were actually just loafing around with no occupation.
Colonial officials assumed that these men likely dedicated
their time and wits to morally questionable activities.
Lithograph by Claudio Linati, in Costumes et Moeurs de
Mexique (London, 1830). Courtesy of SP Lohia Hand
Coloured Book Rare Collection in London. 165
Maps
1.1 Route of the Manila galleons. 51
6.1 Map of the Philippines. 233
ix
x List of Illustrations
Tables
4.1 Convicts Sent from Mexico to Manila, 1765–1811. 157
5.1 Mexican Convicts Who were Denounced to Judicial
Authorities of Mexico City by their Relatives or other
Community Members. 196
Acknowledgments
Dear reader, you are about to know about the many people I need to
thank for a variety of things. These couple of pages will be no less syrupy
than those of many other authors. However, they are perhaps the most
difficult to write and all the more necessary because, really, without all
these people you would not be reading this book.
This is the end of a long journey. This book was born in a research
paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar at UC Davis in the academic year
2005–06. I have always been attracted to the history of Asia, particularly
China, even if several circumstances laid out the path for me to be a
Latin Americanist. In order to include the Far East in my equation, I
thought intensively about the links that the Manila galleons created across
the Pacific Ocean for about two centuries and a half. Eventually, some
hundred Mexicans deported to the Philippines under the accusation of
vagrancy found me at the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City
in the summer of 2005. The dissertation I completed at UC Davis built
on this topic and is at the inception of this book.
Writing these words reminds me of my days as a graduate student at the
history department of UC Davis. At this university I had the privilege of
learning from excellent teachers and mentors. I need to thank the members
of my dissertation committee, Chuck Walker, Andrés Reséndez, and A.
Katie Harris, whose advice and comments pushed me to continue sharp-
ening larger questions and themes. Tom Holloway contributed much with
his criticism on a very early, partial draft. At UC Davis I also became a
better scholar thanks to the inspiration of Alan Taylor, Arnie Bauer, and
Ari Kelman. I am also thankful for the fact that several of them carved
out time to write me letters of recommendation. Throughout the years
xi
xii Acknowledgments
I have continued to benefit from this support. A big thank you goes to
Chuck Walker, who has become a beacon light to go to in the dark and
a lucky charm with his “a cruzar los dedos.”
Allow me to reminisce about the graduate students I was fortunate to
meet at UC Davis. I owe them much because by encouraging each other
in every step of the graduation process I really felt like I was part of a
team. Susan Hogue and Willie Hiatt will always have a special place in my
heart. Others who touched my project in various ways and with whom
I eventually became friends are Jessie Hewitt, Shelley Brooks, Alison
Steiner, Robyn Douglas, Francisco Peña, Liz Covart, José Ragas, Steve
Cote, Chau Kelly, Rossio Motta, and Robert Weis. With Dina Fachin I
shared house, anxiety, Italian coffee, pizzas with zucchini and corn, very
strange smoothies, and much more. In the first years after I left Spain
and adjusted to life in California the moral support and unconditional
friendship from Jan Neff and Bernard Rizzo were fundamental.
As the book was coming into shape in later years, I had the chance to
cross paths with several scholars who read portions of my work and very
generously made critical observations about it. In this regard I owe my
gratitude to Birgit Tremml-Werner, Ruth De Llobet, and Mark Spauld-
ing. My especial appreciation goes to Rainer Buschmann, who read my
entire manuscript in an early stage and gave me very thoughtful feed-
back. Other scholars who at one point or another have helped my project
in the US with their invitations for lecture, interest, support, comments,
and liberality are Kristie Flannery, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Sean Man-
nion, Christian G. De Vito, John Tutino, Joanne Rappaport, Alejandro
Cañeque, Steph Mawson, Edward R. Slack Jr., and Luke Clossey.
Personnel at the various institutions where I conducted research made
possible the progress of this book. At the Archivo General de la Nación in
Mexico City, I want to note the joviality and swift assistance of the staff
at the Galerı́a 4 (Colonial) and the workers who handle the microfilm
collections. Also in Mexico City, colleagues and friends made my stay
much enjoyable and helped me scout all corners of their megacity. I am
beholden to Arturo Soberón Mora, Erika Tapia, Gabriela and Itzel Pala-
cios, Rodolfo Aguirre, Armando Iruegas Llamas, Enrique and, always,
to Alberto Silvestre Gámez Garcı́a. Thank you also to the archivists and
staff at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Centro Superior
de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas in Madrid, and the Newberry Library in
Chicago.
With Cambridge University Press I have had a remarkably seamless
and fluid relationship. I am grateful to Dave Morris and Rosalyn Scott,
Acknowledgments xiii
for their technical assistance and prompt emails, and particularly to my

editor Deborah Gershenowitz. The abstract of a paper I presented at
LASA in Washington, DC, in 2013 triggered her interest and marked the
beginning of our working relationship. I must have written a very awe-
some abstract. Her relentless faith and enthusiasm in my project have been
extremely encouraging, as it was her commitment to move the project for-
ward quickly. I am also in debt with the three anonymous readers who
challenged me to do a better job in matching my claims and my evidence.
The University of California Pacific Rim Research Program liberally
funded some of my archival trips to Mexico City, Seville, and Madrid.
A fellowship and small grants from the History Department at the Uni-
versity of California, Davis, also supported my project. Later on, insti-
tutional support and some resources from UNC Wilmington enabled me
to transform my dissertation into a book. I am fortunate to say that my
colleagues at the History department of this university have become my
professional family. All my colleagues have supported me in different
ways while completing this book. From the moment I was hired, Paul
Townend and Sue McCaffray have been my anchors for a wide range of
things. I am thankful to Lynn Mollenauer, Lisa Pollard, Mark Spaulding,
Bill McCarthy, Venkat Dhulipala, Nathan Crowe, and Glen A. Harris.
On the administrative front, Allison Lawlor and Tammy Grady have
done much more than just ironing administrative glitches.
My family is the center of my universe and I could never thank them
enough for being there for me all along. Without the support of my
husband Richard this book would have never seen the light. I am indebted
to him for his patience when so many weekends, holidays, and boat
days got away from us because I had to write and for taking care of
practicalities while I spend my days in my ivory tower. My heartfelt
thanks must go to my family in Ohio, who are in my mind often. To my
parents Clifford and Marisol, who from Spain try hard to keep up with
my professional and personal “adventures in the US,” and to my in-laws
Bob and Barbara who from Florida have always shown a keen interest on
my work and feed me very well every Christmas. Finally I wish to thank
my son Alex, whose existence has brightened every one of our days for
the last six years and whose questions, such as why I bother writing a
book that has no pictures, constantly put things in perspective.
Introduction
In 1780, 177 Mexican recruits arrived in the Philippines onboard the

Naos de la China, or Manila galleons, the small fleet of Spanish trad-
ing vessels that regularly crossed the Pacific Ocean between Acapulco
and Manila from 1571 until 1815. These men were the annual replace-
ments for the Regiment of the King (Regimiento del Rey), Manila’s pre-
mier military unit composed largely of veteran soldiers. The new cohort
of 1780 turned out to be a very disruptive squad who caused tremen-
dous headaches over the following four years. As the governor of the
Philippines, José Basco y Vargas, discovered later, most of these recruits
had been drawn “from their regimental prisons [and] quite a few were
charged with capital crimes, [so] it is unimaginable how much work
they have given us with their actions and bad example.”1 The governor
reported to Viceroy Martı́n de Mayorga in Mexico City that all but a
third were “totally worthless and extremely despicable, without ques-
tion worse than the natives of these islands, who at least are healthy.”2
Through their incarcerations for drunkenness, unexcused absences, deser-
tion, and a variety of excesses, the recruits generated significant costs
and damaged the service in “multiple ways.”3 In 1784, Basco y Vargas
was finally compelled to return forty of these men to New Spain and
1 Governor José Basco y Vargas to Viceroy Matı́as de Gálvez, Manila, June 18, 1784,
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter cited as AGN), Filipinas, vol. 61,
exp. 5, fol. 210.
2 Governor Basco y Vargas to Viceroy Martı́n de Mayorga, Manila, May 26, 1782, AGN,
Filipinas, vol. 61, exp. 5, fol. 186.
3 Ibid.
1
2 Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World
to announce the departure of the rest the following year. The Philippine
governor also requested that the viceroy in New Spain stop sending such
questionable individuals, preferring a smaller number of less troublesome
replacements: “even if only 50 arrive, or even less, we will be contented
here as long as they are good.”4
Most immediately, this episode illustrates the military, financial, and
social repercussions of the presence of these Mexicans in the Philip-
pines. They disrupted the discipline of local regiments, burdened the
administration with additional costs because of their repeated hospi-
tal stays and imprisonments, lacked motivation and commitment, and,
most importantly, proved useless for their primary task, military service.
From a broader perspective, the incident brings to light the existence of
regular connections between colonial Mexico and the Philippines that
were wider and more diverse than the lucrative commercial exchange of
Mexican silver for Chinese silk and porcelain and other Asian luxuries.
Along with merchants, missionaries, bureaucrats, clergy, and multieth-
nic ships’ crews, Mexican recruits and convicts created and maintained
cross-cultural trans-Pacific connections that have received surprisingly lit-
tle attention from scholars. This book follows these men from recruiting
centers and jails in central Mexico to Spanish outposts in the Philippines,
and it traces relationships of power between the imperial authorities in
Madrid and the colonial governments and populations of New Spain and
the Philippines.
Between 1765 and 1811, Manila Bay received 3,9995 Mexican and
Spanish troops and convicts. The majority were veterans and recruits
(3,219, or 80.5 percent)6 ; at least 336 (8.4 percent) were victims of
vagrancy campaigns or were convicted criminals, of whom 62 (1.5 per-
cent of the total) had been turned in by their own relatives. Additionally,
254 of the total (6.3 percent) were deserters who had been sentenced to
the Philippines, and 190 (4.8 percent) were convicts shipped to the Philip-
pines from Spain.7 Because Mexican authorities dropped the charge of
4 Governor Basco y Vargas to Viceroy Matı́as de Gálvez, Manila, June 18, 1784, AGN,
Filipinas, vol. 61, exp. 5, fol. 210.
5 An alternative total is 3,703 because for the year 1772 my sources are at odds about
the number of recruits shipped to Manila, with 451 or 155 as two possible figures. See
Appendix.
6 An alternative number, for the reason stated in the previous note, is 2,923 or 78.9 percent.
7 These figures are neither definite nor free of problems. Data for some years come from the
reports of governors in the Philippines on the soldiers and convicts who actually arrived
in the archipelago. For other years, these numbers are derived from a panoply of sources
produced in New Spain: lists of Mexico City’s prisons and judicial authorities, official
Introduction 3
vagrancy if the individual voluntarily signed up for military service in

Manila, an uncertain but presumably large number of “recruits” were
actually “vagrants.” All these men were part of the major military over-
haul imposed on the Philippines by the Spanish Crown in the wake of
the British capture of Manila in October 1762 and the city’s occupation
until 1764. The disaster was a devastating blow to Spanish prestige and
morale, especially because it happened almost simultaneously with the
fall of Havana, also taken by the British, in August 1762. After 1764,
governors of Manila pressed for Mexico to send healthy, honorable men
to work in the reconstruction of the fortifications and serve in regular
military units. In 1783, the viceregal office approved the execution of
levies of vagrants to complement the manpower shipped to Manila.
The available archival material related to this military effort is mostly
judicial files, with a wealth of information in the form of personal stories,
and official correspondence that circulated among officials of Mexico, the
Philippines, and Spain. The number of recruits and convicts might seem
small in the larger context of migration within the Spanish empire, but
the historical importance of the process of transportation is not simply
one of the numbers. Indeed, the documentation raises interesting, impor-
tant questions. Why did authorities in Mexico City deliver troublesome
men to the colonial government of the Philippines when improving the
islands’ defenses clearly required younger, healthier, and more obedient
soldiers and workers? What does the intensified attention that Mexican
authorities gave to vagrancy tell us about the values of late colonial Mexi-
can society? How did the questionable quality of the incoming human
resources affect the ability of colonial officials to implement the new
imperial policies in Manila? Exploring these themes offers a pathway
into the thoughts and practices that underlay the Spanish empire in the
late eighteenth century and into the transoceanic breadth of said empire as
signified by processes of convict transportation and military recruitment
that linked the Pacific to the Atlantic and vice versa.
Two clarifications are in order. One is that due to the nature of the
available archival sources, this book generally adopts the perspective of
the imperial authorities in Madrid and the colonial states of New Spain
and the Philippines. With the assistance of secondary sources, however, it
also moves beyond the perspective of the state to illuminate some of the
correspondence of viceroys with Madrid and Manila, reports from officials in charge
of anti-vagrancy patrols in Mexico City, and passenger manifests created by Acapulco’s
authorities and ships’ masters.
intricate and changing patterns of political, social, and ethnic forces that
Mexican soldiers and convicts encountered in the archipelago. Second, I
am aware that the Philippines was not a unified political entity during the
period under study but was in fact a highly atomized territory. Further-
more, because only the area surrounding Manila was under effective
Spanish control, the colony is best conceived as a frontier of the Spanish
empire with its own internal frontiers.8 My descriptions, analyses, and
conclusions thus pertain chiefly to the political-religious nerve center of
the archipelago and might not be directly applicable to the entirety of the
Philippines.
In this book I use “New Spain” and “Mexico” as if they were inter-
changeable terms because New Spain is often referred to as Mexico, or
“Mejico,” in the records, even though I am aware that they are not syn-
onymous and that the geographical limits of the larger administrative
structure of the viceroyalty do not coincide with the territory of modern
Mexico.
Toward a Historical Narrative of the Spanish Pacific World

Knowledge in the US about the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific world
at large is a work in progress, but the historical narratives of colonial
Mexico and the Spanish Philippines have not been completely separated.
Some early works of Latin American scholars who brought into focus
the history of the Philippines include John Leddy Phelan and his The
Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959). In this influential
study Phelan analyzes the transformations of the Philippine society under
Spanish colonization, specifically changes in the spheres of labor, agricul-
ture, ecology, political organization, culture, and religion. In doing so, he
highlighted the creativity of Filipino people in adapting their social, polit-
ical, and cultural structures to Hispanic culture and civilization. In Spain
in the Philippines: From Conquest to Revolution (Quezon City: Ateneo
de Manila University Press, 1971), Nicholas P. Cushner also studied the
Spanish colonial program in the archipelago – especially missionary work,
tribute, and labor – with the purpose of tracing the roots of attitudes
and social conventions that in his opinion remain part of the fabric of
Philippine society today.9 Cushner further explored his interests on land
8 I thank Ruth De Llobet for her illuminating insights on this matter.

9 Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 229.
Introduction 5
tenure patterns, labor, agriculture, and other ecological circumstances in

Landed States in the Colonial Philippines (New Haven: Yale University
1976). Besides delving into the role of friar estates in the lives of Filipino
tenants, Dennis Roth’s The Friar States of the Philippines (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico, 1977) is further testimony to the interest of the
historiography in the 1970s in the origin and development of latifundia
in the Philippines and Spanish America from a comparative perspective.
Later in the 1980s, works like Vicente Rafael’s book Contracting Colo-
nialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under
Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) spiced up the
research on land tenure, tribute, and labor by addressing the role of lan-
guage and communication in the processes of religious conversion and
colonization.
Some Latin American historians in the twentieth century drew atten-
tion to the importance of the trans-Pacific link. By scooping the Philip-
pines in their analyses of Spanish America in general and New Spain
in particular they were able to answer old questions and raise new
ones. Published in 1939, William Lytle Schurz’s pioneer study on the
Spanish trade monopoly between Acapulco and Manila, The Manila
Galleon (New York: EP Dutton and Company, 1939), remains to this
day an obligatory reference. Other seminal works have also focused on
the trans-Pacific link as one of a flow of commodities. French historian
Pierre Chaunu produced the fullest collection of statistical data on Span-
ish trans-Pacific commerce and exposed the existence of a remarkable
overall correlation between Pacific and Atlantic traffic, prices, and eco-
nomic activity.10 “Spanish world” survey texts such as J. H. Parry’s The
Spanish Seaborne Empire (New York: Knopf, 1966), Geoffrey J. Walker’s
Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (London: MacMillan,
1979), and Lyle N. McAlister’s Spain and Portugal in the New World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) also included the
Philippines in their research on imperial commercial circuits. In particular,
Walker and McAlister underscored the Mexican connection with South-
east Asia through Manila as an overlooked piece of the imperial puzzle,
a piece that had repercussions not only on the trade of the viceroyalty of
New Spain but also on the Atlantic fleet system. Walker argued that a
10 Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siécles
(Paris: SEVPEN, 1960). Chaunu’s conclusions, based on official Spanish tax receipts on
legal imports and exports, have been criticized because his numbers misrepresented trade
volumes, did not factor in contraband and fraud, and understated the vitality of the trade
in the seventeenth century.
serious obstacle to the success of the system of navigation and com-

merce between Spain and its American possessions was Mexico’s trade
for cottons and silks with the Far East. A viceroyalty plentifully supplied
with high quality and reasonably priced cottons, silks, and other mate-
rial via the Manila–Acapulco trade did not require the goods brought
from the Peninsula. Walker also pointed at the fact that the merchants
of Mexico came to look upon their trade with the Philippines as their
principal commercial interest.11 McAlister discussed seventeenth-century
economic trends in New Spain in the context of the outflow and inflow
of revenues to and from the Pacific. Contrary to the assumption that
trans-Pacific trade had decreased in the 1600s, McAlister explained that
a thriving trade of oriental merchandise from New Spain to Peru drained
bullion from Mexico and circumvented the interests of the Sevillian
monopolists.12
These studies put in sharp relief that the trans-Pacific link could shed
light beyond the Pacific basin and on the commercial relationship between
Spain and Spanish America. From the 1980s onwards, an extensive body
of scholarship on the Manila galleons has built on these questions and
has continued to focus on the Manila–Acapulco trade mostly from an
economic perspective. Mexican historian Carmen Yuste has researched
for decades on the Mexico City large-scale merchants or almaceneros, the
most dynamic and powerful economic group in eighteenth-century New
Spain.13 Yuste aimed at displacing the center of gravity of the Spanish
trade with Asia from the Iberian Peninsula to New Spain by persuasively
establishing the importance that the mercantile traffic in the Pacific had
for the almaceneros. In Yuste’s interpretation, Mexico was not a mere
transit point in this connection but a direct actor. The trans-Pacific axis
was a colonial alternative of great benefit to Mexico City traders given
that significant constraints characterized the Atlantic commercial link –
namely the presence of intermediaries, stricter fiscal supervision, and the
risk of cargos being sequestered. Yuste argues that Mexican merchants
used extensive panoply of legal and illegal mechanisms to introduce them-
selves into the Manila trade, not only as buyers but also as investors, and
11 Walker, Spanish Politics, 76, 105, 116–17, 131.

12 McAlister, Spain and Portugal, 372–73, 379–80.
13 See Carmen Yuste, El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785 (Mexico
City: INAH, 1984), the monograph Yuste completed for her doctoral degree. A revised
version of this work that includes an analysis of the activities of Mexican merchants in
the Philippines appeared in 2007: Emporios transpacı́ficos. Comerciantes mexicanos en
Manila, 1710–1815 (Mexico City: UNAM).
Introduction 7
dominate with their economic power the trans-Pacific transactions. Yuste

refers to emporios (principal centers of commerce) that went beyond the
territories, the legal restrictions, and the nationalities of those involved
in the trade. Of great consequence for subsequent scholarship includ-
ing my work is that Yuste opened the possibility to study inter-colonial
relationships and how trans-Pacific dynamics were more prevalent in
shaping imperial commercial networks than colonial subordination to
Madrid.
Further elaborating on Yuste’s premises, Katherine Bjork has con-
tended that the interests of Mexican merchants and colonial officials were
central to Madrid’s decision to keep Spain’s only colony in Asia, and this
in spite of considerable cost to the Crown and the opposition of metropoli-
tan commercial interests.14 The “California School” has paid attention to
the Chinese side of the Manila galleon trade and has placed the Manila–
Acapulco connection in a Sino-centered world economy where half of the
world’s silver extracted between 1600 and 1800 ended up in China with
important economic and social consequences for the Asiatic nation.15 One
of the most recent installments in the historiography of the trans-Pacific
commercial connection is the fine and thoroughly documented book of
Mariano Ardash Bonialian, El Pacı́fico hispanoamericano: Polı́tica y com-
ercio asiático en el Imperio español, 1680–1784 (Mexico City: El Cole-
gio de México, 2012), where the author concentrates on the commer-
cial exchanges that occurred in the Spanish Pacific in the period 1680–
1784. Bonialian conceives of a multi-part trans-Pacific system where the
Manila galleon route and the trade between Acapulco and Peru were
connected to each other. Notwithstanding that the Spanish legislation
imposed geographical barriers – the transshipment of merchandise from
Acapulco to Peru coastwise had been prohibited in the early seventeenth
century – Bonialian posits that commerce in the Pacific prospered due to
14 Katharine Bjork, “The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Inter-
ests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998):
25–50.
15 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dennis O.
Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-
Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 391–427; Andre Gunder
Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998); Han-Sheng Chuan, “The Chinese Silk Trade with Spanish-America from
the Late Ming to the Mid-Ch’ing Period,” in European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and
the Acapulco-Manila Galleons, ed. Dennis O. Flynn et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000),
241–260.
untamable fraud and contraband to the point that the transatlantic trade
system could not escape its effects.
These historiographical forays into the Spanish Pacific world under-
stood the importance of linkages with the Philippines and laid solid foun-
dations to consider the breadth of a European early modern empire that
extended across two oceans. But while Latin American scholars have long
been peeking at the Pacific and the far remote possessions of Spain, the
work of historians of the Philippines has not placed too great an emphasis
in enabling the communication between the two historiographical fields.
As an object of historical knowledge, the Philippines are considered a part
of Asia and have been ascribed to the field of Southeast Asian history.
These scholars seem to be more comfortable focusing on the historical
relations of the archipelago with other Asiatic peoples than stressing the
connections of the Philippines with the Eastern Pacific territories. South-
east Asia as a distinctive field of historical study established itself when
J. R. W. Smail proposed in the 1960s the “third way” or autonomous
history with the purpose to cleanse the scholarship of the region of Euro-
centric dependency theories and debunk the nationalist, topically narrow
historiography of the Philippines.16 The “third way,” however, has not
brought the Philippines any closer to Latin America in historiographical
terms.17
16 J. R. W. Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast

Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (1961): 72–102. The struggles to
come to terms with a Hispanic heritage, a majority of Malay and Chinese ancestry,
and a US colonial discourse that demonized the Spanish have noticeably given Philip-
pine historical self-perception a manifestly anticolonial, anti-Spanish, and anti-Latin
American stance. A new generation of Filipino Hispanic literati and other scholars are
instead reappraising hybridity and vindicating the importance of the Hispanic period
and its legacy as an indispensable part of the modern Filipino heritage. Elizabeth Ann
Medina, “Hispanic-Filipino Identity: Loss and Recovery,” Asociación Cultural Galeón
de Manila (1999). Accessed July 2009. www.galeondemanila.org/index.php/es/estudios/
126-hispanic-filipino-identity-loss-a-recovery-by-elizabeth-medina; Isaac Donoso, ed.,
More Hispanic than We Admit: Insights into Philippine Cultural History (Quezon City:
Vibal Foundation, 2008); Fernando Napkil Zialcita, Authentic Though Not Exotic:
Essays on Filipino Identity (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2005).
17 Starting with John A. Larkin, The Pampangans: Colonial Society in a Philippine Province
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), a trend of local history and anti-
dependency theory culminated in Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local
Transformations (Honololu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982), edited by Smail’s stu-
dents Alfred W. McCoy and Ed C. De Jesus. Vicente Rafael, Filipino with doctoral
training at Cornell University uses post-structural textual analysis in his search for Fil-
ipino identity. See Vicente Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the
Techniques of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005).
Introduction 9
Currently, some studies in Spanish imperial history and colonial

Mexico encompass both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins. In Empire:
How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: Harper-
Collins, 2003), Henry Kamen features a lengthy chapter on the Philip-
pines and the relationships of the Spanish with Chinese, Japanese, and
native Filipinos, an important piece of his overall theory that the Spanish
empire was not the creation of one people but a collaboration of many. In
general, however, the stress that the historiographical discourse on Span-
ish America places on the Atlantic has dwarfed the role of the Philippines
as the far western frontier of the Mexican viceroyalty. Surveys of Span-
ish imperial history and general histories of the Mexican region dispatch
the trans-Pacific axis usually with brief mentions to the Manila galleon
trade.18 Furthermore, neither the Philippines nor the Pacific World have
made their way into the teaching curricula of history university depart-
ments; undergraduate and graduate courses in colonial Latin America
or Mexican History do not regularly address this region. Clearly, in the
interest of time instructors need to make choices. In deciding about cur-
ricular content, though, it is worth mulling over how the incorporation
of global perspectives into history courses helps educators drive home the
point that today’s global connectedness is not an exclusive feature of the
modern world.
The amount of scholarly works that approach Latin American history
as a complex unit that embraces Asian territories is likely to grow in the
near future. This is due to the fact that recent Pacific-centered publications
are laying on the table new and fascinating questions. These studies focus
on the Pacific world as a coherent and distinct region and underscore
the connections that have linked this ocean to other areas and peoples
of the world. Some of these titles are The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples,
and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900, seventeen volumes published by
Ashgate between 2001 and 2009; Vanessa Smith’s Intimate Strangers
(2010) and The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (1997), both
18 See, for instance: Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein’s Apogee of Empire. Spain and
New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003); William S. Maltby’s The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); John H. Elliott’s Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–
1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Sean McEnroe, From
Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012); Matthew Restall and Kris Lane, Latin America in
Colonial Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Brian R. Hamnett’s
A Concise History of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
by Cambridge University Press; Mercedes Maroto Camino’s Exploring

the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania, 1519–1794 (Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2009); and John Gascoigne’s Encountering the Pacific in the
Age of the Enlightenment (University of Cambridge Press, 2014). While
these scholars largely concentrate on cross-cultural encounters between
Pacific Islanders and Europeans, in Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas,
Peoples, and Cultures (University of Cambridge Press, 2012) Matt Mat-
suda presents the Pacific region as an interconnected whole where the
histories of Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the American Pacific coast are
pieced together in what he calls “translocalism.” Refreshing as well is
Kristie Flannery’s research on the Philippines in the broader context of the
Spanish empire in the age of revolutions.19
Moreover, recent historiography is transforming the historical narra-
tive of the Spanish Pacific with suggestive alternatives to the economically
driven interpretations that have long dominated studies on Spain’s his-
torical relationship with the Pacific. From this perspective, my book can
be placed alongside the efforts of scholars who have become increasingly
aware of how the commercial activity of the Manila galleons created
intellectual, cultural, and social linkages that affected the inhabitants of
both ends of the route and even subjects in Spain. The works of these
historians further exemplify the many interpretive possibilities that the
inclusion of the Philippines opens up for historical enquiry in a heavily
connected Pacific world.
It is not an easy task to enumerate the scholarly works that analyze
exchanges across the Pacific that ran parallel to the well-known commer-
cial ties. Here I refer to those that have influenced my research the most.
Several authors have inspired me to think in terms of a global Spanish
empire whose inhabitants developed a world conception that transcended
geographical and administrative boundaries. For instance, Luke Clossey
has proposed that the movements of people, ideas, money, and infor-
mation across the Pacific in the seventeenth century displayed enough
similarities with modern globalization to warrant the use of terms such
as “global exchange” and “global awareness.” Clossey finds that “a sense
of geographical closeness” to China shaped the thoughts and actions of
the administrators, missionaries, and explorers of the Americas, histori-
cal actors to whom he attributes a “global consciousness.”20 In a study
19 She is a graduate student at the History Department of the University of Austin, Texas.
20 Luke Clossey, “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-
Modern Pacific,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (2006): 57.
Introduction 11
of similarly broad geographical contours, Fabio López Lázaro has argued

for a global Spanish identity that forged around the multiethnic solidarity
of subjects who lived and worked in international environments in the
seventeenth century – vessels and commercial networks that connected
Europe, America, and Asia.21
The assumption that interconnections existed between the Atlantic and
Pacific spheres in the context of imperial structures also permeates
two recent monographs. In Navigating the Spanish Lake, Rainer B.
Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller examine the Pacific
Ocean “not just as a linear crossing with the galleon’s flow of commodi-
ties, but also as an area governed by the circulation of people and their
histories.”22 These authors advocate that this oceanic space should not
be arbitrarily separated from the Atlantic Ocean because a “multilayered
connectivity” existed between the two in the Iberian world. Consequently,
they understand the Iberian cultural assimilation that occurred in the
Pacific Ocean as “archipelagic Hispanization,” a process they describe
as the negotiated confluence of Hispanization, Sinification, Mexicaniza-
tion, Orientalization, and the cultures of island peoples.23 An authority
on European experiences in the Pacific Ocean, Buschmann, theorizes in
Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014) that in the late eighteenth century Spanish intellectuals,
officials, and diplomats crafted a vision of the Pacific world that intention-
ally linked it to the Americas as if the Pacific territories were an extension
of the Spanish American possessions and not a unique, newly discov-
ered realm. By doing this, Spain wanted to counter the Franco-British
interpretation that the Pacific world could be annexed on a first come,
first serve basis. Buschmann’s conclusions underpin the contention that
the Spanish incorporated the Pacific world into their intellectual horizons
as an important component of the empire worth of defending through
writing.
Works on the Asian diaspora in Latin America during colonial times
by Slack and Tatiana Seijas have influenced my view of how frequently
groups of people moved along migration networks in the Pacific Ocean
21 Fabio López Lázaro, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramı́rez. The True Adventures of a
Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011),
10–13.
22 Rainer B. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr, and James B. Tueller, eds. Navigating the
Spanish Lake. The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 (Honololu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2014), 3.
23 Ibid., 28.
and how the repercussions of these emigrational flows spilled over into the
Atlantic basin. Slack, a specialist in East Asian and Chinese history, has
made us aware of the fact that individuals who arrived in New Spain on
board of the galleons from China, Japan, Philippines, Southeast Asia, and
India (collectively referred to as chinos in the documentation) contributed
to the economic and cultural dynamism of New Spain at many levels.
Slack gives detailed examples of the impact that Chinese imports had on
daily lives and domestic economic activity in New Spain, such as the rise
of an import-substitution ceramics industry powered by the popularity
of Chinese porcelain and the arrival of religious artifacts manufactured
in China and the Philippines.24 Tatiana Seijas’ monograph tracks the
journey of Asian forced laborers from the Manila slave market to the
streets of Mexico City.25 Seijas is specifically concerned with chino slaves,
the term under which slave owners and colonial officials in the Spanish
empire grouped slaves coming from culturally diverse communities in
Asia, and their transition from slavery to freedom in 1672. That year,
the prohibition of enslaving Indians was stretched to include people who
were not born in the Spanish domain. Seijas highlights the agency of
chino slaves who, despite their Asian origin, found ways to claim an
“Indian” identity. According to this author, the experience of chino slaves
points to the interconnectedness of Spain’s colonies and the reach of the
Crown, which brought together people from Africa, the Americas, Asia,
and Europe.26
In the opposite direction of chino migration, the transportation of
recruits and convicts from New Spain to the western Pacific is another
thread of this densely interwoven ocean. This practice, which can be
traced back to the early 1600s, has raised some interest among histori-
ans. The most important work in this regard is Marı́a Fernanda Garcı́a de
los Arcos’ monograph, Forzados y reclutas: Los criollos novohispanos en
Asia, 1756–1808 (Mexico City: Potrerillos Editores, 1996). This histo-
rian provides an administrative history of the military levies in the second
24 Edward R. Slack. “Sinifying New Spain: Cathay’s Influence on Colonial Mexico via the
Nao de China,” in The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Walton Look
Lai et al. (Leiden: Brill Press, 2010), 7–34. Inspired to a great extent by Slack’s work,
Ruben Carrillo has examined Asian migration and settlement in Puebla, New Spain.
Ruben Carrillo. “Birds and People: An Outline of chinos in Mexico (1565–1700),”
Entremons. UPF Journal of World History 1 (2011), 1–19.
25 Tatiana Seijas. Asian Slaves in Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
26 Ibid., 1–5.
Introduction 13
half of the eighteenth century and a description of the logistics involved in

their transportation to Acapulco. Garcı́a de los Arcos also concerns her-
self with the cultural influence these Mexicans had in the Philippines and
theorizes that recruits acted as agents of novohispanization in the geo-
graphically – and culturally – remote archipelago. To my knowledge, and
besides my own article published in 2014 on the performance of Mexican
recruits and soldiers in the Philippines,27 only two other academic works
have approached the topic of forced migration in the Spanish Pacific.
In 2013, Stephanie Mawson published an article that examines convict
transportation between Mexico and the Philippines during the seven-
teenth century in relation to the emergence of an unruly plebeian under-
class in the cities and along the highways of New Spain.28 In their 2006
piece, Beatriz Cáceres Menéndez and Robert W. Patch focus on 220 trial
records of Mexican individuals deported to the Philippines between 1722
and 1729 and reflect on the notions of family honor exhibited within the
documents.29 My study complements these works with a discussion of the
larger significance that the deportation of recruits and vagrants had in the
implementation of imperial policies in New Spain and the Philippines in
the late eighteenth century and the impact that forced transportation had
on the relationships between Spain and her colonies and between the colo-
nial power and the popular classes. I make the vagrants and other convicts
a central part of the story, which enables me to analyze the social and eco-
nomic circumstances in which the process of convict transportation sits in,
the evolution of the Mexican administration of justice, shifting attitudes
toward vagrancy, the colonial military defense and the presidio system,
and the impact and limits of Bourbon reforms in New Spain and the
Philippines.
On balance, the scholarship cited here makes a strong case for putting
the Pacific world on the historical agenda. Pieced together, these studies
set forth that remarkable mobility – forced or voluntary – and global
awareness characterized the subjects of the Spanish empire in early
27 Eva Maria Mehl, “Mexican Recruits and Vagrants in Late Eighteenth-Century Philip-
pines: Empire, Social Order, and Bourbon Reforms in the Spanish Pacific World,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2014): 547–79.
28 Stephanie Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians and the Forzado System: Convict Transportation
between New Spain and the Philippines during the Seventeenth Century,” Revista de
Indias 73, no. 259 (2013): 693–730.
29 Beatriz Cáceres Menéndez and Robert W. Patch, “‘Gente de Mal Vivir’: Families and
Incorrigible Sons in New Spain, 1721–1729,” Revista de Indias 66, no. 237 (2006):
363–92.
modern times. The interconnectedness of Spain’s colonies thus makes

necessary analytical approaches that consider administrative boundaries
between colonies to be porous and fluid. From different perspectives, these
scholars support the idea that Mexico and the Philippines are historically
intertwined. Furthermore, these studies lay bare that inter-colonial rela-
tionships in the Pacific, traditionally overlooked in views that favor the
connection – and subjugation – of overseas possessions to the mother
country, were of tremendous consequence in the region and beyond.
Exchanges across the Pacific included commodities, peoples, ideas, and
information, and the outcomes of this exchange are revealed in more
arenas than just economic development. New Spain’s social and cultural
structures display Asian cultural influences, and it only makes sense that
Mexicans would have left their imprint in the Philippines as well. Lastly,
Spanish officials and intellectuals understood that the Pacific world was a
necessary piece in the broader Spanish American machinery and in fact,
the connectivity between both realms shaped Spanish imperial policy and
commercial dynamics in the Atlantic. The trans-Pacific link cannot be
seen in isolation from the imperial networks that also crisscrossed the
Atlantic Ocean.
Horizontal Relationships Between Colonies in the Spanish Empire

Many of the scholarly works hitherto mentioned, including this book,
showcase that trans-Pacific relationships have shaped the histories of
countries in both sides of the Pacific Basin between the sixteenth and
the nineteenth centuries. I argue that the history of the Spanish Philip-
pines is better apprehended by including the history of colonial Mexico,
and vice versa. And yet, as Atlantic historians have learned, certain pro-
cesses and their outcomes cannot be grasped by looking at discrete ocean
basins.30 Forced transportation from Mexico to the Philippines was a
transregional experience for these men, but it was also directly related
to the imperial blueprints of Spanish politicians in Madrid. Therefore, I
attempt to illustrate a snapshot of the connectivity that existed between
the imperial processes in the Pacific and those in the Atlantic. I ultimately
argue that a perspective of the Spanish empire centered on the Atlantic
30 Alison Games, Philip J. Stern, Paul W. Mapp, and Peter A. Coclanis have strongly
advocated for the historiographies of the British Atlantic and British Asia to dialogue
with each other in order to enhance the histories of each region. See “Forum: Beyond
the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 675–742.
Introduction 15
cannot adequately reflect the historical importance of the richly textured

trans-Pacific entwinement.
In this book I interlace the military initiatives of Bourbon ministers in
Madrid with the predicament of Spanish authorities in Manila after 1764
and the ideological, social, and economic mechanisms that drove the col-
lection of manpower in central New Spain. Such an inclusive approach
reveals that (1) Manila and the areas controlled by the Spanish were
indeed part of the Mexican – and Iberian – world; (2) the policing initia-
tives of Mexican officials that affected the urban poor were much deter-
mined by what occurred in the Philippines; and (3) the role of Mexican
authorities in handling the shipments of recruits and convicts supports
the idea of a Spanish metropole with limited absolute power and imperial
peripheries with significant decision-making capacity.
The forced migration of Mexican recruits and convicts in the late colo-
nial period furthered the Mexicanization – or New Hispanization – of the
Philippines. Historians have dated the beginning of this process in 1565
when the Philippines were placed under the jurisdiction of New Spain. For
the next two hundred and fifty years Mexican crews who deserted in the
Philippines upon the galleons’ arrival in Manila, American agricultural
goods, Mexican linguistic influences, and the Catholic heritage further
contributed to mexicanize the archipelago.31 After the military defeat
against British forces in 1762, Spanish authorities in Manila requested
from Mexico City gente blanca (white people) despite the on-site avail-
ability of native Filipino labor. The forced migration of Mexicans between
1765 and 1811 suggests that metropolitan and colonial officials conceived
of the remote Philippines as an extension of the Mexican world.
I contend that the Spanish Pacific was connected to processes of convict
transportation and military recruitment in the Spanish Atlantic.32 Penal
shipments in the Pacific were one more circuit within a larger system of
imperial circulation of convicts. Before the 1750s, Spanish convicted crim-
inals could be sentenced to hard labor on the galleys, the mercury mines
of Almadén (Ciudad Real, Spain), and the military presidios in North
Africa.33 After the abolition of the galleys in 1748 and the Spanish defeat
31 Rafael Bernal. México en Filipinas: Estudio de una transculturación (Mexico: UNAM,

1965) and others have referred long time ago to this process. Buschmann, Slack, and
Tueller have enthusiastically reanimated the concept in Navigating, 24.
32 For a historiographical review on how Atlantic scholars studying the Spanish empire
have considered the Pacific an anomaly, see Navigating, 3–4.
33 Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1983), xi–xiii, and chapters 3–4.
in 1762, Spanish American presidios, as strategic outposts in need for

manpower, were added to the network of penal destinations. In addition
to the circulation of convicts between Spain and North African and Span-
ish American presidios, Christian De Vito has identified an “interlope”
(intra-American) presidio system in the New World, with multifaceted
and interconnected sub-systems in the Caribbean, New Spain, and South
America.34 My research exposes that forced migration in the Pacific in
the post-1762 era complemented and intersected with these circuits. The
absence of effective methods of military recruitment left authorities in
both Mexico City and Manila scrambling for volunteers and marginal-
ized elements of society, and the balance between the defensive needs of
the Philippines and those of New Spain proved to be one impossible to
maintain.
A Pacific-oriented New Spain also becomes apparent in my narrative.
Indeed, Buschmann has already indicated that a perspective that considers
Spanish American colonies as strictly American territories is a myopic
proposition.35 The Philippines shaped in multiple ways the thoughts,
actions, and choices of Mexicans. Trans-Pacific connections had been an
integral part of the history of continental Mexico since the late sixteenth
century: elite and popular sectors in New Spain delighted on Chinese
silks, Indian cottons, and Asian spices; military and financial support
flowed from Mexico City to Manila with regularity; and Asian slaves and
non-slaves crossed the ocean and became part of the Mexican population.
The annual deportations of vagrants to Manila starting in 1783 shows
that a dynamic and diverse interlacement continued to prosper in the late
eighteenth century, as initiatives of Mexican officials to control disorderly
population in Mexico City had become directly connected to the plight
of Spanish authorities in the far-flung eastern colony.
Albeit part of the Iberian world, the Spanish Pacific was a region with
its own dynamics. The viceregal office in New Spain exercised a power
of decision in the shipment of soldiers and vagrants to the Philippines
34 Christian G. De Vito, “The Place of Convicts in Late Colonial Spanish America, 1750–
1830s.” Paper presented at the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History,
Paris, France, September 4–7, 2014. De Vito’s work addresses the circulation of con-
victs to and within colonial and post-colonial Latin America, and is part of a macro
research project that is developing at the University of Leicester, UK titled “Carceral
Archipelagos.”
35 In his research on the expeditions the viceroyalty of Peru dispatched in the 1770s to
the Easter Island and Tahiti, Buschmann shows that the Pacific acquired the status of a
defensive perimeter against the incursion of foreign powers (Navigating, 9–12, 21).
Introduction 17
that contrasts with the negligible, even peripheral place Madrid had in
said process. Clare Anderson and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart estimate that
Spain sent 4,000 convicts to Spanish America between 1769 and 1837.36
In the Pacific, Mexico City arranged for the transportation of 3,999 sol-
diers and convicted individuals from 1765 to 1811, while Spain could
only send about 200 criminals to Manila during the same period. Spain
was unable to sustain in the Pacific the leading role it had in the Atlantic
and was forced instead to delegate in the Mexican viceroyalty. Appar-
ently, not much had changed from the previous century. According to
Mawson, 7,500 recruits and forzados crossed the Pacific Ocean on board
of the galleons between 1600 and 1691; in the meantime, it is unlikely
that any relevant amount of reinforcements were shipped from Seville to
Manila because for most of the 1600s the bulk of the migratory flux was
directed to Spanish America.37
Another difference between forced migration in the Pacific and the
Atlantic is that vagrants were a sizable percentage of the men that Mexico
transported to the Philippines. Authorities in the Iberian Peninsula
deported military convicts, thieves, and smugglers to Spanish America,
but there is little evidence that Spain exiled its beggars beyond the Pillars
of Hercules.38 In Mexico, on the contrary, challenging social and eco-
nomic circumstances in the early 1780s coupled with a reformist ideo-
logical milieu of enlightened inspiration fueled the decision to sentence
vagrants of Mexico City to several years of military service or public
works in the Philippines. In all likelihood, this was a departure from
seventeenth-century practices, since Mawson does not acknowledge the
existence of vagrants in the records of transportation.
The capacity of Mexican officials to determine essential aspects of
convict transportation to the Philippines sheds light onto the dynamics
36 Clare Anderson and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. “Convict Labour and the Western
Empires, 1415–1954,” in The Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich
et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 108.
37 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 716–17. Magnus Morner, “Spanish Migration to the New
World prior to 1800: A Report on the State of Research,” in First Images of America: The
Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1976), 758–76.
38 In her analysis of convicts sent to Spanish presidios in the Caribbean, Pike does not refer
to vagrants. In the most important study on vagrancy in early Modern Spain to date,
Rosa Marı́a Pérez Estévez mentions just in passing that vagrants could be assigned to
military regiments in Indies. See Rosa Marı́a Pérez Estévez, El problema de los vagos
en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros,
1976), 242.
of power within the Spanish empire. The connections between colonial

Mexico and the Spanish Philippines had the potential to shape metropoli-
tan policies and steer Spain’s relationship with its domains in direc-
tions not always foreseen by Madrid. Viceregal authorities used Manila’s
need for military replacements to exile individuals who embodied moral
attributes despised by the governing elites in New Spain. Yet the office
of the viceroy was apparently unaware of or unconcerned by the insur-
mountable problems faced by the governor in Manila and his subordi-
nates as they tried, unsuccessfully, to employ these difficult men in the
defense of the archipelago. Understanding the Philippines as a weighty
component of the imperial machinery brings the Pacific back into a
prevailing Atlanticentric perspective of the Spanish empire, gives more
prominence to the imperial periphery, and displays the vulnerability of
the metropole.
Therefore, my study contributes to the scholarship that challenges the
interpretation of the Spanish state as absolute. For a long time, the his-
toriography has nurtured the interpretation of decisive, absolutist-like
Bourbon reforms.39 David A. Brading most famously coined the expres-
sion “revolution in government” to refer to Madrid’s determination to
bind New Spain more closely to Spain and secure greater revenues for the
monarchy.40 More recently though, historians like Kenneth J. Andrien,
John Leddy Phelan, John Coatsworth, and Sergio Serulnikov have seen
the uneven and often distinctive impact of the Bourbon policies in Span-
ish America as the outcome of political contestation and negotiation.41
Furthermore, even though new fiscal policies and direct trade of Spain
with the Philippines might have reinforced the ties of Madrid to the Span-
ish Pacific, Bourbon vagrancy policies in Mexicon evidently strengthened
the links between the Philippines and New Spain. My work argues that
39 John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York: Norton,
1973); Douglas North, “Institutions and Economic Growth: A Historical Introduction,”
World Development 17, no. 9 (1989): 1319–32.
40 David A. Brading. Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), 26.
41 Kenneth J. Andrien, “The Politics of Reform in Spain’s Atlantic Empire during the
Late Bourbon Period: The Visita of José Garcı́a de León y Pizarro in Quito,” Journal
of Latin American Studies 41 (2009): 637–62; John L. Phelan, The People and the
King. The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978); John H. Coatsworth, “Political Economy and Economic Organization,”
The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas et al.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 237–74; and Sergio Serulnikov, “Cus-
toms and Rules: Social Conflicts in the Age of Bourbon Reformism (Northern Potosı́ in
the 1770s),” Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 245–74.
Introduction 19
imperial agendas were ultimately recast to accommodate local and

regional interests in the colonies, that the colonial administrations were
significant actors in determining the practices that actually emerged out
of metropolitan directives, and that recognizing a greater degree of local
and regional autonomy on the part of the viceroys and governors helps
us understand how the Spanish empire was governed.
Vagrancy Raids, Popular Classes, and the State in Late Colonial Mexico
The archival material used in this book points to a promising future for
scholars willing to consider the Spanish Pacific as a sphere where the
relationship between colonial power and popular classes and, more par-
ticularly, the impact and limits of the social Bourbon reforms in New
Spain and the Philippines can be examined. The resolution to resort to
annual vagrancy campaigns was directly connected to the enlightened
ideas in which officials and intellectuals in Mexico City moved: produc-
tivity, utilitarianism, social and moral order, public health, and urban
beauty. Bourbon authorities designed a civilizing project that included,
besides the rehabilitation of vagrants, the reform of urban police, new
rules of hygiene, and the regulation of space, bodies, and popular culture.
Since there are virtually no studies on the social Bourbon reforms in the
Philippines, this book can provide a framework for comparative analysis
in a transoceanic context; reports of the colonial administration in the
Philippines about the labor assignments and performance of the depor-
tees do evince that policymakers in Manila were involved in reformist
pursuits very similar to those of their counterparts in Mexico City.
Many historians would agree with Charles Walker’s assertion that
the moral and social Bourbon reforms were “haphazardly put into prac-
tice and their effects were incomplete at best.”42 Along these lines, my
research prompts the consideration that the impact of vagrancy arrests
could have been greater and affected many more unfortunate Mexicans
than they actually did. These raids were a punishment of exceptional
nature and arbitrariness and judicial excesses were to be expected. Levies
were indeed fast-paced with massive detentions, but they were invariably
followed by the liberation of a high percentage of the detainees. Offi-
cials were repeatedly advised to execute levies with prudence and good
42 Charles F. Walker “Civilize or Control? The Lingering Impact of the Bourbon Urban
Reforms,” Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950, ed. Nils Jacobsen et al. (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 87.
judgment to prevent a stream of grievances, and some magistrates stood

out in the process for upholding their own sense of ethics. These find-
ings are in tune with those of historians of criminal punishment in colo-
nial Mexico, Colin MacLachlan and Michael Scardaville among others,
who are of the opinion that the perceived rise in criminality in a rapidly
growing Mexico City did not ultimately lead to abusive or corrupt legal
behavior.43 Even in outlying areas like New Mexico and Texas, Charles
R. Cutter sustains that viceregal control was maintained not because
arbitrariness prevailed but because officials displayed a judicial practice
consistent with common sense and community norms.44
My work shares some premises with historians of colonial Mexico
who have recovered the agency of the poor, shown patterns of popu-
lar resistance to government and elite projects, and demonstrated that
colonial norms were subject to reworking.45 I have encountered at least
sixty-two cases where Mexicans from various social and ethnic affilia-
tions supported the government’s practice of forced conscription. Parents,
uncles, and wives informed on their relatives with the same descriptions
that Bourbon reformers used to compose the levy decrees. They repre-
sent that fraction of working-class families in late colonial Mexico City
that shared with the elites values about work, stability, and moral and
physical decency and that loathed those who failed to uphold such social
norms. The number of cases that actually made it to the desks of the
magistrates – and of which, hence, we have an archival trace – is by itself
not fully indicative of the social forces at work. If orthodox standards of
43 Colin M. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1974), 42–44, 111; Michael Charles Scardaville, “(Habsburg)
Law and (Bourbon) Order: State Authority, Popular Unrest and the Criminal Justice Sys-
tem in Bourbon Mexico City,” The Americas 50 no. 4 (1994): 501–25; Teresa Lozano
Armendares, La criminalidad en la ciudad de México, 1800–1821 (Mexico: UNAM,
1987), 172.
44 Charles Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 34–37.
45 Studies that have stimulated my research are: Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Propriety and
Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Pamela
Voekel, “Peeing on the Palace: Bodily Resistance to Bourbon Reforms,” Journal of
Historical Sociology 5, no. 2 (1992): 183–210; Silvia Marina Arrom, Containing the
Poor: the Mexico City Poor House, 1774–1871 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);
Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial
Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and
Cheryl English Martin, “Public Celebrations, Popular Culture, and Labor Discipline in
Eighteenth-Century Chihuahua,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Cele-
brations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. Beezley et al. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources Inc, 1994).
Introduction 21
social propriety motivated those who eventually turned in their own kin,
it can be assumed that many others were frustrated with their relatives for
similar reasons, even if they never took any legal steps and are therefore
not present in the sources.
Besides these sixty-two instances where a request was made to deport
an individual, there are many other cases peppered with testimonies of
community members about the habits of relatives and neighbors. These
testimonies reveal the importance that working-class families gave to dili-
gence and hard-working habits in late eighteenth-century New Spain. E. P.
Thompson considered the shift from task orientation to timed labor and
the concomitant restructuring of work habits as necessary conditions for
the origination of industrial capitalism.46 But in late eighteenth-century
New Spain, the Bourbon time- and work-discipline were not one-sided
impositions. My findings concur with a literature that suggests that new,
modern concepts of work-discipline were not merely imposed but vol-
untarily accepted. For example, Jan de Vries has placed industriousness
and demand at the center of European capitalist development. In The
Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Econ-
omy, 1650 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
he traces the history of the motivation, orientation, and workforce man-
agement at the level of the household to underline that lower and middle
classes were actors in, not victims of, capitalism. Families labored harder
to consume more and more differently, which resulted in the increase
of both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand
for marketed products. Analyses like de Vries’ complement Thompson’s
portrayal of the supply side of the picture.
Convict deportation from Mexico to the Philippines in the late colonial
period confirms that persuasion worked alongside more violent, despotic
methods in controlling popular groups. Scholars working on border-
lands and/or less urbanized areas of the Spanish empire have long noted
that historical interpretations that refer to subaltern agency as resistance
pose a divide between the state and subjects that precludes from seeing
dynamics of compromise and interchange. Cutter, Jesus F. de la Teja,
and Ross Frank, for the northern periphery of New Spain, and Cyn-
thia Milton and Tamar Herzog for a medium size provincial town like
Quito have found ample evidence of the importance of legitimacy and
46 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present

38 (1967): 56–97, remains the classic statement of work intensification.
social consensus to achieve social order.47 Scardaville, Beezley, Martin,

and French have also found acceptance of authority in a densely populated
political and economic center such as the capital of New Spain.48 That
some residents of Mexico City willingly denounced the transgressions of
members of their own communities further demonstrates that, even in the
context of vigorous Bourbon reformism, the efforts of the state to con-
strain the behaviors of urban popular sectors were not necessarily coer-
cive: authority could be established through tacit consent and ideological
hegemony.
Literature on Bourbon reforms that emphasizes the ability of colonial
subjects to exert power frequently presents an incompetent state that
hardly ever managed to implement its initiatives, but in the execution
of vagrancy campaigns in late colonial Mexico City this interpretative
stance might be inaccurate. Far from a sign of frailty, I believe that
the competence of the colonial government to attain cooperation from
Mexicans bespeaks a strong state. Moreover, the roundups of vagrants
buttressed the power of colonial authorities. The raids targeted not
just the unemployed but also drunkards, gamblers, naked individuals,
47 Charles Cutter contends that in the Mexican borderlands elites and subordinate mem-
bers turned to the legal system because the punishment imposed conformed to their
expectations. See Cutter, The Legal Culture, 147–48. Teja and Frank, editors of Choice,
Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005) defend that colonial subjects volun-
tarily participated in systems of social control (xi). In The Many Meanings of Poverty:
Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2007) Cynthia Milton has theorized that poor quiteños
legitimized colonial rule when they attempted to meet poverty requirements by manipu-
lating the institutions (xviii). Herzog has posited that pre-1750 Quito’s penal system did
not coerce society but rather the latter was intensely imbricated with the former. Tamar
Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System in Quito (1650–1750)
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 8.
48 Scardaville (“(Hapsburg) Law”) has conjectured that judicial behavior in late colonial
Mexico connected with people’s concerns. The editors of Rituals of Rule claim that
“persuasion, charisma, habit, and presentations of virtue” were “familiar techniques
and exhibitions of authority” (xiii). The principles of negotiation and legitimacy have
been quite relevant to the debates on the “passive-city syndrome,” that is, how to
account for the lack of popular rebellion in Mexican cities in comparison with the
riotous countryside. See Susan Deans-Smith, “Review: Culture, Power, and Society in
Colonial Mexico,” LARR 33, no. 1 (1998): 257–77; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of
Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Silvia M. Arrom and Servando Ortoll (eds.),
Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1996); and Van Young, “Islands in the Storm:
Quiet Cities and Violent Countryside in the Mexican Independence,” Past and Present
118 (February 1988): 120–56.
Introduction 23
disobedient sons, and those engaged in concubinage or adulterous rela-

tionships. Obviously, the faculties of the Mexican state ranged from dis-
ciplining laziness and unbecoming forms of entertainment to intruding,
with a moralizing intent, in more private areas of the life of Mexicans,
such as the youth’s education, sexual mores, and personal hygiene.
While undoubtedly stimulating, historiographical rumination on pop-
ular agency has somewhat obscured the impact of Bourbon reforms on
the lives of colonial subjects. The reformers’ failure to foster a new disci-
plined subject and reorder social relations does not mean that the impact
of Bourbon social policies was insignificant. Notwithstanding that the
judicial proceedings of the levies might have appeared fair and legiti-
mate to some Mexicans, those arrested and sentenced to the Philippines
thought that deportation was a grueling experience and a form of civil
death. In addition, most of these “vagrants” were able-bodied indivi-
duals caught in calamitous social and economic circumstances who had
broken the law in one way or another, but they were not major crimi-
nals according to the legal standards of their day. With their banishment,
authorities disrupted economic routines and imposed drastic, stressful,
and long-lasting changes in family units.
Early Modern Western Empires and Convict Transportation

Convict transportation in the Spanish Pacific was an isolated practice
neither within nor outside the confines of the Spanish empire. How-
ever, in the last fifteen years, virtually no study in international unfree
labor migration has acknowledged the Philippines as a convict site for the
Spanish empire.49 My study could be seen as a Hispanic variation on con-
vict transportation history and in fact, thought-provoking comparisons
emerge when trans-Pacific-forced migration is seen alongside the practices
of three other early modern European powers: convict transportation to
North America and Australia in the British empire; the deportations to
Louisiana, Canada, and the West Indies by French authorities; and penal
49 Clare Anderson and Timothy Coates list Spain as a country that transported convicts
but only to Cuba and North Africa. See respectively Convicts in the Indian Ocean:
Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2000), 4; and Convicts and Orphans. Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the
Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Michael
Bogle does not include the Philippines in an index of sixty-six international convicts
penal colonies. See Convicts: Transportation and Australia (Sidney: Historic Houses
Trust of New South Wales, 2008), 7–19.
servitude in the Portuguese imperial enclaves of Brazil, Cape Verde, São

Tomé, Prı́ncipe, India, and Angola. Common and divergent patterns can
be observed in these scenarios. Like New Spain did in the Pacific Ocean,
the British, French, and Portuguese imperial authorities called upon a
labor force that by virtue of its crimes was driven into active partici-
pation in order to support overseas expansion and compensate for the
lack of free wage labor. It also surfaces that imperial and social agendas
distinctively defined forced migration to the Philippines, that is, the pur-
pose to strengthen Spanish power in the Pacific after 1762 and the state’s
ambition to encroach on the lives of colonial subjects.
The dynamics of penal transportation from New Spain to the Philip-
pines were those of a colony shipping individuals to another colony. If
this sounds as a unique feature, it is perhaps because scholars need to
stress more often that in the Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese
deportation systems convict transportation flows from the metropole to
colonial destinations overlapped with intra-colonial circuits. Out of an
estimated total of 110,000 convicts who were transported in the Span-
ish empire, about 25,000 flowed from New Spain to other New World
presidios between 1550 and 1811.50 Between 1642 and 1776, about
50,000 prisoners were transported to British America and 160,000 were
shipped to Australia from 1788 to 1868. Less known is that the British
colonies deported 73,000 convicts to New South Wales, and that 110,000
Europeans and Asians convicted in Indian courts were sent to Australia
and destinations within the wider Indian Ocean world.51 French imperial
authorities deported about 2,300 convicts to New France, Louisiana, and
Cayenne from 1552 to 1809 and close to 100,000 landed in Guiana and
New Caledonia between 1852 and 1938; part of the 70,000 men trans-
ported to Guiana came from French colonial domains.52 A total of 20,500
degredados (male criminal exiles) were banished to domestic and over-
seas locations of the Portuguese empire between 1550 and 1750.53 This
number includes the criminals that Goa sentenced to Sri Lanka, Molucca
islands, Mozambique, and Brazil, and those that Angola deported to
50 Anderson and Maxwell-Stewart, “Convict Labour,” 108.

51 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World,
1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 56–92.
52 Anderson and Maxwell-Stewart, “Convict Labour,” 110; Stephen A. Toth, Beyond
Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854–1952 (Lincoln and London: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 2006).
53 Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 40.
Introduction 25
Brazil.54 The autonomy – or dependence – with which colonies carried out

penal transportation in each of these scenarios could open new enquiry
lines about convict labor and power relationships between empires and
colonies.
While penal transportation in the British empire was chiefly related to
an evolution of policies against crime, in New Spain and the Portuguese
empire the connection between exiles and empire building is more evi-
dent. Before the Transportation Act of 1718 that empowered British local
courts to sentence convicts to North America was passed, the Parliament
was persuaded that terror of the gallows had little effect on delinquency.55
Transportation emerged as a new, intermediary punishment that miti-
gated the rigors of the capital laws, and it also offered a stiffer penalty
than whipping or branding.56 The United States War of Independence
threw the British criminal justice system into chaos; after testing the via-
bility of other geographical locations, in 1787, the First Fleet with 772
convicts set sail for Australia.57 Instead of either building new peniten-
tiaries to relieve an overcrowded judicial and prison system or reforming
a penal code that prescribed death penalty for over 200 offences, convict
penal settlements remained the primary method to punish serious crime
in the British empire. That the Antipodes operated as an entrepot of
geopolitical importance was the by-product of British authorities having
no other suitable place to implement disciplining designs.58
A greater deal of flexibility characterized forced transportation in the
Spanish Pacific and the Portuguese empire. In the Mexican viceroyalty,
presidio, not death penalty, was the most common form of punishment
for serious crimes. Although evidence indicates that financial, political,
54 Ibid., 73–80.
55 David Taylor, Crime, Policing, and Punishment in England, 1750–1914 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–
1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), 281–82.
56 Beattie, Policing, x, 434–36.
57 Between 1779 and 1787, projects to set up penal colonies in Canada, Namibia, the
Falkland Islands, West Indies, and East Indies failed. Emma Christopher, A Merciless
Place. The Fate of Britain’s Convicts after the American Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
58 Several authors defend the theory that Australia provided a basis for trade and defense
against other imperial nations in the Pacific. Ken Dallas, Trading Posts or Penal Colonies:
The Commercial Significance of Cook’s New Holland Route to the Pacific (Davenport,
Tasmania: C. L. Richmond and Sons, 1969); Margaret Stevens, Trade, Tactics, and
Territory: Britain in the Pacific 1783–1823 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983).
and logistical problems also plagued the Mexican penal system, this could
not have been the leading rationale to deflect thousands of individuals
to Manila because there were other presidios within easier reach that
received convicts as well. The Philippines were not a foregone conclusion
for these convicts in the manner that North America and Australia were
for Britain; instead, judicial banishment provided an emergency labor
pool as needed for crises or for special projects. Similarly, Coates states
that the Portuguese Crown came to view degredados not as criminals
already sentenced by the courts awaiting departure, but as mobile royal
labor force whose ultimate destination was yet to be determined accord-
ing to the manpower needs of the mother country or a specific colony. The
adaptability of the Portuguese system was revealed when Brazil’s indepen-
dence in the nineteenth century significantly brought down the number
of colonies available for convict transportation. Penal exile survived in
Angola, Luanda, and Mozambique until 1932. Therefore, Coates argues
that Portugal was the power that used the system of exile to overseas
possessions for the longest time.59
In addition, a considerable overlap and interdependence existed be-
tween transportation and military service in the Spanish and Portuguese
empires. In the early modern period, the Portuguese Crown referred to
the degredado as a soldier rather than the more accurate exile, criminal,
or convict, and Mexican officials listed as “recruits” individuals who had
been convicted of vagrancy.60 Along these lines, Peter M. Beattie has con-
ceived of a “category drift among the intractable poor” in his study on
the Fernando Noronha Island, the largest concentration of convicts from
across the Brazilian empire (1822–89).61 With this terminology Beattie
highlights the multiple ways in which slaves, convicts, free Africans, Indi-
ans, military enlisted men, and the lower ranks of the police, National
Guard, paramilitary forces, and organized crime could end up being
connected to each other. In this island 200 miles northeast of Brazil,
all these individuals could be convicted and become prison laborers in
59 Timothy Coates, Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire, 1740–1932 (Leiden: Brill,
2014), 6–7, 11, 37. Contrary to other European powers, where penal exile phased out
in the nineteenth century and penal reform was widely introduced, in the Portuguese
empire penal reform took roots only in Lisbon with the erection of a few Bentham-
inspired modern prisons.
60 Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 41, 59, 65.
61 Peter M. Beattie, Punishment in Paradise. Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nine-
teenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 6–7,
79, 131.
Introduction 27
jails, arsenals, and penal colonies, while both convicts and non-convicts
could be mobilized to fight. The links connecting soldiers and criminals
reflect the desire of authorities that these people become useful to the
empire.
That women were excluded from convict transportation to the Philip-
pines further proves that imperial and utilitarian schemes were paramount
in the inception of this transoceanic project. The physically strenuous
nature of military service and public works ruled out the possibility of
sending women to the Philippines. In the Portuguese empire, Coates has
found female criminals only in a few cases – notably from the Inquisi-
tion – where they were confined to internal exile or Brazil.62 By com-
parison, women represented about 20 percent of the total number of
convicts transported to British America and about 15 percent of those
banished to the South Pacific.63 Especially in the Australian colonies,
they fulfilled a colonizing agenda working as cooks and servants. Some
prostitutes landed in Louisiana in the early 1700s, while a small number
of women were sent to French Guiana and New Caledonia to encourage
the rehabilitation of convicts and the formation of European families.64
The misdeeds for which individuals were deported reinforce the argu-
ment that imperial and social factors weighed considerably in the forced
migration of Mexicans to the Philippines. The range of individuals that
anti-vagrancy raids targeted in central New Spain means that the pre-
dominant type of offender sent overseas was not a criminal; in fact,
felons were explicitly excluded from penal shipments to Manila. In the
Spanish Pacific, convict transportation is thereby more meaningful in the
context of a new policy of vagrancy and poverty than against crime in
general. Colonial authorities in Mexico resorted to individuals who could
not oppose deportation because of their transgressions and who would
not be likely to compromise the imperial mission with a contumacious
behavior. By contrast, theft and robbery made up much of the felonious
62 Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 84, 119.

63 Edith M. Ziegler, Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women: Crime, Trans-
portation, and the Servitude of Female Convicts, 1718–1783 (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2014). Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police (New
York: Penguin Books, 1975), 14.
64 James D. Hardy Jr., “The Convict Transportation of Convicts to Colonial Louisiana,”
Louisiana History 7, no. 3 (1966): 207–20; Mathe Allain, Not Worth a Straw: French
Colonial Policy and the Early Years of Louisiana (Lafayette: University of Southwest-
ern Louisiana Press, 1988), 68; Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts
to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 103,
273.
origins of the men and women transported to British America and

Australia.65 In the Portuguese empire, exile applied to serious and “abso-
lutely unpardonable” crimes such as blasphemy, murder, injury, kidnap-
ping, rape, witchcraft, harming a judge, attacking jailers, heresy, treason,
and sodomy.66 Parisian tribunals ordered the shipment to Louisiana and
Canada of individuals convicted for grand larceny, murder, poaching,
smuggling, and other criminals in the first half of the eighteenth century.67
Deportees whose removal came at the instigation of their own rela-
tives are an inconspicuous aspect in studies of convict transportation.
Since the offenses that figured in the judicial files of Mexican transportees
were comparably less grave than those of British, French, or Portuguese
convicts, it somewhat defies comprehension that Mexicans wanted to
have their relatives undergo such an experience for relatively minor trans-
gressions. In fact, popular perceptions of the practice of forced deporta-
tion overseas in colonial Mexico and in early modern European empires
seemed to have varied widely. For example, the British press and other
contemporary literature rendered transportation as a frightful barbarian
and useless penalty.68 In New Spain, the propaganda on anti-vagrancy
campaigns explained to Mexicans that the Philippines needed recruits
and presented labor in Manila as a service being done not only to the
Spanish monarch and the archipelago, but also to themselves and to the
rascals, while parents and other individuals believed that the punishment
could actually reform the individual.
There are no solid foundations to underpin a narrative of penal
transportation as a process of successful reformation. Contemporane-
ous reports about increasing crime rates in the overseas penal colonies
of Britain and France indicate that exile and forced labor were no more
65 The majority of convicts sent to the Chesapeake Bay area were guilty of grand larceny,
with a minor number of murderers and highwaymen. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for
America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987). Beattie, Policing, 304. The criminal character of the
men and women shipped to Australia has been object of greater dispute, although all
positions agree on that most of them were culpable of some form of property crime.
Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63–82.
67 Hardy, “The Convict Transportation”; Allain, Not Worth a Straw, 68; Peter Moogk,
“Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada before 1760,” William and Mary
Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1989): 463–505.
68 Anthony Vaver, Bound with an Iron Chain (Westborough, MA: Pickpocket Publishing,
2011), 102–03. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore. The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New
York: Vintage Books edition, 1988), 494.
Introduction 29
effective in these places than they were in the Philippines, where colonial
authorities in Manila associated Mexican and Spanish deportees with
criminal activities. The search for utilitarian colonial solutions to domes-
tic penal problems was an anomalous phenomenon at a time when penal
systems were starting to develop. At the end of the eighteenth century, the
idea of prison not as a mere tool for custody but as punishment in itself
was taking hold. Prison reformers John Howard (1726–90), Cesare Bec-
caria (1738–94), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) wrote on the moral
regeneration that the deprivation of freedom and the isolation from other
convicts could bring about. They were harbingers of a more humani-
tarian spirit that aimed at leaving behind torture, arbitrariness, physical
punishment, and death penalty.69 In this context, convict transportation
appeared a throwback to a penal old regime.70 In fact, while the attempt
to reform wrongdoers no doubt motivated some government officials,
the need to fill a perceived demographic hole in overseas possessions was
probably a bigger part of the story.
Summary of Chapters
Chapter 1 traces the origins of the Manila galleon connection, with a
narrative of the Spanish settlement in the Philippines since 1571, the
importance of this remote location in the Spanish imperial scheme, and the
foundations of the Spanish Philippine society and economy. The chapter
also explains the larger trans-Pacific migration patterns that connected
both shores of the Pacific Ocean before 1762: missionary moves; flow
of free and non-free labor from Asia to Mexico; and the transportation
of recruits and convicts. Lastly, the chapter describes the shock waves
that the occupation of Manila in 1762–64 unleashed at the local level
and the military Bourbon reforms that it precipitated. Another trans-
Pacific migration pattern started to develop when Manila requested with
urgency that Mexican and/or Spanish soldiers and workers were sent to
the archipelago.
Chapter 2 argues that the continuous complaints of Spanish authori-
ties in Manila about the insufficient numbers and deplorable physical and
moral conditions of the reinforcements sent from Mexico City were the
69 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Second
Vintage Books Edition, 1995), 104–06, 205–08.
70 John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 135–39, 145–46.
result of two interconnected processes. Firstly, by the end of the eighteenth

century, presidio had become the predominant form of punishment in the
criminal justice system of New Spain. To sentence individuals to military
service and forced labor in the Philippines seemed as a natural course of
action for Mexican officials at the same time that it increased the com-
petition between Mexican and Philippine presidios for able male bodies.
Secondly, practices of military recruitment in late colonial Mexico were
inefficient and invariably relied on vagrants, beggars, and other criminal
elements. After 1762, both the Philippines and New Spain depended on
and competed for the same elusive, low-quality human resources. In this
context, the institution of systematic roundups of vagrants in 1783 to
assist Manila authorities seemed necessary.
Chapter 3 analyzes the evolution of vagrancy policies in New Spain in
the late eighteenth century when colonial authorities were challenged by
a perceived rise of criminal activity that they connected to vagrancy. The
chapter explains the impact that several agricultural crises and increasing
rural migration had on Mexico City, as well as the Bourbon program
for social reform that inspired by the Enlightenment aimed at controlling
seemingly unruly popular classes. In this socio-economic and intellec-
tual context, new anti-vagrancy strategies were implemented: rejection
of indiscriminate Christian charity, renewed efforts to distinguish the
false beggars from the truly needy, and the adoption of annual levies of
vagrants.
Chapters 4 and 5 are examples of the precious insights that the
vagrants’ judicial processes yield into how individuals lived and developed
relationships with spouses, friends, children, and parents during Mexico
City’s first urban crisis. Chapter 4 examines the number of vagrants
deported to Manila, the reasons for which they were arrested, and their
ethnic and social background. The chapter also delves into the physical,
psychological, economic, and social consequences of the roundups. In
Chapter 5, I focus on sixty-two cases of individuals who turned in their
sons and other relatives to the authorities requesting they be banished to
the Philippines. The chapter exposes not only that the predicament of the
colonial government in Manila was a factor in the decision of parents to
resort to judicial authorities and the resolution of magistrates to issue a
sentence to Manila, but also that colonials upheld values related to work
ethic and moral behavior that they defended by denouncing those who
violated them.
Chapter 6 dwells on the lives of Mexican deportees in Philippine soil.
The performance of these men provides a window into the long-lasting
Introduction 31
material, economic, and social consequences of the British occupation in

Manila. The chapter analyzes the different ways in which these men did
not measure up to the expectations of authorities and opens up a venue to
explore the nature and limits of social Bourbon reforms in metropolitan
Manila – that is, local efforts to battle vagrancy, crime, alcohol, gambling,
and disloyalty to the government. In an attempt to escape the imperial
perspective of official sources, the chapter examines the role of these
individuals as convict laborers in various public works executed in the
city and a few cases that indicate that the moral reform of these men in a
context of involuntary exile and forced military service or labor was not
beyond belief.
1
Intertwined Histories in the Pacific

The Philippines and New Spain, 1565–1764
The Philippines were unlike any other possession of the Spanish Crown.
They were the only colony Spain had in Asia and they were incorpo-
rated into the empire decades later than Mexico (1521) and Peru (1543),
the core areas of Spanish America. This chapter will unfold the dis-
tinctive character of this Spanish outpost attending at its geographical
location, the ethnic composition of its population, and its relationships
with the Mexican viceroyalty. Located off Southeast Asia, the Philippines
were a niche of unique strategic importance, and during the period of
Spanish rule it was continuously threatened by foreign powers. In addi-
tion, the archipelago’s main function was to be not a productive center
like Mexico and Peru but a hub for commercial relationships with Asia.
Native Filipinos, Chinese, and other groups of Asian origin chronically
outnumbered the Spaniards in the Philippines. Whereas in the colonial
centers of Mexico City and Lima approximately half of the popula-
tion was of Spanish descent, in Manila the Spaniards continued to be
a minority. Finally, the Philippines developed their most intense and con-
sequential connection not with the metropole but with another Spanish
colony: New Spain.
The chapter will also delve into the wide range of connections that
were established as a result of the annual crossings of the Manila galleons,
with special attention to trans-Pacific migration patterns before the British
occupation of Manila in 1762. A glimpse at the circulation of Mexican
recruits and criminals, Asian slaves, Japanese emissaries, and Spanish and
Mexican missionaries will help us set the stage for the forced transporta-
tion of soldiers and vagrants in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
32
Intertwined Histories in the Pacific 33
The transportation of manpower occurred amidst other economic and

military reforms the Bourbon dynasty introduced in the Philippines after
the Spanish colonial rule was restored in Manila in 1764. Transoceanic
migratory flows also attest to the existence of a densely interwoven ocean
where events on one shore cannot be considered in isolation from events
on the other.
The Challenges of Founding a Spanish Colonial Society in Asia

The first reason why the Philippines ever acquired any interest for the
Spanish was one related to spices. After all, the entire Columbian enter-
prise was about finding a route to the riches of Asia. The earliest Spanish
contact with Asia took place in March 1521 when the Portuguese explorer
Ferdinand Magellan reached Cebu, in the southern part of the Philip-
pines. The final goal of the Spanish-funded expedition was to forgo Mus-
lim intermediaries and initiate contact with the Moluccas, or the Spice
Islands.1 Magellan’s expedition illuminated the vastness of the Pacific
Ocean, triggered massive conceptual challenges, and uncovered an alter-
native route to the spice-rich islands; it also precipitated a controversy
with Portugal over the Moluccas.2 The year 1521 was the beginning of
the creation of abundant cartographic and descriptive information about
this region that would be jealously guarded by the Spanish.3
The viceroyalty of New Spain became the organizational base for sub-
sequent expeditions that endeavored to establish a Spanish foothold in the
Philippines. In April 1565, Miguel López de Legazpi founded in Cebu the
first Spanish settlement in the archipelago.4 In a historic achievement, one
of Legazpi’s pilots, Andrés de Urdaneta, reached Acapulco in September
1565 after discovering the return route (eastward crossing) that galleons
would follow yearly for the next two centuries and a half.5 In 1571, after
1 O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan. Vol. 1: The Spanish Lake (London: Croom
Helm, 1979), chapter 2.
2 Juan Gil, Mitos y utopı́as del descubrimiento: II. El Pacı́fico (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,
1989), 13–42.
3 About the dynamic Castilian conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, see Buschmann, Iberian Visions, 13–45.
4 John M. Headley, “Spain’s Asian Presence, 1565–1590: Structures and Aspirations,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (November 1995): 623–46. For the
financing of the Mexican expeditions, see Marı́a Fernanda Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Las
relaciones de Filipinas con el centro del virreinato,” in México en el mundo hispánico.
Vol. 1, ed. Oscar Mazı́n Gómez (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2000), 51–67.
5 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 216–50.
six years of arduous adjustment to the lack of customary food and tropical
discomfort in Cebu City, Legazpi took control of Maynila, what would
become the Spanish town of Manila, in the northern island of Luzon.6
It was soon revealed that the Philippines were not notable for their spice
production; nevertheless, in Manila the Spanish found an exceptional
vanguard to develop far-reaching relations with Asia. The archipelago’s
geographic situation facing the Chinese coast between Japan and the
Moluccas endowed the Philippines with a starring role in the commerce
with the Far East.7 The move from Cebu City to Manila was a deci-
sive step for Spanish participation in this trade. The native inhabitants
of Manila had long been engaged in fruitful diplomatic and commercial
relationships with the southern islands of Mindanao, Sulu, and Moluccas
and more broadly, with Japan, China, Siam, Burma, and India.8 Once
the Spaniards had time to observe the local and international transac-
tions being conducted around them, they created the Manila–Acapulco
trade. The primary agents in this exchange were Chinese petty merchants
who brought to Manila silk, porcelain, jade, and other fine textiles from
South China, cottons and ivory from Mughal India, and spices from the
Moluccas, Java and Ceylon.9 Loaded with these products and a small
amount of local gold, cotton and wax, the galleons set sail to Mexico
from the port of Cavite in Manila Bay. Between five and six months later
a fair was held at Acapulco. In March, the trading ships were ready to
catch the northeast winds back across the Pacific crammed with silver and
passengers.10 The viceroyalty of Peru also benefitted from this Spanish
spearhead into Asian trade and vessels were dispatched from Callao to
Acapulco to exchange Peruvian silver for Chinese goods. Increasing royal
6 Nicholas D. Pisano, The Spanish Pacification of the Philippines, 1565–1600 (Kansas:

US Army Command and General Staff College, 1992), 289–303. Leoncio Cabrero
Fernández, Andrés Urdaneta (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987). Luis Muro, La expedición
Legazpi-Urdaneta a las Filipinas, 1557–1564 (Mexico City: Secretarı́a de Educación
Pública, 1975).
7 The complex crossing of commercial routes that the Philippines were connected to is
the theme of a compilation of essays edited by Salvador Bernabeu Albert and Carlos
Martı́nez Shaw, Un océano de seda y plata: El universo económico del Galeón de Manila
(Sevilla: CSIC, 2013).
8 Ubaldo Iaccarino, “Manila as an International Entrepot: Chinese and Japanese Trade
with the Spanish Philippines at the Close of the 16th Century,” Bulletin of Por-
tuguese/Japanese Studies 16 (June 2008): 71–81.
9 Anthony Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800,” in The Cambridge His-
tory of Southeast Asia. Vol. II: From c. 1500 to c. 1800, ed. Nicholas Tarling (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 116–63.
10 Schurz’s is still the most vivid description of the Manila–Acapulco trade.
restrictions culminated with a total ban of this commerce in 1631, albeit

followed by two centuries of unsanctioned trade.11
Equally important to commercial factors in the colonization of the
Philippines were military considerations. The Spanish Crown desired to
have a strategic position in the Asian world from which to halt the pres-
sure of other European powers and expand the Spanish presence in Asia.
The Spanish pretended to have created a hegemonic, enclosed space in
the Pacific that included Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines.12 Historians
today, though, no longer sustain the notion of the Pacific Ocean as a
“Spanish Lake” and instead describe Spaniards as guests in a scenario
they never dominated.13 The Spanish became rivals of the Portuguese in
the spice trade of the Moluccas when they took control of Tidore and
Ternate in 1603, but they surrendered both positions in 1663 leaving
all the Spice Islands under the control of the Dutch.14 Spanish forces dis-
patched from Manila built two forts in northern Taiwan in the 1620s, but
the Dutch East India Company (VOC) finally forced them out of the island
two decades later.15 However, even a formidable European power like
the Dutch nation was more fragile in Asia in the seventeenth century than
has been traditionally assumed; they enjoyed no clear technological supe-
riority and had to depend on Asians for capital, protection, and trading
opportunities.16 Other Spanish ambitious projects in the region that never
materialized were the conquest of China and Thailand in the last two
decades of the sixteenth century.17 From 1610 to 1624, the establishment

12 O. H. K. Spate and Schurz agreed with Madrid’s claims about the Pacific Ocean being
indeed a “Spanish Lake.”
13 Kamen, Empire, Preface.
14 Arun Das Gupta, “The Maritime Trade in Indonesia, 1500–1800,” in South East Asia.
Colonial History: Imperialism before 1800, ed. Paul Kratoska (New York: Routledge
Press, 2001), 91–125.
15 José Eugenio Borao, The Spanish Experience in Taiwan, 1626–1642: The Baroque
Ending of a Renaissance Endeavor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009),
205.
16 Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony. The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the
West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8, 12, 17, 26. Andrade examines
the Sino-Dutch War of 1661–1668 between the Chinese military leader Koxinga and
the Dutch East India Company to gauge the military balance between Europe and Asia
two centuries before the Opium War, when the better organizational ability, cannons,
rifles, and ships of war of the British decisively defeated the Chinese. Andrade concludes
that Koxinga’s men were well trained, well disciplined, and well led, and that Europe’s
technological superiority at this time was only marginal.
17 In the 1580s, Jesuit missionaries and officials in Manila campaigned for a plan to conquer
China that included the collaboration of Japanese converts. Manuel Ollé, La empresa de
China: De la Armada Invencible al Galeón de Manila (Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2002).
of direct maritime relations between New Spain and the Tokugawa regime
in Japan took the “Spanish lake” to its maximum size.18
The economic system of the Philippines revolved around the galleon
trade, but the Spaniards brought to the Western Pacific a program of
territorial expansion, economic exploitation, Christian conversion, and
cultural change that went beyond the trade activities to which the British,
the Portuguese or the Dutch devoted most of their energy in their own
areas of influence. Besides cinnamon and some gold in Luzon, no appar-
ent rich natural resources comparable to the Mexican silver were found
in the archipelago. The Manila galleon, though profitable for many, did
little to develop the islands because the trade did not rely on any major
local product. The sizable commercial profits deterred the Spanish from
engaging in a system of agricultural or mineral exploitation and the inter-
nal economy remained isolated and underdeveloped.19 Responding to the
protests from traders in the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish government
set restrictions on the trans-Pacific trade by limiting the annual amount
of vessels and goods. The Crown finally decided to impose a monopoly
instead of a free trade system that could have generated very handsome
revenues through custom duties.20
Spain claimed formal possession of the Philippines, but authorities
in the islands were never in a position to exercise full administrative
and military control beyond Manila and environs.21 Even in the island
of Luzon they never managed to dominate the mountainous northeastern
provinces, inhabited by natives whom the Spaniards called Igorotes, while
the Europeans populating the Visayan Islands, in central Philippines,
were predominantly missionaries.22 The southern Muslim sultanates of
Brunei, Sulu, and Mindanao, frequently in alliance with the Dutch, pro-
vided formidable opposition to the Spanish purpose of trading with the
Proposals for a military coalition with Cambodia against Thailand in the 1590s were
abandoned in the early seventeenth century. Florentino Garcı́a Rodao, Españoles en
Siam (1540–1939): Una aportación al estudio de la presencia hispana en Asia Oriental
(Madrid: CSIC, 1997), 15–38.
18 Christopher Howe, The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 21.
20 Headley, “Spain’s Presence in Asia,” 634.
21 Kamen, Empire, 208–16.
22 For a history of the Igorotes in the context of Spanish colonial history of the Philippines,
see William H. Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots. Spanish Contacts with the Pagans
of Northern Luzon (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1974).
Moluccas and China.23 Muslim pirating attacks were a constant source of

concern for governors in the Philippines. These sultanates were politically,
religiously, commercially, and diplomatically independent. Although the
Spanish considered the moros (Spanish for “moors”) rebels against a
Spanish authority extending to the whole archipelago, the southern Mus-
lim populations acted as sovereign states and saw the Spanish as an
external enemy.24 It became customary for Manila to ask Mexico City
for the shipment of cannons, ammunition, and other materials necessary
to build coastguard ships that patrolled the shoreline to defend the native
Filipino population.25 The concentration of Muslim influence in the south
created an enduring division within the Philippine territory.26
Because of a dispersed pattern of settlement and the absence of sociopo-
litical unity, the process to bring all the Philippine islands under a single
political and religious authority was neither unopposed nor completely
successful for centuries to come.27 Society in the Philippines was built
around small kin-based units known as barangays. Barangays were com-
posed of several dozens of families each, and they combined to form vil-
lages that were usually independent of, and hostile to, each other.28 The
social and political fabric of the Philippines appeared as very different
from what the Spanish conquerors and settlers had encountered in cen-
tral Mexico, where the Mexica had developed strong political structures,
an effective organized labor system, and a highly stratified society; nev-
ertheless, in the colonization process of the Philippines the first settlers
23 Nicholas Tarling, Sulu and Sabah. A Study of British Policy Towards the Philippines
and North Borneo from the Late Eighteenth Century (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 5–9.
24 In a pathbreaking study, James F. Warren portrayed the Sulu Sultanate in northern
Borneo as an autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state and a thriving polity that
established alliances with the Dutch and the English, demanded tribute from neighboring
territories, and vigorously took advantage of the growth of the China trade. James
F. Sulu Zone, 1768–1898. The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in
the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: National University
of Singapore Press, 2007), 156–64.
25 This is what Governor José Raón requested from Viceroy Marquis of Cruillas in August
27 of 1765. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter cited as AGI) Filipinas 929
exp.2 f.43 (1765).
26 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. Vol. 2: Expansion
and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–1993), 252.
27 P. N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso, State and Society in the Philippines (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 50.
28 Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of
Morphogenesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 10.
and colonial authorities working in the islands were naturally inclined

to closely follow the models they knew best, that is, those set by New
Spain.
The Spanish inserted themselves into the sociopolitical dynamics of
the place and employed pre-Hispanic structures to mobilize labor and
to collect tribute. Spanish authorities aimed at retaining the native elite
of the archipelago not only to defuse a source of resistance to colonial
rule but also with the purpose of having the principalia, the small local
elite of native village- and town-level officials, function as intermediaries
and agents of colonial government.29 The gobernadorcillos (literally, little
governors) of provinces and the cabezas de barangay (village heads) exer-
cised supervision over the system of personal service known as polos y
servicios. Patterned after the Mexican repartimiento, this system obligated
indios – the Spanish colonial term for the natives of the Philippines30 – to
give forty annual days of free services to construct buildings, cut timber
to build galleons and warships, or fight in military expeditions. Servicios
consisted largely of domestic service in churches, convents, and clerical
estates. In the early 1600s, the principalia were also held responsible for
collecting the bandala from the natives. This annual quota of products
assigned to the indios for compulsory sale to the government resembled
exploitative practices in New Spain, namely the repartimiento de mer-
cancı́as, or forced distribution of goods to Indians.31
Spiritual conversion was pivotal to the organization of labor. By 1587,
Augustinian, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Dominican missionaries had arrived
in the Philippines. Idolatry campaigns in Yucatan in the 1560s had contri-
buted to the disappointment that many missionaries experienced about
the evangelical effort in New Spain, and these apostles eagerly embraced
the challenge to convert Asia. The religious orders launched a program of
resettlement that echoed the paradigm of reducción applied in Mexico.
Parish priests and friars became Spanish ecclesiastical agents sustainers of
the royal authority in the countryside.32 With assistance of the principalia,
29 Phelan, Hispanization, 150.

30 Columbus misnamed the native inhabitants of Hispaniola as indios, thinking that he
had reached India. The term crossed over to the Philippines to serve the same purpose
of referring to the indigenous population of the colony.
31 Lourdes Dı́az Trechuelo, Filipinas, la gran desconocida, 1565–1898 (Pamplona: Univer-
sity of Navarra, 2001), 42–49.
32 Leonard Y. Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast
Asian Society, 1500–1800,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas
Tarling, 15.
they guaranteed order, collected taxes, and mobilized labor for the needs
of the colonial state.33 With regards to the process of evangelization,
Phelan propounds the theory about the Philipinization of Catholicism,
that is, that converts adopted Christian teachings and rituals creatively,
blending them with pre-Spanish norms and practices to create a “folk
Catholicism” unique to the Philippines.34 Such interpretations, though,
have failed to consider how Chinese and Chinese mestizos influenced the
development of folk Catholicism in the islands.35
The consequences of the Spanish colonization were certainly more
noticeable in the trafficked environment of Manila than in the rural
areas. The economic organization around the galleon trade resulted in
the concentration of the Spanish population in Manila and in tremen-
dous repercussions on the population and ethnic composition of the
city.36 The number of Manila residents rose from 2,000 estimated in
1570 to 40,000 in 1620. Commerce promoted an extraordinary ethnic
and cultural diversity. While intramuros (literally, ‘within the walls’) was
residence to only Spaniards and leading indios, outside of the walls of
Manila (extramuros) lived Chinese, Japanese, indios, mestizos, and other
foreign communities. In addition to the critical economic role of the city,
Manila was a well-fortified enclave, and ecclesiastical and civil institu-
tions signaled the municipality as the politico-religious nerve center of
the archipelago.37 Restrictions on Spanish travel to the interior because
of the perceived dangers of a hostile population and environment limited
further penetration in the territory.
One of the most significant demographic features that distinguished
the Spanish Philippines from large regions of colonial Spanish America
was the relatively small size of white (Spanish and Mexican) population.
Demographically speaking, the Philippines remained an overwhelmingly
Asian possession of the Crown, with indios, Chinese, and Chinese mes-
tizos exceeding Spaniards and Mexicans with comfortable margins.38
As early as 1586 officials in Manila pleaded the government of Madrid
33 Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 67. Cushner, Landed States, 13–16. Roth,
Friar States, 50–62.
34 Phelan, Hispanization, 160. With similar conclusions but from the perspective of cultural
anthropology, Vicente Rafael has studied the connections between language, power,
translation, and religious conversion in Contracting Colonialism.
35 Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, epilogue to Navigating, 129.
36 Reed, Colonial Manila, 33.
37 Ibid., 50–51.
38 Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos in Manila,” in Navigating, ed. Rainer Buschmann
et al., 63.
to send out more settlers.39 By mid-seventeenth century, Manila counted

only 150 Spanish households.40 In 1810, contemporary observers
reported that in the whole colony there lived 4,000 Spaniards of both
sexes and all ages, classes, and occupations, of which about a thousand
could be found in Manila.41 Peninsulares (Spaniards born in the Iberian
Peninsula) held the highest administrative and ecclesiastical positions of
the Philippine colonial social system.42 A substantial Creole population
did not develop because many peninsulares never truly settled in the
colony. Indeed, peninsulares were never the only ethnic component of
the white minority of the archipelago. Mexicans started to arrive in the
Philippines almost as early, in the 1570s, first as replacement soldiers and
sailors and soon after as clergy, bishops, priests, missionaries, merchants,
royal officials, and judges of the Real Audiencia, the Supreme Court
that oversaw the affairs of the Philippines and the Spanish East Indies.43
While the number of Spaniards born in Spain did not meaningfully grow
in the Philippines throughout the colonial period, the Mexican group did
expand over time. In the second half of the eighteenth century Mexicans
outnumbered peninsulares in the province of Tondo, where the city of
Manila was located, by several hundreds.44
Spaniards developed an ambivalent relationship of mutual profit and
suspicion with the Chinese living in the Philippines. The Spanish commu-
nity encouraged Chinese immigration and trading relations. In Manila,
the sangleys (a Spanish corruption of a Chinese term) performed commer-
cial activities, manufacturing, and other economic functions supportive
of the city and the colony. The sangleys were among the first colonies of
39 Antonio Garcı́a Abasolo, ed., España y el Pacı́fico (Córdoba: Dirección General de

Asuntos Culturales, 1997), 36.
40 Kamen, Empire, 209.
41 Tomás de Comyn, Estado actual de las islas Filipinas en 1810: Brevemente descrito
(Madrid [s.n.], 1820 [1810]), 4. Comyn was the general manager of the Philippine
Royal Company at the time.
42 Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Grupos étnicos y clases sociales en las Filipinas de finales del siglo
XVIII,” Archipel 57 (1999): 55–71.
43 Bernal, México en Filipinas, 184–93. ‘Indias Orientales Españolas’ or Spanish East Indies
referred to Spanish territories in Asia-Pacific: Philippines, Guam, Mariana Islands, and
Caroline Islands. The most comprehensive study of the Real Audiencia in the Philip-
pines remains Charles Henry Cunningham, The Audiencia in the Spanish Colonies.
As Illustrated by the Audiencia of Manila (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1919).
44 Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Grupos étnicos,” 66.
Chinese ever to be established outside mainland China.45 Most of them

were native to Fujian, a province on the Chinese southeast coast. The san-
gleys assumed control of the internal economy of Manila providing an
economic link between the Spanish and the indios, and they dominated
the majority of business sectors. They were tradesmen, retailers, mer-
chants, artisans, craftsmen, farmers, and general laborers.46 In the early
1580s, sangleys reached several thousands. Attempting segregation, Span-
ish authorities assigned them their own quarter, the Parián, and forced
them to live outside the city walls, distant enough for military security
but near enough for economic convenience. Massacres of the Chinese by
Spaniards occurred in 1603, 1639, and 1662, but as “essential outsiders”
they always returned to Manila.47
Other major group with which the Spanish had to find a measure
for coexistence was the mestizos de sangley, who gradually found a
niche between the bulk of the native Filipino population and the power-
ful Chinese minority. Because the majority of Chinese immigrants were
male, a significantly large group of Chinese and native Filipino heritage
emerged. Even if in the eyes of authorities the mixed breed always occu-
pied an uncomfortable middle ground, the relationships of the Spanish
with mestizos de sangley were smoother than with the Chinese because
the former converted to Catholicism.48 There is no doubt that embracing
45 Wang Gungwu, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities,”

in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Sanjay Subrahmannyam (Alder-
shot: Brookfield, 1996), 50–71.
46 Dı́az Trechuelo, “The Role of the Chinese in Philippine Domestic Economy,” in The
Chinese in the Philippines. Vol. 1: 1570–1770, ed. Alfonso Félix (Manila: Solidaridad
Pub. House, 1966), 175–218. Edgar Wickberg, “The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine
History,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 5 no.1 (1964): 62–100.
47 Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid, eds., Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the
Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997). Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–98
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 10–18.
48 In late 1788, Governor Félix Berenguer y Marquina asked the town council of Manila
and the superiors of the religious orders to report on “current state of the Philippine
Islands.” In these reports it transpires that civil and religious authorities conceived of
the Chinese mestizos as more industrious and robust than indios. But contemporary
observers also made note of the sagacity and inclination for business of mestizos de
sangley, supposedly inherited from the immigrant Chinese, and they often linked them to
shady commercial practices such as usury. “Estado de las Filipinas en 1788 en respuesta
al oficio de 7 agosto 1788 del Gobernador General Berenguer y Marquina sobre el estado
general de estas islas, motivos de su ruina, e indicación de los remedios convenientes a su
restauración,” [hereafter cited as “Estado de las Filipinas”] AGI, Filipinas 787 (1788).
Christianity proved to be an advantageous move for the mestizos. Reli-

gious conversion meant lower taxes, unrestricted movement in the islands,
and right to own land and slaves. By 1620s the mestizos de sangley started
to form a distinct mixed-blood class, or casta, in the minds of colonial
secular and religious authorities. The Chinese mestizos steadily grew alien
from the non-Christian Chinese. Furthermore, the Spanish started to per-
ceive them as loyal vassals after they participated, on the Spanish side,
in the conflicts against the Chinese in the late 1630s. By the 1730s Chi-
nese mestizos were a rapidly growing force in the Philippines in terms
of demographics – 40,000 for the entire archipelago – economic power,
and social clout.49 In 1741, mestizos de sangley became one more legal
category alongside Spanish and Spanish mestizos, indios, and Chinese.
The impact of Spanish rule in the Philippines was different from that
in New Spain; how dramatic this impact was is a question that historians
have yet to settle. On the one hand, no new crops that required use of
intensive labor were introduced in the Philippines and cattle-raising never
became extensive. The process of mestizaje did not reach the same pro-
portions as in Spanish America. Whereas in Mexico a race-based social
hierarchy, the casta system, resulted in a multitude of officially recognized
ethnic categories, in the Philippines the categories were reduced to four.
The teaching of Castilian was never enforced with the same determina-
tion. The Spanish political authority in Manila had little effect at the local
level where existing patterns of land ownership, agricultural methods, and
labor survived strongly. In fact, the specialized scholarship has not iden-
tified structural changes in power relationships or in the relationships of
the Filipinos to their economic environment until the 1770s.50
On the other hand, Phelan asserted that the Spaniards had peacefully
subjugated native Filipinos and that no demographic disaster comparable
to that of central Mexico in the sixteenth century affected the indige-
nous population of the archipelago, contentions that now seem utterly
outdated. Geographer Linda Newson has revisited the figures for the
population of indios in 1565 and the impact of Old World diseases in
the Western Pacific to argue that tributes, labor, and forced integration
of communities into colonial society and Catholicism caused the native
population to shrink by 36 percent in 1600.51 As far as the long-term
49 Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 64–66.

50 Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 209–10.
51 Phelan, Hispanization, 15–19. Linda A. Newson uses tributary records that are twenty-
years older than the late-sixteenth century fiscal sources Phelan handled and puts forward
consequences of the process of Spanish cultural assimilation, old and

new studies oscillate between postulating the physical and psychological
damage suffered by the native population and underscoring the capacity
for adaptation and resistance of indios.52
New Spain and the Philippine Connection

The uniqueness of the archipelago also relied on the fact that the Philip-
pines established the most meaningful connections not with Spain but
with the Mexican viceroyalty. The relations that tied Spain, Mexico, and
the Philippines were a complicated triangulation in which Mexico had
a central role, and not only from a geographical standpoint. New Spain
behaved as an extension of the Spanish empire’s core because Madrid
had no option than to rule the islands through Mexico City. The vicere-
gal office supplied Manila with financial resources, and Mexican traders
assumed the control of the Manila–Acapulco trade. The viceroyalty reg-
ularly dispatched recruits and convicts to the archipelago and functioned
as an intermediary point for the flow of Asian slaves and free migrants,
Mexican and Spanish missionaries, and Japanese diplomatic expeditions
between Asia and Europe. Overall, the Philippine islands were far from
being a “Spanish” colony from 1571 to 1815. Rather, the office of the
viceroy and the inhabitants of New Spain thought of the Philippines as an
extension of the viceroyalty, a place that informed some of their dreams,
fears, and ambitions.
The Philippine islands elicited conflicting feelings in colonial Mex-
icans; it was an unfamiliar and intimidating place but of extreme
a figure of 1.5 million indios in 1565 versus the 1–1.25 million that historians have
traditionally worked with. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2009), 24–36.
52 Whereas Cushner has contended that the Spanish colonization caused the sociocultural
dislocation of the nineteenth-century native Filipino (Spain in the Philippines, 5), Phelan
has referred to native Filipino adaptation as key for the preservation of pre-conquest
institutions (Hispanization, 133, 159), and M. N. Pearson has argued that native Fil-
ipinos were capable of resisting Spanish cultural and political domination through a
selective adaptation (Pearson, “The Spanish ‘Impact’ on the Philippines, 1565–1770,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 12 no. 2 (April 1969): 165–
86). Some recent studies underplay the oppressive character of Spanish colonial rule
and emphasize instead the importance of negotiation with indigenous elites in the larger
framework of Spanish imperialism in the Pacific Ocean (Philippines, Marianas, and
Micronesia). Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, introduction to Navigating, 13. Local his-
tories of the Philippines also offer glimpses on the economic, social, and cultural impact
of Spanish rule on pre-Hispanic societies, such as Bruce L. Fenner, Cebu Under the
Spanish Flag, 1565–1896 (Cebu City: University of San Carlos, 1985) and Larkin, The
Pampangans, 1972.
economic importance. The remoteness of Manila was singularly daunting

and conjured up terrifying images of shipwreck, pirate attacks, and oth-
ers. These unfortunate events figured prominently in Mexicans’ imagery
of the islands, as they translated into not only human casualties but also a
loss of cargo that greatly affected merchant interests both in Manila and
Mexico City.53 The economy of Manila was entirely dependent in the
success of the voyage, as practically every member of the community had
an investment in the shipment. For merchants of the tribunal of commerce
of Mexico City, the sinking of one vessel meant the forfeiture of consid-
erable amounts of silver. Not surprisingly, everything that surrounded
the galleons, and especially the news about their arrival, brought forth
loaded reactions from colonials. Inquisitorial trials against women who
prophesied the appearance of the vessels in the Acapulco bay, or against
those who turned to these sibyls to inquire about the galleons are sug-
gestive of the anxiety and emotional stake that Mexicans had developed
around the Mexico City–Manila connection.54
The Mexican viceroyalty cast its shadow over the archipelago to the
extent that, at least nominally, Mexico City enjoyed a great deal of
oversight of Philippine political and ecclesiastical affairs. The governor-
general of the Philippines performed similar functions to those of the
Mexican viceroy as foremost executive, president of the Real Audien-
cia, and chief commander of the armed forces. Although the governor-
general reported directly to the Council of the Indies in Madrid, the
standard operating procedure was to defer the majority of political, eco-
nomic, and religious businesses to the viceroy in Mexico. In addition,
the viceroy had the prerogative to make recommendations for the posts
of governor-general and oidor (judge) of the Audiencia as well as other
administrative and military assignments. Most of the offices in the Philip-
pines went to peninsulares who had administrative experience in New
Spain or to Creoles born in Mexico.55 The bishop of Manila was sub-
ordinated to the archbishop of Mexico, and the individuals who the
53 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 189, 311. For an analysis of the financial loss related to the
Manila Galleons’ difficult journey, see William J. McCarthy, “Gambling on Empire:
The Economic Role of Shipwreck in the Age of Discovery,” International Journal of
Maritime History 23 no. 2 (2011): 69–84.
54 In the section Inquisition of the AGN there are a few court cases against women on this
matter. In 1621, a black woman named Cecilia was accused of divination for having
predicted for several years and almost without error the arrival of the galleons. AGN
Inquisition 335 exp.102 (1621). In 1650, the tribunal received a denunciation against
Marı́a de Solis for asking a female Indian clairvoyant whether the ships would arrive
soon. AGN Inquisition 435 exp.106 (1650).
55 Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 153–68.
commissary of the Inquisition in the Philippines arrested had to be sent

to the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Mexico City for trial.56 At the same
time, it is important to take into account that in practice the distance and
slow communications unavoidably conferred the colony great political
autonomy.
The extent to which the Philippines treasury depended on the situado –
annual funds sent from Mexico to pay for costs of administration – is still
subject to debate, but there is little controversy that this payment allowed
Mexico City to get involved in many aspects related to the colonization
of the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia.57 Two types of monies made up
the situado: the duties collected at Acapulco on the galleon’s exports and
an outright subsidy from the viceroyalty. The situado helped to defray
the civil, military, and ecclesiastical salaries and other expenses related
to naval construction and galleon crews; it also underwrote the secular
administration and evangelical activities in the Mariana Islands, China,
and Tonkin (Vietnam). The annual funds sent from Mexico City had
much relevance for the Philippine economy until the implementation of
the Bourbon reforms in the late 1700s.
A seemingly never-ending silver production allowed Mexican mer-
chants to infiltrate themselves in the Philippine commercial organization
and eventually control trading activities with Manila. The Philippine trade
became a better alternative than that provided by the transatlantic route
because Mexican traders obtained here a wide range of good quality mer-
chandise at lower prices and with fewer intermediaries, and they avoided
the risk of having their wealth confiscated in Seville. The merchants of
Mexico City were able to place a significant number of representatives in
Manila while the yields of the Pacific trade contributed to their transfor-
mation into the most dynamic and powerful group in the viceroyalty.58
56 José Toribio Medina, El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las islas Filipinas
(Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1899), 40–43, 171–86.
57 In 1981, Leslie Bauzon interpreted the situado as a deliberate strategy on the part of
Spain to keep some colonies from being too powerful and instead dependent on the
wealthier viceroyalties. See Deficit Government: Mexico and the Philippine Situado,
1606–1804 (Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1981). More recently, Luis
Alonso Álvarez has looked at the Philippine tax system to make a case for a financially
independent archipelago. El costo del imperio asiático. La formación colonial de las
islas Filipinas bajo dominio español, 1565–1800 (La Coruña: Universidade Da Coruña,
2009).
58 Yuste, Emporios transpacı́ficos, 122–27. Mexican merchants profited from the trans-
Pacific link even during the seventeenth century, the purported years of economic
depression. See John TePaske, “New World Silver, Castile, and the Philippines (1590–
1800),” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. John
F. Richards (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), 425–45. Louisa Schell Hoberman,
Furthermore, Mexican domination of the commerce with Manila, more

than political reasons or the evangelical imperialism of zealous mis-
sionaries, might have driven Spain to retain this colony and tolerate
for so long an unrewarding trade that Andalusian merchants opposed
wholeheartedly.59
The process of cultural, political, and economic transformation of the
Spanish Philippines before 1815 has been described as mexicanization.60
Historians like Phelan taught us that the archipelago was hispanized; but
that a pervasive and enduring process of mexicanization also developed is
even more significant, as arguably this was not the outcome that Spanish
authorities aimed at. While peninsulares crowded the upper echelons in
the colonial society of the Philippines, the majority of government func-
tionaries, ecclesiastical personnel, soldiers, sailors, merchants, and many
convicts in the Philippines were born in New Spain. Mexicans could be
found across a spectrum of occupations, social classes, and economic
statuses, thus enabling mexicanizing influences to penetrate deeper than
the hispanizing ones. The process of mexicanization rests on the premise
that Manila was forced to rely on Mexican material and military sup-
plies; after all, the assumption of European superiority advised against
recruiting native Filipinos for tasks sensitive to the security of the colony.
But mexicanization also refers to the physical presence of Mexicans in
the islands and to a cultural transfer and information of policies. Words
of Nahuatl origin that seeped through into the archipelago’s languages,
Mexican influence on Filipino art, the impact of Catholicism on native
Filipino culture, and the transfer of Mexican plants, flowers, and food to
the Western Pacific have also been used to attest to the mexicanization of
the Philippines.61
Some scholars have gone as far as to posit that Manila was mil-
itarily and economically subordinated to Mexico City. Chaunu pro-
posed that New Spain was the metropole for the Spanish Pacific because
Mexico’s Merchant Elite 1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 17–20.
59 Bjork, “The Link.”
60 Bernal, México en Filipinas, passim.
61 Miguel León-Portilla, “Algunos nahuatlismos en el castellano de Filipinas,” Estudios
de Cultura Náhuatl 2 (1960): 135–38; Victoria Armella de Aspe, “Artes asiáticas y
novohispanas,” in El Galeón del Pacifico. Acapulco-Manila 1565–1815, ed. Fernando
Benı́tez (Guerrero: Gobierno del Estado de Guerrero, 1992), 203–239. According to
Portilla, some Nahuatl words that have made it into Tagalog are: xócoatl (chocolate –
beverage based on cacao; cacao bars), petla (petaca – a hut or box made of estera),
tamalli (tamal – corn dough, steamed, and wrapped in banana or corn leaves), and
cacáhuatl (cacahuete – peanut).
trans-Pacific commerce did not benefit Spain but Mexico.62 Yuste has
further confirmed this idea by defending that trading relations between
Mexico City and the Philippines replicated those of Seville with Spanish
America. The authors of Navigating the Spanish Lake have carried on
this claim by stating that “in its relationship with the Pacific Ocean, New
Spain was not simply a dependency of its Iberian namesake; economically,
politically, and culturally it behaved as a metropole itself.”63
The emphasis on the metropole-like performance of New Spain is
valuable because it has increased the visibility of the Spanish Pacific and
has shaken off the assumption that New Spain was a passive peripheral
realm of the Spanish empire. But the metropole-colony terminology can
be misleading and is certainly limiting. On the one hand, a comparison
with the classical colonial relationship that linked Spain and Mexico has
inspired historians to apply this terminology to the Pacific scenario, but
the trans-Pacific link does not easily fit the model of imperial exploita-
tion. Labor was not modified to extract the natural resources of the
Philippines in the benefit of New Spain and in exchange for manufactures.
Instead, the viceroyalty established a purely commercial relationship with
the Philippines. Plus, the discussion about dependency pertains more to
the makings of Mexican and Spanish colonial representatives than to the
everyday realities of the Filipino population. The incoming situado did
not directly affect the subsistence of indios, and native economic systems
and the pre-Hispanic political organization continued to rule the internal
day-to-day economic and social order.
On the other hand, framing the Mexico–Philippines relationship in
terms of dominance distorts our historical knowledge of the Spanish
Pacific world in four ways. First, an emphasis on rule and sovereignty
fails to notice how the histories of these two colonies intertwined in the
larger context of the Spanish empire and the wide range of other rela-
tionships that were established between them. New Spain could very well
have behaved as a metropole in some instances, but it might generate pro-
ductive discussions as well to consider the viceroyalty as an intermediary
point for products, explorers, functionaries, slaves, clergy, and soldiery
who passed through on their way to the Philippines or to Europe. Sec-
ond, such an approach leaves Manila with little agency as a colony of
New Spain when, in fact, if continental Mexico was a way station for
peoples, products, and ideas from Asia to Europe, the Philippines were
the indispensable steppingstone that connected Mexico to Asia. Third,
62 Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique, 267–68.

63 Buschamnn, Slack, and Tueller, introduction to Navigating, 5.
the perspective of domination overlooks that the mexicanization of the

Philippines could not happen without New Spain simultaneously under-
going a process of orientalization.64
Fourth and last, a focus on New Spain’s relationship with the Philip-
pines clouds our understanding of Manila’s connection to late Imperial
China, the importance of this commercial enclave to Ming and Qing
rulers, and how this importance might have affected the Philippines.
Many Chinese from Fujian had settled and traded in the Philippines
before 1571, but it was after this date that Spain became a major sup-
plier of silver to China. The Single–Whip tax reform in the 1570s created
in China an unprecedented and pressing need for the precious metal as
a means of payment. Chinese demand for silver altered the direction
of international commerce,65 but trade with the Philippines also signif-
icantly altered China’s economy and society as Chinese manufactures
found new export markets. The Chinese rural economy became commer-
cialized and monetized especially along the southeast coast.66 Hundreds
of Fujianese travelled to Manila annually after 1571; they could rely on
an already existing widespread trading network in East and Southeast
Asia, and Manila offered a neutral setting where they could escape the
usual supervision of their respective estates.67 The demographic, social,
and economic weight of the sangleys in Manila has been discussed earlier
in this chapter.
Because large numbers of Chinese migrated to the Philippines, it is easy
to overemphasize the importance that this trading post had for China.68
64 The trade of Mexican silver for commodities brought from China, India, Burma, Siam,
and Persia contributed to the orientalization of New Spain. See Yuste, “Los precios
de las mercancias asiáticas en el siglo XVIII,” in Los precios de alimentos y manufac-
turas novohispanos, ed. Virginia Garcı́a Acosta (Mexico City: Instituto Mora/ CIESAS/
Consejo Mexicano de Ciencias Históricas, 1995), 231–64, for the variety of oriental
products that could be found in colonial Mexico. Catholicism in New Spain may have
undergone as well a process of orientalization since many religious artifacts used in the
viceroyalty were manufactured in China and the Philippines.
65 Flynn and Giraldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,”
Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–21.
66 Andrew R. Wilson, Ambition and Identity. Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila,
1880–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 90–91. The trade also created
inflation and growing income disparities. New World crops such as sweet potato, corn,
and peanuts had an impact on Chinese agriculture and demographic development.
67 Birgit M. Tremml, “The Global and the Local: Problematic Dynamics of the Triangular
Trade in Early Modern Manila,” Journal of World History 23, no. 3 (2012): 561, 568.
68 Slack has argued that sangleys were close to have made the Philippines a colony of the
Middle Kingdom. Slack, “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted
Image,” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (2009): 50.
However, this critical trade does not seem to have translated into any
type of political domination, not even into a substantive state-to-state
relationship. Imperial rulers did not try to politically integrate mercan-
tile outposts into China. While local officials and the region’s residents
of Fujian and nearby maritime provinces had a substantial stake in this
trade, the Chinese state in Beijing was largely uninterested in these ven-
tures and preferred to prohibit private profit-oriented external commerce.
Furthermore, the official policy was to disavow any responsibility for Chi-
nese subjects residing overseas.69 Fujianese settlers in Manila remained
peripheral to the official consciousness, considered subjects of the rulers
of Luzon rather than people of China. For all these reasons, imperial
authorities in China showed little desire to avenge ordinary merchants,
such as during the massacres of the Chinese by Spaniards in 1603, 1639,
and 1662.70
Trans-Pacific Migration Patterns before 1762

The Pacific passage was undeniably important for the history of the
region. Besides connecting distant economies, the Manila galleons drew
together the histories of peoples on opposite sides of the Pacific. This
section focuses on four specific examples that illustrate how the circula-
tion of peoples governed this oceanic space in the seventeenth century:
the transportation of Mexican recruits and criminals to Manila, the flow
of incoming slaves from the East into Mexico and Spain, the 1614–15
Japanese diplomatic mission to Spain and Rome, and the trans-Pacific
moves of Spanish and Mexican missionaries. These vignettes, which have
received scholarly attention in recent years, remind us of the ties that
stretched between Mexico and Asia. Furthermore, the movement pat-
terns examined here were far-reaching. Due to its central geographical
position, New Spain functioned as a springboard for migration flows that
from the Spanish Pacific spilled into the Atlantic world. New Spain was
at the center of intercontinental movements of people, ideas, money, and
information. This context of pre-1762 fertile, widespread trans-Pacific
connections sets the stage for the forced transportation of recruits and
vagrants in the late eighteenth century and it ultimately demonstrates that
69 Tremml, “The Global and the Local,” 572, 577–78, 583. Wilson, Ambition and Identity,
90–94. Wilson has found only sporadic mentions to these migrants in Ming and Qing
official records.
70 Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created. Society, Culture,
and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (New York and London: M. E. Sharpe,
2013), 10; Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 92.
colonial societies were flexible, multiethnic, and inserted in very global,

complex dynamics where frequent cultural exchanges were the norm.
Replacement Soldiers and Convicts

Inter-imperial warfare and internal instability determined the need for
manpower in the archipelago. To the extent that the Spanish military
power in the Philippines was never strong, the defense of the Philippines
constituted a Mexican enterprise from the beginning. As early as 1589
authorities in the islands reported on the lack of Spanish troops, the
recurrent death of soldiers and the officials’ perception about the “perni-
cious vices” of the military, such as drunkenness, concubinage, gambling,
brawling, and theft.71 In the seventeenth century Dutch traders and col-
onizers in Southeast Asia posed the greatest threat to the survival of
the Spanish colony and the Spanish military presence in the Moluccas,
especially after the Hispano–Dutch war (1609–48) broke out in the Old
World and the theater of war expanded to include the Spanish holdings
in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.72 The Iberian Union in 1580 made the
predicament of the Spanish in the region exceptionally thorny because
from then on until 1640 Spain acquired imperial responsibility over the
Portuguese Asian possessions.
Because the Iberian Peninsula could not effectively assist the archi-
pelago, the responsibility of a well-fortified and supplied Philippines
rested mostly with New Spain. Annual transportation of 150–200 men
from Mexico City to Manila started in the 1570s to replace dead sol-
diers and deserters in the archipelago.73 Mexican military personnel and
sailors participated in campaigns in Borneo, Japan, and Moluccas, and
against the sangleys, the Dutch, and the Mindanao moors.74 Financial
woes, manpower shortages, sheer distance, and Spain’s military com-
mitments in Europe conspired to frustrate Madrid’s attempts to send
71 Francisco Sande, “Relation and Description of the Phelipinas Islands,” in The Philip-
pine Islands, 1493–1898, ed. Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson, vol. 4, 1579–
1582 (Cleveland, OH: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1905), 107; Antonio de Morga,
“Report of Conditions in the Philippines,” vol. 10, 1597–1599, 91–92; and Fernando
de los Rı́os Coronel, “Reforms Needed in Filipinas,” vol. 18, 1617–1620, 337.
72 For a detailed assessment of the Dutch–Spanish rivalry in the Far East, see Borao,
The Spanish Experience, 7–30.
73 Luis Muro, “Soldados de la Nueva España en Filipinas,” Historia Mexicana 19, no.
4 (1970): 391–466. Royal Order of King Philip IV. AGN Reales Cédulas Originales 1
exp.15 f.39 (1626). Royal Order of King Philip IV. AGN Reales Cédulas Originales 1
exp.16 f.40 (1627).
74 Antonio Molina Memije, América en Filipinas (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992), 140.
Beijing NORTH
JAPAN AMERICA
KOREA
CHINA
Pacific Ocean
Hong Kong
Xiamen CENTRAL
Guangzhou
Macao AMERICA
HAWAII Acapulco
INDO-
CHINA South Manila PHILIPPINES
51
China
Sea Cebu
Marshall
Marianas Islands Route of Manila galleons
Islands
Westbound
Eastbound
INDONESIA
map 1.1. Route of the Manila galleons. The North Pacific Gyre, a surface ocean current that moves water clockwise between
the Equator and 50° N latitude, determined the route that the Spanish fleet ought to adhere to every year for a successful
navigation. While the westbound galleons could follow a relatively straightforward course from Acapulco to Manila, the
eastbound convoys had to describe a northward and significantly longer arch, a path that took the vessels very close to the
Japanese coasts on an annual basis.
direct aid to the Philippines. Twice in the decade of 1610, King Philip III
gave orders to prepare relief armadas (armadas de socorro) for the Asian
colony. The first one, with eight galleons, two caravels, 600 crewmen,
and almost 1,400 infantrymen, was equipped in 1616. At the last minute,
though, it was diverted to patrol Gibraltar as rumor had it that a Dutch
fleet was on its way to Venice. Only a small part of the convoy managed
to continue the trip to New Spain. In 1619, a second armada de socorro
of six galleons, almost 800 crewmen, and a thousand soldiers suffered a
shipwreck in the coast of Andalusia and 300 people drowned. The crew
and soldiers of these enterprises had to be forcefully recruited due to
the difficulty in finding seafarers and military personnel. In 1622, orders
were dispatched to the viceroys of New Spain and Peru to send money,
troops, ammunition, and artillery vessels to the Philippines.75 In addition
to Mexican reinforcements, Slack claims that native Filipinos, Japanese
ronin (masterless samurai), and Chinese mestizos were an invaluable sec-
ond line of defense for the outnumbered and overextended veteran troops
in the Philippines in the seventeenth century.76
Before 1762 there was a long tradition that regarded the Pearl of the
Orient as a site paradoxically associated with crime and punishment.
For instance, the forced exile of Spaniards to the Philippines occurred at
least since the first half of the seventeenth century, when it was habit-
ual for Mexican authorities to round up and ship to the Western Pacific
the gente llovida who from Spain had arrived in the Indies fleet with-
out permission.77 Alonso Ramı́rez, a carpenter from Puerto Rico who
was trying to make a living in New Spain, reported to have received a
sentence “meted out to delinquents in Mexico, namely, exile in the Philip-
pine Islands,” a punishment that was executed in 1682.78 Mawson has
demonstrated that a forzado system, in which individuals were enlisted
into military service either by a sergeant or by an officer of the law in a
75 Marı́a José Nestares Pleguezuelo and Fernando Nestares Garcı́a-Trevijano, “Las

Armadas de socorro a Filipinas y el Estrecho de Gibraltar, 1616–1619,” in El
Mediterráneo: Hechos de relevancia histórico-militar y sus repercusiones en España.
V Jornadas de Historia Militar (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), 613–628.
77 In the first half of the seventeenth century these Spaniards were especially abundant in
New Spain. Royal Order of King Philip IV, Madrid. AGN Reales Cédulas Originales 1
exp. 15. 39 (1626).
78 López Lázaro, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramı́rez, 110. English buccaneers later cap-
tured Ramı́rez in the Philippines. He was eventually set loose with a vessel in Madagascar
from where he made his way back to Yucatan.
criminal trial, was solidly established in New Spain long before the time
frame of my research. From 1600 to 1690, convicts yearly comprised
approximately a quarter of all soldiers sent to the Philippines, with an
annual average of around forty-eight men. Mawson notes that this was a
system “meted out to some of New Spain’s most unruly and disobedient
plebeian elements.”79 At this time, men convicted to the Philippines were
mostly thieves, highwaymen, criminals, and runaway soldiers; vagrants
were just fillers when other impressment methods failed to attract suffi-
cient number of recruits.
Mawson’s conclusions suggest that individuals who had committed
minor crimes rarely found their bones shipped to the Philippines in the
seventeenth century. That being said, the Real Audiencia of Mexico did
punish with exile to the far removed Spanish outpost crimes that presently
would not be considered as of serious nature. Peddlers who attempted to
sell their merchandise in Indian settlements, who trafficked with stolen
iron goods at the local markets in Mexico City, and who traded without
license at the baratillo – also known as the thieves market because it
specialized in the sale of stolen clothing and other merchandise – risked
monetary fines and between two and six years of service in Manila.80 In
1677, Mexico City authorities penalized with up to 1,000 pesos and six
years of banishment to the Philippines the production and consumption
of trigo blanquillo, a type of white wheat, alleging that it was harmful
for human health.81 Even within convicts there existed a hierarchy that
determined who would and would not be deported: the assumption of
European superiority dictated that only men of “good quality” were to
be sentenced to the Philippines. The Audiencia reserved lashes and work
at the galleys and obrajes (textile mills) for Indians, mestizos, mulattos,
and other castas.
79 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 718.

80 Actos of December 12, 1613; March 24, 1621; and December 24, 1635. Eusebio Ventura
Beleña, Recopilación sumaria de los actos acordados de la Real Audiencia de esta Nueva
España y providencias de su superior gobierno. Vol. 1 (Mexico, 1787), 111, 189, and
11, respectively.
81 Ventura Beleña, Recopilación sumaria, vol. 1, 96. Behind the prohibition of trigo blan-
quillo there were the economic interests of certain grain producers. Because this partic-
ular cereal plant produced faster and larger renderings than most types of wheat, the
abundance of blanquillo in the markets caused the price of non-blanquillo grains to
plummet and eat away the earnings of other farmers. Clara Elena Suárez, La polı́tica
cerealera en la economı́a novohispana: el caso del trigo (Mexico: CIESAS, 1985), 87–89.
Free and Non-Free Asian Migration to Mexico and Beyond

Between 40,000–60,000 and 100,000 Asian immigrants arrived in New
Spain in about 250 years.82 Typically, they crossed the Pacific as sailors,
servants of Spanish passengers, slaves, and merchants. Despite the fact
that this population was very diverse in geographical and ethnic origins,
religious background, age, and gender, in the Spanish empire Asians were
generally referred to as chinos. In reality, few were actually Chinese. The
term “chino” could be as broad as to include any native of Asia, that
is, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, or Malaccan individuals. To add
to the confusion, the meaning of chino did not remain static over time
and associations with slavery contributed to the ambiguous ethnic and
legal status the chinos held in New Spain.83 Many Asians who stayed in
the viceroyalty, either because they had no desire to return to their home
countries or were brought as slaves, married local Indian and mixed-
race women. These unions eventually gave rise to a sizable population
of chinos who for the most part settled in the west coast – Acapulco,
Michoacán, and Guerrero-as well as in Mexico City and Puebla. Their
most prominent vocations were barbers and venders of various goods
such as cotton and silk textiles from Asia, Mexico, and Spain/Europe,
comestibles, or second-hand items. The variety of skills they arrived with
created frictions with other classes who plied the same trade.84
Asian slavery in colonial Mexico has awakened the interest of some
scholars.85 Seijas estimates that an annual average of sixty slaves might
have made the crossing with a total of at least 8,100 Asian captives
between 1576 and 1700. The realities of smuggling and irregular book-
keeping, though, make it impossible to quantify the trans-Pacific slave
trade.86 The loss of native workforce to epidemics combined with a grow-
ing economy based on silver mining opened a niche for Asian slavery to
prosper in New Spain.87 In 1593, the Spanish Crown decided to place
82 Slack, “The Chinos in New Spain,” 36.

83 In the early eighteenth century, Chinese women who had migrated to colonial Mexico
started to establish more formal unions with blacks and mulattos. Carrillo correlates
this process of ethnic intermarriage to the fact that the term chino ceased to refer to
people coming from the Orient to become one of the many castas, precisely around that
time (“Birds and People,” 17).
84 Slack, “Sinifying New Spain,” 13.
85 Deborah Oropeza Keresey, “La esclavitud asiática en el virreinato de la Nueva España,
1565–1673,” Historia Mexicana 61, no. 1 (2011): 5–57; Seijas, Asian Slaves.
86 Seijas, Asian Slaves, 83–84.
87 Carrillo, “Birds and People,” 14.
this human traffic under official supervision; only bureaucrats and other
honest people would be allowed to come from Manila to Acapulco
with slaves for their personal service. Despite the regulations, crewmem-
bers became important intermediaries of a lucrative business that con-
nected Portuguese slave traders to well-off Mexicans.88 The Portuguese
introduced slaves in the Philippines from their colonial state of India,
which comprised territories in Mozambique, India, Malacca, Tidore and
Terrenate in Indonesia, Timor oriental, Macao, and Nagasaki. It is more
precise then, to talk about Asian and African migration into New Spain
via Acapulco. The majority was absorbed by the urban economy of
Mexico City as domestic servants or laborers at textile mills. Others were
employed in haciendas of cocoa and coconut palm in the Pacific coast.89
The Crown legislated in favor of the emancipation of Asian slaves in the
1670s–80s, and chinos legally became indigenous vassals of the Spanish
monarchy.90
The migratory flow from Asia spilled over from the Pacific Ocean into
the Atlantic world. We know, for instance, that Chinese merchants passed
on to Spain from Mexico in the late 1570s.91 A number of license petitions
to continue journey to Spain after arriving in New Spain from Manila
testify to the outflow of free Asians from Mexico to Spain.92 Also, chino
slaves owned by elites in Mexico were occasionally transported across
the Atlantic to serve their masters in Spain.93 The ordeal of some of these
slaves in the Iberian Peninsula reveals the contested nature of slavery in the
Spanish empire. For the purposes of licensing, slaves from Asia were usu-
ally called chinos in the Iberian Peninsula as well because several decrees
outlawed Indian slaves from entering Spain. In the meantime, indio in
Spain generally referred to the indigenous people of the colonies, whether
they were from the Philippines or not. Therefore, when Asian slaves
appealed for their freedom to the House of Trade in Seville, they preferred
to identify themselves as indios to gain the legal protections afforded to
88 Oropeza, “La esclavitud asiática,” 12. Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish
Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 19–38. Seijas’ thesis is that during
the Iberian Union the Portuguese helped sustain Manila’s economy by providing an
important labor force that worked to build and maintain the archipelago.
89 Seijas, Asian Slaves, 132. Oropeza, “La esclavitud asiática,” 35–41.
90 After emancipation, chinos were considered equal to native Indians: they could live in,
and freely travel between, Indian communities and they paid royal tribute. Seijas, Asian
Slaves, 1; Slack, “Sinifying New Spain,” 25.
91 Carrillo, “Birds and People,” 10.
92 Seijas, Asian Slaves, 85, n. 43.
93 Slack, “Sinigying New Spain,” 13.
colonial subjects, as an indio from the Philippines was a subject of the

King of Spain and naturally free.94
The Keicho Embassy (1613–20)95

Date Masamune, the pro-Christian daimyo of Sendai in northeastern
Japan, sponsored in 1613 a diplomatic mission to Spain and Rome by
way of Mexico. This delegation has not made its way into the standard
narrative histories of colonial Mexico or the Spanish empire and has
become instead an exclusive realm of specialists in the history of Japan and
the history of Japanese encounters with other cultures. The episode has
not been considered to reveal anything about New Spain itself. However,
this transoceanic diplomatic mission, in combination with the free and
non-free Asian migratory patterns I have just reviewed, sheds much light
onto the pivotal role of the Mexican viceroyalty as a communication
bridge between two oceans and three continents and the unexpected ways
in which Asians contributed to the multicolored Mexican culture.
The diplomatic, political, and commercial aspects of the Keicho
Embassy are fairly well known. About 140 Japanese samurai, merchants
and attendants, and forty Spaniards and Portuguese departed Sendai
under the leadership of the Spanish Franciscan missionary Luis Sotelo and
the samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga. Sotelo had been working in Japan since
1603, and Hasekura was a retainer of Date Masamune who acted as
ambassador.96 Date hoped to obtain from the Spanish King Philip III an
agreement to establish direct trade between Japan and Mexico bypassing
the monopoly of the Manila galleon. Sotelo’s goal, on the other hand, was
to lead a new Christian movement with the support of Pope Paul IV and
the daimyo of Sendai by creating a diocese in northern Japan indepen-
dent of the Jesuit-dominated diocese of Nagasaki in the south.97 These
expectations were frustrated, though, because King Philip III resented
the fact that the embassy represented the leader of only one region of
Japan and not the entire country. To add to the monarch’s aggravation,
reports about the wave of persecution against Christianity under the new
94 Seijas, “Native Vassals: Chinos, Indigenous Identity, and Legal Protection in Early
Modern Spain,” in Western visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671),
ed. Christina H. Lee (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 153–64.
95 Keicho is the Japanese term for a period that spanned from 1596 to 1615.
96 These are Robert Richmond Ellis’ numbers. See They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian
Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 47.
97 Ellis, They Need Nothing, 47–50.
Tokugawa regime had reached Spain while the delegation was still in
Europe.98
Questions about the cultural and ethnic repercussions of this enterprise
in New Spain are far from exhausted. Hasekura returned to Japan in 1620
with only twelve companions.99 According to Nahua historian Domingo
Chimalpahin (1579–1660), who chronicled the passing of the embassy
from Acapulco to Veracruz, Hasekura decided to leave more than half of
his suite in Mexico City, supposedly to continue developing trade rela-
tions with the viceroyalty, while he proceeded to Europe. Most of these
Japanese were baptized.100 While they waited in the viceroyalty for the
return of Hasekura three years later, they had sufficient time to cultivate
relationships with local women. Some members of Hasekura’s delegation,
fearful of going back to Japan where a new prosecution against Christian-
ism had begun in 1614, decided to remain in New Spain. Several decades
later there were Japanese living in Oaxaca and other places of the Mexi-
can Pacific coast, some of them leading very successful lives as members
of local elites.101 Legal provisions in the 1640s and 1660s did much to
equate the Japanese living in New Spain with the Spanish by allowing the
Asian group to bear swords and daggers, to trade, and to enjoy tribute
exemptions.102 Thus, Mexican-ness evolved not only around the Span-
ish, Indian, African, and mestizo legacies but also around the cultural
contribution of Asians.
The Keicho Embassy also illuminates the capricious ways in which
Asian culture, like far-reaching tentacles, touched the shores of Spain.
When Hasekura’s group departed the Iberian Peninsula in 1617 to return
98 Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, eds., Asia in the Making of Europe. Vol. III:
A Century of Advance. Book 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 211–13.
99 Thomas Christensen, 1616: The World in Motion (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2013),
335.
100 Rafael Tena, trans., Diario: Domingo Chimalpáhin (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2001),
377.
101 Thomas Calvo has demonstrated that a small Japanese colony formed in Nueva Galicia
between 1624 and 1642. “Japoneses en Guadalajara: blancos de honor durante el
seiscientos mexicano,” Revista de Indias 43, no. 72 (1983): 533–47. Calvo’s and the
following studies highlight the capacity of the Japanese for cultural integration in
the region, their brilliance in commercial and business activities, and the tolerance
of Mexican colonial society in putting aside ethnic prejudices to recognize economic
achievement: Eikichi Hayashiya, “Los Japoneses que se quedaron en México en el
siglo XVII. Acerca de un samurai en Guadalajara,” in México y la Cuenca del Pacı́fico
6, no. 18 (2003): 10–17; Melba Falck and Hector Palacios, El Japonés que conquistó
Guadalajara. La historia de Juan de Páez en la Guadalajara del siglo XVII (Guadalajara:
University of Guadalajara, 2009).
102 AGN General de Parte 8 exp.116 f.74 (1641). AGN Indios 24 exp.21 f.15v (1666).
to New Spain, at least six Japanese individuals stayed behind in Coria del
Rı́o, near Seville. Today a couple hundred residents in this municipality
identify themselves – Japón is their surname – as descendants of the
members of Hasekura’s mission.103 If seen in isolation, the presence of
Asian slaves and Japanese travellers in Spain appear as unconnected,
patchy threads of information; if put together, they actually expose the
bond that, by virtue of the Manila galleon system, had been created
between Spain and the remote world of Asia and the Pacific, a bond
that is commonly neglected in historical reconstructions of the Spanish
empire.
Asia, Mexico, and the Missionary Enterprise

China bore a sense of geographical closeness for those living in the Mex-
ican viceroyalty. Luke Clossey has proposed that for the religious orders
operating in New Spain, China was neither a “superficial nor a periph-
eral concern”; rather, China represented the possibility of real action.104
The China mission mesmerized generations of missionaries inspired by
dreams of converts, by the hopes of martyrdom and by each other.105
The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) had suggested that
the true significance of the conquest of Mexico might very well have been
to provide a steppingstone to China, where he was persuaded that the
Christian faith would endure and thrive.106 Among the missionaries who
crossed the Pacific on board of the galleons in the early colonial period
there were many Mexicans – Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, and
Jesuits. Rafael Bernal particularly notes that there were so many Creole
Augustinians in the Philippines that a conflict aroused between Augus-
tinians from Spain and those from New Spain.107 Thanks to donations
from well-to-do Mexicans, New Spain was a major source of funds in
supporting the China mission.108
With the Philippines as a way station to China, Japan, and South Asia,
New Spain linked the Pacific to the Atlantic in one Christian, religious
103 Juan Manuel Suárez Japón, Japones y Japoneses en la orilla del Guadalquivir (Seville:
Fundación El Monte, 2007).
104 Clossey, “Merchants, Migrants,” 43, 51.
105 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), 159–61.
106 David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the
Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 122.
107 Bernal, México en Filipinas, 190–93.
108 Clossey, “Merchants, Migrants,” 48, 53.
enterprise. For missionaries coming from Spain, Mexico became a train-

ing center; in the New World they underwent acclimation before passing
to Asia. New Spain was also a stopping point for news passing from Asia
to Europe. Clossey has tracked the lively exchange of Jesuit letters across
the Pacific and the arrival in Mexico of Dominican reports with news
about Chinese imperial decrees and the China mission. All of this would
not have been possible without Manila acting as a hub for information
flowing into Mexico. Furthermore, the viceroyalty did much of the col-
lection, editing, and publishing of the information on China for American
and European audiences.109
The Early Bourbon Era in the Philippines, 1700–62

These migration patterns conformed the background against which
forced transportation in the late eighteenth century occurred. Up to an
extent, there is no question that the most significant changes that the Bour-
bon reformers implemented in the Philippines occurred after the British
invading forces left the archipelago in 1764. Notwithstanding, several
initiatives prior to this date point at a re-evaluation of colonial policies
in the Philippines, especially in the military, commercial, and religious
realms. These changes, known as the Bourbon Reforms, were part of the
broad economic and political legislation of enlightened inspiration that
the Spanish monarchs introduced in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout
the empire during the eighteenth century.
Traditional literature on Bourbon reforms indicates 1762, the year
when the British captured Havana, Cuba, and Manila during the Seven
Years’ War (1757–63), as the big take off for comprehensive reform
projects. Historians have thus largely focused on the reign of King Charles
III (1759–88) as the only significant era of change in the century. This
is especially true amongst historians of Spain’s American territories,
where the historiographical mainstream reserves the term “Bourbon Latin
America” for the period after 1763.110 Before 2013, only isolated studies
109 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 105–06, 196, 204.

110 Ainara Vázquez Varela and Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso, introduction to Early Bourbon
Spanish America. Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759), by Eissa-Barroso
and Vázquez Varela, eds. (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 1. Examples of traditional
historiography on the Bourbon reforms are Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century
Revolution in Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958); Nancy Farriss,
Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico 1759–1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege
(London: Althone Press, 1968); Brading, The First America.
aimed at re-assessing early Bourbon innovations and the alleged social

and political impact of post-1762 military programs in the colonial soci-
eties of the Caribbean.111
More recently, scholars have endeavored to systematize the implica-
tions of King Philip V and King Ferdinand VI’s policies in Spanish Amer-
ica, and their reflections can illuminate our understanding of the early
Bourbon period in the Philippines. Three studies in 2013 and 2014 have
called for a revision of the Bourbon reforms’ chronology.112 These works
claim that scholars have downplayed the pre-1763 period, perceiving only
disjointed and mostly minor reforms that did not form part of any con-
scious or overarching policy and were tied to the outmoded structures of
the Habsburg empire.113 We are told now that the contributions of early
Bourbon politicians were not patchy or inconsistent but ambitious and
coherent. These contributions represented fundamental breakthroughs in
crucial areas of colonial policy – commercial, military, administrative,
and fiscal policy – modernizing the Spanish Atlantic world with some
impressive and enduring results.114 Moreover, this new scholarship finds
that the roots of the concerns that drove the Caroline program after 1763
were manifest from at least the 1710s. Bourbon reforms developed in
a recognizable pattern related to the Crown’s desire to strengthen the
colonial military system, increase royal direct authority over all areas of
the Spanish empire, develop a more efficient and rational administration
of peninsular and colonial resources, and extend state control over the
wealth and immunities of the Church.115
111 For the case of Santo Domingo, Rivas and Gascón have contended that the differences
in military readiness before and after 1762 were quantitative rather than qualitative,
with numerical increases in military ranks but little changes in the behavior of officers’
corps. See Christine Rivas, “The Spanish Colonial Military: Santo Domingo, 1701–
1779,” The Americas 60, no. 2 (October 2003): 249–72, and Margarita Gascón “The
Military of Santo Domingo, 1720–1764,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73,
no. 2 (May 1993): 431–52.
112 In 2013 Eissa-Barroso and Vázquez Varela edited the volume Early Bourbon Spanish
America. Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759). Adrian J. Pearce has
published The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan) in 2014, the same year that Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J.
Andrien’s The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon
Reforms, 1713–1796 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) appeared.
113 Vázquez Varela and Eissa-Barroso, introduction to Early Bourbon, 7. Pearce, Origins,
7–11.
114 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 69, 127–28, 349.
115 Vázquez Varela and Eissa-Barroso, introduction to Early Bourbon, 4; Pearce, Origins,
14.
In the Philippines, early Bourbon initiatives might not have been as

consequential and long-lived as those implemented in the Atlantic world,
but they do reveal that a sense of danger and vulnerability fueled military
schemes in the archipelago. In the first half of the eighteenth century,
demographic recovery had begun in the tributary population of Luzon
and the Visayan Islands with an average growth of 1.4 percent a year.116
The colonial administration, however, was not in a position to take full
advantage of the population resources in the archipelago. The dangerous
navigation between islands hampered communications between Manila
and the center and south of the Philippines. In addition, the Spanish gov-
ernment lacked personnel to administer the territory effectively. Alcaldes
mayores (provincial governors) had little reach beyond the cabecera
(district capital) of their very extensive provinces, a factor that extremely
complicated the collection of tributes. In order to alleviate this problem,
Governor Juan de Arechederra y Tovar informed the king in 1747 about
his project to divide the province of Leyte, which included two islands in
the Eastern Visayas, Leyte, and Samar, each with about twenty villages,
in two alcaldı́as mayores.117 The situation was inordinately challenging
in the south, where three villages in the northern coast of Mindanao were
dependent on the alcaldı́a mayor of Cebu on the other side of the Bohol
Sea. This circumstance significantly hindered any attempt of the Spanish
to colonize the island of Mindanao. The lack of administrative cohesive-
ness was aggravated by the fact that in the Bourbon era there remained
a religious division in the archipelago between the Muslim sultanates of
Maguindanao, in southern Mindanao, and Sulu – which ruled over much
of the Sulu archipelago, parts of Mindanao and Borneo – and the rest of
hispanized Christian realms in Luzon and the Visayan islands.
While the Dutch threat receded in the eighteenth century, Muslim
pirates from Mindanao and Sulu persisted in their raids and depreda-
tions on the provinces of the Visayan Islands and the Spanish settlements
of Mindanao. Consequently, the military expenses of the Spanish state
accrued on a regular basis in these regions.118 The presidio of Zam-
boanga, first founded in 1634 in a peninsula southwest of Mindanao and
116 Newson, Conquest, 259.

117 Antonio F. Garcı́a González, El gobierno en Filipinas del Ilmo. Sr. Don Fray Juan de
Arechederra y Tovar, obispo de la Nueva Segovia (Granada: Universidad de Granada,
1976), 153–58. The Council of the Indies approved the division in 1751.
118 Joaquı́n Martı́nez Zúñiga, A Historical View of the Philippine Islands: Exhibiting Their
Discovery, Population, Language, Government, Manners, Customs, Productions, and
Commerce. From the Spanish of Martinez Zuñiga, Published at Manila in 1803. Vol. 2
abandoned in the 1660s, was reestablished in 1719. A garrison in this

presidio policed the Sulu Sea to the north and the Moro Gulf to the south
to stop Muslim incursions. Between 1745 and 1750, during the time
that Arechederra was governor, the Spanish Crown pondered the feasi-
bility of setting up a Spanish colony nearby Zamboanga with the hopes of
encouraging the production of Mindanao’s natural resources. However,
the attacks of Sulu pirates were especially intense in the late 1740s and
1750s, and the project of colonization came to a halt. To protect traders,
fishermen, and coastal towns Arechederra, as well as Governors Francisco
José de Ovando (1750–54) and Pedro Manuel de Arandı́a (1754–59),
built new frigates and organized expensive punitive expeditions against
Sulu.119
Besides Muslim interlopers, the British also assailed the archipelago
regularly before 1762. The first time that British and Spanish forces
clashed in the Philippines in the eighteenth century was a few decades
before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Spanish efforts to eliminate
British contraband activities in the Caribbean and the mounting pres-
sure of Britain against Spanish territories in Florida and Central America
finally led to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. This conflict later merged
into the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe lasting from 1740
to 1748. The British deployed all their naval power over the Spanish
colonies, and royal orders circulated in Spanish America to put territo-
ries in good defensive posture and to take initiatives to annoy or hinder
British forces.120 Admiral Edward Vernon took Portobello in the coast
of Panama in 1739, and rumors in Manila about the British presence
in Batavia prompted local authorities to hastily repair fortifications and
place both Manila and Cavite in a state of defense.121 In the end, the
British did not strike in Manila but Commodore George Anson captured
the vessel Nuestra Señora de Covadonga in June of 1743 just off the coast
of the Samar Island as it arrived from Acapulco. The seizure of the nao
de la China – the second of the century – cost dearly to Manila merchants
(London: Black, Parry, and Co., 1814), 48, 61–66. Born in 1760, this Augustinian lived
in the Philippines from 1786 until he died in 1818.
119 Garcı́a González, El gobierno, 148–49, 204–05; Zúñiga, A Historical View of the
Philippine Islands, 94–98.
120 Ignacio Rivas Ibáñez, “The Spanish Use of Deception and the Defense of America
During the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1740),” in Eissa-Barroso and Vázquez Varela,
Early Bourbon, 178.
121 Zúñiga, A Historical View, 84–86.
and the colonial government in the islands as the galleon was loaded with
about 1,300,000 silver pieces of eight.122
To counter the Muslim and British threats some military innovations
were introduced in the Philippines prior to the fateful invasion of British
forces in 1762. One of these initiatives was part of a broader scheme
for the renovation of the military establishment in Spanish America by
which rotating battalions were to be converted into permanent units or
garrison troops called ejército de dotación or fijo. In 1719, the same year
that in Havana, Cuba a fixed battalion with six 100-men infantry com-
panies was formed, a veteran infantry regiment with 1,000 plazas was
created in Manila.123 For most of the eighteenth century, the operational
ability of the army in Spanish America had been mostly defensive, the
military scheme’s primary objective being to provide adequate coastal
defense while guarding all major entry points into the imperial holdings.
This system relied heavily upon a few fortified sites placed in strategic
locations, manned largely by regular army troops from Spain.124 Before
1762, the defense of the Philippines relied on some battalions of volun-
teers from New Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, and the reinforcement
units that each newly appointed governor brought with him to Manila.
With the system of fixed battalions, Spanish legislators now intended
for permanent units to be stationed in cities, ports, and fortified enclaves
throughout the American empire. The system, however, was not extended
beyond Cuba and to the rest of the Caribbean until the War of Jenkins’ Ear
(1739–48).125 After 1750, ejércitos de dotación were set up in Veracruz,
Yucatan, and Callao but the policy of neutrality of the secretary of State
Ricardo Wall (1754–63) lessened the need for aggressive military reforms
122 Garcı́a González, El gobierno, 20–21. In January 1710 the British Woodes Rogers
captured the eastbound galleon off the Californian coast in Cabo San Lucas with an
estimated cargo of two million pesos.
123 Juan Marchena Fernández, Oficiales y soldados en el ejército de América (Seville:
Escuela de Estudios-Hispanoamericanos, 1983), 286. Antonio de Pablo Cantero, “El
ejército de dotación en Filipinas (1800–1868),” in La era Isabelina y la Revolución
(1843–1875). Actas de las XIII Jornadas Nacionales de Historia Militar. Sevilla, del 13
al 17 de noviembre de 2006 (Seville: Centro de Historia y Cultura Militar y Cátedra
General Castaños), 648–78.
124 Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty. The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial
Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 8–9. Marchena, Ejército y milicias
en el mundo colonial americano (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 135–37
125 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 91–94; 199–200. Nueva Vizcaya, Cartagena
de Indias, and Panama were next in line but not until the late 1720s and early 1730s
(122–24).
and marked the end of expansion in the regular army.126 In the meantime,
less than fifty years after its creation, the size of the veteran regiment of
Manila had been halved because of the lack of peninsular reinforcements.
Not until 1769 did new regulations attempt to revive the system of fixed
battalions in the islands.
In the central decades of the century, military concerns continued to
keep busy royal officials in the archipelago. As a response to reports of
British naval activity in the area, Arechederra dedicated the first years of
his governorship to revamp the military defenses of Manila and Cavite.
The governor erected new bulwarks and repaired elevating bridges, gates,
defensive walls, and other military buildings; presidios in the provinces
were reinforced as well. Arechederra took special care of the operations at
the Royal Foundry of Manila; hence, hundreds of new artillery pieces
and cannons were forged and added to the gates. He was also responsible
for energizing the enlistment and training of artillerymen.127 In the late
1750s, Governor Arandı́a took steps to further improve the arsenal of
Cavite and the officers’ pay.
Parallel to local developments in the Pacific, Bourbon ministers in
Madrid were setting in motion important changes in colonial policy.
During the period that Kuethe and Andrien refer to as the “revival of
reform” (1726–36), the minister of Marine and the Indies José Patiño
accorded the highest priority to reestablishing the navy and bringing mod-
ern, defensible shipyards in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Caribbean
into full operation. Thus, shipbuilding activities in Havana experienced
in the 1730s an impressive boost, largely thanks to the remittance of the
situado from Mexico. Because of the losses endured by Spain between
1739 and 1748, the replacement of vessels and the overall strengthening
of the armada became a most urgent concern for the minister of Marine
Marquis of Ensenada.
The efforts of royal advisors to regain control over the Atlantic and
Pacific trade and to increase colonial revenues further confirmed that the
priorities of the Madrid government had moved from dynastic consider-
ations focused on the Mediterranean to colonial affairs. The Treaty of
Utrecht in 1713 had given the British not only the slave trade monopoly
but also the annual ships of permission, which served as a legal opening to
market goods in Spanish America and as an instrument for smuggling. In
the following decades, illegal commercial activities controlled by English,
126 Ibid., 214.

127 Garcı́a González, El gobierno, 43–57.
French, and Dutch traders in the Pacific and the Caribbean continued to
escalate, threatening the very commercial lifeline of the monarchy. Trade
reforms undertaken before King Charles III ascended the throne in 1759
were the creation of the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, the establishment
of an effective coast guard in the Caribbean to harass contrabandists, and
the promotion of monopoly companies with the intention to develop the
Caribbean imperial peripheries.128
From 1718 to 1724, the Spanish Crown prohibited the import from
the Philippines through Acapulco of any textile made of Asian silk. While
this ban applied only to the Pacific world, Bonialian has placed it in the
larger context of commercial circuits within the Spanish empire. Asian
textiles constituted a cheaper and better quality alternative source of
cloth – Spanish who upheld mercantilist economic policies believed that
this competition frustrated the sale of peninsular merchandise in Spanish
America, induced the decline of the system of fleets and galleons, hindered
the development of textile manufacturing sectors in Spain, and diverted a
huge volume of coins to trans-Pacific circuits to the detriment of Atlantic
commercial networks. The prohibition was reiterated several times until
in 1724 the circulation of Asian silk products was allowed again in the
Mexican viceroyalty. Although the restrictive measure had caused discon-
tent and disturbances in Manila and it had angered Mexican merchants,
Bonialian theorizes that it was not the resistance of these groups what
brought down the prohibition. The author argues that while the inter-
diction was in effect, the system of galleons and fleets in the Atlantic
proved unable to respond to the growing needs of American markets,
especially the Mexican demand for imported textiles. The reopening of
the trans-Pacific axis in 1724, it was hoped, would reduce the temptation
of resorting to foreign smuggling. Bonialian concludes that the permission
to import Asian textiles was a pragmatic one, one that aimed at achieving
an imperial equilibrium of the circuits.129
Another salient characteristic of the early Bourbon program of reform
was the advancement of the power of the state over the Roman Catholic
Church, an initiative that had clear economic overtones. Scholars who
emphasize post-1762 reforms focus on episodes such as the expulsion of
the Jesuits from the Spanish domain, but there were other attempts to curb
Church power before this major event. The secular impulses of the Bour-
bon cadre of officials had particular resonance in the Philippines, where
128 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 68–69, 84, 109, 115–17, 197–98, 223.
129 Bonialian, El Pacı́fico hispanoamericano, 69, 73–77.
the religious orders enjoyed practically unrestrained influence.130 The

confrontation between civil authorities and religious orders was evi-
dent during the governorship of Arechederra. Spanish historian Garcı́a
González gives the governor credit for formulating enlightened proposi-
tions and situates him at the crossroads between “a new generation” and
“more medieval ideas” that circulated in the archipelago. Arechederra’s
maneuvers reveal that he perceived the friar curates and their condition of
major landowners and beneficiaries of native labor as an obstacle for the
demographic and economic development of the archipelago. Arechederra
placed some restrictions on the system of polos y servicios to curtail the
abuses committed by communities and particular individuals. The gover-
nor was of the opinion that indios should be provided with agricultural
means for their subsistence, even if at the expense of the religious orders’
real state. Arechederra envisioned the possibilities of supporting the pro-
duction of Philippine cotton, which he considered a better product than
that of India, as well as other natural resources.131 Around the same time
that the Enlightenment was making its appearance in the upper admin-
istration of the Philippines, minister of Finance José de Campillo wrote
in 1743 a reformist tract about the need to encourage the production of
agricultural products in the Indies and the convenience of liberalizing all
other economic structures, in particular maritime commerce.132
Governors who succeeded Arechederra persisted on their offensive
against the considerable power of the regular clergy in the islands. The
religious orders’ sway over the native population contributed to the idea
that civil authority was weak and that friars acted on the margins of duties
to the Spanish state. Friar curates were also believed to unlawfully benefit
from the perception of the indigenous tribute. Therefore, attempts were
implemented to reinforce the submission of indios to civil authorities,
break the indios’ dependency with religious orders, and augment the fiscal
control over the resources of the archipelago. In 1751, Governor Ovando
increased the capacity of alcaldes mayores to collect tribute and sell mer-
chandise to indios. The initiative reduced the role of the friar curates but
it opened the door to new forms of exploitation.133 At this time royal
130 The expulsion of the Jesuits in most areas of New Spain was carried out in 1767. Due
to the longer distance with the metropole, royal orders for the execution of the same
process did not arrive in Manila until 1769. See Santiago Lorenzo Garcı́a, La expulsión
de los jesuitas de Filipinas (Alicante: University of Alicante, 1999).
131 Garcı́a González, El gobierno, 9–11, 127, 134–36.
132 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 136–37.
133 Josep M. Fradera, Filipinas, la colonia más peculiar: La hacienda pública en la definición
de la polı́tica colonial, 1762–1868 (Madrid: CSIC, 1999), 72–74.
ministers in Madrid were laying the foundations of a secularization pol-

icy. Accordingly, the edicts of 1749 and 1753 dictated the transfer of
rural parishes from the religious orders to the secular clergy of the dioce-
ses, a move that in due course would undermine the economic power and
social prestige of regular orders in Spanish America–especially Domini-
cans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians.134 In the Philippines,
the Ordenanzas de Buen Gobierno that Governor Arandı́a published in
1759 further reasserted the power of alcaldes mayores. The Ordenanzas
increased the faculties of the latter to engage in commercial activities and
administer education to the indios. The provisions were not implemented,
though, because of the steadfast opposition of the friars.135 About a
decade later Governor Simón de Anda y Salazar (1770–76) aggressively
challenged friar dominance in the archipelago by passing the parishes
into secular hands.136 Secularization in the Philippines was, however,
stalled several times during the nineteenth century by political reaction in
Spain.137
The British Occupation of Manila and Late Bourbon

Reformism in the Spanish Pacific
The pace of the reforms in the archipelago quickened after Britain’s con-
quest of Manila in 1762, a calamitous event that notably altered the signif-
icance of the Pacific world, and the Philippines in particular, to the Spanish
empire. The British occupation of Manila during the Seven Years’ War
haunted the Spanish imagination for decades. Manila remained under
British control from October 1762 to May 1764 with profound conse-
quences for the economy and society of the colony. After the British had
bombarded the city walls for weeks, Manila surrendered under humiliat-
ing terms.138 It was a devastating blow to Spanish prestige and morale,
especially because in August of 1762 Havana, Cuba, had also fallen to the

135 Marta Marı́a Manchado López, “Las relaciones entre la autoridad civil y las órdenes
religiosas en Filipinas durante el gobierno de don Pedro Manuel de Arandı́a,” Anuario
de Estudios Americanos 53, no. 1 (1996): 37–52.
136 Salvador P. Escoto, “The Administration of Simón de Anda y Salazar, 1770–1776”
(PhD diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1973).
137 Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 103.
138 Nicholas Tracy, Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years’
War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 20–35. Manila had to indemnify the
British for the expenses of the campaign, and British troops were given permission
to loot. John (F.R.G.S.) Foreman, The Philippine Islands. A Historical, Geographical,
Ethnographical, Social and Commercial Sketch of the Philippine Archipelago and Its
Political Dependencies (London: Kelly and Walsh, 1890), 94–115.
British. The loss of these two strategic strongholds reminded the Spanish
quite shockingly of their military and commercial vulnerabilities and gave
a renewed impulse to the reformist process that the Bourbon dynasty
had started in 1700. In the Philippines, the spectacular increase in mili-
tary expenditure and the reorganization of the militia and veteran forces
sealed a rupture with a fiscal past characterized by rigidity in income and
moderation in expenses.139 Analyses of Bourbon colonial policy in the
eighteenth century emphasize the fact that events in the Atlantic Ocean
led King Charles III to elevate military imperatives to the top of his
reformist agenda for America; at the same time, these studies usually
downplay that the loss of Manila was an equally important catalyst for
Madrid’s efforts to modernize its American and Asian holdings.
Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War and the overall fast-evolving
situation in the Pacific determined the strategic role the Philippines ought
to have in the Spanish imperial scheme in the post-1764 era. The prospect
of a Madras-based British–Indian force taking over the archipelago
became the greatest threat in the region after 1762, although other con-
cerns took shape as well. In the international chessboard of the Pacific
Ocean, pieces were changing positions swiftly and the outlook was not
promising for the Spanish. After 1765, the waters of the “Spanish Lake”
gradually filled with British, French, and Russian adventurers – John
Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville,
and James Cook – in search for commercial opportunities and the elusive
Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia. These explorations stirred deep
consternation among Spanish officials and diplomats. Expeditions to the
Falkland Islands, Australia, and the Polynesian islands were purported
to have mere scientific purposes, but they had the potential to translate
into more tangible problems for the Spanish empire in the Pacific. For
instance, Madrid had misgivings about the British settlement in Australia
in the mid-1780s because of its closeness to the Philippines and the dis-
tinct possibility of the British flooding Spanish colonial markets with
cheap Pacific products.140 In this context, Spanish policymakers under-
stood that the possession of the Philippines remained vital to prevent
other European powers from putting in jeopardy the occidental ports of
Spanish America.
Historians recognize that “a much greater volume of reform, part of
it of a much more radical nature, was undertaken in the late Bourbon
139 Fradera, Filipinas, 71.

140 Buschmann, Iberian Visions, 154–87.
era than the early one.”141 The enlightened reformist vision and energy
of King Charles III far exceeded that of his father, Philip V, and half-
brother, Ferdinand VI, at a time when the threat of Britain’s unrivaled
power pushed the monarchy to support widespread modernization. To
offset the territorial and power losses experienced in the Seven Years’
War and the conflict of the British colonies with England (1775–83),
King Charles III extended the reforms that his predecessors had begun in
the Spanish Atlantic world. Spanish politicians were persuaded that only
a reworking of the relationship with the Americas could revive the monar-
chy. Pedro Rodrı́guez de Campomanes and other reformers believed that
the political, administrative and economic re-conquest of the Indies was
sine qua non for the internal and international recovery of Spain.142 A
legion of historians, however, has persuasively revealed the limits of a
“re-conquest” that did not meet the reformers’ expectations of a funda-
mental change in the economic relationships between the metropole and
the colonies.143
The problem of security was the precipitant of change. Kings Philip V
and Ferdinand VI’s collaborators did much to prepare the way for the
officials who followed them, but Spain’s defeat reflected the military’s
lack of preparedness. By 1763 the British had become much stronger
while Spanish rearmament in America had not made comparable strides –
in part because of Wall’s policy of neutrality under the reign of King
Ferdinand VI. The double defeat in 1763 made King Charles III and
his ministers recognize the need to shore up defenses in the Indies.144
The augment and professionalization of military forces thus became a
priority for the colonial state in Spanish America and the Pacific world in
141 Pearce, Origins, 11. Pearce’s emphasis.

142 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 294–95, 301–07.
143 Ideally, the recovery of fiscal and political control should have been accompanied
by a new economic exploitation of the Indies and by an internal economic growth
of the metropole. Instead, the colonial defense consumed huge monetary amounts
and Spain remained an underdeveloped metropole in want of large-scale structural
reforms. Josep Fontana, “España y América en la economı́a mundial del siglo XVIII,”
in El Hispanismo anglonorteamerican, ed. José Manuel de Bernardo Ares (Córdoba,
España: Cajasur, 2001), 509–20; Antonio Garcı́a-Baquero, El comercio colonial en
la época del absolutismo ilustrado. Problemas y debates (Granada: Universidad de
Granada, 2003); and Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Edge of Crisis. War and
Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1818 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2009).
144 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 221, 226–27, 231, 350.
the last four decades of the 1700s. Bourbon reformers planned to field a
competitive army, to secure the strategic posts in the Atlantic and Pacific
flanks, and to settle other frontier areas.145
The renovation of the fortifications and the reorganization and enlarge-
ment of military forces entailed fiscal and economic interventions. Cam-
pomanes wrote that military and naval power depended not so much on
a country’s wealth as on the state’s ability to tax this wealth.146 There-
fore, to follow the British example, the economist argued, Spain had to
treat the American territories – and by extension, the Philippines – not as
provinces, as the Habsburg rulers had done, but as colonies. The overseas
territories should shoulder the brunt of new fortifications, stronger
Creole militias, and increased presence of Spanish warships.147 In the
Pacific, the enlightened legislators’ reasoning translated into the principle
that the Philippines should become the economic basis to finance the new
military requirements in the region.
Consequently, Spain attempted a significant economic and fiscal repo-
sitioning of the archipelago. This reorientation was all the more neces-
sary due to the vulnerability of an economy that rested almost entirely
on the galleons. This vulnerability had been exposed in 1762 when the
British seized the Mexico-bound galleon Santı́sima Trinidad with a cargo
worth several million pesos. Governor Basco y Vargas (1778–87) exe-
cuted the core of social and economic reforms. Some of these were short-
lived, but others caused significant changes in the Philippines later in the
nineteenth century.148 To achieve greater economic self-reliance, Basco
y Vargas pressed forward with projects for the large-scale production of
145 Elliott, Empires, 303.

146 Pedro Rodrı́guez de Campomanes, Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias
(1762), ed. Vicente Llombart Rosa (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios fiscales, 1988), 206–
27, 242.
147 John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989), 329–73. Josep
M. Delgado Ribas, “Eclipse and Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1650–1898,” in End-
less Empire. Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline, ed. Alfred McCoy
et al. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 43–54.
148 Dolores Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, Historia económica de Filipinas durante la etapa colo-
nial española: Un estudio bibliográfico (Madrid: Fundación Empresa Pública, 1998),
110–27. The economic transformation of the Spanish-controlled areas after 1764 has
been thoroughly studied. See Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 75–79; Norman
G. Owen, Prosperity Without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial
Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30–40; and Fradera, “The
Historical Origins of the Philippine Economy: A Survey of Recent Research of the Span-
ish Colonial Era,” in Australian Economic History Review 44, no. 3 (2004): 315–18.
Ed C. De Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly in the Philippines: Bureaucratic Enterprise and
Social Change 1766–1880 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1980).
export-oriented cash crops. Like Arechederra decades earlier, Basco y

Vargas believed in the commercial potential of locally grown products
such as tobacco, spice plants, silk, cotton, indigo, hemp, fruit trees, sugar-
cane, cacao, and coconut. The Economic Society of Friends of the Nation
was created in Manila in 1781 to stimulate agricultural and industrial
production, although the institution was inactive by 1797 and was dis-
banded in 1809.149 To aid in the financing of commercial agriculture,
the Royal Company of the Philippines was born in 1785 to conduct
direct trade between Madrid and Manila. The creation of this commer-
cial organization was also related to the fact that the capture of the
Santı́sima Trinidad and more broadly, the increase of European traffic in
the area had prompted the Spanish officialdom to search for alternative
routes to the Manila galleon system.150 The Company, however, was in
decline by 1796, affected by the inability to compete with the Dutch and
British interests in the area and the animosity of the Manila–Acapulco
merchants.151 At any rate, the Company’s voyages had a political corol-
lary, as they established faster communications with Spain and allowed
Madrid to know more promptly about events in the archipelago.
Of notable importance for the economic self-sufficiency of the
archipelago were the establishment of a fiscal monopoly on tobacco and
the opening of Manila to foreign traders, both Asian and non-Asian. The
tobacco monopoly was a late application of a reform implemented for
the first time in Cuba in 1717.152 Enacted in 1781, the initiative was
successful in the Philippines in several ways. The clearing of forested land
for tobacco pioneered the way for other commercial crops, like abaca
and sugar, to be cultivated in interior and mountainous regions. The
tobacco monopoly further propitiated the transition to export agriculture,
which in turn led to important changes on land tenure and social strati-
fication in the nineteenth century. Liquor, meat-slaughtering, municipal
tax collection, and cockfighting became government-auctioned rights as
well.153 Decrees between 1785 and 1789 eliminated mercantilist restric-
tions on Manila’s trade with Spain and the American territories. Asian and
149 Marı́a Luisa Rodrı́guez Baena, La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del Paı́s de Manila
en el siglo XVIII (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1966), 16–22.
150 Buschmann, Iberian Visions, 49.
151 Maria Lourdes Dı́az-Trechuelo Spı́nola, La Real Compañı́a de Filipinas (Seville: Escuela
de Estudios Hispanoamericanos de Sevilla, 1965).
152 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 89. For an account of the organization of the
tobacco monopoly, see De Jesus, Tobacco Monopoly, who considers it the only success
of Basco y Vargas’ initiatives.
153 Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 76.
European ships were permitted to carry cargo to Manila in what had been
the situation in practical terms for decades.154 The tobacco monopoly and
the liberalization of trade are thought to have been fundamental for the
continuity of Spanish colonial power in the archipelago because they
rendered the Philippines financially independent.155
Because of the high costs and difficulties in persuading peninsular sol-
diers to go to the Americas or to the Pacific Ocean, colonial officials placed
their expectations on well-equipped regiments of volunteers recruited in
the Indies commanded and trained by Spanish officers.156 In the Philip-
pines, the efforts to establish a regular army were complemented with
the organization of urban and provincial militias. As the veteran infantry
regiment created in 1719 languished because of lack of reinforcements,
the royal order of November 16, 1769 dictated the creation of the vet-
eran Regiment of the King with 18 companies and 1,272 plazas. Natu-
rales (people from the country) could amount no more than half of the
regiment while peninsulares and americanos (in the archipelago, term
reserved for those born in the Spanish American colonies) should con-
stitute the other half. Specifically, each company should include at least
twenty americanos. To ensure a steady supply for the replacement of the
americanos who deserted or were discharged, the royal order of Novem-
ber 1769 established that the viceroy of New Spain annually recruited
one hundred Mexicans.157 The 1769 regulation also gave faculties to
the governor-general to establish urban and provincial militias in the
archipelago, although these would not be organized for a decade. Fearing
another invasion by the British East India Company during the United
States War of Independence (1775–83), King Charles III decreed in 1779
the organization of provincial militias in the Philippines modeled after
those in New Spain and Cuba.158 The Regiment of the Real Prı́ncipe with
154 Dı́az-Trechuelo, “El comercio en Filipinas durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,”
Revista de Indias 23, no. 93–94 (July–December 1963): 463–85.
155 As far as the tobacco revenues, Josep Fradera believes these guaranteed the fiscal
resources necessary to sustain the Spanish presence after the transoceanic system col-
lapsed in 1815. See “Historical Origins,” 318.
156 Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 134–49.
157 Cantero, “El ejército de dotación,” 648–78. Dı́az-Trechuelo, “La defensa de Filipinas
en el último cuarto del siglo XVIII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 21 (1964):
157.
158 The new militia order took a standardized shape throughout the overseas Spanish
possessions after the publication in 1769 of the “Reglamento para las Milicias de
Infanterı́a y Dragones de la Isla de Cuba.” Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815. Crown, Military
and Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 150. One of the most
consequential modifications of this order was that the military privileges (fuero militar)
1,000 plazas, a battalion composed of seven different Chinese mestizo

militias, was the first one to be established. Other indios’ militia units
in the provinces formed more slowly owing to their remoteness from
Manila and the difficulties of finding commanding officers who were
blancos, born in Spain, Europe, Mexico, or the Philippines.159
Most accounts emphasize that the general overhaul of the colonial
empire was designed in Madrid, but this interpretation ignores how social,
ethnic, and political forces specific to each area interplayed with imperial
goals and influenced the implementation of the reforms. On the one
hand, the new policies were more effective in Manila and its surrounding
areas, where they enjoyed the support of Creoles and other local groups,
whereas in the rest of the archipelago they were largely ignored. On the
other hand, one decisive reason for local authorities to keenly agree with
the need to develop a plan for restoring imperial power in the Pacific was
that the brief incursion of the British had stirred social and ethnic fears.
The Spanish defeat and British occupation had offered opportunities for
the large populations of indios and Chinese to abandon their loyalties
to Spanish rule. Indios participated in the plundering of Manila in 1762
and local grievances against alcaldes mayores and parish priests fueled
native rebellions in about ten provinces with the explicit support of the
principalia.160 The Chinese community in Manila, with which relations
had always been very volatile, responded eagerly to British moves to open
up Manila to foreign trade, which created favorable circumstances for the
development of local exports.161 The conflict reinforced the conviction of
the colonial officialdom that the heart of the Chinese belonged to China
and that the loyalty of indios was erratic.162 In 1766, those Christian
Chinese who had collaborated with the invading forces were expelled
and anti-Chinese regulations were reasserted.
In contrast, Chinese mestizos, whose role in the islands’ economy had
steadily expanded, by and large did not side with the Chinese against the
were extended to enlisted personnel with the intention to attract local elites – and
their finances – to the militia ranks. Lyle McAlister, The Fuero Militar in New Spain,
1764–1800 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1957).
159 Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 74, 77.
160 J. Kathirithamby–Wells, “The Age of Transition: The Mid-Eighteenth to the Early
Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Tarling, 228–
75.
161 Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 48–52.
162 The testimonies of Juan Cencelli, colonel of the Regiment of the King, in 1779 (AGI
Filipinas 929 exp.16 f.356) and Governor Berenguer y Marquina in 1788 are represen-
tative examples of this (AGI Filipinas 787).
Spanish colonial government. Chinese mestizo troops were part of the

resistance forces that Governor Anda y Salazar cobbled together north of
Manila against the British and their Philippine allies – Chinese Christians
and Muslims from Sulu and Mindanao.163 Some mestizos de sangley
even assisted in rebuilding the shattered economy.164 The ethnic and
social space of the Manila area was changing rapidly at the end of the
eighteenth century. A prime example is that Chinese mestizos rose to eco-
nomic and social prominence after 1741 as the contraction of Chinese
population in both Manila and its nearby provinces by the expulsions
of 1755 and 1766 reduced economic competition.165 Some scholars have
seen these Chinese mestizos as proto-middle class because they fully par-
ticipated in these economic changes. Mestizos de sangley supplied raw
materials, moved export crops from the provinces to Manila, and dis-
tributed imported goods, trades previously dominated by the Chinese.166
The soaring Chinese mestizo population had reached about 120,000 by
the turn of the nineteenth century.167
Against this complex and changing backdrop, long-term considera-
tions about the meager Spanish presence and the ethnic imbalance that
had always characterized the colonial society of Manila and its hinterland
came to the fore. Moreover, these considerations substantially shaped
reformist initiatives related to the defense of the islands. The events of
1762 had made painfully evident that the Spanish military power in the
Philippines had been consistently declining and that this had created a
military dependency on native and non-native auxiliaries.168 Colonial
authorities in the islands, though, were reluctant to accept that the assis-
tance of indio and mestizo populations was of the utmost importance for
the Philippines to remain under Spanish control. In fact, it was this same
dependency that officials tried to sidestep by requesting more manpower
from New Spain.
163 Tracy, Manila Ransomed, 32–55.

164 Wealthy Chinese mestizos like Antonio Tuason provided critical financial assistance
to the defense of the archipelago. Ruth De Llobet, “Orphans of Empire: Bourbon
Reforms, Constitutional Impasse, and the Rise of Filipino Creole Consciousness in an
Age of Revolution” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2011), 62–63.
165 Wickberg, The Chinese, 25–30. For a recent review of the increasingly prominent role
of Chinese mestizos in the Philippine colonial society, see Slack, “Arming Chinese
Mestizos,” 69–70.
166 Wickberg, The Chinese, 127–135. David Joel Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 159–63. Fradera, “Historical Origins.”
167 Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 68.
168 Ibid., 68–70.
The fiscal head of the Real Audiencia of Manila, Francisco Leandro

de Viana, wrote a reflection in 1765 often cited for its laying out of the
bases for new economic policies in the Philippines.169 The memorial of
this Basque lawyer was also an analysis of the military weaknesses that
the conflict with the British had made so conspicuous. In his opinion, the
defeat had further jeopardized the honor and prestige of Spain in the
Philippines.170 Moreover, a recent rebellion in Pangasinan in western
Luzon persuaded Viana that a generalized uprising was to be expected
at any moment. In this regard, Viana proposed to upgrade the islands’
fortifications and to increase the number of Mexican soldiers in Manila
and in the nearby principal port of Cavite from 2,000 to 4,000. Viana
considered Mexicans to be brave, obedient, and very tough, and he was
not alone in this belief. There was no evidence that americanos sided with
the enemy in 1762. On the contrary, images of their brave performance
populated the memory of the inhabitants of the archipelago.171 Although
“they displayed all vices that are proper to men,” Viana was confident of
the deterrent effect of discipline and punishments. Notwithstanding his
passionate praise of Mexicans, Viana considered it “unavoidable” that
several hundred veterans from Spain serve as officers if the islands were
to have “respectable” troops.172
Later governments echoed Viana’s recommendations. The British
occupation was followed by several decades of intensive campaigns to
rebuild and strengthen the military and civil structures of Manila, which
had been gravely damaged by the bombardment.173 Expenditures for
military wages, fortifications, maritime defense, coastal protection, naval
169 Francisco Leandro de Viana, “Demostración del mı́sero deplorable estado de las Islas
Philipinas; de la necesidad de abandonarlas o mantenerlas con fuerzas respetables; de los
inconvenientes de lo primero y de las ventajas de lo segundo; de lo que pueden producir
a la Real Hacienda; de la navegación, extensión y utilidades de su comercio,” Manila,
10 Feb. 1765, Newberry Library, Chicago, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection,
MS 1452 no. 2. Viana (1730–1804) supported the creation of a trading company to
establish direct commerce between Spain and the Philippines via the Cape of Good
Hope. Borja, Basques in the Philippines, 63–66.
170 Viana, “Demostración,” chap. 1 (this source is unpaginated).
171 Friar Nicolás Cora, provincial of the Dominican order, admitted in 1788 “there is
no doubt that [the Mexicans’] mischief upsets their superiors,” but “their loyal chests
are some other incontestable walls.” Friar Nicolás Cora to Governor Berenguer y
Marquina, San Juan del Monte, 7 Sept. 1788, AGI, Filipinas, vol. 787.
172 Viana, “Demostración,” chap. 3.
173 On the maintenance of civil buildings, fortifications, and other military structures in
the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, see AGI Filipinas 787, 915, 926–27, 929; AGI Ultramar
583; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas, Madrid (hereafter cited as CSIC)
riel 1164 legs.1, 3 (1810–1811).
construction, and crew training increased accordingly.174 As for Viana’s

proposal to double the number of Mexican troops, governors and other
officials concurred that a larger Spanish and Mexican cultural presence
was necessary to tighten the empire’s grip in the Philippines. The idea
was most eloquently captured in the mid-1780s by Governor Basco y
Vargas when he said to the Minister of the Indies José de Gálvez that
an “equilibrium . . . must exist in these far-off lands between white and
indigenous people to remove all reasons for distrust.”175 In the colonial
ethnic hierarchy, Spanish blood was preferred, but the daunting distances
and the realities of recurring war in Europe allowed Spain to play only a
minor role in supplying its Pacific colony with manpower.176 New Spain
was the most reliable proposition for procuring troops, but as time would
prove, what Manila needed in human resources and what Mexico City
could – or wanted to – provide were not necessarily the same thing.
The initiative to transport Mexican recruits and vagrants in the post-
1764 era is one way in which local agendas guided strategies of defense
in an increasingly threatened Pacific world. Another such initiative is
the establishment of auxiliary units of Chinese mestizos in 1779. Slack
reckons these militias as an important venue for the social, political, and
economic advancement of this ethnic group.177 Similarly, Buschmann
has analyzed the role of the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the
exploration to heretofore-uncharted Pacific regions in the 1770s. Taking
over metropole-like functions, Mexico City and Lima maneuvered to
enhance the maritime capabilities of their territories, at the same time
becoming active centers for the learning and producing of knowledge.
The viceroy of Peru Manual de Amat y Juniet (1761–76) sent expeditions
to the Easter Islands and Tahiti that combined religious and geopolitical
goals.178 The viceroy of Mexico Antonio Marı́a de Bucareli y Ursúa
(1771–79) created a naval department in San Blas, point of departure
174 Fradera, Filipinas, 150.

175 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.5 f.238 (1784).
176 In the early 1780s Manila asked that new battalions be sent from the Iberian Peninsula,
but Madrid could only respond with the deportation of criminals and deserters. This
proved to be a phenomenal waste of resources and lives, because most men fled or died
during the journey or arrived in the Philippines in a very debilitated condition. Several
files in the following volumes at the AGN contain information on the escape attempts
of European prisoners in Veracruz: AGN Filipinas 36 exps.7–10 f.234–289, and AGN
Filipinas 57 exps.1–8 f.1–190.
178 The Tahiti foray was also an attempt to establish a mission but Franciscan missionaries
failed and had to return to Peru in 1776. Viceroy Amat claimed that some of these expe-
ditions produced detailed charts on the littoral regions surrounding Peru. Buschmann,
Iberian Visions, 122–24.
for forays that ventured all the way from San Francisco to Alaska in
the North American Northwest coast in 1774–79.179 Both viceroyalties
became vital pieces for the empire’s defense in the Pacific as they sought
to extend the defensive perimeter of North and South America against
foreign incursions, as if the Pacific was a continuation of the colonial
realm of the Americas.180
In this context, the story of forced trans-Pacific migration illustrates
how colonial centers benefitted from the reformist frenzy and the climate
of danger created by the presence of foreign powers in the area. Indeed,
New Spain’s response to Manila’s requests for manpower bespeaks a
reaction of strictly local variables. Viana’s memorial and other similar
documents directly influenced the urgent requests for Mexican troops
that all governments in the Philippines uttered after 1764. Ignoring the
ready availability and good disposition that authorities in the islands had
noted about some indios and the Chinese mestizos, authorities wanted
to reinforce the Spanish Philippines with white, strong, healthy men who
could work in Manila’s fortifications and urban reforms, who would
submit to military discipline, and who were clean of vice. Mexico City
dispatched to Manila around 4,000 individuals between 1765 and 1811,
of which about 800 were men who had been sentenced to military service
or public works. The transfer of recruits and convicts to the Philippines
was habitual practice since the early 1600s but few individuals guilty
of serious crimes can be found in the passenger manifestos in the late
eighteenth century. Furthermore, after 1783 vagrants had clearly become
a target, amounting to an important portion of the transported convicts.
Why would Mexico City send this type of men when Manila clearly asked
for a very different kind? The following chapters will explain that New
Spain’s difficulties in finding enough suitable men and the perceptions
of colonial officials about increased delinquency and social disorder in
central Mexico led viceregal authorities to take advantage of Manila’s
plight by disposing of troublesome social elements.
Conclusion
In the Spanish colonial puzzle, the annexation of the Philippines at the
end of the sixteenth century took on a different meaning for Spain and
179 Missionary goals were also important for Bucareli y Ursúa’s expeditions, in which
Catholic missions were founded along the coast of Alta California. Warren L. Cook,
Flood Tide of Empire. Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973).
180 Buschmann, Iberian Visions, ch.4.
New Spain. On the one hand, Madrid did not gain a traditional colony.
The archipelago was neither economically exploited nor totally domi-
nated from a political and administrative point of view. The metropole
acquired instead a window into Asian commerce and Chinese commercial
networks, a platform to project the Spanish power in Southeast Asia, and
a spearhead to deter foreign advancements. On the other hand, the Mex-
ican viceroyalty was in better position than Spain to benefit, especially
commercially, from the new trans-Pacific connection. In many ways, New
Spain and its inhabitants thought of the Philippines as an extension of
the Spanish American realm.
The Pacific passage acquired notable importance for the histories of
colonial Mexico and the Spanish Philippines. The Manila galleons were
much more than a channel to facilitate trade between culturally remote
peoples. Products, ideas, and peoples circulated across the Pacific Ocean
and beyond for 250 years. The connections that were created had a long-
lasting and multifaceted effect on the social, political, religious, cultural,
and economic spheres of life at both ends of the route. Discussions about
dominance and metropole-like behaviors are inspiring in that they open
up new venues to rethink the place of so-called peripheral colonies in the
empire but more than tentacles of power, these connections became the
backbones of histories that complemented and affected each other. After
all, inter-colonial relations shaped the Philippine and Mexican colonial
societies more than their subjection to Spain did. Simultaneously, some-
where along the line the archipelago evolved from a site of enormous
promise to a dumping ground of recruits and convicts.
A glance at pre-1762 Philippines–New Spain connections allows us
to better appreciate change and continuity in the development of trans-
Pacific linkages and to understand how local forces determined the out-
come of the Spanish imperial policies in the region. In the wake of the
British occupation, Mexico City received pressing requests from the office
of the governor-general in Manila for white, serviceable soldiers and
workers. Madrid was forced to rely on the viceroyalty of Mexico to pro-
vide the Western Pacific with the necessary manpower, yet again. But, as
the following chapters will show, in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury a whole set of new circumstances influenced the decisions of viceregal
authorities about who to send to the Philippines and for what reasons.
Enlightened principles about order, efficiency, and productivity were
making their way into New Spain and the Philippines; utilitarian punish-
ments had become the most prevalent form of discipline in the Mexican
judicial system; and the problem of vagrancy had been connected to a very
worrisome level of criminal activity in Mexico City. All facts considered,

late colonial Mexican authorities had no compunction about regarding
the Philippines as a place of second category to where vagrants and
incorrigible family members could be sentenced to military service or
public works.
Despite the efforts of the viceregal office in Mexico, the men trans-
ported to the Philippines never fulfilled the expectations of the governor-
generals in Manila because New Spain had to face similar pressures to
strengthen its military defenses after 1762. Chapter 2 will look at the crim-
inal justice system in eighteenth-century New Spain, where undermanned
presidios yearned for a share of the ever-widening spectrum of offend-
ers who were being punished with convict labor. The chapter will also
examine the procedures of military recruitment in Mexican regiments,
which invariably resorted to vagrants, delinquents, and other undesir-
able social elements. For these reasons, Mexican and Philippine colonial
governments were left vying over the same pool of able bodies.
2
Convicts and Soldiers in the Spanish Empire
There was a widespread belief among Philippine and Mexican authori-

ties that there existed an overabundance of vagrants in the viceroyalty.1
Therefore, it warrants some consideration that the presumed avail-
ability of manpower in New Spain could never fulfill the Philippines’
expectations. From 1765 to 1811, between 3,700 and 4,000 individuals
were forcefully transported from Spain and New Spain to Manila (see
Appendix). An estimated 3,219 (or 2,923)2 people were recruits and vet-
erans. Officials rarely distinguished between these two categories in their
counts, merging them both in one single aggregate. However, based on
some years when the differentiation was made, it can be argued that about
30 percent were regularly veterans and 70 percent were young recruits.
In addition to recruits and veterans, about 780 convicts were shipped
during the same period; vagrants constituted the lion’s share after 1783.
I suspect that a large number of “recruits” were actually “vagrants,” as
many individuals preferred to voluntarily sign up for military service in
Manila than to be transported as a felon. Civilian and military prisoners,
as well as individuals who had been spontaneously denounced by their
relatives or other community members, are included in the count of 780
convicts.
In the archival record, soldiers and convicts who passed from New
Spain to the Philippines were largely undistinguishable from each other in
1 Viceroy Marquis of Amarillas made this argument to Governor Arandı́a in 1757 to

encourage him to request as many men as needed. AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Filipinas
5895 exp.6 (1757).
2 For the year 1772 the sources are at odds about the number of recruits shipped to Manila,
with 451 or 155 as two possible figures.
80
Convicts and Soldiers in the Spanish Empire 81
the latter part of the eighteenth century. Because of the constant shortfall
of effectives, judicial and military procedures were indeed inextricably
linked in Spain and in late colonial New Spain. Felons could be sentenced
to forced labor in a presidio but also to military service; deserters and
wayward soldiers were frequently punished with penal servitude in a for-
tified military settlement. Sustained manpower shortages characterized
other early modern European armies as well; a case in point is Portugal,
whose military was closely linked to criminals and their punishment from
1550 to the end of the eighteenth century.3 Judicial administration and
military service, two seemingly unrelated systems, were actually inter-
dependent. While convenient for the colonial state, which could benefit
from readily available cheap labor, this intertwinement was one of the
reasons for the deficiencies that beset the defense system of the Spanish
territories in the Americas and the Pacific.
By looking at judicial punishment and military service in the Spanish
empire in the late 1700s, this chapter answers two questions: why New
Spain sent mainly convicts to the Philippines when colonial officials in
Manila were requesting soldiers; and why, despite continuous shipments
from the 1760s to the early 1810s, Manila continued to consistently
report a shortage of human assets. The issuance of sentences to convict
labor or service in a military post was a common practice in the admin-
istration of criminal justice in the Spanish empire. In other words, the
process by which an individual joined the armed forces was by and large
a non-voluntary action. Inadequate recruitment tactics and the reliance of
military authorities on convict labor placed the defense of New Spain and
the strategic stronghold of Manila in a delicate predicament, especially
after 1762. Thus, my answers to these two questions add depth to our
understanding of the difficult military situation the viceroyalty was in at
the end of the 1700s. In the aftermath of the British occupation, the new
condition of Manila as a high-priority destination for soldiers and con-
victs constituted a new variable that introduced notable instability and
strain in the system of Mexican presidios. Competition for manpower
in New Spain intensified because this system was already undergoing
extreme pressure after the Bourbon authorities initiated an overhaul of
the American defensive system also after 1762. Imperial designs and obli-
gations with a far-flung archipelago were highly incompatible with local
3 Coates also reports an overlap in the meanings of single man, soldier, and degredado in
his study of state-sponsored penal exile in the Portuguese empire (Coates, Convicts and
Orphans, 93).
military commitments and political burdens and had a negative effect on

the capability of the viceregal office to man other presidios in the realm
of New Spain.
Military Needs in Late Bourbon Philippines and New Spain

Regulations for Manila’s veteran regiment in 1769 specified that at least
one fourth of the men be americanos; to this end, royal orders tasked
the viceregal office in New Spain with annually recruiting one hundred
Mexicans. In addition, recruits and convicts from New Spain were also in
demand in five fortified settlements that were in operation at this time in
the Philippines. Two of these presidios, Manila and Cavite, were located
at the center of the Spanish power in the island of Luzon. Here, the for-
tifications and other military structures damaged by the British invasion
were in need of fundamental repairs. In addition, the Royal Foundry
constantly required convicts to forge cannons and artillery supplies for
military units in the Philippines and even New Spain.4 Eighteen miles
south of Manila, Cavite is in a hook-shaped peninsula jutting out into
Manila Bay. The enclave is surrounded by sea and only a narrow pas-
sage of ten yards wide connects it to the mainland. The authorities at
the stronghold were a governor and the commandant of the arsenal, and
they relied on a battalion of 150 men.5 In Cavite, the presidio inmates
were the most important source of labor supply for a range of activities
related to this city’s status as the primary port and shipyard of the colony.
Convicts worked here as carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, and bricklay-
ers, building, among other things, the galleons for the Manila–Acapulco
trade.6
At the outer fringes of the Philippines, the presidios of Calamianes,
in the western Palawan islands, and Misamis and Zamboanga, in Min-
danao, were crucial spearheads against the threat of Muslim pirates from
the south but these outposts were always undermanned and vulnera-
ble. Zamboanga was the largest of the three, garrisoned with a military
governor, two permanent coastguard galleons, and an infantry and
4 AGI Filipinas 929 exp.25 (1785).

5 The French navy officer and explorer Jean-François de Galaup, Count of Lapérouse,
documented this information while visiting the archipelago in 1787. Jean-François de
Galaup, Travel Accounts of the Islands, 1513–1787 (Manila: Filipiana Book Guild,
1971), 371.
6 As noted in Joaquı́n Martı́nez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las islas Filipinas o mis viajes
por este paı́s (Madrid: Filipiana Book Guild, 1893), 150–52. His Estadismo was likely
composed sometime in 1803–05.
artillery company with a total of about 600 soldiers by the mid-1700s.7

Here, men served in coastguard galleons or infantry companies in an
attempt to protect the area against Muslim incursions from Mindanao
and Sulu. They also participated in the organization of punitive expedi-
tions against the Moors.8
Besides the recourse to voluntary workers and convict labor, the only
available mechanism to execute community projects and tasks related to
the administration of the Spanish state in the archipelago was the system
of polos. Every year, tributary indios between the ages of sixteen and sixty
had to provide forty days of personal service. Local authorities marshaled
polistas to repair roads, bridges, and official and religious buildings; to
serve on board as sailors, rowers, and gunners; to work at the foundries;
to provide military service in patrol vessels and exploration expeditions;
to till uncultivated land; and to cut down and haul logs to the shipyards
where also polistas constructed commercial galleons, frigates, and gal-
leys. In theory, polistas should receive a payment for their work but this
was not always the case in practice. Even when they were remunerated,
the colonial administration appropriated the significant difference that
existed between labor market prices and the amount paid to polistas.9
Principalia and their families were exempt from the duty to render forced
labor. An exemption could be secured as well by paying a fee called the
falla.
The system of polos became a service hateful to the native population
of the Philippines not only because of the onerous nature of the work but
also because of its many irregularities. Complaints about the fraudulent
collection of the fallas and the harsh treatment of polistas started to
come to light in the late 1500s and had considerably increased by the
1620s.10 Labor draft affected the capacity of communities to produce
agricultural goods and pay the tribute, among other things because the
polo time usually exceeded the specified forty days. That the Spanish
Crown had more paternalistic and benevolent aspirations is inferred from
the fact that several reform decrees tried to check on the exploitation of
natives. In 1609, King Philip III established that workers could not be
drafted during the planting and harvest times. This royal document also
addressed anomalies in the organization of forced labor by prohibiting
7 Garcı́a González, El gobierno, 14.

8 CSIC ser. Consultas riel 302 (1804).
9 Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas y la construcción colonial de Filipinas
(1565–1789),” in España y el Pacı́fico, ed. Antonio Garcı́a-Abásolo González (Córdoba:
Dirección General de Asuntos Culturales, 1997), 37–70.
10 Cushner, Spain, 113–16.
the reservas. This was the procedure by which indios subjected to polos
were distributed to the local nobility of gobernadorcillos and cabezas
de barangay who paid a sum of money to have indios work in their
lands and houses. The practice of “reserving” indios for the particular
purposes of the principalia not only was illegal but also caused the neglect
of community projects. Despite prohibitions to the contrary, the reservas
continued well into the eighteenth century.11
Labor became a perennial problem particularly in shipbuilding. Ship-
yard-related activities were the most exacting service that the Spanish
authorities demanded from polistas. Besides, abuses regularly accompa-
nied the recruitment and labor of these work-gangs. In the woodcutting
process thousands of workers were required to set about on a long and
arduous trek into the mountains, cut trees down, and bring back the
lumber. This endeavor entailed for workers to leave their homes typically
for more than a month. Shipbuilding working conditions led to native
revolts in the mid-1600s, usually supported by the outspoken opposition
of the missionaries. Royal edicts in the seventeenth century prescribed that
draft workers were not to be used when voluntary Chinese, Japanese, and
native labor was available, and that polistas were not to be transported
long distances to different climates. However, these protective measures
were shrugged off and strenuous labor terms continued to characterize
shipbuilding. Distance from Spain endowed local interests in the Philip-
pines with room to maneuver in managing labor policy, and the war
against the Dutch or the Muslims was always a justification for increas-
ing shipyard uses.12 Forced labor for the government was one of the most
controverted proposals for the reform of the administration in the Philip-
pines in the nineteenth century, although it was not abolished until the
outbreak of the revolution for independence in 1898.13 In the meantime,
for ideologically committed Spanish legislators and Philippine officials,
the forced transportation of Mexican recruits and convicts to Manila
could potentially ease labor pressures on the native Filipinos and defuse
social unrest rising from the corrupted administration of the polos.
Meanwhile, in New Spain, soldiers and laborers were also desperately
sought after when the viceregal office embarked on a large-scale military
11 Sánchez Gómez, “Las élites nativas,” 38.

12 Cushner, Spain, 117–24.
13 Ibid., 126. Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “Los debates sobre la regulación de la prestación
personal en Filipinas en el siglo XIX,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 57, no. 2 (2000):
577–99.
overhaul in the last four decades of the eighteenth century. As seen before,
military reorganization to transform rotating battalions into fixed units
with a more rigid discipline had started in the Caribbean and Gulf of
Mexico before 1762. But it was after this date when the Spanish govern-
ment revitalized its commitment to strengthen the defenses of the Spanish
possessions in New Spain and the Caribbean provinces. Military provi-
sions now aimed at creating a much larger military establishment through-
out the colonies, while the construction of massive fortifications in key
Spanish American ports soon started to absorb vast amounts of penal
labor. Mexico’s situado covered most of the recruitment, equipment, and
running costs of military effectives as well as the renovation and build-
ing of fortifications and vessels. Viceregal authorities were able to shift
income from mainland Mexico to bolster Caribbean defenses because of
an impressive mining boom and an overall economic expansion in the
second half of the century.14
One of the priorities of imperial defense planning after 1762 was to
field competitive land forces in the American possessions. Accordingly,
Lieutenant General Juan de Villalba and a large cadre of military per-
sonnel were dispatched to New Spain in 1764 to reorganize the mil-
itary forces. Separate commissions were also dispatched to Cuba and
Puerto Rico, while for other places the Crown relied on local authori-
ties to reform local defenses. In New Spain, Villalba took measures to
increase the size of the fixed garrison (ejército de dotación) to three full
regiments.15 In the following decades, the number of garrison troops
tripled, reaching about 8,800 effectives by 1800.16
During the eighteenth century it became a standard practice to supple-
ment the armed forces in New Spain and the Philippines at times of war
or other emergencies with reserve battalions and regiments sent directly
from Spain and known as the ejército de refuerzo. The enlargement of
these units gained spectacular speed in New Spain, going from four units
per decade between 1730 and 1750 to twenty units per decade between
1780 and 1800. By 1810, the annual average of soldiers in the reserve
companies was 2,500.17 These reinforcements, however, proved to be a
14 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 94, 115–17.

15 Ibid., 247.
16 Marchena, Oficiales y soldados, 278. Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon
Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 110–
11.
17 Marı́a del Carmen Gómez Pérez, El sistema defensivo americano (Madrid: Editorial
Mapfre, 1992), 46–49.
phenomenal waste of resources and lives. Military historian Marchena

indicates that the men who arrived as ejército de refuerzo in Puerto Rico,
Havana, Veracruz, Cartagena, and Panama were usually soldiers noted
for their problematic behavior in their regiments in Spain.18 The number
of military replacements that from the Iberian Peninsula landed in the
Philippines in the period under study most likely remained in the low
hundreds.19 Manila authorities petitioned the Council of the Indies in
Madrid for the constitution of new infantry units in several occasions,
but it was not until 1803 that the yearned-for battalions were finally
formed. Many men encountered death in the course of the navigation or
while crossing New Spain. The recruits who survived the intercontinental
odyssey arrived in the Philippines too debilitated to withstand the adjust-
ment period to the tropical climate and carry out their terms. Many of
them were later reported to endure miserable material conditions and a
very low morale in Manila.20
Because expanding regular garrisons throughout the Americas was
prohibitively expensive, provincial and urban militia units comprised of
colonial subjects in strategic localities advantageously supplemented the
regular army. Militias had existed in New Spain since the early 1600s but
it was not until the reign of King Charles III when the Spanish Crown
approved the establishment of well-trained, disciplined, and professional
colonial militia units along lines already developed in Spain. The reform
process in the Americas started in Havana when the Spanish monarch
accepted in 1763 the proposal of the captain general of Cuba, Count
of Ricla.21 Using a copy of the Cuban regulation as a model, Villalba
raised in Mexico six provincial militia infantry regiments, two cavalry
regiments, and one dragoon regiment.22 The militia body in New Spain
continued to grow and at the beginning of the nineteenth century there
were about 22,000 effectives.23 In addition, the office of the viceroy was
also responsible for staffing other units in Havana, Puerto Rico, Santo
18 Marchena, Oficiales y soldados, 341.

19 My estimation of 200–300 men stems from scattered mentions in the correspondence of
Philippine authorities about the performance of these men in the islands and the troubles
they caused.
20 AGN, Filipinas 58 exp.2 f.36 (1806). AGN Filipinas 57 exp.7 f.177–186 (1807). AGN
Filipinas 57 exp.8 f.187–189 (1807).
21 Kuethe, Cuba, 150; Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 237–39.
22 Archer, “Charles III and Defense Policy for New Spain, 1759–1788,” in Paesi Mediter-
ranei e America Latina, ed. Gaetano Massa (Roma: Centro di Studi Americanistici,
1982), 190–200.
23 Alexander Humboldt, Ensayo polı́tico sobre el reino de la Nueva España (Mexico:
Editorial Porrúa, 1966), 554–57.
Domingo, Campeche, San Blas, Acapulco, and selected points along the
northern presidial lines where the royal navy and the fixed regiments were
in continual need of fresh troops.24
The events of 1762–63 had conjured up the fear that, in the hands
of the enemy, the ports of Havana, San Juan, and Santo Domingo could
serve as a base for an attack on Spanish shipping and threaten the security
of Veracruz and the rest of New Spain. In order to shore up the military
defense system and execute public works programs, a workforce of black
slaves, free laborers, and some local prisoners was initially deployed in
the region. By the late 1760s, however, the number of slaves ebbed while
that of presidiarios (prisoners) increased steadily. Black slaves were too
costly because of high mortality rates, and free laborers also required
daily expenditures. To keep costs down, presidiarios came to play an
important role in the completion of Spanish fortification plans in the
Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico during the second half of the eighteenth
century.25
There was certainly more than enough work for recruits and prisoners
at these sites. In Havana, reformers developed plans that included the
reconstruction of the fortress El Morro, the erection of two new forts,
the expansion of the garrison, the cleaning of the harbor, and the pre-
vention of flooding with chain pumps.26 These initiatives, along with
municipal programs such as street paving and the construction of a water
supply system, created a severe demand for soldiers, navy personnel, and
forced workers.27 In the 1780s and 1790s the labor demands in Cuba
far exceeded those of other enclaves in the region. In 1787 the governor
of Cuba requested the viceroy of Mexico 2,000 presidiarios to satisfy
the requirements of the new fortifications in Havana alone.28 Further-
more, the Spanish government in Havana had military obligations that
stretched beyond Cuba, such as the regiments of Guatemala, Saint Augus-
tine (Florida), Pensacola, and New Orleans. Manpower was thus of the
essence in Havana but the Spanish officials in the island were fraught
with numerous difficulties when trying to gather enough military person-
nel and laborers.29
24 Vinson, Bearing Arms, 13.

25 Pike, Penal Servitude, 137.
26 For a description of the military plans set in motion in Cuba, see Kuethe, Cuba.
27 AGI Ultramar 170 (1773). Correspondence in this volume also reveals that the demand
for forced laborers was a constant item in the agenda of the Spanish authorities in Cuba.
29 In 1791, Guatemala solicited vagrants from Havana to reinforce the local regiment of
veterans. Havana’s authorities replied in the negative arguing that men were needed
The Bourbon plans for defense also brought some definite improve-
ments in the fortifications and coastal artillery of Veracruz and Puerto
Rico, along with new reasons to bolster the flow of convict laborers to
these destinations.30 The fortress-prison of San Juan de Ulúa had a long
history of being home to abundant and diverse criminals.31 Foreign pris-
oners were routinely detained in this presidio, while brigades of Mexican
presidiarios worked in San Juan de Ulúa, Veracruz, and environs in the
second half of the eighteenth century.32 Additionally, Veracruz was the
place to which most Indian convicts, customarily exempted from mil-
itary service, were sentenced.33 The reformist program in Puerto Rico
was as broad and vigorous as in the rest of the Spanish Caribbean.34
King Charles III approved in 1765 the use of 445 presidiarios to work
on the reconstruction of the forts of San Felipe del Morro and San
Cristóbal. The largest contingents of prisoners appeared during the most
intense stage of the work, 1771–83, with an acute decline afterwards
that reflects the completion of the major undertakings.35 The intertwine-
ment of forced labor and military recruitment that characterized the
defense system of the Spanish empire became evident in Puerto Rico when
soldiers shipped from Cadiz in 1767 for the reinforcement companies in
New Spain found themselves toiling in the fortifications of this island
instead.36
in Cuba and other destinations in the Gulf of Mexico. Archivo General de Siman-
cas (hereafter cited as AGS), Secretarı́a de Guerra (hereafter cited as SGU) 6943
exp.13 f.6–6v (1791). Meanwhile, the captain general of Cuba had been dispatching
to Saint Augustine members of black free militias who had been sentenced to two
to six years of penal servitude for bad conduct, vices, and insubordination. In 1799,
though, Havana said there were no more workers to be had for Saint Augustine. Jane
Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999),
198–99.
30 Juan Batista González, La estrategia española en América durante el siglo de las luces
(Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 130–32.
31 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 81.
32 Charles F. Nunn, Foreign Immigrants in Early Bourbon Mexico, 1700–1760 (New
33 The criminal behavior of Indians was accorded special consideration. While prosecuted,
it was punished less severely than that of others for the same offense. Indians served
sentences to penal servitude in presidios located, not overseas, but within the jurisdiction
of modern Mexico. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 81.
34 Altagracia Ortiz, Eighteenth-Century Reforms in the Caribbean. Miguel de Muesas,
Governor of Puerto Rico, 1769–76 (East Brunswick, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1983), 38.
35 Pike, Penal Servitude, 122, 138.
36 Marchena, Oficiales y soldados, 343.
The expanding network of presidios in the vast northern frontier and

the populating enterprises in California and the North Pacific were also
pressing worries for the viceregal authorities at this time. By the late
1760s, it had become clear that Northern New Spain was vulnerable to
attack from adjacent non-Spanish lands. The region faced a whole set
of problems, real or imagined: how to defend Louisiana, newly acquired
in 1763; how to protect the North Pacific shores after Britain obtained
Canada from France also in 1763; how to strengthen the Spanish posi-
tion against Russian fur traders who were moving down the northwest
coast from Alaska; and how to ward off the continuing incursions of hos-
tile Indian tribes on Spanish settlements.37 The northern territories were
too large and distant for Mexico City to efficiently administer them, so
Bourbon authorities elevated them to a commandancy general (coman-
dancia general) known as the Interior Provinces of New Spain. The cre-
ation of this comandancia in 1776 aimed at exercising greater surveil-
lance over growing septentrional settlement patterns. This administra-
tive unit included at one time or another Nueva Vizcaya, New Mexico,
Sinaloa, Sonora, California, and Coahuila.38 Finally, the acquisition of
the Louisiana territory in 1762 heightened the need to adjust the defenses
of the northern frontier and contain the British east of the Mississippi
river. In this context, New Orleans became one more recipient of subsi-
dies and men from New Spain.39
Convict deportation to the Philippines is the least known leg of this
broad, flexible, and keenly competitive network of penal institutions,
but its relevance within this system was notable. The Spanish American
presidio system faced a perennial shortage of penal labor in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. In the case of Havana, for example, Pike
has explained this deficit in terms of the volume and intensity of the work
and the high rates of desertion, death, and releases.40 But deportations to
Manila might have had as well an important impact on the obstacles that
Mexican authorities encountered when trying to provide reinforcements
37 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), 205. Alan Taylor has argued that the vague knowledge the Spanish had
of their overstretched domains and the failure to recognize the real weaknesses of their
enemies on the peripheries of the Spanish empire led to over exaggerate the British and
Russian threat. See Alan Taylor, American Colonies. The Settling of North America
(New York: Penguin, 2002), 445–50.
38 Weber, Spanish Frontier, 224–27; John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Fron-
tier 1513–1821 (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1974), 167–90.
to the outlying regions of the viceroyalty. The ratio of those condemned to

the Philippines to the total of Mexicans sentenced to presidio is slippery,
among other reasons because under the category “recruits” there were
an unknown number of individuals who had been accused of vagrancy
but had voluntarily signed up for military service in the Philippines. After
collating my figures with the number of individuals punished with presidio
by the Acordada between 1765 and 1811, it appears that while in some
years the ratio could have been 2 percent, during the 1770s sentences to
Manila constituted up to 30 percent of all presidio convictions.41
After reviewing the military and other defense-related commitments
that preoccupied Manila and Mexico City after 1763 it becomes apparent
that on the one hand, while the Philippines were in dire need for soldiers
and labor, New Spain was in an equally tight corner. On the other hand,
the punishment of vagrants to penal servitude for a period of four to
eight years in a far off destination like the Philippines was an exceptional
penalty in the Mexican judicial system, since vagrants were not usually
condemned to presidio in the first place. In light of the considerations set
forth thus far, the decision to deport these individuals to the Philippines
was not inescapable because Mexico City clearly had commitments in
much closer locations where manpower was constantly deficient. That
there were other viable destinations for convicts was well understood
by the authorities in the Philippines. When in the early 1730s Governor
Fernando Valdés y Tamón requested to King Philip V that New Spain
stop sending convicts of serious crimes, he pointed to the “many presidios
and other means to punish criminals” that existed in the viceroyalty.42
Madrid then ordered Mexico City in 1734 to assign convicts to other
locations, but the interdiction was only observed until the mid-1750s and
repeatedly ignored after that.43 Half a century later, King Charles III was
compelled to reissue the same prohibition.44
41 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 114; Alicia Bazán Alarcón, “El real Tribunal de la Acor-
dada y la delincuencia en la Nueva España,” Historia Mexicana 13, no. 3 (1964): 334,
337.
42 AGN Reales Cédulas (Originales) 53 exp.54 f.141v (1736).
43 Norman F. Martin, “Pobres, mendigos y vagabundos en Nueva España, 1702–1766:
Antecedentes y soluciones presentadas,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 8, no. 8
(1985): 99–126.
44 Royal order, Madrid, May 5, 1784. Ventura Beleña, Recopilación sumaria, vol. 2, 308.
This royal order was also ignored. In 1791, Governor Berenguer y Marquina reminded
Viceroy Count of Revillagigedo of the 1784 royal order that excluded those convicted
of infamous crimes from troop shipments from Mexico. CSIC ser. Consultas riel 301
(1791).
Why the Philippines?

If the Philippines were not a foregone conclusion for these convicts, how
should we interpret that New Spain’s government channeled some of
its available and much-needed manpower to a destination that compli-
cated the logistics of transportation exponentially? If the motivation was
to reform these individuals and at the same time have them be of ser-
vice to the state, then Veracruz, Pensacola, Puerto Rico, and Havana
were as satisfactory as any other military outpost in the Spanish empire.
Rather than judicial reasons, imperial projections can better explain why
the colonial government recurrently resorted to Manila. New Spain inten-
tionally assigned deserters, vagrants, and other convicts to the Philippines
to reinforce the role of the archipelago in the Bourbons’ defense planning
for the Spanish empire. It was probably in consonance with imperial cal-
culations as well that gente llovida (stowaways in merchant vessels from
Spain) were forcefully transported to the Philippines in the seventeenth
century, a practice that persisted in 1769 when unoccupied Spaniards in
New Spain were sent to Manila with the hopes that they would find a
proper vocation in the archipelago.45
There were other considerations that weighed in the decision to opt
for the Philippines as a destination for convict labor and that further
illustrate the distinct, important, and not necessarily favorable place the
archipelago occupied in the Mexican colonial imagination. The image
of military conscripts and gangs of shackled prisoners being conducted
to Acapulco across the viceroyalty had been entrenched in the minds of
New Spain’s inhabitants since the end of the sixteenth century, when
Mexico City started to regularly send recruits and criminals to Manila.
Despite the changing international situation in the Pacific after 1763, in
the understanding of Mexican colonial administrators the military needs
of the Philippines were only second to those of Veracruz or Havana,
and therefore they utilized Manila to clean the reputation of other
enclaves that were regarded more decisive in the defense network of the
viceroyalty.
Additionally, the Philippines were considered a prime place for pun-
ishment. Local authorities claimed that the correction of convicts could
be accomplished in the western edge of the Pacific Ocean in a manner
that could not be done in other presidios of New Spain. Even distressed
parents reckoned the Philippines as a preferred location for punishment
45 November 24. Ventura Beleña, Recopilación sumaria, vol. 2, 182.

(see Chapter 5). Living conditions in a Philippine presidio were not more
wretched than in San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz or El Morro in Havana,
but other features made the archipelago unique and much more challeng-
ing. The chances of a presidiario to return from Manila to Mexico were
minimal. Trans-Pacific communications were less frequent and more pre-
carious than between Mexico City and other destinations in the viceroy-
alty, and the Philippine climate was notorious for being very harsh on
Europeans.
As usual auxiliaries in expeditions of pacification in the 1500s, Mexi-
cans knew first-hand that most of the Philippine territory remained well
beyond Spanish control. Hence, the Philippines were the perfect place
to confront the “other.” While in large areas of New Spain the indige-
nous population was significantly reduced and the process of Spanish
acculturation solidly established, in the Philippines only the area sur-
rounding Manila was under effective Spanish control. The presence of
Chinese, Japanese, native Filipinos, and Muslims was dense and disquiet-
ing for colonial authorities. In the 1780s, the Real Tribunal del Consulado
(Royal Tribunal of Commerce) referred to Manila as the “Asian exile or
prison for the Spanish people.”46
During the insurrectionary events of the 1810s it became even clearer
that Mexican authorities conceived of the Philippines as a place of punish-
ment or, at least, as a suitable venue to which individuals who threatened
the existing political order could be removed. The Tribunal of Infidencias
had been created in 1809 to rule with specificity on sedition toward, or
emanating from, the military forces. Between 1810 and 1821, this tri-
bunal sentenced to the Philippines and the Mariana Islands dozens of
individuals (infidentes) who had been accused of infidelity to the Crown
for deserting royal forces, raising revolt, and/or recruiting rebels.47 In
many of these cases, judges commuted a death sentence to exile in the
Pacific for six or eight years.48 Obviously, royalist forces believed that
a high degree of commitment to insurgent behavior deserved a more
46 AGI Filipinas 787 (1788). The members of the Consulado noted that the Pearl of
the Orient had significantly declined since the 1750s and that Spain and America had
“healthier soils” and a more moderate climate.
47 According to Andrés del Castillo Sánchez, the total number was higher than forty.
Andrés del Castillo Sánchez, “Los infidentes mexicanos en Filipinas,” in El Galeón de
Manila: Un mar de historias, ed. Gemma Cruz Guerrero et al. (Mexico City: JGH, 1997),
157–73.
48 AGN Infidencias 40 exp.10.
unforgiving condemnation than just confinement in a fortified military

settlement in mainland Mexico or the Caribbean.
Infidentes condemned to the Philippines were young males, frequently
peasants and muleteers, who labored away from more policed, urban
milieus and journeyed constantly. Therefore, they were exposed to the
rhetoric and actions of insurgent groups traveling the countryside. More
importantly, their troubled circumstances launched them into the arms of
the independence movement.49 In March 22, 1817 Madrid prohibited any
further transfer of criminals from Spanish American ports to Manila. The
governors of the Philippines and the Marianas had vehemently objected
to the quality of these felons and had expressed their concern about
the spread of the rebellion in the Spanish Pacific as a result of these
deportations.50
“Difficulties Truthfully Insurmountable”: The Scramble for Able Bodies

Because they faced a similar predicament in the late eighteenth century,
the Philippine and Mexican governments inevitably found themselves
jostling for able bodies. Ultimately, correspondence between viceroys in
Mexico City and general governors in Manila reveals that around 1800,
the viceroyalty had failed to reliably provide soldiers and labor to the
newly established regiments and fortified settlements in New Spain and
the Philippines. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, the
colonial administration in the Philippines regularly expressed disapproval
of the low numbers and the moral and physical condition of recruits
and convicts. The typical response of Mexican authorities to their irri-
tated counterparts in Manila was that at the time of enlistment the men
were physically fit for service. Furthermore, recruiting officers in Mexico
refused to take responsibility for the moral nature of recruits, placing the
burden on the Philippines instead. In 1775 and 1776, Viceroy Bucareli y
Ursúa affirmed to Governor Anda y Salazar that he had taken pains to
ensure that all recruits were of a suitable height and robustness. As far
as their behavior, however, “neither is it easy to be sure about it at the
49 For instance, Abundio Tranquilino, sentenced to eight years in the Mariana Islands, had
fled to “the country of the rebels” because he feared the army would arrest him for
having killed a gambling partner when under the effect of alcohol. AGN Infidencias 120
exp.5 (1813–1814).
50 In 1814, the governor of the Philippines had represented to Madrid that these insurgents
undermined the “constant fidelity” of the natives. AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Reales
Cédulas Originales y Duplicados 4155 exp.18 (1818).
time of their arrest, nor it is the duty of the officials here.”51 Bucareli y
Ursúa sustained that the men who departed from Acapulco were healthy
and vigorous but that the long navigation and the dry diet on board
“might have weakened them and made them more vulnerable to the dif-
ferent and more active temperament of the islands.”52 With noticeable
exasperation, Bucareli y Ursúa delivered to Manila a similar reasoning
every year.53
Notwithstanding the many explanations given, Mexican authorities
were acutely aware of the low quality of the draftees and moreover,
expectations on the matter were very gloomy. In 1787, the ad interim
governing Audiencia in Mexico acknowledged that in order to supply
“the white, honest, and of the best behavior type of recruits that the gov-
ernor demands, there are difficulties truthfully insurmountable.”54 The
Audiencia believed that to forcefully conscript decently behaved indi-
viduals into military service in Manila was “neither attainable nor in
accordance with the maxims of good government.” However, since vol-
unteers did not massively respond to the call of recruiting officers, a
violation of the law is what empowered authorities to coerce them to
enroll. In 1792, Viceroy Count of Revillagigedo conceded that, despite
the efforts to carefully select these men, “I doubt we will find them with
no vices.”55
In every response, Mexico City referred to serious difficulties in draft-
ing men in decent shape because either they had been conscripted in pre-
vious levies or they had been assigned to military posts elsewhere in New
Spain. Philippine authorities watched with dismay how the number of
useful bodies dispatched from New Spain dwindled over the years. As the
1770s drew to a close, objections about insufficient replacements were
received from the Philippines yearly. The reception in Manila of only
twenty-seven men in 1800, a far cry from the hundreds shipped thirty
and twenty years earlier, became the norm for the rest of the decade.56
The lingering notion that New Spain “is plentiful with vagrants and idle
51 AGN Filipinas 12 f.2 (1776).

52 AGN Filipinas 10 f.409 (1775).
53 In 1778, a clearly annoyed Bucareli y Ursúa informed Governor Pedro de Sarrió that he
had personally supervised the enlistment of the replacements. AGN Filipinas 12 f.290
(1778).
54 AGI Filipinas 929 exp.941 f.942v (1787).
55 AGN Filipinas 28 exp.3 f.136v (1792).
56 AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.238 (1801). In 1809, Governor Mariano Fernández de
Folgueras expressed to Viceroy Pedro de Garibay his disappointment for not having
received recruits in quite a few years. AGN Filipinas 59 exp.1 f. 2.
people” irritated Viceroy Félix Berenguer y Marquina in 1802 because it

proved false every time a levy was executed.57
The documentation shows that the efficiency of colonial officials was
negatively affected by the need to simultaneously attend to Manila’s needs
and manage the plights of the strongholds in the Caribbean. The penal
system established by the colonial state in New Spain was very elastic and
in theory could with relative ease match availability of manpower with
current needs in military and convict destinations. The penal exile system
in the Portuguese empire analogously proved to be flexible and multi-
functional, and it responded to crises and shifting imperial interests with
mutable sentences and locales.58 But military requirements could be quite
suffocating at times, and Mexican authorities often found themselves in
dire straits when trying to meet the demands of multiple open fronts. For
example, in 1795 Viceroy Marquis of Branciforte found himself in the
position of having to locate in the same year 400 men for Manila and
1,500 for Havana.59
In the policies coming out of the Council of the Indies, Manila was
perceived as a significant piece for the defense of the empire. However,
when pressed between the two, it was often the circumstance that Mexi-
can authorities were committed to assign manpower to more local des-
tinations rather than to Manila. In August 1794, convicts to Manila
who had already been waiting in Acapulco more than six months
were conducted to Veracruz and boarded to Havana for the replace-
ment of navy crews in the Caribbean.60 In 1807, judicial authorities of
Mexico City substituted sentences to Manila for assignments to local
military regiments on the grounds that the “lack of people . . . burdens
the army in this kingdom.”61 In January 1810, Viceroy Lizana y Beau-
mont decided to send to the War for Spanish Reestablishment in Santo
Domingo the reinforcements he had originally planned on shipping to
the Philippines.62 However, despite the efforts to redirect manpower
to outposts that were in most need, in the late 1790s and early 1800s
57 AGN Filipinas 51 exp.6 f.85 (1802). Berenguer y Marquina served as governor-general

of the Philippines from 1788 to 1793 and as viceroy of Mexico in 1800–03.
58 Coates has tracked the practice of Portuguese judicial authorities to grant pardons and
appeals and the shift of degredado sites away from Brazil and toward Angola and India
by the 1650s. Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 116–17.
62 The viceroy was unaware that this war had finished two months earlier, on November
1809. AGN Filipinas 59 exp.1 (1810).
accounts about shorthanded military locations poured in Mexico City

from all corners of New Spain, a conspicuous sign that the viceregal
government had utterly failed in protecting the domain.
Placing convict transportation to the Philippines in the context of mil-
itary recruitment and judicial practices in late colonial Mexico casts light
on the fact that New Spain was ill protected and unable to attend all its
engagements; that there was a notable discrepancy between the type of
assistance that Manila authorities requested from Mexico City and what
they actually received; and that the predicament of the Pacific colony
had direct bearing on the military state of affairs in continental New
Spain. The deportations to the Philippines add a new layer of clarity as to
why the militarization of the late colonial society and the restructuration
of imperial defenses were altogether unsuccessful in Mexico. Historians
of the colonial Latin American military have sustained since the 1970s
that at the closure of the colonial period regular Spanish armies were
pathetically weak, fortifications poorly maintained, and supporting mili-
tias inadequately trained, armed, and organized.63 For example, Archer
argued that the fragility of the Mexican army became painfully clear
between 1797 and 1802 at the outbreak of war with Great Britain.64 Yet
Kuethe and Andrien provide a counterpoint to these pessimistic assess-
ments when they indicate that Spanish victories during the United States
War of Independence reflect the success of at least some military reforms.
According to these authors, in this conflict King Charles III managed to
wage war more effectively, score victories against Great Britain both on
land and at sea, and defend his strongholds in Central America. All these
achievements, Kuethe and Andrien suggest, were all the more remarkable
because the Spanish regime had failed so miserably in 1762.65 The story
of forced transportation to the Philippines, however, leads to the belief
that Kuethe and Andrien’s arguments might not be easily applicable to
late colonial New Spain.
63 Archer, Army in Bourbon Mexico; Leon Campbell, The Military and Society in Colo-
nial Peru, 1750–1810 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978); and Allan
Kuethe Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–1808 (Tallahassee: Uni-
versity of Florida Press, 1978).
64 In 1796, viceregal authorities had to dispatch regular troops and militia to Veracruz,
where an epidemic of yellow fever and high rates of desertion had consumed much of
the regiment. At the same time, men from regular regiments in Mexico City were sent to
replenish the two Mexican units stationed in Havana. Archer, Army in Bourbon Mexico,
80.
65 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 271–72, 301–02, 340.
The overlap of penal servitude, presidio labor, and military recruit-

ment proved to be detrimental for the military predicament of the Spanish
empire. Recruitment strategies failed to take advantage of the population
growth in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in New Spain, a fail-
ure that was at the heart of the challenges that the colonial armed forces
came up against.66 Convicts could be forced laborers and impromptu
soldiers; military deserters could be sentenced to convict labor or military
service in another destination. As a consequence, the factors that inhib-
ited volunteers to join the military in the first place were only aggravated.
The presence of criminals sabotaged the good health military officers
strived for in their ranks, as these unmotivated recruits were culpable
of mounting up the rates for desertion and crime within the regiments.
This vicious circle did not make military destinations such as Havana or
Veracruz any more alluring, and surely it did not contribute to produce
more adherents to the cause of the Spanish monarch in the Philippines,
9,000 miles and a minimum of four months away. As a result of the inter-
dependence between military enlistment and convict labor, considerable
competition among multiple locations and local agendas ensued, which
in turn brought about that the accessibility to manpower in a specific
site depended to a great extent on the concurrent needs of several other
locations in the same network. In the fierce competition for hale and
hearty bodies, the deportations to the Philippines notably exacerbated
the military plight of viceregal authorities.
Against this backdrop, the transfer to the Philippines of approximately
4,000 recruits, veterans, and convicts in the last fifty years before Indepen-
dence does appear as an important piece in the rather intricate puzzle of
imperial defense networks. The constitution of the ejército de dotación in
the viceregal domain, the restructuration of militia units, and mounting
labor needs in the presidio system likely had an impact on the avail-
ability of New Spain to supply far-flung destinations like Manila. The
process by which New Spain collected individuals to meet these obliga-
tions is a complicated one in which military recruitment, convict labor,
and penal discourse were interweaving strands. In the sections that follow
I explain the struggles of eighteenth-century colonial officials in Mexico
City to produce the effectives and workforce required and the subsequent
66 New Spain’s population doubled over the course of the eighteenth century, reach-
ing almost 6 million inhabitants in 1800. Richard L. Garner, “Prices and Wages in
Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” in Essays in the Price History of Eighteenth-Century
Latin America, ed. Lyman Johnson et al. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1990), 73–108.
frustration of Spanish authorities in Manila. To do so I first examine

the enlistment methods that viceregal authorities had recourse to in the
second half of the 1700s and, second, I outline how the criminal jus-
tice system in Spain and New Spain was refashioned in a manner as to
supplement with convicts the recruiting needs and goals of the armed
forces.
Military Recruitment
To a great extent, the recruitment systems used in late Bourbon Mexico
mirrored those employed in early modern Spain. In the Iberian Peninsula,
the traditional method to replace soldiers finishing their terms was the
voluntary recruit, also known as banderas de recluta. These were recruit-
ing teams or parties of soldiers, each led by an official or sergeant. To
complement the numbers of voluntary recruitment peninsular authorities
sporadically used the quintas, a system by which one out of five young
single men in each district were drafted into the army by lottery.67 In
1770, King Charles III established that the quintas be performed annu-
ally for the replacement of the military. Although the provisions for the
lottery of single men contemplated an extensive list of exemptions, the
quintas became the precedent of compulsory military service in modern
Spain. In the eighteenth century levies of vagabonds were another avail-
able recourse when there were not enough volunteers to fill vacancies in
the regiments. In the enlightened mentality of the time the application
of levies had a social objective as well because the purpose was to give
vagrants, idlers, and troublemakers a useful occupation.68
In New Spain, appeals for volunteers and forced conscription pre-
vailed. The system of quintas was not permitted in Spanish America, so
in the eighteenth century Mexico City amply relied on casas de bandera
and banderas de recluta, where the former came to designate the physical
place or establishment where a recruiting team performed their duty of
enlisting new people. Following the procedure established in Spain, the
Mexican bandera de recluta for the ejército de dotación worked to allure
volunteers who were in good health and robust enough to endure life
67 Cristina Borreguero Beltrán, El reclutamiento militar por quintas en la España del siglo
XVIII. Orı́genes del servicio militar obligatorio (Valladolid: University of Valladolid,
1989).
68 Fernando de Salas López, Ordenanzas militares en España e Hispanoamérica (Madrid:
Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 109–14. Fernando Redondo Dı́az, “El ejército,” in Historia
general de España y América. Tomo X, vol. 2, ed. Carlos E. Corona Baratech et al.
(Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1990), 170–74.
in the army, of Catholic religion, at least 5 feet in height, without vices,

and between sixteen and thirty six years of age, although the brack-
eting age kept changing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
All were to come from the casta limpia sectors – whites, castizos, and
mestizos.69
The norm during the seventeenth century had been to staff rotating
battalions with men recruited in Spain, but to populate with peninsulares
the permanent military regiments created after 1763 turned out to be an
expensive and logistically complex plan. The regulations for the system
of fixed battalions in Cuba had social prescriptions favoring Spaniards –
Americans were limited to only 20 percent of troops. Notwithstanding,
expectations about getting a large amount of Spaniards for New World
regiments were unrealistic. Soldiers were hard to find, and local authori-
ties had to adjust to the realities encountered. Hence, the prescriptions set
for Cuba loosened in Mexico and other places, and the limit on the num-
ber of Americans was ignored completely. As a consequence, the colonial
military establishment grew rapidly and involved Creoles and people of
color. By the mid-1780s, Creoles outnumbered Europeans in the lower
ranks of the regular army all throughout the Americas; eventually, Cre-
oles had gained strength also at the top with a ratio that overwhelmingly
favored Americans.70 Specifically in New Spain, about 80 percent of the
troops of the ejército de dotación in 1800 were made of males born in
the viceroyalty.71
Bribery and compulsion became general recruiting practices despite
constant orders to abide by royal ordinances, to refrain from using coer-
cion, and to attract only the highest quality volunteers. With no possi-
bility to offer attractive motivation packages to recruits, underpaid sub-
delegates, magistrates, curates, and others who controlled some aspect of
enlistment made the sale of exemptions into big business. The answer was
to press more those of the lower strata, who had no easy access to money
to buy themselves an exception. An outstanding example of this corrup-
tion are the two casas de bandera that had been established in Mexico
City and Puebla with the specific purpose of attracting volunteers for the
Philippines. Ostensibly recruiting centers, these were actually gambling
houses that drew new soldiers through gambling debt instead of offering
them monetary incentives.72
69 Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 179–82.

70 Kuethe and Andrien, Spanish Atlantic, 200, 313.
71 Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 182. Archer, Army in Bourbon Mexico, 127.
72 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.5 f.130–260 (1783).
The recourse to forcible recruitment methods in New Spain further

marginalized the common people and magnified anti-military attitudes.
Levies of vagabonds, gamblers, and other delinquents in Mexico City
and Puebla provided men for service in the Veracruz regiments.73 The
levies that provided manpower for regiments in the Philippines will be
the focus of attention in the next two chapters. Other extraordinary,
unpopular methods of enlistment were to forcefully recruit militiamen
for the regular regiments, to draft apprentices from the guilds, or to
condemn gente llovida to eight years in the regiment that was closest to
the location where they had been caught.74 All these methods abused
the general populace. For the lower classes, enlistment and subsequent
active duty meant family separation, severe hardships for abandoned
dependents, and an omnipresent fear of a horrible death. Few men were
in the ranks of the army in New Spain because they enjoyed military life or
had developed professional attitudes. Archer maintains that the residents
of Mexico City were virtuosos in the art of draft evasion, resorting to
violence and flight to the mountains. On the verge of Independence, the
army had failed to become an honored and prestigious institution, to the
point that a lack of a strong esprit de corps might have bred the passivity
of the Mexican army in 1808 in the face of insurgency.75
As far as the militia, the goal of Bourbon reformers was the profes-
sionalization of these units. Villalba managed to raise a large colonial
militia force in New Spain. In order to dignify this institution, military
planners added requirements to access the force, shored up the time of
military instruction, made it a requirement for militiamen to wear uni-
form, and extended the application of the fuero militar – the right to
judicial process in military courts. Indeed, militia units became an impor-
tant avenue for the social promotion and prestige of Creoles.76 Members
of a militia were automatically exempted from transportation to Manila.
In the decades to come, Villalba’s reform of the Mexican militia did not
go uncontested. Voices from the Iberian Peninsula kept rising against the
73 Archer, “To Serve the King: Military Recruitment in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 55, no. 2 (1975): 230.
74 In order to fulfill Viceroy Miguel José de Azanza’s order in 1799 to furnish troops for
the regular units, Mexico City’s town council sanctioned the drafting of 220 apprentices
from the guilds. Archer, “To Serve the King,” 239. Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix
ordered the governor of Veracruz that Spanish illegal immigrants be drafted for the local
troops. Lozano Armendares, La criminalidad, 104; Marchena, Oficiales y soldados, 297.
75 Archer, “To Serve the King,” 242, 250.
76 McAlister, The Fuero Militar, 64–71. Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 135–37.
idea of systematically arming American subjects and proposed instead to

shift the focus to a regular army imported from Spain and supplemented
by an unprivileged reserve militia in Mexico.77
Unquestionably, Mexicans would prefer to have a career in the rel-
atively prestigious militias or join a regiment in Mexico rather than
going to far removed locations like the Philippines. Even enlisted men,
more accustomed to a martial lifestyle, were not easily convinced to start
or to resume their careers in one of the regiments of the Luzon Island.
There were plenty of deterrents in signing up for the Philippines. In the
early 1770s, high officials in Spain like Alejandro O’Reilly, at the time
Inspector General of Infantry, clearly understood that “it will be difficult
to persuade them to such a long navigation, and to live in a land they do
not know and is so distant, with half the enjoyments they have in New
Spain, which is a very pleasant country, not expensive at all, and full
of resources for every honest Spaniard.”78 In 1787, Mexicans continued
to despise the thought of a career in the islands not only because of the
lower salaries, but also because if “they like the military life, it is easy for
them to enlist in the regiments of the viceroyalty, where under the protec-
tion of their relatives they can make the same or more merit with more
comfort and satisfaction.”79 Not surprisingly, the rate of volunteers who
enrolled in New Spain for military service in the Philippines remained
throughout the years below the levels of satisfaction of the authorities
involved.
The Philippines did evoke positive images to some Mexicans, though,
and occasionally traces of a genuine motivation to serve in the Philippines
are found in the documentation. Recruiting officials trying to woo irres-
olute prospects for enlistment referred to a string of potential benefits,
such as the low cost of living in the Philippines.80 Other times, recruiters
appealed to arguments of ethnic prowess and rivalry. They harangued
volunteers about how Mexican soldiers could be as good as Europeans
because they had great tolerance to hardships and they were remark-
ably brave in combat, even if peninsulares filled the higher ranks.81 The
possibility of being promoted in the archipelago was very real due to
the scarcity of Caucasian officials. Youngsters from upper-class families
requested to be assigned to Manila as distinguished soldiers on the basis
77 Archer, “Charles III and Defense Policy,” 194–97.

78 AGI Filipinas 925 (1771).
of their publicly known ‘noble birth,’ and their families paid for their
transportation to Acapulco. Manuel Cacela, son of a relator of the Audi-
encia, expressed in 1784 his desire to serve the monarch “determinately
in the Philippine islands, because this is the place that best suits me.”82
Adventurous men like Cacela had led a life virtually free from hardship.
They sought to earn merits performing a service that was regarded as very
honorable, and they yearned for new experiences away from a relatively
easy life in New Spain. For others, like Mariano de Aso y Otal, the army
was an understandable option after his four siblings had chosen the mil-
itary career. Furthermore, a brother already established in Manila had
offered to cover Mariano’s “decency and support” in the archipelago.83
Challenges to recruit and retain volunteers such as the ones described
thus far allowed for a fluid partnership between the administration of
criminal justice and the military hierarchy in the Spanish empire. The
tradition of populating presidios in tactical sites with vagrants, deserters,
and disorderly soldiers had developed in an intermittent but persistent
manner throughout the eighteenth century. After 1750, the administra-
tion of justice in the Spanish empire evolved toward the application of
utilitarian punishments for a wider range of offenses. In what follows
I discuss how the changing discourse on criminality and punishment in
early modern Spain and colonial Mexico was directly connected not only
to a new penal discourse, which was an outgrowth of the more general
Enlightenment faith on man, but also to the adoption of new policies of
imperial defense by Bourbon state reformers.
Enlightened Penal Discourse and Convict Labor

The antecedents of penal servitude in Spain were rooted in late medieval
Spanish history, but it was infrequently used until the Catholic Monarchs
Ferdinand and Isabella reintroduced it at the end of the fifteenth century
as a more useful alternative than other existing afflictive penalties. The
military needs of the emerging national state in the Iberian Peninsula in
the sixteenth century further developed the practice of exploiting the labor
power of prisoners for the benefit of the government. The most common
destinations were the galleys, followed by the mines of Almadén (whose
mercury was needed to refine Mexican silver) and the presidios of Ceuta,
Orán, Melilla, Alhucemas, and Peñón de Vélez in North Africa. Forced
labor in these sites was a sentence that primarily befell serious offenders
82 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.4 f. 9 (1784).

but it did not replace capital punishment or bodily mutilations. For those
convicted of vagrancy and other lesser crimes fines, banishment, and
flogging continued to be applied.84 Other early modern European powers
such as Portugal also resorted to the punishment of exile to suit domestic
and imperial requirements that were a heavy burden on their available
demographic resources, such as populating border regions and colonial
cities and staffing garrisons.85
During the Enlightenment new legal theories started to underpin
penal discourses and practices. Rationalist thinkers such as Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Diderot, or Voltaire strove to create a “science of man” that
aimed at a better understanding of human behavior. These authors were
concerned about equality before the law and the rights of humanity, and
they proposed new criminal legislation whose fairness was not subjected
to the arbitrary power of lawmakers.86 The humanitarianism of enlight-
ened intellectuals was based on the premise that men were shaped by their
environment without the deflecting influence of inherited characteristics
such as original sin. Human nature could thus improve and criminals
could be reminted as useful citizens.87
The ruminations of these scholars gave birth to the classical school of
criminology, represented by the Italian philosopher and politician Cesare
Beccaria, the English Quaker John Howard, and the English political
radical Jeremy Bentham.88 These influential thinkers demanded more
respect for human beings while at the same time advocating a more pro-
ductive punishment. Humanitarian and utilitarian reasons then formed a
seemingly unlikely tandem in the rationalization and reorientation of ret-
ribution in the Enlightenment. Philosophes in general condemned torture
and death penalty, they moved away from corporal punishment, galley,
84 Pike, Penal Servitude, 92, 111–15.

85 Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 3. In the fourteenth century, Portuguese degredados were
sentenced to galleys, to exile within Portugal, or to a presidio in North Africa or islands
off the Atlantic coast. In the sixteenth century and afterwards, overseas destinations
in Estado da India, Angola, and Brazil were incorporated into the imperial judicial
framework. Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 42–85.
86 Mary Efrosini Gregory, Freedom in French Enlightenment Thought (New York: Peter
Lang Publishing, 2008), 60–62.
87 Gascoigne, The Enlightenment, 123–26.
88 Richard Bellamy, Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition (Colchester:
ECPR Press, 2013), 56–67. John Hostettler, A History of Criminal Justice in England and
Wales (London: Waterside Press, 2009), 153–55. James E. Crimmins, “The Principles
of Utilitarian Penal Law in Beccaria, Bentham and J. S. Mill,” in The Philosophy of
Punishment and the History of Political Thought, ed. Peter Koritansky (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2011), 136–71.
and slavery, and they sought to devise a penal system that would make
punishment more fruitful for the state and the offenders. In the reformers’
view, if humankind was perfectible, rehabilitation should be the object of
correction through a regimen of social discipline and compulsory learning
of skills at the prison, workhouse, or overseas plantations. The regular-
ity and discipline of labor would lead to the edification of the prisoner
while simultaneously repairing the damage the prisoner had inflicted upon
society.
In Spain, intellectuals, jurists and politicians of the stature of Gaspar
Melchor de Jovellanos, Juan Meléndez Valdez, Juan Sempere y Guari-
nos, Valentı́n de la Foronda, Campomanes, and Juan Pablo Forner were
familiar with the works of enlightened European authors who had writ-
ten about the need to reform criminal law. For example, Jovellanos and
Meléndez Valdez translated into Spanish Beccaria’s theories about a penal
code that offered a range of punishments graduated according to the grav-
ity of the crime. The influence of enlightened European thinking in the
Iberian Peninsula, though, does not preclude the possibility that after
the 1770s these Spanish theorists could have arrived independently to
similar ideas on penal policy.89 The doctrines of European and Spanish
intellectuals translated into concrete changes in the areas of social reform
and criminal justice practice. For instance, Pike considers the creation of
houses of correction and associations in Madrid in the 1780s a reflec-
tion of Howard’s proposition to promote useful, remunerative labor as
a correctional tool. The principles flaunted by Howard spawned some
programs in Spanish jails to make more spacious rooms in prison build-
ings, improve sanitary conditions, and most specially, separate prisoners
by ages and crimes in order to facilitate the rehabilitation of offenders.
Torture as a means of extracting evidence and confessions was very much
a part of criminal procedure in European countries in the early modern
period, but after most philosophes criticized its moral wrongfulness the
most common forms of torture fell into disuse in Spain in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century.
One of the most important effects of the Enlightenment on Spanish
legal culture was the shift away from retributions of merely punitive
nature toward a more utilitarian and rehabilitative administration of
89 Francisco Tomás y Valiente, “Aspectos jurı́dico-polı́ticos de la Ilustración en España,”

in Obras completas, vol. 4 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Polı́ticos y Constitucionales,
1997), 3263–72. Adriana Terán Enrı́quez, Justicia y crimen en la Nueva España, siglo
XVIII (Mexico City: UNAM, 2007), 127.
justice. Besides the humanitarian arguments brought forward by reform-

ers, the utilitarian needs of the Bourbon state after 1750 provided both a
justification and a stimulus for the more modest usage of corporal pun-
ishment and the continued expansion of penal servitude. The projects
undertaken by the Spanish state in the public sphere – military forti-
fications, roads, canals, and municipal improvements – heightened the
demand for unskilled workers. Despite the growth of Spain’s popula-
tion in the eighteenth century,90 these needs could not be met with free
labor because the government claimed to be unable to pay the wages
that would attract workers from the free market. Convict labor began
to be applied to a greater number of offenders in the second half of the
eighteenth century.91 Influenced by the belief that every subject had the
obligation to contribute to the well-being of the country and that idleness
was the root of all vice, the Spanish government pursued large categories
of antisocial transgressors from vagabonds and minor criminals to the
unemployed and the destitute who were impressed into the armed forces
or assigned to some form of penal servitude. These offenders could thus
be useful to the state and rehabilitated at the same time.
After the abolition of the galleys in 1748, naval arsenals, North African
and American presidios, military service, and public works gained greater
relevance in the Spanish penal system.92 Generally speaking, after the
1760s Spanish tribunals sentenced to arsenals and presidios individuals
who had been charged with serious felonies, whereas the advocates of
reform championed military service and public works as the best means
of punishment for those convicted of minor crimes. The North African
military garrisons were populated by soldiers who had committed homi-
cide, theft, robbery, or infractions against military discipline; by men
convicted for property crimes that involved violence; and by defrauders
of the tobacco monopoly. The number of prisoners transported to the
New World presidios, not very significant before 1763, increased espe-
cially after 1771. At this time, a new legislation stipulated that deserters,
mostly recidivists, be sent to the Americas in order to reduce the ram-
pant desertion rates in North African presidios. Public works presidios
were created in the second half of the 1700s as part of an extensive
program to improve transportation and communications within Spain
90 During the eighteenth century the population of Spain grew by 50 percent. David
Ringrose, Spain, Europe, and the ‘Spanish Miracle,’ 1700–1900 (New York: Cambridge
91 Pike, Penal Servitude, 60–64, 147, 152–54.
92 Ibid., 70, 115, 122.
with the pavement of roads and the construction of canals. The bulk of
individuals sentenced to public works were culpable of offenses against
good customs and morals, disturbers of the domestic and public peace,
and petty thieves. The majority of vagrants were condemned to military
service.
Overall, the juridical innovations enunciated by enlightened authors
were known in Spain in the late eighteenth century, but they did not
penetrate completely the Spanish penal policies, and the support for these
ideas remained outside of official circles.93 Beccaria, Howard, and Ben-
tham had called for the end of penal transportation to overseas colonies
and had urged for the transition to more rational, humanitarian, and
utilitarian institutions such as workhouses and prisons. In the Spanish
empire, the continuation of the practice to deport vagrants and other
criminals to the Philippines indicates that at the highest political lev-
els beliefs and agendas contrary to these enlightened propositions pre-
vailed. Indeed, imprisonment as a sentence and a punishment in itself,
and not just as a transitory state in the process of administration of
justice, was almost unknown in Spanish civil law until the nineteenth
century.94
Concurrently with a decline in the application of death and corporal
punishment sentences, penal servitude reached its most extensive devel-
opment in New Spain during the eighteenth century. The new discussions
about penal reform in the Iberian Peninsula permeated to some extent
criminological paradigms in the Spanish colonies.95 In New Spain, the
changing discourse on criminality and punishment had started to uneasily
combine utilitarian and humanitarian components. Above and beyond
the influence of the Enlightenment, this theoretical shift in the viceroyalty
was linked to two facts: first, labor needs in the presidios of Philippines
and New Spain in the second half of the 1700s were growing steadfast;
and second, armed forces in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Philippines
relied heavily on civilian and military convicts to maintain regiments at
full strength. It is against this background that the transportation to the
Philippines of adult males who had been sentenced to military service
or convict labor seemed nothing but a matter of course for Mexican
officials.
93 Osvaldo Barreneche, Crime and the Administration of Justice in Buenos Aires (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 23.
94 Pike, Penal Servitude, 154–55.
95 Barreneche, Crime and the Administration, 14.
Historians of criminal justice in colonial Mexico tend to describe the

judicial system in the viceroyalty in the late eighteenth century in mostly
favorable terms, among other things because death penalty was rarely
applied. According to historians Colin MacLachlan and Alicia Bazán,
the judges of the tribunal of the Acordada – the most important law
enforcement agency in the 1700s; by the 1780s, this tribunal accounted
for four-fifths of all criminal cases in the viceroyalty – 96 only sentenced
to capital punishment about 2 percent of all the individuals they con-
victed in central Mexico throughout the century. This pattern has been
noted for other parts of the viceroyalty as well.97 In the 1700s judicial
officers were progressively more reluctant to administer physical punish-
ments; in comparison with the seventeenth century, lashes, mutilation,
loss of limb, and pillory had considerably subsided.98 As in the Iberian
Peninsula, confinement or incarceration did not serve the purpose of pun-
ishment but of preventing the flight of convicts. In addition, the amount
of jailed population in Mexico City that was eventually released with no
further conviction sharply rose in the last two decades of the century to
unprecedented percentages of around 70 percent.99
A perusal of the sentences delivered by the Acordada, the sala del
crimen – chamber of the Audiencia that handled criminal cases – and
alcaldes ordinarios – city magistrates with municipal jurisdiction – pro-
vides overwhelming evidence that convict labor was the form of cor-
rection that judicial authorities of Mexico City most frequently applied
to both minor and more serious offenses from the early 1700s through
the first decades of the nineteenth century.100 Individuals charged with
96 Testimony of Viceroy Revilla-Gigedo in 1791. Cited in MacLachlan, Criminal Justice,

51.
97 MacLachlan (Criminal Justice, 114) and Bazán (“El Real Tribunal de la Acordada,”
334, 337) have data for the periods 1703–1811 and 1719–92, respectively. MacLachlan
computed a total of 57,579 Acordada convicts, while Bazán reckoned 10,256 prisoners
for the period 1719–81 and 25,256 for 1782–92. Cutter for New Mexico and Texas
and William B. Taylor for central and southern New Spain coincide in that there existed
only a few cases of capital punishment. See, respectively, Legal Culture (137) and
Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford
98 Bazán has observed that by mid-eighteenth century sentences to flogging were few and
far in between in Mexico City. Cutter has noted the same phenomenon for Northern
New Spain (Legal Culture, 141) as Herzog has done for Quito (Upholding Justice,
35–41).
99 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 114. Bazán, “El Real Tribunal de la Acordada,” 334,
337.
100 MacLachlan and Bazán calculate that about 35 percent of the Acordada convicts were
sentenced to private labor, exile, presidio, military service, hospitals, the poorhouse, and
homicide and robbery usually received a presidio sentence of anywhere

between four and eight years, whereas pettier transgressions such as
vagrancy were punished with short terms of six months to two years
of hard labor in public works projects.101
During the seventeenth century and for most of the eighteenth cen-
tury state convict labor remained unimportant in comparison with penal
servitude for private contractors. Until 1767, the most common dynamic
was for the sala del crimen and the Acordada to sell convicts to private
entrepreneurs to work in silver mines in the north, in the textile indus-
try in the capital and other places, in the sugar plantations, in bakeries,
and with shoemakers. The sale of penal laborers to private enterprises
was an important source of revenue for judicial authorities with which
to pay fees and salaries. However, it was a widespread practice on the
part of magistrates to arrange for the compulsory repartimiento of work-
ers where entrepreneurs had no choice but to take the prisoners, leading
Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix to prohibit this business in 1767.102
In the last quarter of the century the municipal government and colo-
nial authorities of Mexico became the principal employers of penal labor.
The demand in the public sector intensified in response to the require-
ments of public works programs and imperial defense. Between 1756
and 1808, only 275 prisoners were sold to private enterprise, which
constituted 1.6 percent of the 16,968 individuals sentenced to convict
labor by the Acordada in that period. The remaining 16,693 were sen-
tenced to presidio. By way of comparison, between 1703 and 1756 pri-
vate entrepreneurs purchased 23.3 percent of those convicted to penal
servitude.103 The desire to upgrade municipal services and change the
urban environment in the French style fashionable of this period impelled
government officials of Mexico City to use brigades of prisoners to clean
streets and canals, build bridges and aqueducts, reconstruct the tree-lined
Alameda avenue, pave the streets in the center of the city, and install a
street lighting system. Other destinations for penal labor were service in
the military or in the navy; the poorhouse, hospitals, and apprenticeships;
apprenticeships. Gabriel Haslip-Viera has data for the verdicts of convict labor issued
by the sala del crimen in 1796 and one alcalde ordinario in 1800–17 with comparable
results (30 percent). See Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico
City, 1692–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 113. Lozano
Armendares estimates that between 1800 and 1812 the sala del crimen, Acordada, and
the Real Casa de la Moneda (mint) condemned 37 percent of their prisoners to some
form of convict labor.
101 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 77, 82.
102 Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 105-ss.
103 Ibid., 113.
and the programs for the renovation of fortifications in the major ports
of Mexico, Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico after 1763.
In addition to new local and imperial demands, the inspiration of
European criminologists can also explain the growth of convict labor in
late colonial Mexico. Authors like Sempere y Guarinos, Jovellanos, and
Campomanes were read in the viceroyalty, and there is no reason why
works on penal law by Mexican thinkers would not be inspired by the
postulations of criminal reformers from overseas. For example, a native
of New Spain, Manuel Lardizábal y Uribe published in Madrid in 1782 a
review of Spanish criminal law titled Discurso sobre las penas that made
him a reputed jurist among Spanish legal circles and that was widely
used in Spanish America. Easily detectable in his work are the ideas
of proportionality between crime and punishment and the correction of
offenders as the ultimate objective of the administration of justice.104
In the late colonial Mexican justice system presidio, among all varia-
tions of convict labor, had become the prevalent method of punishment.
Indeed, the thrust of the presidiarios that streamed through the intra-
colonial presidio networks in the Atlantic flank, northern New Spain,
and the Pacific were Mexican civilians sentenced by the tribunals of
the Acordada and sala del crimen. Between 1756 and 1782, sentences
to presidio amounted to 60–80 percent of all judicial outcomes at the
Acordada. In the last twenty years of the century, the Acordada magis-
trates still passed more presidio sentences than any other type of pun-
ishment, but the rate dwindled to about 30 percent at a time when
approximately 70 percent of lawbreakers were set at liberty with no
conviction.105 Representing 12.1 percent of all sentences, penalty of pre-
sidio was also the most common form of retribution in 1796 at the sala del
crimen.106
It is difficult to know, though, how many convicts went to each of
the presidios. According to MacLachlan, the better part of the Acordada
prisoners served their terms in Havana or Veracruz.107 Presumably very
few petty criminals were transported to these locations.108 The larger
104 Barreneche, Crime and the Administration, 22. Jaime O. Rodriguez, ‘We Are Now
the True Spaniards.’ Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the
Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012),
78.
105 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 114; Bazán, “El Real Tribunal de la Acordada,” 334,
337.
106 Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 103.
108 Pikes notes this for the Cuban presidios. Pike, Penal Servitude, 145.
part of these forced laborers had committed crimes against persons and
especially against property–horse and cattle thieves, bandits, and robbers.
Occasionally, presidiarios from beyond the confines of New Spain were
also transported to one of these strategic enclaves.109 Mexican civilian
convicts – mostly vagrants – who were distributed to military outposts
in the Philippines will be the focus of the next two chapters. The trail of
presidio sentences and transportation of convicts within New Spain lays
bare the existence of transregional, intra-colonial circuits in which key
defensive sites in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Northern New Spain,
and the Philippines were connected to each other. Analogous networks
with different sub-systems of convict destinations were in place in other
colonial centers in Spanish South America.110
Because recruiting soldiers and colonists for the remote areas of the
northern frontier was not an easy endeavor, it was not rare for con-
victs, along with prostitutes and orphan boys and girls, to be forcefully
transferred to these latitudes.111 Presidios in Northern New Spain chiefly
served as a place for temporary confinement of Indian war prisoners,
but occasionally these outposts utilized penal labor from central Mexico
when their edifices were undergoing construction or repair.112 Mexican
convicts were also sent to Piedras Negras, Coahuila a fortified settlement
created in 1773 to defend colonists from Apache attacks.113 California
offered more substantial economic benefits than the rest of the fron-
tier, with pelts of sea otters that Europeans sold at a much higher price
in the international market, and it was to be the last territory of the
109 Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 259. Cartagena and Venezuela sent men to San Juan in
Puerto Rico.
110 For Spanish America, De Vito refers to an “interlope system of presidios.” For the
viceroyalty of Peru, De Vito has identified several sub-systems of convict transporta-
tion that circulated prisoners sentenced to public service at military fortresses, frontier
areas, or new settlements. These circuits radiated from Lima toward territories in
the Audiencias of Charcas and Quito; Valdivia, Chiloe, and Juan Fernández islands
in Southern Chile; and Rı́o de la Plata. De Vito, “The Place of Convicts.” On this
topic, see also Herzog, Upholding Justice, 35 and Agnieszka Czeblakow, “A Prison by
Another Name: Incarceration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Audiencia of
Quito” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2012).
111 Weber, Spanish Frontier, 265. For more on the difficulties that Mexican authorities
encountered in populating these areas see, Oakah L. Jones, Los Paisanos. Spanish Set-
tlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1996).
112 On the role of the presidio in the far north, see Max Moorhead, The Presidio: Bastion
of the Spanish Borderlands (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975),
267.
113 Moorhead, Presidio, 50.
northwest to be colonized by Spain. Indeed, it would be King Charles

III who resolved that more installations and presidios in Upper Califor-
nia were critically important: Monterey (1770), San Diego (1772), San
Francisco (1776), and Santa Barbara (1782).114 Some of these places
became convict destinations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.115
Civilian prisoners who had gone through trial and received a sen-
tence were only a portion of the convicted laborers who were assigned to
presidio duty and military service in New Spain and the Philippines. Sol-
diers who had been convicted made up the rest of penal labor employed at
these locations. Mexican military commanders considered that to remove
soldiers from their regiments and forcefully relocate them to a particu-
larly demanding outpost was an appropriate punishment for a variety of
faults. Viceregal authorities found in penal servitude and exile a formula
to purge regiments in Mexico City from soldiers who had faced some
sort of disciplinary action or displayed problematic behavior. Mexican
soldiers charged with desertion, theft, murder, or selling their uniform
pieces could be punished with years of forced labor in the fortifications
of Havana, Puerto Rico, and Veracruz, while several hundred Mexican
deserters found their bones shipped to the Philippines. As listed in the
Appendix, at least 254 (or seven in one hundred) individuals sentenced to
the Philippines between 1765 and 1811 were defectors. Because an unde-
termined amount of “recruits” and “veterans” were actually deserters,
the real amount must be in all likelihood higher than 254. High-ranking
military officials in Manila regarded the deserters’ military formation,
experience, and exposure to discipline as assets, and they noted a sig-
nificant difference in the quality and usefulness of defectors versus the
deplorable habits of the recruits.116
Besides deserters, other undisciplined soldiers were sent with some
regularity to the Philippines. In 1790, the captain of the Regiment
of Mexico Rafael Amar received the command to single out individ-
uals who disturbed the internal order in his unit.117 He weeded out
114 Bannon, Spanish Borderlands, 153. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 236–70.

115 For example, founded in 1797, the settlement of Santa Cruz was populated by about
one hundred of destitute paupers and convicts from Guadalajara and Guanajuato.
Barbara Voss, The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis. Race and Sexuality in Colonial San
Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 61.
116 That was the opinion, for instance, of the commander of the battalion of dragoons of
Luzon José Arlegui y Leoz. AGI Filipinas 929 exp.16 f.349–350 (1779).
117 AGN Correspondencia Diversas Autoridades 5386 exp.8 (1790).
twenty-two men with the note of “very bad.” Two decades later, instruc-
tions on this matter stressed reformation in addition to punishment. Reg-
iment commanders had the option, not the obligation, to present soldiers,
corporals, and sergeants who would be willing to serve in the Philippines
where they could erase “their weaknesses or omissions.”118
Apart from the determination to discipline these men for actions their
superiors regarded as reprobate, there were other specific motivations
behind the decision to send Mexican military convicts to the Philippines.
For instance, the need to gain space in major prisons and reduce the eco-
nomic pressure of the incarcerated population was quite compelling in
the encumbered penal system of Mexico City.119 Hence, in 1790 Viceroy
Count of Revillagigedo decided to expel to the Philippines recidivist
deserters to accelerate the processing of prisoners in Mexico City jails.120
The desire to sanitize the reputation of other military enclaves in the
viceroyalty could also trigger viceregal orders to channel defectors to the
archipelago. In the 1770s, Viceroy Bucareli y Ursúa was concerned about
the saturation of Cuban regiments with “bad people” and he resolved to
reroute to the Philippines around 250 deserters who had been sentenced
to serve in Havana.121 Similarly, on the brink of the Independence war,
the number of defections multiplied in central New Spain and the stand-
ing of San Juan de Ulúa as the most important Mexican presidio was
further blackened when Mexico City dispatched there scores of desert-
ers. In 1809, the town council and the consulate of Veracruz protested
against the local battalion being a corps made “only of miscreants and
delinquents.” At least temporarily many defectors were rerouted to the
Philippines that same year.122 Authorities reasoned that deserters would
be less motivated to abandon their brigades in the isolated Manila than
in the bustling port of Veracruz from where they could more easily take
flight to other parts of the Spanish empire.
New Spain and Imperial Presidio Networks

Mexicans were not the only prisoners circulating in these intra-colonial
penal circuits. In the Iberian Peninsula, judicial authorities were also of

119 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 28–33. Scardaville, “(Habsburg) Law,” 4. Van Young,
The Other Rebellion. Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Inde-
pendence, 1810–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 328.
121 AGI Filipinas 926 (1772). The transportation of defectors was staggered over several
years.
the opinion that forced transportation to a distant site and arduous phys-
ical labor was warranted punishment for individuals who had broken
the law. In exiling peninsulares to the Spanish American territories and
the Philippines, Bourbon government officials were motivated as well by
a yearning to strengthen the numbers of white European-born Spanish
in colonial locations. Consequently, the transportation of military and
civilian presidiarios from Spain and North Africa complemented, and
overlapped with, intra-colonial presidio networks. It has been estimated
that the office of the viceroy in Mexico redistributed in New World pre-
sidios – mostly in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico – about 20,000
Mexican convicts between 1550 and 1811. By way of comparison, Spain
only supplied Cuba and Puerto Rico with approximately 4,000 presidiar-
ios in the period 1769–1837.123 The bulk of the prisoners sent by Span-
ish authorities were recidivist deserters from Oran and Ceuta who after
1773 were punished to serve additional sentences in the presidios of
Havana, Puerto Rico, New Orleans, and Pensacola. Men convicted for
homicide, assault, or theft and smugglers who had violated the royal
tobacco monopoly also arrived in the Caribbean from peninsular ports in
the last decades of the eighteenth century.124 Vagrants levied in various
cities of the Iberian Peninsula only occasionally peppered the ranks of the
ejército de dotación in the Americas.125
In this multilayered circulation of convicts from Spanish America,
Spain, and North Africa the Caribbean became a crossroads. Havana
was the main distribution center for the New World presidios with a
jail for prisoners in transit – depósito de presidiarios. It became common
practice, however, to retain here prisoners destined for other locations;
officials in Havana adduced acute labor shortages in the island and lack of
funds to ship men to their destination. After the fact, Havana authorities
would request the king’s approval for their actions. Since this authoriza-
tion was usually forthcoming, the retention of these prisoners became
permanent.126
Convicts from the Iberian Peninsula who served in the permanent reg-
iments of Manila were much less numerous than those who carried out
their sentences in Spanish America. By my count, around 190 prison-
ers from all over Spain left the shores of Cartagena and Cadiz toward
123 Anderson and Maxwell-Stewart, “Convict Labour,” 108.

124 In the 1790s convicts were sitting in peninsular jails waiting to be shipped. AGS SGU
6898 exp.1.
125 Marchena, Oficiales y soldados, 296–97. Rosa Marı́a Pérez Estévez indicates that there
were very few of these in the Americas. Pérez Estévez, El problema, 242.
126 Pike, Penal Servitude, 116, 143.
the remotest colony of the empire.127 Military offenders condemned for

desertion were the most common, followed by civil prisoners such as
tobacco smugglers from Seville, site of the royal tobacco factory. Others
were accused of assault with blade or firearm, theft, possession of pro-
hibited weapons, insubordination, vagrancy, and public disturbances in
general.128 A few other individuals were arrested for inebriety; for mis-
treatment of their wives, other women, or their elders; and for hunting
without license in the royal forest of El Escorial.129 There was also a
political prisoner, Ramón Orozco González, convicted to ten years to
the Philippines for distributing in Madrid pasquinades against the secre-
tary of State José Moñino, Count of Floridablanca, and other prominent
statesmen.130 While several decrees prevented New Spain from trans-
ferring felons or convicts of infamous crimes (crı́menes feos) to the
Philippines, Madrid had no scruples in appointing to military service
in Manila individuals who, notwithstanding were listed as “convicts of
non-infamous felonies,” had been indicted for the death of their wives,
rape, incest, adultery, and even sodomy, a crime punished at the time
with death penalty.
The practice of outfitting Manila with men from Spain continued
despite the many logistical inconveniences. Indeed, convict transporta-
tion from Spain to the Philippines through the port of Veracruz resulted
in a myriad of headaches and expenses. Prisoners often waited for years
at the depósitos de presidiarios in the Iberian Peninsula before they finally
boarded on a vessel. Crowded and unsanitary conditions took their toll
on the convicts, and those who survived were so weakened as to be
unserviceable by the time they were ready to be sent to the Americas.131
In addition, there were several points along the journey at which pris-
oners could escape: upon landing in Veracruz, during the 300 mile trek
from Mexico City to the Pacific Coast, or in Acapulco.132 Those who
127 Most likely more than 190 arrived in the Philippines because this count only includes
individuals for whom I have confirmation of their boarding. Scattered references in the
Philippine sources suggest that the number of “europeos” (Europeans) arriving in the
islands was higher than 190.
128 Between 1788 and 1790, the accounting officers at the Casa de la Contratación (House
of Trade) dated several lists of deserters and other convicts of non-infamous crimes
(“Listas de los desertores del ejército y otros reos que no siendo de delitos feos se
destinan a servir en los regimientos fijos de América e islas Filipinas”). These lists
constitute the largest portion of volumes 550 and 553 of section Arribadas at the AGI.
129 AGI Juzgado Arribadas 287A (1786–1788).
130 AGI Arribadas 553 (1790).
132 On the afternoon of April 10, 1804, thirty-seven of the forty prisoners who had just
disembarked in Veracruz ran away into the countryside. Sergeant Francisco Norma
committed crimes in Mexican soil occupied the time and the money
of the colonial court system. The military escorts that conducted con-
victs across the viceroyalty were quite costly, as well as the soldiers dis-
patched to apprehend fugitives, the guards who performed surveillance
in hospitals, and the shackles and food while in prison and in tran-
sit to Acapulco.133 Despite these complications and strains, the Cadiz-
Veracruz route proved adequate to authorities until 1788. After a hiatus
in which convicts were boarded in the vessels of the Royal Company of
the Philippines and reached Manila through the Cape of Good Hope,
Spanish authorities resumed the passage through New Spain in the early
1800s.134
Peninsular convicts bound to the Philippines were usually detained for
a long time in New Spain, some of them never making it to their final
destination in Manila. This is an indication not only of the insurmount-
able logistics of having these men cross half the world to reach Manila,
but also of the existence of undermanned locations in New Spain where
these rogues could be instrumental. If the arrival of the galleons from the
Philippines was months away, peninsular convicts could be temporarily
assigned to the presidio of San Juan de Ulúa. In chain gangs they cleaned
streets, worked on the construction of the camino real between Mexico
City and Jalapa, dug ditches and drove stakes into the ground.135 After a
while, viceregal authorities would argue that the lack of means to trans-
port the prisoners to Acapulco justified that their destination be changed
to Veracruz where they could continue working as forced laborers. This
was a departure from procedure, as the exploitation of workers could only
happen at their assigned destinations, but it became a usual practice in
declared that he got distracted with an asthma attack and that he was unaware of
the dangerous nature of the men he was to escort, a rather implausible circumstance.
In a confrontation between the soldiers and the fugitives two days later, one convict
was killed. AGN Filipinas 36 exp.7–11 f.234–290; AGN Filipinas 56 exp.6 f.151–84;
AGN Filipinas 57 exp.1–9 f.1–220. Most of the escapees were captured, but some
tried to flee again in December while journeying to Acapulco. This time, another forty
prisoners broke free from their military escorts, killed two Indians, and injured others.
In September 1807, some of these convicts remained in different prisons of Mexico City
awaiting trial for different offenses. AGN Filipinas 57 exp. 1 f.1–58; AGN Filipinas 57
exp.5 f.142–167.
133 AGN Filipinas 52 exp.9 f.258–266.
134 AGI Arribadas 553. AGI Juzgado Arribadas 287B.
135 AGN Filipinas 42 exp.15 f.186–188v (1808). The camino real or royal road served
local markets but it was principally an arterial connection between Mexico and Spain.
For a social history of road construction laborers in late Bourbon Mexico, see Bruce
A. Castleman’s Building the King’s Highway: Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico’s
Caminos Reales, 1757–1804 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).
Veracruz and, as noted earlier, at the depósito of presidiarios in Havana.

Ultimately, the practice signals both the flexibility and competitiveness
that characterized the presidio system in Spanish America.
A new life and new relationships started for these peninsulares in
New Spain. Eventually, the viceroy set them free if they demonstrated
irreproachable conduct or if they satisfactorily performed as supervisors
of other prisoners.136 Others had to remain in the viceroyalty until their
troubles with the Mexican justice were resolved, which could take longer
than the actual length of their sentence.137 Convicts who the physicians
had declared unable to travel to the Philippines or at high risk of infecting
the galleon crew served the remaining of their terms in Mexican hospitals.
Many suffered from scurvy and hernias; others were diagnosed with
epilepsy, dementia, or some undetermined mental perturbation.138 After
spending a considerable amount of time under military custody, these
men created emotional bonds with other convicts. They exchanged notes
in prison, and some stayed in touch when in liberty. In September 1807,
an escapee from the Acordada jail managed to pass a message to his ex-
inmates where he anxiously asked how many of them were sick, whether
they were still shackled, and whether they had been notified yet about an
imminent departure to Manila.139
In between periods of incarceration, they established sentimental
unions with resident women that helped them cope with their circum-
stances. For some, founding a family was conducive to settlement and
reform. In September 1807, Leandro de Vega asked permission to marry
a Spanish woman with whom he was expecting a child. Bringing her to
Manila, he argued, would give him “tranquility.”140 José de San Román
was believed to have redeemed himself after seven years dwelling in New
Spain because he had married, fathered two children, and had given no
136 A Spanish tribunal had condemned Joaquı́n Calderón to ten years in the Philippines for
theft and forgery. He joined the public works of Veracruz upon his arrival in 1804. In
1809, he was released for good behavior and illness, but a few months later Mexican
officials arrested him for incontinencia (illicit sexual union, usually out of wedlock).
This time the public prosecutor did not think so high of Calderón. The magistrate
argued that he should complete his ten-year term because of the serious crimes he
perpetrated in Spain and because his immoral conduct in the viceroyalty proved that
he had not reformed. AGN Filipinas 46 exp.4 f.71–155 (1809–1810).
137 The proceedings against Antonio Rivero for a robbery he had committed shortly after
arriving in New Spain in 1804 were still open ten years later. AGN Filipinas 50 exp.6
f.115 (1814).
138 AGN Filipinas 57 exp.7 f.177–186 (1807). AGN Filipinas 57 exp.8 f.187–189 (1807).
139 AGN Filipinas 57 exp.6 (1807).
reason to be arrested.141 For others, however, the viceroyalty was just

another place to make a living using the same questionable methods they
had been punished for in Spain. For instance, in October 1806, police
authorities suspected that convicts arrived from the Iberian Peninsula
were connected to a series of jewelry burglaries committed in Mexico
City.142
Conclusion
That convict labor was the prevalent form of punishment in the Spanish
empire by the end of the eighteenth century was partially a result of
the inescapable links that existed between administration of justice and
military recruitment. Peninsular and colonial authorities reasoned that
prisoners ought to be made useful at a time when the military and public
demands of the empire increased exponentially. When the situation of the
Philippines became critical after the British occupation in 1762, viceregal
authorities had at their disposal a well-greased system that could easily
adapt to the economic, military, and political needs at the time, with con-
victs and soldiers who were allocated – and often reallocated – regardless
of the identity of the criminal or the crime, or the capabilities of the
soldier. Civilian and military convicts from New Spain and even Spain
were considered serviceable at each and every one of the defense points
of the viceroyalty. But because multiple presidios and military units com-
peted for these resources, the same flexibility that characterized the system
also accounted for the unreliability and unpredictability of authorities in
delivering manpower to all locations. Such a system ultimately sheds light
on the vulnerability of the military establishment of New Spain and the
colossal challenges Mexican authorities faced when trying to draft men
for Manila.
Peninsular laborers and soldiers were part of the military overhaul of
the Philippines after 1762, but the daunting distances and the realities of
war in Europe explain the minor role Spain had in this process. During
the period under study, New Spain sent about 4,000 convicts and recruits
to the Pacific archipelago while the peninsular government only managed
to deliver around 200–300 men, which clearly indicates that the umbilical
cord between Mexico and the Philippines was stronger than that between
Spain and the Pearl of the Orient. The role of New Spain in sustaining

trans-Pacific connections paralleled the growing responsibility that, to

the detriment of Madrid’s hegemony, the viceroyalty had acquired in its
own militarization process. The mexicanization of regular troops was
well under way in the late 1770s, and a majority of Mexican convicts
populated the presidios in continental New Spain, Gulf of Mexico, and
the Caribbean.
The next chapter explicates what happened when it became apparent
to Mexico City authorities that criminal prosecution and usual practices
of military enlistment did not produce sufficient soldiers and laborers
for the Philippines. Ineffectual recruiting systems and an entrenched tradi-
tion of relying on petty criminals, paupers, and dissolute individuals made
it both necessary and unsurprising that Mexican authorities resorted to
annual levies of vagrants in 1783 to staff the permanent regiments and
other outposts in the Philippines. In comparison with the earlier sys-
tem of trans-Pacific convict transportation, in the late eighteenth cen-
tury more vagrants than convicts of other crimes were shipped. That
is, there was a correlation between the military situation in the Pacific
region becoming more critical and the nature of the crimes committed
by the individuals subjected to deportation. The criminal and social pro-
file of transportees to Manila also evolved in relation to specific trans-
formations in New Spain’s society. Indeed, in late eighteenth-century
Mexico City anxiety about a perceived upsurge in delinquent activity and
Enlightenment-inspired changes in vagrancy policies weighed consider-
ably in the viceregal decision to institute annual levies of vagrants and
advance a social cleansing agenda at the heart of New Spain.
3
Poverty, Criminality, and the Bourbon State
Banishing Mexican convicts to the Philippines was not a new practice,

but that in the late eighteenth century vagrants constituted the majority
of the forcefully exiled is. An explanation of the changes in vagrancy
policies in New Spain in the 1700s reveals that developments in the
Philippines shaped judicial processes and social policies in continental
New Spain. While the official stance on vagrancy in the eighteenth century
was already shifting toward a more utilitarian approach, the predicament
of post-1762 Manila further contributed to a departure from previous
procedures by instigating the adoption of more frequent, organized, and
systematic campaigns in 1783. This chapter explores the links between
crime and poverty and the evolution of poverty attitudes and laws away
from an indiscriminate Christian charity to a determination to discern
the false beggars from the true needy. The vagrant poor became a very
acute concern for Mexican Bourbon officials, intellectuals, and other elite
members in the late 1700s, and deportation to the Philippines came to be
viewed as the solution to this problem.
This chapter presents the decision of Mexico City to resort to annual
vagrancy campaigns in 1783 as the result of a combination of long-
and short-term factors. In the early 1780s, several agricultural crises and
the consolidation of economic practices that concentrated profits in the
hands of a few at the expense of a broader community of peasants and
workers pushed great numbers of rural migrants to the capital, creating
the conditions for the first urban crisis of the city. At the same time, a
Bourbon program for social reform of enlightened inspiration was being
developed in Mexico City and other urban centers in the viceroyalty
with the intention to exert control over seemingly unruly popular classes.
119
In this reformist ideological milieu, ideas about productivity, utilitarian-

ism, and the rehabilitation of the vagrants that emanated from Madrid
also circulated. In other words, the socio-economic context of Mexico
City and surrounding areas in the 1770s and 1780s produced a class of
vulnerable individuals who were categorized according to new definitions
of criminality and vagrancy. Eventually, changes in New Spain’s demog-
raphy and economy persuaded Mexican reformists to advocate the idea
of rounding up vagrants on a regular basis. Levies of vagrants aimed at
achieving a certain degree of social cleansing. By the last two decades
of the century, some individuals were considered such a social scourge
as to deserve transportation to Manila, particularly at a time when it
was expedient to do so, as it happened in 1782. This year, the closing
down by royal order of the traditional recruiting centers for the Philip-
pines in Mexico City and the nearby Puebla forced Mexican officials to
annually deport Mexican vagrants to Manila as an alternative method of
enlistment.
Socio-Economic Distress in Late Eighteenth-Century Central Mexico

Socio-economic developments that affected the capital and the surround-
ing countryside warrant attention because almost half of the individuals
who were deported to the Philippines between 1765 and 1811 had only
recently moved to Mexico City. In the last decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury agricultural and urban crises struck a social structure where a very
large lower class was already on the verge of poverty. Crises in the corn
harvest castigated central Mexico every eight to ten years from 1750 to
the outbreak of the Independence movement in 1810 – historians have
recorded agricultural failures in 1749–50, 1759–60, 1771–72, 1780–81,
1785–86, 1801–02, and 1810–11. Additionally, Charles Gibson’s tabu-
lation of agricultural conditions in the valley of Mexico from 1768 to
1780 reveals that grim conditions of drought, shortage, disease in wheat,
frost, and other natural disasters had relentlessly hit certain sectors of the
population in the years before annual anti-vagrancy raids were instituted
in 1783.1
Besides famine and epidemics, other economic developments in the
central and western highlands of New Spain were in all probability
consequential for the emergence of a demographic group in Mexico
1 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley
of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 457–58.
Poverty, Criminality, and the Bourbon State 121
City and nearby provinces susceptible to fall under new classifications

of vagrancy.2 John Tutino construes these developments as capitalism
and argues that the Bajı́o, historically a center of trading circuits con-
necting East Asia, the Americas, and Europe, was the core of a fully
operational capitalist society by 1770.3 Important for my argument is
that, in Tutino’s view, while the Bajı́o economy flourished polarization
accelerated, concentrating profits and wealth on the few while forcing
insecurity, declining earnings, and poverty onto a majority of struggling
families. In Tutino’s definition of “predatory capitalism” profit-seeking
investors and entrepreneurs such as mine owners of Guanajuato and
Zacatecas, merchants-financers of Mexico City, textile producers, and
owners of livestock diminished the livelihoods of urban and rural work-
ers and small independent producers. The author considers that a labor
market reliant on wage labor existed and was essential to the development
of capitalism in the Bajı́o. Tutino also interprets that silver mining and
refining, agricultural estates, tobacco factories, and large obrajes brought
specialization, division of labor, and the concentration of thousands of
workers consistently underpaid.4
Besides Tutino, other authors have already noted that the expansion
of the hacienda system and the shift in estate production from tenant pro-
duction to commercial cropping were leading factors that, in the Bajı́o
and elsewhere, pushed emigrants out of the Mexican countryside. Van
Young has suggested that the traditional equilibrium shifted dramatically
in favor of the great rural estates at the expense of the Indian peasant
sector.5 The growth of urban population spurred the commercialization
of agriculture in the city’s hinterland and started to draw all groups of
rural society into an expanding network of relations mediated by a cash
economy. The old regime of an extensive economy, low labor utiliza-
tion, small markets, and low capital investment transitioned to a post-
1760 regime of rising land values, intensifying use of land and labor,
expanded markets, and increasing capital investment. The population
2 John Tutino, Making a New World. Founding Capitalism in the Bajı́o and Spanish North
America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
3 Tutino claims that this was the first fully commercial and recognizable capitalist society
in the world (30), an assertion that has caused waves of critical controversy among fellow
historians.
4 Ibid., 264, 301, 336–41, 455.
5 Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. The Rural Economy
of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820, 2nd edn. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2006), 1, 8.
also increased in the countryside after 1700, which put pressure on land
and economic resources. Broadened local markets for goods, services,
primary materials, and food required the more intensive use of greater
quantities of land and labor, leading to increasing competition between
the peasant and commercial sectors over the ownership and uses of land
and other resources.6 For the Bajı́o, Tutino has documented that in the late
1780s landlords planted maize on irrigated fields and built new granaries,
which promised new profits for them at the same time that social rela-
tions notably changed. Innumerable tenants and independent rancheros
were affected when commercial growers demanded higher rents, evicted
long-time tenants, and hired hands as needed for low pay.7 In Puebla,
Lipsett-Rivera has indicated that the turnover of property accelerated
and many of the newly landless became workers or tenant farmers in the
expanding haciendas or left the countryside altogether as migrants to the
city.8
All these social and economic transformations help explain the down-
trodden situation that many men and women in the neighboring provinces
of Mexico City found themselves in after 1760. It is then plausible
that, intimately connected to these events, rural migration to Mexico
City became an intense and continued phenomenon in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century. In 1793, the estimated population of New
Spain was more than five million. Only 7.5 percent of this number
resided in municipalities considered cities, although this trend would soon
change. Between 1742 and 1811, the population of Mexico City rose to
168,000 from 98,000, largely due to migration from the city’s immediate
surroundings.9
The developments described thus far might have been capitalist in
nature, but agricultural failures that afflicted vast numbers of Mexicans
in the second half of the eighteenth century followed the pattern of sub-
sistence crises in a pre-industrial economy. Historians have noticed the
6 Van Young, Hacienda, 39.

7 Tutino, New World, 277, 370–72. The number of tenants reduced considerably after the
1790s; by 1811, most of these had become employees and seasonal laborers working for
wages in estate fields.
8 For a case study on Puebla see Sonia Lipsett-Rivera, “Puebla’s Eighteenth-Century Agrar-
ian Decline: A New Perspective,” Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 3 (1990):
463–81.
9 Scardaville, “Crime and the Urban Poor: Mexico City in the Late Colonial Period”
(PhD diss., University of Florida, 1977), 1, 53. Richard Warren, Vagrants and Citizens.
Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 9.
vulnerability of the colonial economy to environmental threats, as well as

the abnormality of weather patterns in the 1700s.10 In a classic work in
the field, economic and social historian Enrique Florescano established in
1986 that, besides meteorological fluctuations, inadequate supply caused
shortages of food. Speculative practices on the part of hacendados (large
property owners), who had storage facilities to hold back their crops until
times of scarcity, resulted in grain sales that registered higher prices in
bad years. At these junctures, rural wage laborers and small landholders
were critically affected.11 The death of cattle had disastrous effects on
the meat supply and famine ensued. Periodic dearth empowered hacen-
dados to increase the pressure on smaller proprietors. The plunge of the
demand and purchasing power, along with the lack of laborers, ruined
manufacturing output and set a declining trend in commercial activity.12
In the bigger cities, the breakdown of public services and the impossibility
to assure food supply brought misery to an expanding underclass. Even
if not necessarily a direct result of the agricultural crises, outbreaks of
smallpox in 1761–62, 1779–80, and 1797–98 and typhus in 1763–64
caused misery in rural areas.13
Rather than drawn by the enticement of urban life, rural dwellers
were pushed to the cities by economic, social, and political distress.
Here they met a populace already buffeted by inflation, shrinking wages,
and underemployment where job opportunities and social mobility were
limited.14 The progressive impoverishment of the artisan class was par-
tially rooted in the Bourbon Reforms. The royal government cut down
the monopoly and privileges of the urban artisan guilds on the grounds
that they were a hindrance to economic development.15 The abolition
10 Georgina H. Enfield, Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability

(London: Blackwell, 2008), 105. Susan C. Swan, “Mexico in the Little Ice Age,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 4 (1981): 633–48; Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of
Insurgency. Mexican Regions, 1750–1824 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 119–20.
11 Florescano, Precios del maı́z y crisis agrı́colas en México, 1708–1810 (Mexico: Edi-
ciones Era, 1986), 19–25. Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 71. John Tutino, From
Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico. Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 76.
12 Van Young, Hacienda, 102–03.
13 Gibson, Aztecs, 448–50. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761–
1813. An Administrative, Social, and Medical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1965), 112.
14 Warren, Vagrants, 9. Arrom, Containing the Poor, 6–7.
15 Jorge González Angulo Aguirre, Artesanado y ciudad a finales del siglo XVIII (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983), 244.
of guild rights granted all workers the freedom to compete for work, a
condition that facilitated the development of capitalism.16 But because
independent industry in the colony had not prospered as much as it had
in Spain, the assault on the guild system considerably exposed artisans.
Rural migration to the cities further compounded this situation, as it
engendered labor surpluses that kept wages so low as to be insufficient
to support the average family. The epidemics had ruined several busi-
nesses, which naturally impacted the available jobs for urban dwellers
and new immigrants from the countryside alike. The large amount of
artisans involved with the criminal justice in this period lays bare the
precarious social and economic circumstances of this group.17
Agricultural disasters that were conducive to urban breakdowns unveil
the structural flaws inherent in the Mexican economy. The interdepen-
dence between economic sectors determined the dramatic and tentacle-
like consequences that an agricultural failure set in motion. Each cyclical
crisis jutted out the prices for all basic foodstuffs, not just maize, and
unleashed a chain reaction that disrupted the agrarian, industrial, and
commercial parcels of the economy.18 Underneath punctual dire straits
there were deeper processes of inequality that had long contributed to
the wretchedness of the unprotected classes in New Spain, such as the
concentration of land in the hands of Creole landowners and the Church,
the regionalization of the markets, the demographic pressure of the land-
less, the fall in real wages of the rural working people, and the haciendas’
monopoly of grain sale.19 In such a situation, the lack of adequate means
of production, with very few industrial manufactories in the viceroy-
alty and not enough cultivable lands, only resulted in the inability of
the colonial state to sustain and create sources of work for a growing
population.20 Over and above, social and ethnic hierarchies affected the
marginalization of these groups because they limited what occupations
these individuals could take.
16 Tutino, New World, 313.

17 Vanessa E. Teitelbaum, “La corrección de la vagancia. Trabajo, honor y solidaridades en
la ciudad de México, 1845–1853,” in Trabajo, ocio y coacción. Trabajadores urbanos
en México y Guatemala en el siglo XIX, ed. Clara E. Lida and Sonia Pérez Toledo
(Mexico City: UAM, 2001), 115–56.
18 Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency, 123.
19 Florescano, Precios del maı́z, 103–16. Alan Knight, Mexico: The Colonial Era (New
20 Martin, “Pobres, mendigos y vagabundos,” 126.
The establishment of routine roundups of vagrants in 1783 demon-

strates that the strains that wracked the economy of the Mexican viceroy-
alty were increasingly tightening and that agricultural and urban crises
had enlarged the lower social class. Florescano has observed that after
1770 cyclical movements were more irregular, their phases more capri-
cious, and their variations more severe, and has concluded from this that
the consequences of agricultural crises grew more ample and profound
from then on.21 As a paradigm of the intensified tensions, historians have
pointed at 1785–86 as the most important crisis in colonial maize agricul-
ture that brought about most havoc in the economic and social structures
of the colony.22 The año de hambre, the year of hunger, occurred in 1786
after the August frost of 1785 and during the severe three-year drought
of 1785–87. It smote central Mexico from Oaxaca through the central
highlands of the Bajı́o. In the years 1784–87 alone, 40,000 rural immi-
grants arrived in the metropolis from neighboring territories. It surely
was not coincidental that in 1786 fifty-five offenders were deported to
the Philippines, a figure significantly higher than the annual average of
ten to fourteen convicts sent to Manila in other years. In 1787, author-
ities registered thirty-four convicts on board of the galleon and another
nineteen in 1788. There were no galleons in 1789, 1790, or 1791 but
in 1792, another group of thirty-eight felons figured in the passengers’
manifest (Appendix).
The recurrence of these recessions signifies that the administrative and
economic Bourbon reforms in New Spain camouflaged economic, social,
and political problems of a long-term nature.23 The legislation passed
by the Bourbons aimed at fashioning a more dynamic economy based
on free trade, revitalized mining production, and remodeled imperial fis-
cal machinery. The results were remarkable in many counts: by 1808,
the Mexican population was larger, colonial commerce broader, silver
output greater, and royal authority stronger but deficit spending had
become the rule and fiscal pressure aggravated the impoverishment of
Mexicans.24 Agriculture gained little from technological improvement
and the emphasis placed on the mining industry limited the number of
21 Florescano, Precios del maı́z, 60.

22 Gibson, Aztecs, 316; and Florescano, Precios del maı́z, 47.
23 Van Young, Other Rebellion, 70–71.
24 Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain,
Britain and France, 1760–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81–
118.
enterprises capable of employing an upward population. What the cycli-

cal agrarian and urban crises in the latter part of the eighteenth century
proved was that notable economic growth had not been accompanied
by development. Also, growth could not be sustained nor equally dis-
tributed because reformers did not contemplate the dismantling of tradi-
tional structures. Mexico remained colonial in its economy, society, and
institutions.25
The concurrence of hunger, epidemics, and criminality in the high
points of the cycles is of momentous relevance to understand the cre-
ation of new institutions and criminal legislation, the revived impulse
that Mexican authorities gave to the battle against vagrancy in the early
1780s, and Bourbon social reforms in general. Scholars have observed
this coincidence throughout the colonial period and particularly as New
Spain approached the time of its Independence.26 In times of agrarian dis-
aster and contraction of business, unemployment, disease, vagrancy, and
criminal activity seemed to have ensued, especially in the cities. Indeed,
the forced transportation of vagrants to the Philippines attests to the
fact that in the late colonial period Mexico City was struggling with the
social calamities that the human flow pushed out from the hinterland had
caused. Urban infrastructures could not absorb the displaced individuals
because, given the nature of the colonial economy, full employment was
impossible.
Criminal Activity and Bourbon Social Engineering in Mexico City

Partly as a result of the socio-economic situation described earlier, many
Mexicans living in the cities and the countryside became targets of newly
expanded judiciary and law-enforcement agencies. To be sure, the main-
tenance of order had been a source of concern for government officials in
Mexico City and surrounding areas for a long time, not just in the second
half of the eighteenth century. The riot of 1692, during which thousands
of raging plebeians caused extensive property damage in the capital, had
already revealed the inadequacy of Habsburg social control.27 In the
25 Van Young, La crisis del orden colonial: Estructura agraria y rebeliones populares
de la Nueva España, 1750–1821 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), 51–124. Richard
L. Garner and Spiro E. Stefanou, Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 255–58. Knight, Mexico, 206–60.
26 Florescano, Precios del maı́z, 81–97; Knight, Mexico, 233–35. Van Young has sought
the roots of the Revolution in the circumstances of hunger and unemployment during
the decades leading to the 1810 rebellion. Van Young, Other Rebellion, 71–75.
27 See Cope, Racial Domination, for a thorough account of the riot.
following decades, viceroys and other judicial authorities believed that

the actions of ordinary justice (sala del crimen) and the special jurisdic-
tion of the Santa Hermandad – a police and judicial power in charge of
crimes committed on roads and in uninhabited areas – were not enough
to reduce the level of crime. Common punishments did not seem to
deter thefts and assaults.28 In the early 1700s it was understood that
the abundance of idle and vagabond people was a determining factor in
the problem of banditry and urban delinquency.29 Additionally, it had
become abundantly clear that the ever more ethnically complex colo-
nial society of Mexico implied a unique social and economic source of
concern.
The establishment by royal decree in 1722 of an especial tribunal
and police force, the Acordada, has been considered a major advance in
the administration of justice in New Spain. The creation of this court
of law responded to the perceived necessity for a judicial organization
that was not burdened by political obligations and territorial limitations.
The Acordada had jurisdiction over robbery, theft of livestock, physical
violence, arson, banditry, and murder on roads and highways, as well
as on illegal liquors. For the most part, the Acordada and the sala del
crimen oversaw a majority of property and violent crimes, while the local
jurisdiction of the alcaldes ordinarios mainly extended over social dis-
orders considered less serious in nature: vagrancy, adultery, fornication,
concubinage, bigamy, gambling, and drunkenness. The magistrates of
the Acordada enjoyed independence from all territorial governors and
judicial bodies, including the sala del crimen.30
By mid-century, Mexican legislators deemed it opportune to introduce
yet more changes in the policing of Mexico City. In 1756, the jurisdiction
of the rural-based Acordada was extended to the viceregal capital. The
Crown authorized the Acordada to police Mexico City day and night
with full authority over homicide, violence, and robbery, a further sign
that the uneasiness about urban crime had not subsided. The absence
of restrictions that characterized this tribunal’s actions led to contin-
uous clashes with the Audiencia and other judicial authorities. In the
second half of the century the Acordada, born out of the need to pro-
tect not the individual but the colonial society as a group, coexisted with
28 Terán Enrı́quez, Justicia y crimen, 55. Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, Antes de la Acor-
dada: La represión de la criminalidad rural en el México colonial, 1550–1750 (Seville:
University of Seville, 2013), 167.
29 Bazán, “El Real Tribunal de la Acordada,” 324.
30 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 65–70, 115.
difficulty with the enlightened proposals about human rights and the push
of ideas like Beccaria’s. Notwithstanding, the endurance of this institu-
tion until 1812 suggests that there was a persisting necessity for a judicial
organization that could act swiftly, flexibly, and independently.31
Further steps were taken in the 1780s to ensure that the police force
and criminal court system operated efficiently. In 1782 Mexico City was
divided into eight major zones, each sectioned into thirty-two cuarteles
(minor districts) patrolled by alcaldes de barrio (neighborhood police).
The alcaldes benefitted from an improved coordination with the Acor-
dada, the sala del crimen, and municipal authorities but their most
important functions were not judicial but related to administration and
patrolling. Alcaldes facilitated the authority’s scrutiny over the residents
in their district by keeping a census of all establishments (workshops,
businesses, stalls, offices, inns, taverns, restaurants, and others), a reg-
ister of all the residents, house by house, and a logbook of deaths and
travelers.32 Alcaldes were responsible for enforcing the legislation regard-
ing recreational activities and behavior in public places. They conducted
surveillance to prevent excesses associated with alcoholic consumption,
and they executed regulations for the refashioning of the pulquerı́as (tav-
erns), such as the removal of sidewalls and heavy window curtains to
allow for the public gaze to penetrate these spaces.33 Compelling obser-
vance of gambling laws was also part of their routine duties.
The introduction of new crime control schemes as a means to pre-
serve order and royal authority and rein in a multiracial populace took
place amid socio-economic developments that thrust many Mexicans into
distress, unemployment, poverty, and sometimes delinquency. But the
expansion of police and judicial structures was also the product of a dis-
tinctively Mexican context of Bourbon-inspired social reformism. Indeed,
the concern of elite groups toward the actions, attitudes, culture, beliefs,
and values of the lower class fueled a broad program of social reform.
Social reforms were an extension of the comprehensive policies that under
the reign of King Charles III affected the administration, the fiscal appa-
ratus, the army effectives, and the church in all corners of the empire.
31 By the time the War for Independence erupted, the tribunal had become obsolete. Steps
were taken to convert the Acordada into an anti-insurgent force, but the liberal constitu-
tion of 1812 threw the legality of the tribunal into doubt and created a supreme tribunal
of justice to which all courts of law in the viceroyalty were subordinated. MacLachlan,
Criminal Justice, 102–07.
32 Lozano Armendares, Criminalidad, 25. Viqueira Albán, Propriety, 175–78.
33 Voekel, “Peeing on the Palace,” 190–91.
A topic of increasing interest among historians, the changing relation-

ship between the state and the urban poor was as fundamental for the
recovery of the Spanish empire as the more-famous instances of Bourbon
reformism.34 In the understanding of Spanish reformers, the maintenance
of public order and reform of social behavior would produce a more
rational and productive citizen.35
The period from 1785 to 1810 is commonly considered the apotheosis
of the Enlightenment and “the breakdown of customs”36 in the Mexican
viceroyalty – although it was not a phenomenon exclusive to this colony
by any means.37 While enlightened principles were evidently shared across
the Atlantic, social reforms in New Spain were not a direct copy of the
statutes applied in Spain. In the colony, elite sectors aspired to establish
a new social order against the backdrop of the Bourbons’ concept of
modernity and morality. The decrees and the correspondence between
colonial officials lay bare perceptions of moral decline, disorderliness of
the streets, and intensification of urban violence. Not only theft, assault,
and murder were viewed as serious problems but also begging, vagrancy,
public drunkenness, filthiness, incorrigible children, and family disputes.
Considerations about ethnicity and more appreciable strains on the ethnic
hierarchy due to the rocketing numbers of the casta groups also dictated
the actions of Mexican authorities. A culturally and biologically mixed
plebe that could no longer be neatly compartmentalized in ethnic cate-
gories manifested itself as a source of anxiety for elites. Independently
of the success historians ascribe to these reforms, the fact that they were
enacted speaks volumes about the expectations and apprehensions of the
ruling sectors of New Spain.
In order to educate – civilize, in the enlightened terminology – the
lower class of the viceroyalty, various ordinances concentrated on edi-
fying urban dwellers with a greater sense of hygiene and sanitation. At
34 Although the balance of studies continues to be favorable to the military, political,

administrative, and economic aspects of the Bourbon legislation, within the past few
years scholars have broadened and deepened discussions to include the intellectual ori-
gins of the reform, the spread of scientific knowledge, social engineering, and the impact
of the new policies on the cultural sphere. Andrien, “The Politics of Reform,” 637–62.
35 Jean Sarrailh, La España ilustrada de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII (Mexico: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1992), 80–84, 528–37. Antonio Domı́nguez Ortiz, Sociedad y
estado en el siglo dieciocho español (Madrid: Ariel, 1976), 342–44.
36 Viqueira Albán, Propriety, 151.
37 Upper-class anxiety about crime and social control led to comparable reforms in Peru.
Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King. Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in
Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 129.
the turn of the century, Viceroys Count of Revillagigedo (1789–94) and

Berenguer y Marquina (1800–03) considered that the beauty and mag-
nificence of Mexico City depended on the eradication of the bad habits
of its inhabitants.38 The decrees mandated residents to keep dirt from
the front of their houses and prohibited them from throwing garbage in
the streets or letting cows, dogs, and pigs wander about freely. The plebe
was instructed not to urinate or defecate in public spaces. A new sewage
system, garbage carts, and public toilets were part of an institutional-
ized effort to conceal natural bodily functions. Enlightened ministers in
Mexico attempted to regulate not only urban spaces but also colonial
bodies.39 Even if they were defined as being of general interest, Bourbon
policies on the cleansing and health of the individual can be considered
as ultimate instruments for social control.40 However, the reiteration of
these regulations indicates that public health initiatives failed in Mexico
City, where a populace with little interest in adhering to municipal sani-
tation codes and the lack of an effective regulatory body to enforce health
standards impeded the improvement of sanitary conditions.41
Cultural attitudes about hygiene, addictions, and public propriety pro-
vided elites with a means of self and class identity, defining social and
behavioral boundaries between the poor and themselves.42 This class
identity justified Bourbon reformers’ determination to procure the sepa-
ration of elite and non-elite individuals by assigning to each human activ-
ity and social group a certain place – physical and symbolical – in the city.
Municipal authorities forced Indians and castas to live outside the elite
neighborhoods and undertook censuses of all establishments. Abandoned
houses were demolished while wider, well-lit boulevards, parks and gar-
dens were built to uplift the moral behavior of citizens. New regulations
ended the long tradition of the plebe and elites sharing diversions such
as theater, bullfights, carnivals, or juego de pelota (ballgame). Sumptuary
38 Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 17. AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Bandos 3423
exp.51 (1800).
39 Carrera, Imagining Identity, esp. 106–35.
40 Michel Foucault, who theorized that the object of the politics of medicine and hygiene
was the “social body” and that the primary interest of the state was to transform
people into a productive labor force, inspires me here. Michel Foucault, “The Politics
of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980),
166–83.
41 Andrew Knaut, “Yellow Fever and the Late Colonial Public Health Response in the Port
of Veracruz,” Hispanic American Historical Review 77, no. 4 (1997): 619–44.
42 Voekel, “Peeing on the Palace,” 199–200.
laws established appropriate dress codes to uphold the social hierarchy,

and the 1776 Pragmatic Sanction tried to put a halt to marriages between
social unequals.43
In tandem with the legal regulation of peoples, bodies, and spaces
reformers pursued the restructuring of popular culture. Public diver-
sions such as carnival rituals, theater, and games were deemed vulgar,
improper, and decadent. Bourbon policymakers diligently fought the
weight of religion in Mexican social and cultural life. Although impor-
tant to popular religiosity and community identity, excessive or irregular
demonstrations of public piety were despised by authorities. Bourbon
legislators stifled autonomous cultural expressions evident in local cel-
ebrations and made sure that remaining rituals conveyed appropriate
political messages.44 Moreover, participation in religious festivities, pil-
grimages, dances, and processions were restricted because they prevented
colonial subjects from being more productive.45
Plenty of evidence suggests that the policing and judicial activity in
Mexico City greatly intensified in the last twenty years of the eighteenth
century, precisely when viceregal authorities took a harsher stance toward
vagrancy with the institution of annual levies in 1783. This is not surpris-
ing, given the plethora of behaviors that Mexican legislators criminalized
during “the breakdown of customs.” The establishment of the thirty-
two alcaldes de barrio in 1782 undeniably contributed to enlarge the
number of arrests in the streets of Mexico City and prompted the crim-
inal justice system in the capital to record a feverish activity. It is for
the Acordada that historians have more consistent data for this century.
According to MacLachlan, about 57,000 individuals were tried during
the life of this tribunal, 75 percent of which (43,000) were arrested and
condemned between 1781 and 1808.46 Scardaville has estimated that the
Acordada, in conjunction with other tribunals in Mexico City, processed
about 10,000 cases annually during the 1780s and 1790s.47 However, the
incidence of crime was likely greater than the statistics indicate because
not all violations of the law were necessarily detected or reported, and
not all arrests led to the formation of criminal cases.
43 Viqueira Albán, Propriety, 97–102.

44 Martin, “Public Celebrations,” 95–114.
45 Voekel, Alone Before God. The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 98–105.
47 Scardaville, “(Habsburg) Law,” 5.
Data on the social class of those arrested illustrate that, during a period
when it was felt that crime was getting out of hand, the focus of judicial
activity was no longer the individual criminals but the appearance of a
dangerous class of people.48 Of the cases processed by the Acordada, sala
del crimen, and alcaldes ordinarios in the 1790s, 1800, and 1810s, at least
three quarters involved lower and marginally middle-class people such as
artisans, laborers, small farmers, service-sector workers, and individuals
of limited occupational skills, as opposed to a meager 10–15 percent of
people in upper and middle strata.49 That the urban poor were the ones
more frequently involved with judicial problems was to be expected given
that the largest segment of Mexico City’s population was in fact the lower
bottom of the social structure – Indians, mestizos, and mulattos, but also a
sizable section of poor Spaniards and Creoles. Urban workers in Mexico
City constituted a varied lot. Most of these toiled in small workshops
where they had invested little capital in tools or materials. The rest of the
urban workforce was made up of unskilled laborers (porters, domestic
servants, and street vendors) and those employed by the city in poorly
remunerated positions in manufacturing enterprises (bakeries, butcher
shops, and textile plants), construction projects, and tobacco factories.
The majority of the urban poor, though, were forced to wander the
streets.50
The vast disparity between the amounts of Mexicans who were appre-
hended and those who were actually convicted is symptomatic of the
apprehension with which the ruling sectors approached the actions of
plebeians in Mexico City. The percentage of prisoners who were eventu-
ally released escalated much faster than the number of arrests in the last
quarter of the century. On the onset of this tribunal’s existence, the Acor-
dada judges set free less than 20 percent of the individuals they incarcer-
ated, whereas the rate of prisoners who were only temporarily confined,
received a minor punishment, or were released climbed to about 40 per-
cent in the late 1770s and reached an astonishing 60–70 percent in the
early 1780s that remained steady until 1811.51 The inordinate amount
48 Herzog, Upholding Justice, 213.

49 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 45. Haslip Viera, Crime and Punishment, 59–61.
50 Warren, Vagrants, 11.
51 Between 1781 and 1811, MacLachlan lists a total of 32,990 convicts (72 percent of
all individuals convicted in those years) who were temporarily confined or received
a minor punishment, but he assumes that many of them were actually released. The
number is significantly higher than the 2,068 convicts who were freed in 1703–81 (17
percent of all convicts). MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 114. Bazán’s figures suggest
of liberations is also telling of a criminal system that administered justice

neither arbitrarily nor abusively.
Social Bourbon reforms and a vigorous administration of criminal
justice aimed at curving a supposed regression of moral values in New
Spain’s popular classes. The Bourbon legislation assumed that Mexicans
were at this time more indolent, more indecent in their clothing and man-
ners, inveterate alcoholics, and more inclined to break the law. But to
be sure, enlightened assumptions about the plebe and vagrants do not
necessarily illustrate more than just the mentality of those who uttered
them. A change in colonial social values had occurred, and elites had
become more concerned with regulating certain behaviors and less toler-
ant of traditional social practices.52 The issuance of laws that aspired to
control and impose order in physical and personal spaces, along with an
increase in the total number of arrests, do not necessarily mean that there
actually was social chaos and a rampant criminality in the streets of Mex-
ico City. Instead, these developments betray the perceptions of judicial
authorities about what they considered to be transgressive and punishable
behaviors.
Notwithstanding that official data is not evidence enough to state
that an intensification of urban crime occurred in Mexico City in the
late 1700s, there is reason to believe that crime and vagrancy actually
increased in the years between 1770 and 1810 because of a deterioration
of living standards among the urban poor.53 The socio-economic context
was surely a factor in nurturing an impression about ubiquitous criminal
activity. The chasm between subsistence level wages, incomes, and the
comparatively high cost of living is evidence of the precarious economic
condition of the urban poor in late colonial Mexico City. The cost of
food was the heaviest burden, with very high prices during inflation years
and food shortages. Clothing was also so expensive that people usually
rented it; the public sight of those who could not afford to go about
dressed fueled the comments of visitors and observers about naked, dirty
individuals.
similar conclusions, with a total of 15,871 individuals freed in 1782–92 (62 percent of
all convicted) versus 1,918 released in 1719–81 (18.7 percent). Bazán, “El Real Tribunal
de la Acordada,” 334, 337.
52 Viqueira Albán has argued that New Spain’s upper class went through a gallicization
process in the late colonial period. Viqueira Albán, Propriety, xvi.
53 Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 48. Scardaville, “Justice by Paperwork: A Day in
the Life of a Court Scribe in Bourbon Mexico City,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4
(2003): 979–1007.
If anything, the belief that crime was the inevitable result of begging
became stronger toward the closure of the 1700s because vagrancy had
become an urban problem attached to drunkenness and gambling. The
Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt noted in 1803 that the cap-
ital was beset by mendicity, with 20,000–30,000 vagrants residing in
the city.54 In very scathing terms, the Spanish lawyer and bureaucrat
Hipólito Villarroel, who resided in Mexico for more than twenty-five
years, wrote in 1785 about vagabonds who virtually overrun the capital:
“[the city] is an impenetrable forest filled with evil and dissolution; . . . the
lazy, daring, insolent, shameless, and untamed multitude who strike fear
in the rest of the inhabitants.”55 The oidor of the Audiencia of Mexico
Baltasar Ladrón de Guevara and foreign travellers also expressed their
contempt about the physical and moral environment in which vagrants
and beggars in Mexico City lived in.56 The implication that the poor
were most likely to commit a crime precluded contemporaries from
considering other explanations as for why certain individuals broke the
law.57
In the light of the processes analyzed thus far in this chapter, the hard-
ening of anti-vagrancy attitudes and the decision to raise annual levies in
1783 should be placed at the heart of a multifaceted context. Men and
women of lower classes proved to be very vulnerable to the economic,
social, cultural, and judicial transformations that were reshaping New
Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Judicial and police
structures that were extending their reach and becoming more and more
zealous identified these individuals as menacing and undesirable. Many
were specifically caught in the wide-meshed net of the struggle against
vagrancy and the application of new legal categories of vagrants. Levies
of vagrants and the redemption of the individual through the inculcation
54 Humboldt, Ensayo polı́tico, 113.

55 Hipólito Villarroel, México por dentro y fuera bajo el gobierno de los virreyes, o sea,
enfermedades polı́ticas que padece la capital de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Imprenta
del C. Alejandro Valdés, 1831 [1785–87]), 175.
56 Baltasar Ladrón de Guevara, “Discurso sobre la policı́a de México,” in Antologı́a de
textos sobre la ciudad de México en el perı́odo de la Ilustración, 1788–1792, ed. Sonia
Lombardo Ortiz (Mexico City: INAH, 1982), 77. Sharon Bailey Glasco, Construct-
ing Mexico City. Colonial Conflicts Over Culture, Space, and Authority (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 37.
57 As a way of illustration, Francois Giraud points that family solidarity had much to do
with the decision of individuals to be unlawful. Francois Giraud, “Los desvı́os de una
institución. Familia y parentesco entre los ladrones novohispanos,” in De la santidad a
la perversión: O de por qué no se cumplı́a la ley de Dios en la sociedad novohispana,
ed. Sergio Ortega (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), 197–217.
of virtues of hard work figured as one of several Bourbon projects that

proposed to control the intimate spaces of plebeian sectors in New Spain.
Both in the Iberian Peninsula and the viceroyalty enlightened parame-
ters defined the contours of a different type of “vagrant.” Therefore, I
turn now to how evolving social and legal criteria culminated in new
definitions of vagrancy by the mid-1700s.
Shifting Attitudes Toward Poverty and Vagrancy in

Eighteenth-Century Spain and New Spain
In Habsburg Spain, charity was a religious duty but pauperism con-
cerned royal and municipal governments since at least the fourteenth
century, when the earliest forms of policing appeared.58 While Euro-
pean countries under the banner of Reformation attempted to centralize
and secularize assistance to the poor and created institutions for the
reform of vagrants through work, Spain has been viewed as resistant
to all change in the name of Catholic orthodoxy with a disorganized
and haphazard poor relief system directed by an overindulgent Church.59
Since the 1980s, though, social historians like Robert Jütte have con-
vincingly separated the reorganization of poor relief from confessional
dependencies and have placed the abandonment of charity in the larger
economic, social, and religious crisis of late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries.60 Indeed, Spain did not remain aloof from the innovations
and ideas current in other parts of Western Europe, and a change in the
vision of poverty might have taken place already in the mid-1500s. At
this time, the Spanish Crown backed efforts of reformers in the city of
Toledo who were armed with proposals on social legislation of humanist
Juan Luis Vives.61 However, the many objections to confinement, namely
among them that the removal of mendicants from the streets would
58 Isabel Ramos Vázquez, “Policı́a de vagos para las ciudades españolas del siglo XVIII,”
Revista de Estudios Histórico-Jurı́dicos 31 (2009): 224.
59 On the Christian obligation, poor relief, and changes in the notion of poverty for Europe
as a whole, see Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell,
1994).
60 Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge Univer-
stiy Press, 1994), 136. Other historians who decline to see extreme distinctions between
Catholic and Protestant health care provision are Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renais-
sance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971); and Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
61 Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 7–34.
prevent the faithful from practicing the charity necessary for salvation,
precluded the Spanish state from assuming a more prominent respon-
sibility over the well-being of the poor for the next century and a
half.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spanish authori-
ties applied rigor to individuals who begged for alms without having real
need. These were held accountable for usurping the right that the real
vagrants had to charity. False beggars or vagabonds – who at the time
could include useful beggars, gypsies, foreigners, and street vendors – were
punished to lashings, imprisonment, personal service to a private individ-
ual with no wage, or banishment. Although occasionally, vagrants were
also sentenced to the galleys and North African presidios for two to four
years.62 For the most part, though, vagabonds and petty offenders in the
Habsburg period lived out their marginal lives freely, wandering about
the country and subsisting off charity and crime. It would not be until the
1700s when the pressure of public opinion and the economic objectives of
the government combined to produce a more systematic offensive against
vagrancy and delinquency.63
Under the Bourbon sway, the traditional Catholic view of pauperism
finally gave way to a more hostile, secular conception. Charity as the
principal goal of the Habsburgs transitioned to a more Enlightenment-
based view of treating poverty with regulated social welfare programs.
The confident, optimistic Bourbon response to urban poverty was to
prohibit begging and to take over the role of the Church as principal
caregiver of the needy. Enlightened thinkers criticized traditional, pri-
vately managed forms of assistance, such as obras pı́as (pious works),
cofradı́as (confraternities), and casas de misericordia (asylums) because
they lacked coordination in goals and funds; instead, these intellectuals
advocated for public management in the context of a paternal state that
ought to provide education and the teaching of trades.64
While the relief of the deserving poor occupied some of the reformers’
time and effort, the larger part of the changes in vagrancy policies focused
on vagrants and false beggars. A stream of publications appeared in
the eighteenth century lamenting the substantial numbers of vagabonds,
beggars, and idlers – usually in conjunction with observations about
a rising level of crime – and recommending decisive action to control
62 Pérez Estévez, El problema, 167.

63 Pike, Penal Servitude, 49–50.
64 Ramos Vázquez, “Policı́a de vagos,” 223.
the problem. Legislators took pains to make a distinction between the

employable false beggar and the deserving local pauper in order to deter-
mine who deserved the time and resources of the state, separate the inno-
cent from those living in vice, and exact the maximum productivity out
of the able population. Vagrants were to blame for their own destitu-
tion, while the deserving poor had to be confined in hospicios generales
(poorhouses) to learn the skills and work ethic that reformers deemed
were necessary for them to become productive members of society.65 By
virtue of this system, the state would deal directly and more rationally
with poverty.
Drawing the boundaries between vagrants and the true destitute was
considered important in the Spanish legal framework. From the mid-
1700s to 1845, the legal definition of vago (vagrant) evolved constantly
in the hands of Spanish legislators. Legal developments in this matter also
denote that lawmakers characterized a certain social type rather than a
crime.66 A 1745 royal decree published in Madrid was the first attempt
to systematize this distinction. The ordinance defined vagrants as those
living without an honest means of support. Supplementary instructions
in 1751, 1759, and 1765 broadened the category of vago with a vast
and highly colorful array of characters from all social strata, some of
them with licit professions: men sleeping in the streets, unemployed arti-
sans, disobedient sons, amancebados (those who maintained a long-term
illicit sexual affair that involved cohabitation), foreigners, street vendors,
stallholders, street performers (musicians, acrobats, puppeteers), individ-
uals who led nomadic lives (gypsies, wandering pilgrims), hidalgos with
no income, and university students who failed to attend class. Vagrancy
laws in the second half of the eighteenth century also opened a new
niche where, under the denomination of malentretenido (troublemaker)
authorities were allowed to impress the drunkards and gamblers along
with dı́scolos (those of unruly behavior), that is, those who disturbed
the public peace, those who harassed women, and those who vandalized
public avenues and public works.67 By the last quarter of the century, lib-
ertines, fornicators, and men who mistreated their wives or abandoned
their families all were being prosecuted under similar legislation.68
65 An ample discussion of the classification of vagrants and differentiations between true

and fake beggars is in Pérez Estévez, El problema, 55–64, and Arrom, Containing the
Poor, 11–43.
67 Ramos Vázquez, “Policı́a de vagos,” 236–41.
68 Perez Estévez, El problema, 65–76.
The campaign against idlers and social outcasts began during the reign
of King Philip V (1700–46), but before 1775 there is little evidence of an
attempt on the part of legislators and authorities to rehabilitate vagrants.
Officials moved away from punishing false beggars with lashings, per-
sonal services, or banishment but levies were ordered and executed on
occasion for very specific state reasons and after setting concrete numer-
ical targets. Usually vagrants were collected to fulfill punctual needs of
the regiments but there could be other reasons. In the 1750s, levies were
organized because the program of naval expansion developed by the min-
ister of Marine, Marquis of Ensenada, required the mobilization of large
numbers of unskilled workers at the lowest possible cost to toil in the
arsenals, a dreaded destination for vagrants.69 In March 1766, mobs ran-
sacked parts of the city of Madrid for several days, infuriated because
of high bread prices and a decree that outlawed the public wearing of a
popular long cape and round hat. Local authorities in the capital pointed
at the role of vagrants, idlers, and troublemakers as active instigators of
the so-called Esquilache riots. That year, only in Madrid 1,000 vagrants
were rounded up; levies were executed again in 1767 and 1768, producing
another 5,000.70
The publication of yet another decree in 1775 crowned the Bourbon
efforts to address vagrancy. The document stressed the need to reduce
the manifold regulations that had been issued on the matter to a simple
and efficient rule. Earlier decrees of 1733 and 1745 and a variety of sup-
plemental instructions overlapped and were equivocal on who to detain,
where to retain vagrants, what resources to use, and how to delimit the
different jurisdictions.71 Following Campomanes’ suggestion to speed up
the expunction of vagrancy, the collection of vagrants was to be executed
with annual frequency in provincial capitals and other populous towns.
After 1775, the jurisdiction over the vagrancy levies process was trans-
ferred from the Ministry of War to the Council of Castile: the vagrant
went from being a subject that only merited the attention of military
authorities – a potential recruit – to being a subject of vast plans for
the social reform of marginal classes.72 The shift betrays the resolution
to solve the problem of vagrancy and eradicate idleness in a definitive
manner.

71 Ramos Vázquez, “Policı́a de vagos,” 236–41.
72 Pérez Estévez, El problema, 197–222.
figure 3.1. The royal decree that instituted annual roundups of vagrants in
Spain was received in Mexico City a few years after it was published in Aran-
juez in May 7, 1775. Ordenanza de S.M. en que se previene y establece el
recogimiento de vagos y mal-entretenidos por medio de levas. Madrid, 1775.
Signatura: XVIII/494(23). Courtesy of Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu
(Biblioteca Gregorio Mayans).
The 1775 decree gave a revived impetus to the provisions issued in

1733 and 1745 to assign the undeserving poor to military service, which
suggests that the change in the stance on poverty had definitely con-
verged with manpower requirements. Vagrants aged between seventeen
and thirty-six years and at least 5 feet tall were to be conscribed into
the army. The majority of vagrants in Spain in the eighteenth century
were destined to military service, but the 1775 ordinance also exposed
the desire to have a reserve available for other destinations that had few
volunteers, such as naval arsenals and public works presidios.73 Vagrants
were sent to the arsenals if of shorter height than 5 feet; here they con-
stituted the greater number of workers until the 1770s.74 Those who
were deemed unsuitable for military service because of their old age or
ill health were allocated to government-sponsored public works. In the
1780s it was frequent for prisoners to be utilized outside the public works
presidios to perform work beneficial to the king or in the public interest,
such as street-cleaning, repair of port facilities, and the construction of
bridges, custom houses, military hospitals, and barracks. However, even
in a city like Madrid, the number of vagrants in municipal work projects
was always minimal. Military service was indeed a favorite destination
among vagrants because in the regiments they were incorporated as sol-
diers to all effects whereas in arsenals, public works, and hospicios they
formed a special category.75
The departure from previous policies did not happen in a vacuum.
The Esquilache riots and the allegedly subversive role of vagabonds and
beggars in the uprising had again put in sharp focus the “excesses of
the plebe.” After the revolt was over, vagrants had clearly become the
focus of public attention. The government of the city of Madrid prohib-
ited vagrants from going to taverns and other places associated to vices.
In addition, the upward-sloping enmity with England in the 1770s and
Spain’s foreign wars required reinforced military units in the colonies.
This state of affairs created a steady demand for soldiers, and roundups
of vagrants continued strong and constant in the next few decades. Pérez
Estévez has calculated that 63,010 vagrants were rounded up in 1730–82.
It is assumed that since the general population increased in the Iberian
Peninsula, the amount of vagrants most likely did as well. However, the
73 Of 44,777 vagrants whose destination Pérez Estévez knows about for the eighteenth
century, 55 percent (24,899) went to the army.
74 Pike, Penal Servitude, 68–69. Arsenals had very high rates of dead and sick people.
figures of the levied individuals do not testify to a constant crescendo

over the century because the number of vagrants that each levy targeted
for was based on punctual administrative and military needs at each
time.76
The new attitude toward poverty was also a reflection of the enlight-
ened rationalism of Spanish politicians and their deep awareness of the
imperial decline and economic difficulties that Spain faced in the eigh-
teenth century. The seemingly infestation of false beggars began to be
seen as a major cause for the dwindling Spanish power at home and
abroad. Idleness became the spotlight of reformers like Campomanes,
Jovellanos, Bernardo Ward, and Sempere y Guarinos, who saw vagrancy
as a scourge for the economy, the source of all moral depravation, and
the gateway to a life of crime and deceit.77 These ilustrados established
a connection between labor and the volume of production, and they
estimated the vagrants’ economic barrenness as a considerable strain on
local communities and the empire as a whole. Intellectuals assumed that
every subject had an obligation to contribute to the prosperity of the
society and the state; and the state, as the guardian of public good, had
both the responsibility and the right to direct the population into useful
employment. The maxims of these secular writers therefore linked the
prosperity and power of the empire to the productivity of individuals. In
the politicians’ plan to modernize Spain, vagrants occupied the role of a
potential workforce in need of discipline and monitoring. The surge in
property crime and the desire to defend a renewed value of property for
the benefit of rising middle class sectors may have influenced as well the
understanding of vagrancy as an exceptionally acute problem.78
Notwithstanding the new emphasis on the economic benefits to be
derived from welfare measures and the fact that the campaign against
idlers and misbehavers affected mostly those who could be impressed
into the armed forces, it is fair to assume that Bourbon policy-makers did
have genuine concerns for the well-being of the poor. Forced labor and
76 Ibid., 340–41.
77 Pedro Rodrı́guez de Campomanes, Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos
y su fomento (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Don Antonio de Sancha, 1775), and Gaspar
Melchor de Jovellanos, Colección de varias obras en prosa y verso del Exmo. Señor
D. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Madrid: Imprenta de D. León Amarita, 1831). The
economists and politicians Ward and Sempere y Guarinos developed similar ideas in
Obra pı́a y eficaz modo para remediar la miseria de la gente pobre de España (Madrid:
Imprenta de D. Antonio Espinosa, 1787) and Biblioteca española económico-polı́tica,
vol. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta de Sancha, 1801), respectively.
78 Ramos Vázquez, “Policı́a de vagos,” 222.
military service appeared as a means for discipline, individual redemp-

tion, and social reintegration. Philanthropy and a more defined purpose
of rehabilitation was part of the reflections of enlightened writers, espe-
cially the consideration that vagos needed to learn a trade or profession
for their successful reintegration. The centuries-old idea of confinement
gained wide support, and institutions of social transformation that com-
bined the principles of the poorhouse, workhouse, and penal institution
were established all over the country in 1750–1800. A large part of the
pauper and idle population – women, children, the aged and physically
handicapped – remained untouched by the vagrancy laws. The over-
whelming majority of inmates at the workhouses were elderly or sick
men who had been disqualified to serve in the army or to perform hard
labor in fortifications or public projects. In the 1780s, houses of cor-
rection started to take on an increasingly penal character as they held
a mixed population of vagrants, beggars, orphans, the crippled, and the
insane but also prostitutes, petty offenders, and married women accused
of adultery, licentious behavior, or concubinage.79
The transition to a utilitarian type of discipline has been associated to
the rise of early capitalism,80 but the Spanish case does not adjust easily
to this premise. As stated elsewhere, the Bourbon government was firmly
steering away from exemplary corporal punishments to a discipline that
aimed at providing the empire with cheap soldiers and workers. Penal
labor became a system of rehabilitation that now included the unem-
ployed, vagrants, and other marginalized social groups.81 The 1775 ordi-
nance heralded the emergence of a capitalist moral and logic of work,
productivity, and free time. The central focus of the document was the
struggle against idleness, defined as detrimental to “the universal indus-
triousness of the individuals, on which notably depends the happiness
of people.”82 Therefore, the new law authorized municipal officials to
prosecute unemployed individuals and those who were absent from their
job during working time. But since “vagrant” also referred to those who
were found at “unearthly hours” wandering or sleeping in the streets, in
gambling houses, or in taverns it follows that the intention was to regulate
how the populace used their spare time. The primacy of political-military
interests, though, was a pivotal factor in the ultimate failure of a modern,
79 Pike, Penal Servitude, 54–57, 153.

80 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Chapter 3.
81 Pike, Penal Servitude, 55, 135–40. Pérez Estévez, El problema, 341.
82 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Ordenanzas 2356 exp.10 (1775).
state-led poor-relief project in Spain that could force vagrants to work.83

That is, the allocation of idlers and troublemakers to work at useful
tasks, to learn trades and to form industrious habits, just as statesmen
like Campomanes and Ward had envisioned, was only secondary to their
allocation to military service.
The radicalization of vagrancy policies in New Spain in the second half
of the eighteenth century signifies that both the metropole and the viceroy-
alty underwent social, cultural, and economic transformations that gen-
erated a new consternation about criminal activity and its connections
to poverty and vagrancy. In retrospect, the persecution of vagrancy had
been a permanent feature of colonial life shortly after Hernán Cortés
established Spanish rule in Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1521. As early as the
1530s, local authorities reported numerous Spaniards who had failed
to join new expeditions and whose presence in the pueblos de indios
(indigenous villages) was a constant source of trouble. Worried about the
repercussions of white vagrancy to the colonial enterprise and the preser-
vation of ethnic and social barriers, Madrid forced Spanish wanderers to
settle in plots of land that had been specifically allocated for them in the
city of Puebla, 60 miles southeast of Mexico City. The expectations of
the colonial state about these vagrants remained clearly utilitarian for the
decades to come. Local officials had to inform the viceroy on those who
remained idle. Laws issued by the Council of the Indies gave vagrants
the choice to either establish themselves as servants of a patron or learn
a trade from which they could survive. Failing to do so, they were to
be expelled from the region.84 Specific provisions for the “incorrigible,
disobedient, and harmful” dictated that these vagrants be sent to “Chile,
the Philippines, or other places.”85
Because colonial magistrates usually relied on Castilian legal codes for
guidance – the laws of the Indies (1680, 1791) were just supplemental
83 Other factors may have been the economic interests of a landed class who was not
inclined to lose cheap agrarian labor to the development of modern, capitalist enterprises
such as wool industry, and the political and economic frailty of the Spanish merchants,
who were not in a position to finance poor-relief projects. Cosimo Perrotta, “La dis-
puta sobre los pobres en los siglos XVI y XVII: España entre desarrollo y regresión,”
Cuadernos de CC.EE y EE 37 (2000): 95–120.
84 King Philip II, November 1, 1568; this provision was published again by King Philip III
in the “Instruction to Viceroys, 1628.” Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias
mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Magestad Católica del rey Don Carlos II. Vol. 2
(Madrid: 1791), 358.
85 King Philip II, “Instruction to Viceroys, 1595.” Recopilación de leyes, 359. The instruc-
tion was addressed also to the presidents of audiencias and governors.
in character – the efforts at policing vagrancy developed along germane

paths in both sides of the Atlantic throughout the colonial era. Nonethe-
less, the problem of vagrancy in New Spain was certainly distinct from
that in Spain. What had began as a phenomenon of “white” character-
istics had adopted a multiethnic tone in the second half of the sixteenth
century with mestizos and mulattos quickly growing into a mass of eth-
nically mixed vagabonds.86 Legislation on vagabonds in the 1550s and
1560s included mestizos who, like the Spanish vagrants in the 1530s, had
to settle, learn a trade, work with a master, or cultivate the land lest they
wanted to be banished from the province. In 1595, mulatto and zambo
vagrants were compelled to perform domestic labor or to choose another
way of life so that they were not a burden on the community.87
The proliferation of vagabonds in New Spain continued to be a prob-
lem for the rest of the colonial period. In the 1600s and 1700s, vagabonds
and beggars were to be harshly dealt with in order to make the punishment
of vagrancy a public example. Mexican courts of law habitually sentenced
vagrants to public whipping, lashes, incarceration, public works, banish-
ment, and presidio.88 The practice of using the free labor of vagrants
to overcome persistent labor shortages can be dated as early as 1609,
when King Philip III ordered the viceroys and local judicial authorities to
apply Spanish vagabonds to work in the mines, fields, and other public
works so that their example encouraged other ethnic groups to devote
themselves to some productive occupation.89 Exile of vagrants to frontier
territories was an important component in the militarization, settlement,
and maintenance of posts in remote areas. For example, at the urge of
the Crown in 1693 vagabonds and other criminals were sent to Nueva
Vizcaya in the far north for the colonization of the new territories.90
In the late 1710s, Viceroy Marquis of Valero decreed the banishment of
vagrants to the province of Texas and the presidios of Saint Augustine and
Pensacola in Florida.91 In the 1750s, the office of the viceroy continued
to assign vagabonds to public works such as street paving, the building
86 Norman F. Martin, Los vagabundos en la Nueva España. Siglo XVI (Mexico City:
Editorial Jus, 1957).
87 King Philip II, “Instruction to Viceroys, 1595.” Recopilación de leyes, 359.
88 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 31. Martin, “Pobres, mendigos y vagabundos.”
89 King Philip III, May 26, 1609. Recopilación de leyes, 359.
90 Susan Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North. Indians under Spanish
Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 104.
91 Hidalgo Nuchera, Antes de la Acordada, 140. Bazán, “El Real Tribunal de la Acordada,”
323.
of the aqueduct of Chapultepec, and the cleaning and preservation of

sewers.92
It was after the Seven Years’ War that enlightened programs to tackle
vagrancy were implemented in the colony. By then it was apparent
that the treatment of the undeserving poor had acquired a more utili-
tarian, less punitive character. The idea of addressing poverty through
moral transformation instead of indiscriminate charity was present in
contemporary writings of religious and secular intellectuals. For exam-
ple, Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana (1722–1804), archbishop of Mex-
ico from 1766 to 1772, summoned his flock to combat idleness and
crime and advanced proposals to increase economic production. Villar-
roel wrote about the need to instill working habits in the poor as the
only way to eradicate laziness.93 Viceregal instructions from the 1760s
on prescribed that vagrants be assigned to an occupation, a poorhouse,
drafted in the army, presidios, or public works in the cities. Enlight-
ened reflections in Spain about mercantilist policies and exploitation
of precious metals that limited the number of enterprises capable of
employing a growing population led to economic reforms in the colonies,
such as the establishment of state-sponsored manufacturing enter-
prises.94 Between 1769 and 1780, state-run tobacco factories were estab-
lished in Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Orizaba, Puebla, Querétaro, and Mexico
City, in part to give employment to the idle poor. By the end of the cen-
tury, the royal tobacco factory in Mexico City employed more people
than any other organization in the capital, with some 8,000 male and
female workers.95
The campaign against vagrancy in New Spain was a reflection of the
Bourbon mentality that had redesigned social welfare in Spain, but there
is little question that the implementation of these policies took a character
of its own in the viceroyalty. This is certainly evident in the consideration
that was afforded to the Mexican deserving poor in the last quarter of
the century. In 1774, the colonial administration prohibited begging and
92 Rosa Marı́a Gómez González, “Vagos y mendigos en la ciudad de México a fines de la

colonia,” Iztapalapa 44 (July–December 1998): 153–54.
93 J. Carlos Vizuete Mendoza, “Caridad episcopal. Arzobispos de Toledo y los pobres,”
in La Iglesia española y las instituciones de caridad, ed. F. Javier Campos y Fernández
de Sevilla (San Lorenzo de El Escorial: R.C.U. Escorial-Ma. Cristina, 2008), 31–50.
Villarroel, México por dentro y fuera, 135–36.
94 Haslip Viera, Crime and Punishment, 41–42.
95 Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats and Planters, 168, 176.
instituted the Poor House of Mexico City. Inevitably, as Spanish legisla-

tors had realized in the Iberian Peninsula, the measure came accompanied
by the distinction between “true beggars” and “vagrants, idlers, and trou-
blemakers,” the former being confined to the poorhouse and the latter
put to work for the government.96 Silvia Arrom has compellingly argued
that the establishment and development of the Poor House in Mexico
City, although born out of the desire to imitate the metropole, should
not be seen as an example of cultural dependency but as an experiment
to which the viceroyalty contributed substantially.97 The need to address
the consequences of the urban crisis in Mexico City at the end of the cen-
tury morphed the project until it became an institution to educate white
orphans instead of suppressing mendicancy and exerting control over the
multiethnic community for whom it was designed.
An inflection point in the vagrancy policies of New Spain occurred in
the early 1780s when the draconian system of annual levies to the Philip-
pines was instituted. The innovation was related to socio-economic con-
ditions in central New Spain. In this context, a large group of individuals
was now at risk of falling prey to the execution of arbitrary measures by
the state to ensure social control. But the anti-vagrancy initiative was also
linked to circumstances that were external to New Spain. As indicated
earlier, the 1780s was an extremely tense decade in the Spanish Pacific
and a critical moment in the history of forced migration from Mexico
to the Philippines. In 1779, Spain entered the war for the US indepen-
dence as an ally of France against Great Britain, an action that again
placed Manila under the threat of British attack. The war declaration
gave momentum to Manila’s fortification works and soon precipitated
in Mexico City the development of new schemes to provide the Spanish
outpost in the Pacific with recruits. In other words, the special connec-
tion that New Spain had with the Philippines and the predicament of the
archipelago in the 1780s weighed decisively in the estimation of Mexican
authorities that vagrants were so despicable persons as to deserve to be
punished with transportation to Manila.
Complaints from Governor Basco y Vargas about the quality of the
military reinforcements were at their apex precisely around this time.
Before 1784, draftees for the annual military rotation recruited in the
casas de bandera were the vast majority of Mexican individuals who
96 On this distinction and the changes in the notion of poverty in late colonial Mexico, see
Arrom, Containing the Poor, 16, 32–39; and Voekel, Alone Before God, passim.
97 Arrom, Containing the Poor, 17–18.
arrived in the Philippines. In his reports about one specific military squad
that landed in the islands in 1780, Basco y Vargas not only balked at the
fact that the drafting system produced recruits addicted to gambling, but
also that this squad was made of soldiers removed from regiment prisons
and charged with different crimes, many of them capital. “The problems
they have caused with their deeds and bad example,” he lamented, were
“indescribable.”98
In the late fall of 1781, Viceroy Martı́n de Mayorga (1779–83) com-
missioned officials of the Royal Treasury Pedro José de Lemus and
Juan Ramón de Navarrete to conduct an investigation on the irregu-
larities detected in the casas de bandera of Mexico City and Puebla.99
In these institutions recruitment for the Philippines was less a volun-
tary option than a forced solution to personal increasing debts. Each
individual received five pesos if he committed to serve in a military
unit in the archipelago. In most cases, though, he gambled the money
right away at the gaming tables of the casas the bandera, quickly rack-
ing up considerable dues. For the next three days defaulters were held
on the premises to continue gambling. If they did not pay back what
they owed, including the five pesos, on the third day they would be
enlisted in a Manila regiment.100 As Lemus and Navarrete discovered,
the recruiting officials intentionally led the luckless recruits into a whirl
of debt. They brought in expert players who mingled with the gam-
bling crowd, and it was usual for the decks of cards to be marked. In
order to create a favorable atmosphere for gaming, the houses were open
almost without interruption. Food and alcohol were sold on-site day
and night at inflated prices, and women of easy virtue were allowed
to come in and place their bets.101 A disgusted Navarrete described the
crowd as “an ants’ nest of the dirtiest and most naked plebe,” gath-
ered around the tables, “cramped against each other, generating a mur-
mur, heat, and fetidness that cannot be tolerated, and all together being
an spectacle that seems to belong to hell more than to this world.”102
Although relatives and friends were encouraged to bail out those who
were retained, many did not care enough to trouble themselves. The offi-
cials tricked others into paying more than what the individual actually
98 AGN Filipinas 61 exp 5 f.210 (1784).

99 AGI Filipinas 929 exp.23,f.533–539 (1782) and 540–543 (1781).
101 Garcı́a de los Arcos offers more details on how these so-called recruiting centers oper-
ated. Forzados, 83–90.
owed. Some women had to prostitute themselves to rescue a husband or a

brother.
This scandal carried particular weight in Madrid. After the news
reached His Majesty’s ears, on August 12, 1782 King Charles III abolished
the casas de bandera in Mexico City and Puebla. The following January,
a noticeably embarrassed Viceroy Martı́n de Mayorga concurred on the
need to eradicate the abuses. He alleged that his predecessor, Bucareli y
Ursúa, had initiated the practice of running ostensible recruiting centers;
he himself had never agreed with it.103 A decree dated on November 2,
1783 established that the system to recruit volunteers for the Philippines
using mobile recruiting teams (banderas de recluta) was to continue in
the same terms as it was conducted for other regiments in continental
New Spain.
The termination of the casas de bandera impelled the office of the
viceroy to find another method to produce the manpower that Manila
required. Inasmuch as experience had taught colonial authorities that
they could not count on masses of volunteers signing up for service in the
Philippines, the recourse to marginal elements of society appeared as a log-
ical alternative at a time when penal servitude had become the prevalent
form of judicial punishment and in a colony where the army traditionally
had no qualms in recruiting vagabonds when needed. To mitigate the
effects of the abolition of the casas de bandera, the officer of the Royal
Treasury Juan Cossı́o echoed a previous suggestion of Lemus to conduct
annual anti-vagrancy campaigns and to sentence some of those appre-
hended to military service or public works in the Philippines.104 Viceroy
Martı́n de Mayorga’s successor Matı́as de Gálvez finally approved the
conscription of vagrants as a replacement for the scandal-ridden casas de
banderas on November 2, 1783. The office of the viceroy also endorsed
Cossio’s idea that the levies be executed according to the directives of
the Royal Decree on “vagrants, idlers and troublemakers” published in
Madrid in May 7, 1775.105
Colonial authorities carried out the 1775 royal decree on annual levies
differently from their counterparts on the Iberian Peninsula, further con-
firming that local agendas in the Spanish American colonies ultimately
conditioned the execution of metropolitan policies. The adoption of
the system of levies described in the 1775 ordinance introduced two
103 AGI Filipinas 929 exp.23 f.547 (1783).

105 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Ordenanzas 2356 exp.10 (1775).
important innovations in the strategy deployed thus far in the colonial

domain. On the one hand, the execution of more systematic, nearly annual
campaigns broke with the previous practice of sporadic levies for specific
purposes that had mostly depended on the viceroys’ zeal to address the
consequences of poverty. On the other hand, weighty imperial consider-
ations informed the new policy, with the consolidation of Manila as the
military settlement to which most vagrants would be sentenced. Banish-
ing vagrants overseas was a circumstance that the original 1775 decree
published in Madrid did not refer to. It was because of the unique rela-
tionship New Spain had with the Philippines that Mexican authorities
opted to transport vagrants, not to other presidios in the viceroyalty, but
to the far-flung archipelago, a resolution that caused logistical nightmares
and mighty expenses.
In addition, the adoption of the 1775 decree established a change with
respect to previous practices in the deportation of Mexican individuals to
the Philippines. This order specified that convicts of abominable crimes
should be punished not with exile but through regular judicial channels.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was frequent, to
the chagrin of Spanish authorities in the archipelago, to include this type
of criminals in the shipments to Manila. At least in 1734 and again in 1759
Manila’s governorship requested to Mexican authorities to refrain from
sending men who had been condemned for theft or other infamous crimes
because of the damage they caused to the local order and the discipline
of the troops. Archival evidence indicates, though, that the transporta-
tion of these individuals was a regular procedure still in the 1770s.106
In 1784, King Charles III again prohibited the viceregal office in Mexico
City from transferring to the Philippines men convicted of very serious
crimes. With few exceptions, vagrants constituted from then on the better
part of the individuals subject to forced transportation.
The philosophy that animated the practice of scheduled deporta-
tions to the Pacific was a belief in mutual benefit for the three parties
involved: the Philippines, the society of New Spain, and the vagrants
themselves. The immediate purpose was to provide the Philippines with
manpower by apprehending individuals whose age, skin color, and phys-
ical health made them appropriate candidates for a military career in the
islands. Alongside motivations of imperial nature, Mexican authorities
106 In 1772, approximately a dozen men charged with theft, homicide, rape, and sodomy
embarked in Acapulco. AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Filipinas 3239 exp.10; AGN Filip-
inas 8 f.102–105.
also hoped that these raids, undoubtedly a harsher method than more
traditional tactics, helped achieve some degree of social cleansing and
address the problem of the poor.107 The colonial state alleged that the
attitudes and habits of vagabonds were harmful to other social sectors and
that forced drafts were necessary to protect the quiet, tranquility, and even
honor of the non-vagrants. Mexican magistrates employed a botanical-
medical jargon to describe the social threat that the uprooted and unem-
ployed represented. Criminal prosecutor Alva, for instance, referred to
“vagrants, idlers and troublemakers” as a social disease, “bad weeds”
that had to be pulled out so that “they do not contaminate the rest, and let
the virtues of the good citizens flourish.”108 In the decades that followed,
Mexican society’s perception of vagrants remained largely negative. In
the early 1780s, the sergeant major of the Regiment of Mexico Pedro de
Garibay described vagrants as a heavy burden for the republic because
of their idleness, vices, and tendency to commit larceny.109 Despite sus-
tained campaigns, the contempt for vagrants had hardly diminished, and
for lieutenant colonel of engineers Miguel Constanzo levies still consti-
tuted in 1809 a favorite method to “purge society of men who are more
malignant and pernicious than the most despicable insects.”110
Allegedly, the third party to profit from a forced exile to the Philip-
pines was the vagrant himself. At least on paper, Mexican legislators
were outstanding heralds of the Enlightenment’s model of human nature
by which human beings were shaped by their environment and not by
inherited character traits. Colonial officials contended that the removal
of vagrants to the Philippines held the potential to facilitate their reform.
Pedro de Garibay pointed to the redemptive capabilities of the harsh envi-
ronment of the Philippines, as well as the salutary effects of distance from
relatives and the comforts of home: “once transferred to Manila, these
individuals change the temperament of their passions, the object of their
thoughts, the morality of their habits, and the substance of their exercises;
[in the Philippines] they lack the pabulum of vices and the easy assistance
and aid they have here with immediacy; those are, in my opinion, the pri-
mary causes of their ruin.”111 In addition, Mexican officials pinned their
hopes in the discipline that recruits were to receive in the Philippines.
107 Martin, “Pobres, mendigos, y vagabundos,” 111–12.

Government officials and other persons of influence and power in New

Spain fully appreciated the potential for social disorder that could result
from poverty, unemployment, exploitation, living conditions, poor diet,
clothing, and ill health but the social and economic reasons that ultimately
brought about these circumstances were usually neglected. Instead, the
connection between crime and poverty, by then a fixed tenet of the judi-
cial philosophy, conditioned the response of the authorities to crime.
Vagrants and beggars were considered transgressors of the social order,
not the result of the flaws of the economic and social structure of the
colony. Therefore, the Bourbon state approached poverty as a hindrance
and not as a political and economic problem. Due to the low esteem in
which the colonial government held the majority of the population, judi-
cial authorities were not so ambitious as to bring down the level of crime.
Rather, paternalistic elite institutions might have preferred to tolerate
a degree of antisocial behavior that did not pose a threat to the estab-
lished social structure and that allowed to relieve some tension.112 Official
pronouncements concerning the level of criminal activity and vagrancy
were often put forth to justify maintaining and reinforcing the judicial
and police apparatuses. Some responses to these pronouncements were
to eliminate almsgiving, to build poorhouses, to strengthen police and
judicial power, and to issue laws against public drunkenness, gambling,
and nakedness. In this context, annual raids that targeted a catch-all cat-
egory of vagrants for deportation to a faraway archipelago in the Pacific
appears as yet another enterprise primarily oriented at reducing social
pressure. None of these initiatives prevented or even addressed the socio-
economic and structural causes of destitution – hierarchical organization
of society, unjust distribution of wealth, and tax systems, just to name a
few – and unlawful behavior persisted.
Conclusion
In 1783, Mexico City adopted an offensive against vagrancy that had
initially been designed by Madrid authorities and for Madrid’s particular
needs. Apparently, ruling sectors in both Spain and the colonies imag-
ined their subjects to be immoral and less than civilized. But Viceroy
Matı́as de Gálvez’s resolution of November 1783 was neither a sheepish
copy of Iberian policies nor a passive response to Manila’s predicament.
The establishment of methodical campaigns against vagrants was also
112 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 39–45.

more than a mere echo of the Spanish shifting attitude toward pau-
perism. Elite distress about poverty and vagrancy had been brewing
in New Spain over a long period of time; it was a reaction to the
social and economic realities of the region as much as it was a child
of the Enlightenment. Local pessimistic perceptions of the Mexican poor
shaped a moralizing, European-born discourse where the state assumed
the duty to instill in them time discipline, work ethic, and a sense of
civic responsibility. The resolution to look for candidates for deportation
among the urban destitute can be interpreted as a reaction to a chal-
lenging socio-economic milieu in Mexico City that had brought down
employment and nurtured an unremitting anxiety about criminal activ-
ity. Therefore, anti-vagrancy raids and forced conscriptions to the Pacific
not only were an instrument to rule and civilize a populace whose lifestyle,
habits, and values were looked upon with disdain, but they also opened
up a conduit for the relief of social pressure in the decades leading to
Independence.
The Mexican crusade against economically detrimental habits and
the effects of destitution is more fully understood when the Philippines
are included in the picture. A gaze at the western Pacific allows a bet-
ter grasp of the extent of the socio-economic wretchedness of central
Mexico, where the determination to alleviate social strains went as far
as to consider deportations to an archipelago that was almost twice far-
ther from the viceroyalty than Spain, a desirable option. In other words,
Mexican reformers thought so broadly about the problem of civilizing
the plebe as to make the remote Philippines part of the solution. The
decision to forcefully transport vagrants to Manila was precipitated by
the scandal that surrounded the casas de bandera in the early 1780s,
but the execution of this initiative was only possible because the severe
economic circumstances in Mexico had created a pool of likely suspects
for the authorities to stock the fledgling army of the Philippines. The per-
ceived social situation in Mexico placed certain individuals under closer
scrutiny, while the Philippines provided a destination where the latter
could be used for the greater good of the empire when the breaking of
hostilities with Britain placed the Philippines in a delicate predicament.
In this manner, post-1762 developments in Mexico and the Philippines
further integrated the history of the Pacific region.
In the eighteenth century New Spain’s administration of justice had
transitioned from reliance on punitive initiatives to enforcement of more
utilitarian ways. Vagrancy raids and banishment to the Philippines were
ostensibly advanced, enlightened measures that aimed at cleansing society
from disruptive elements for the sake of stimulating growth in the colony
and in the interest of the individuals being removed. The assumption at
the time was that in late colonial Mexico vagrants constituted a significant
percentage of the populace. The following chapter will show that, in fact,
when faced with the demands for manpower that the galleon brought
every fall from the Philippines, local authorities saw more vagrants wan-
dering the streets of Mexico City than usual. No doubt they exaggerated
the extent of criminal activity in order to justify the human transfer to the
Pearl of the Orient. Individuals in unstable labor positions scrambling to
survive in a strenuous economic context were readily labeled as vagrants.
But a good portion of them were in reality useful males and skilled work-
ers who at the time of their detention had lost their jobs and had not been
able to find a new one. Without steady employment, they spent many
hours at taverns and gambling houses where disputes sparked. Driven
by necessity to steal in order to eat and to pay off gambling debts, crime
would likely be more common among these sectors. Levas de vagos (levies
of vagrants) contributed to weaken the workforce of the viceroyalty while
the problem of vagrancy was no closer to a solution.
4
Levies for the Philippines in Late Colonial Mexico
This chapter focuses on the targets of anti-vagrancy campaigns, how the

raids were conducted, and the ways in which they affected the lives of
Mexicans. Because the needs and perceptions of Mexican authorities had
changed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, so their punishment
methods did. Punishment was adjusted and hardened, and deportation to
the Philippines emerged to discipline already known behaviors. Therefore,
developments in the Spanish western Pacific had an impact on the lives of
New Spain’s inhabitants. Women were excluded and so were offenders
of major crimes, which further supports the idea that the deportation of
vagrants was conceived not so much as a judicial punishment but as a
utilitarian and imperial tool to produce workers and soldiers.
The wide range of crimes these men were accused of reveal that authori-
ties perceived these men as transgressing the social order in different ways.
Anti-vagrancy raids go a long way toward explaining that the colonial
state saw the need to expand its control over an increasingly growing
population. The institution of the annual levies in 1783 indicates that
the relationship between rulers and subjects began to change. The levies
empowered authorities to intervene in both public and intimate aspects
of the lives of Mexicans to not only discipline laziness, unproductiv-
ity, unseemly professions, and excessive drinking and gambling, but also
intrude with a moralizing intent in more private arenas, such as the educa-
tion of the youth, out-of-wedlock relationships, public sexual behaviors,
marriage, and personal hygiene. Considerations about the preservation of
racial purity in the Philippines were also at play, as Indians, blacks, and
mulattos were generally excluded from these deportations. When faced
with the different options for punishment, judicial authorities chose to
154
Levies for the Philippines in Late Colonial Mexico 155
sentence a significant number of vagrants to the Philippines presumably

because judges were cognizant of Manila’s need for manpower.
The roundups were not free of economic and social consequences, as
they had the potential to disrupt family structures. Notwithstanding that
they were aware of the outcome that a verdict of vagrancy could carry
for those arrested, Mexicans informed on the habits of their fellowmen
when they were interrogated. This chapter therefore argues that the cri-
teria by which members of the community qualified each other reveal
the importance that working-class families gave to industriousness in
late eighteenth-century New Spain. Said criteria also manifest that the
Bourbon time- and work-discipline were not one-sided impositions.
This chapter and the next are mostly crafted with the records that
the levy process produced. The 1775 order prescribed three days for
those under custody to prove they were not vagrants by demonstrating
an established occupation or providing evidence of a wife and/or other
dependents. Colonial authorities summoned supervisors, masters, tutors,
co-workers, friends, neighbors, and/or relatives to answer questions about
prisoners’ routines, work life, and family responsibilities. These interro-
gations conform a very rich in detail, evocative, and high-yielding archive
material, as they bear information on the everyday life of Mexican men
and women under colonial rule, including community relationships, fam-
ily structure, labor, and honor.
Levies to the Philippines: Procedures and Vagrancy Charges

It took two years for the system of annual levies to start working in cen-
tral Mexico. Published in November 1783, the new instructions did not
allow enough time to organize levies before the galleons left Acapulco
the following winter. Officials could only put together a group of forty-
five men that, predictably, displeased the governor of the archipelago:
soldiers charged with desertion, “incorrigibleness,” and even homicide;
and three inmates from two civil prisons accused of vagrancy, scandals,
assault, and quarrels.1 In November 1784, Governor Basco y Vargas
bitterly complained about the disappointing results of the new sys-
tem’s debut: “far from experiencing improvement with the new ruling,
we end up in the most distant extreme, that is, if before the recruits
were bad as one, now they are bad as eight, and every day the distur-
bances grow here.”2 No vagrants were shipped in 1785 either; the first

delivery of vagrants to the Philippines did not set sail until the winter of
1786.3
From then on, levies were performed in those years when the galleons
brought letters from the Philippine governor urging for more recruits. As
the table below shows, this happened not annually but very frequently.
The multiple authorities involved in the process point to the fact that
jurisdiction over criminal offenses significantly overlapped in colonial
Mexico. Orders to roundup vagrants were sent to the different judicial
authorities in Mexico City, that is, the sala del crimen, the Acordada,
and the local ordinary magistrates of the city council. According to the
1783 stipulations, if both the raids in the capital and the recruitment of
volunteers conducted by the banderas de recluta did not produce sufficient
effectives for the replacement of the Manila regiments, the levy was to
be extended to other populous towns. Instructions to do so were then
dispatched to territorial authorities like intendentes and corregidores who
had judicial responsibilities in the provinces. The Intendancy system was
in full motion in 1786 after the creation of twelve independent territorial
divisions that followed French models. The intendentes, acting as a sort
of regional governors, were mainly responsible for introducing economic
changes in their territories as part of the Bourbon reforms taking place
in the Spanish empire at large, but they also busied themselves with
the administration of justice, police surveillance, and the maintenance
of public peace.4 The corregidores were representatives of the viceregal
jurisdiction in a town and its district. They were executives, magistrates,
and legislators in their areas.
Besides levies specifically carried out for the purpose of collecting men
for Manila, the judges of the Acordada and sala del crimen also resolved
with punishment to military service or forced labor in the Philippines a
number of cases in their regular proceedings. As it had happened earlier
in the century, the viceroy could participate directly in these procedures
by designating a magistrate to investigate the cases of people being con-
sidered for exile.5 While in Spain local priests were key collaborators of
the state who elaborated lists of existing vagrants in anticipation of a
major raid, it appears to be the case that in central Mexico levies for the
Philippines were mostly a secular affair.6

4 For a study of the nature of the intendancy system, see Ricardo Rees Jones, El despotismo
ilustrado y los intendentes de la Nueva España (Mexico City: UNAM, 1979).
5 Cáceres and Patch, “Gente de Mal Vivir,” 365.
6 Pérez Estévez, El problema, 203–05.
table 4.1. Convicts Sent from Mexico to Manila, 1765–18117
Year Convicts Year Convicts

1765 3 1792 38
1766 3 1795 14
1767 5 1797 31
1768 4 1800 11
1774 2 1801 13
1776 4 1802 57
1778 3 1803 2
1779 3 1804 4
1780 11 1806 6
1784 3 1807 1
1786 55 1808 7
1787 34 1810 2
1788 19 1811 1
total 336
The number of Mexican vagrants sentenced to the Philippines is not

easy to ascertain. At least 336 individuals are noted in the documentation
as having experienced this fate but in all likelihood they were not the
only ones. In the affiliation books many entries read, “volunteer to serve
His Majesty in the Philippines,” but these enrollments were anything but
voluntary. The entries actually referred to individuals who had presented
themselves as volunteers to join the army after being accused of vagrancy.
By virtue of the instruction of September 22, 1786 published in Madrid a
volunteer could forsake his recourse to appeal the accusation of vagrancy;
the stain that impressment left was erased and his daily wages started
immediately. 8 Although frugal and very irregular, the military entailed
a sure salary. It ought to be assumed that many Mexicans accepted this
offer. On the contrary, those who presented witnesses to refute the charges
and attest to their condition of hombres de bien (honorable men) were
deported as felons and did not gross any income until they arrived in
Manila.9
7 The majority of these convicts, especially after 1783, were vagrants. The table includes
Mexicans who had been spontaneously denounced by their relatives or other community
members.
9 AGN Filipinas 48 (1785).
Out of 336 individuals convicted to the Philippines in 1765–1811, 90

percent (309) were condemned in 1780–1811. This should be interpreted
as a direct result of the institution of annual roundups of vagrants and
a reflection of the intensification in the general volume of arrests that
characterized criminal justice in Mexico City at this time. Out of these
309 individuals, about 40 percent (122) were arrested between 1780 and
1788, a further indication of the significant impact that drought, shortage,
frost, and other natural disasters had on certain sectors of the population
in the latter years of the 1770s and during the 1780s. Besides these gen-
eral patterns more specific, critical circumstances impelled authorities to
execute larger raids, such as el año de hambre in 1786 and during periods
when Spain was at war with other European powers, especially in the late
1790s and early 1800s.
It is only with serious reservations that a relation can be established
between the total number of Mexicans condemned for vagrancy and those
specifically sentenced to the Philippines. For eighteenth-century Mexico
there is no continuous record of the distribution of judicial sentences by
the type of crime committed, only piecemeal information about the activ-
ity of some tribunals during specific, brief periods of years. All combined,
MacLachlan’s, Haslip Viera’s, and Scardaville’s numbers throw a rough
estimate of about 230 individuals who were indicted for vagrancy in
Mexico City in 1796–1817, but this figure does not include the pursuits
of all judicial authorities operating in the capital.10 The better part of the
convictions to the Philippines was the result of extraordinary measures
such as levies, not the product of regular arrests. Furthermore, many of
those categorized as “recruits” were actually convicts. Nevertheless, the
comparison could indicate that the amount of men that authorities were
sentencing to the Philippines was not necessarily smaller than those who
were convicted, also for vagrancy, to other punishments in continental
New Spain or the Caribbean.
My working presumption is that the number of arrests for vagrancy
does not necessarily reflect the level of incidence of vagrancy on Mexican
10 In 1796, the alcalde ordinario of district number 7 arrested fifty-two people for
“drunkenness, vagrancy and gambling,” while in 1800–17 the sala del crimen processed
sixty-three vagrancy cases (Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 54). Scardaville
(“Crime and the Urban Poor,” table 7 of chapter 1) recorded that in 1798, 1 percent of
arrests were for vagrancy (total of arrests were 4,352). MachLachlan only has data for
the years 1799 and 1800 (acordada and sala del crimen) with a total of sixty-eight men
accused of vagrancy.
society. Rather, it illuminates how society perceived mendicity and a host

of other behaviors associated to it and what judicial measures were taken
to address the problem. The arrests of drunks, vagrants, and petty crimi-
nals probably spiked in the 1780s, 1790s, and early 1800s as a response
to the publicized need for manpower in the Philippines. But neither all
vagrants were arrested nor all those who were arrested were inevitably
fake beggars. Vagrancy proceedings constituted usually around 10–12
percent or less of all cases processed by the different judicial institutions
in the late 1700s.11 In other words, other crimes necessitated more of the
time and effort of authorities, especially property crimes, violence crimes,
and sexual offenses. Notwithstanding, the variety of behaviors that were
despised and included under the banner of vagrancy is what interests me
the most.
In the pages that follow, I examine the charges that were made against
men sentenced to Manila to show that in New Spain vagrancy had become
an umbrella category for many behaviors that were accepted no more
in late colonial society. While a purposefully ambiguous understanding
of criminal activity on the part of authorities contributed to the impres-
sion of ubiquitous criminality, the actions and behaviors that in the judg-
ment of Mexican magistrates deserved imprisonment also lay bare
perceptions of deviance from social norms and reveal values that were
dear to some segments of New Spain’s society.
The fact that a criminal prosecutor reprimanded José Rivera because
“since his childhood he should have dedicated his time to learn some trade
with which to make a living and dress with regular decency,” succinctly
captures the expectations Mexican ruling sectors had about industrious-
ness and proper conduct.12 Rivera presented himself as a silversmith, but
officials were in disbelief because they assumed that the profession of mak-
ing or repairing silver articles yielded a decent enough living for him to
dress with more decorum. Unemployment itself was considered immoral:
if a young male physically able to work did not, he was referred to as
11 Haslip-Viera estimates that of all trials that the alcalde ordinario of district number 7
conducted in 1796 10.3 percent were for vagrancy, while in 1800–17 10.6 percent of
all cases processed by the sala del crime were for vagrancy as well. For the year 1798,
Scardaville indicates that there had only been 1 percent of arrests related to vagrancy
(“Crime and the Urban Poor,” table 7 of chapter 1). According to MachLachlan, in
1799 and 1800, 12 percent of sentences to presidio fell upon vagrants in the Acordada
and sala del crimen.
a lazy person. For magistrates, unequivocal cases of this were individu-

als who did not attend work regularly or stayed unemployed for several
months.13 Officials were thorough and persistent in enforcing these social
standards; they patrolled not only at night but “even during the day at
the flea market and other places where it is usual to find vagrants, idlers,
and troublemakers.”14
Authorities had little patience with individuals who changed masters,
professional occupations, or place of residence. Notwithstanding that the
ongoing economic instability made job changes a fairly common occur-
rence, authorities considered geographical mobility and an erratic or dis-
continuous work history as signs of an aimless and barren lifestyle.15
In these cases, courts tended to have short leniency despite protests.
Doménico Garcı́a, for instance, declared he had been working as a servant
because he could not find employment as a carriage builder, his original
line of work.16 In Garcı́a’s example the reason to change professions
might have been a necessity, but other times there was simply a disin-
terest to conform to a regulated existence. Every so often the detainees
claimed that their mobility was a deliberate choice. José Palacios had
been a servant in several houses but he often switched masters, sometimes
because he was fired, sometimes because he was seeking something else,
but “always with the intention to provide himself with a better destiny to
live on.”17 What might have been a genuine desire to breathe fresher air
appeared to authorities a dishonest act. Coincidentally, domestic servants
were looked upon with particular wariness. Lieutenant Colonel Miguel
Constanzo believed that those who passed through many households did
it accompanied by stolen valuables.18
13 José Joaquı́n Peña was deemed of good conduct but he had been absent from work for
a year and a half. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.10 f.159 (1794). The carpenter José Ignacio
Alcocer went to work some days while others he did not. AGN Filipinas 31 exp.9
(1793). The silversmith Manuel Mendoza had labored at different locations but with
intermissions of quite a few months. AGN Filipinas 51 exp.17 f.354 (1802).
15 Examples of young Mexicans constantly changing jobs are plentiful in vagrancy trials.
Nicolás España had been a weaver before he became a confectioner. AGN Filipinas 34
exp.4 f.114v (1794). José Santos Rico started as an apprentice to carpenter after having
worked at the cigar factory. AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.73 (1801). José González had
been a servant before getting involved in the shoemaker trade. AGN Marina 176 exp.1
f.76 (1801).
Mexican judges found reprehensible the reluctance of some youths

to submit to a work routine, and they brandished this resistance as a
justification to assume their tutelage. An example is the case of Fran-
cisco Sierra, who at fourteen years had already been an apprentice to a
brazier, a shoemaker, and a blacksmith. His sister accused him of not
wanting to settle and repeatedly reported Francisco to the authorities
after the teenager had fled on various occasions from each occupation.19
The state’s interest in the education of the youth explains why the levies
targeted fourteen-year-old boys. This was largely true when the lads were
orphans or when authorities judged the parents’ influence to be detri-
mental. The arrest of José Antonio de León in Puebla in 1793 illustrates
the latter circumstance. León was condemned to the Philippines because,
as magistrate Rafael Sánchez Carvajal explained, “in time he will be a boy
pernicious to the common good, and with more reason if he stays in com-
pany with his adoptive mother, a woman inclined to inebriation, dancing,
and [other] dissolutions.”20 Some teenagers caught in vagrancy roundups
were heads of their households. The fact that they were expected to have
a job and other adult responsibilities at that age strongly insinuates that,
instead of a concept of adolescence, authorities perceived a straight line
from childhood to adulthood.21
Almost half of the individuals who found themselves shipped to the
Philippines were born and raised in the provinces and had only recently
moved to Mexico City. In some cases they relocated only months, or
even days, before their arrest. Evidently, the incoming flow had exer-
cised important pressures on the city residents. The Philippines offered a
convenient escape valve. During periods of agricultural contraction and
famine, some farmers were forced off their properties because they had
a too small or poor land to sustain them; these migrants usually settled
permanently in the city. Others were temporary residents, agricultural
day laborers who had been denied employment in the large estates when

20 AGN Civil 718 exp.19 (1793).
21 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life (New York:
Knopf, 1962) opened a new area of enquiry when he thought of childhood in historical
terms. The awareness of the particular nature of childhood that distinguishes the child
from the adult, he wrote, did not exist in the European Middle Ages, when both shared
the same culture, clothing, and games. Comparably, records of vagrancy trials in late
colonial Mexico imply that childhood and adolescence were stages of life that adults
tried to shorten by forcing their offspring to learn a trade and provide for the family at
an early age, instead of letting them develop at their own pace.
crops failed or who worked in haciendas during planting and harvest sea-
son and came to the city the other months of the year.22 The attraction of
emergent industries in the viceroyalty’s seat of government, in particular
state-sponsored manufacturing enterprises, played a role in this migra-
tion. For example, some men arrested in these campaigns had worked in
Mexico City’s Royal Tobacco factory, the capital’s single most important
source of employment.
Immigrants, both agricultural workers and skilled laborers, were most
susceptible to be caught in a raid. They roamed the streets for a long
time until they found a job and they were new faces in town, unknown
to local authorities. These new arrivals were usually employed only for
short periods of time and sometimes had to take undesired occupations
when there was no demand for their specific skills. When apprehended
in January 1801, José Ignacio Pozo contended that in his hometown of
Tulancingo, “they work with fine clothing versus the more coarse mate-
rial they use in the city, which is why he has not been able to employ
himself.”23 Unable to use his skills, he had found work as a bricklayer
and a cook. Many migrants to Mexico City maintained strong attach-
ments to their home villages and typically returned to them when their
subsistence got rough in the capital. City dwellers took a dim view of
these comings and goings, perceiving in them a lack of commitment to
the urban community and a proof of immigrants’ immorality. In January
1795, a prosecutor scribbled that a bricklayer from Tacuba arrested for
drunkenness “always looks for something to do, and when he does not
find it, he goes back to his town [to weed maize], which proves his idle-
ness and unwillingness to settle down.”24 Those who came to the city at
certain times of the year to conduct commercial businesses were subject
to detention too. Each year during the Christmas season, José Vicente
Montenegro traveled some 130 miles from Querétaro to Mexico City to
sell pastries and candies. In January 1795 he was arrested in the bullring
and condemned to deportation.25
Not only foreigners, but also Mexico City residents selling fruit,
pulque – alcoholic by-product of the maguey plant – or blankets in the

23 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.48v (1801).
25 AGN Filipinas 34 exp.13 f.365 (1795). Likewise, officials took Felipe Mota into custody,
a vendor from Calpulalpan, Tlaxcala who had come to the capital “to sell (like he had
always done) eggs and other products,” as his sister stated. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.9
f.151 (1794).
streets could be identified as sin oficio (without any practicing trade) and
in a few weeks’ time put on board of the Manila galleon.26 Muleteers,
porters working in the lakes, street musicians, and dancers constituted
a visible target for authorities. These professions implied great mobility
and independence and were less susceptible to control. Working in the
streets, in the roads, in the canals, or in public squares was regarded
with contempt, as it did not meet social expectations about what was an
acceptable job. In January 1801, a master thought it was an act of charity
to send his employee to China because the latter wanted to sell clothes
directly in the market rather than “working quietly in the tailor’s shop.”27
Those working from home were likewise eyed with suspicion, since they
evaded the attempts of authorities and masters to monitor workers’ pro-
ductivity and working habits. The advantages of self-employment were
obvious to some individuals, but not to authorities.28 Juan Canduja con-
fessed he did not work at any silversmith’s shop because he benefited
from working at home; but when he was caught dressed with a ripped
rug, officials berated Canduja for not procuring himself a more decent
living.29
Many of these men were charged with vaguely worded offenses that
suggest they had committed a crime of moral nature. Prisoners were
depicted as “vicious,” “idle,” or “troublemaker[s]” possessed of “bad
habits” or “bad behavior” – a charge that could refer to just loitering
about or, more often, to drinking and gambling. Authorities were nervous
about men rambling in the streets with no apparent purpose. The lack of
productivity was immoral on its own but if they were wandering and were
unfocused and inattentive to work or family duties, they were ostensibly
capable of more serious mischief. A magistrate in Mexico City considered
that Ignacio Arroyo was likely to be a vagrant because he was arrested at
ten o’clock in the morning, too early “to be wandering around in a work
day when he should have been instead working as a tailor, which he said
was his occupation.”30 According to Mariano Reina, the patrol took him
just for “watching the parade across from the Viceroy’s palace.”31 Men
26 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.54 (1801). AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4 (1794).
27 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.62v (1801).
28 Two years before his impressment in the fall of 1800 for undressing an inebriated woman
at a tavern, José Anastasio Mendoza had left his master to start making shoes at home.
AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.68 (1801).
30 Ibid., fol. 300.
gathered in the street were to be even more distrusted and potentially

violent. For example, magistrate Rafael Sánchez Carvajal imprisoned
the weaver Francisco Castrillo in Atlixco, Puebla for inciting others to
meet outside the city to play fivestones on the grounds that affrays often
resulted from gaming.32
Work and sociability areas, the spaces most affected by Bourbon poli-
cies against urban insecurity, delinquency, and immorality were the main
scenarios where levy officers operated. The campaigns were not secre-
tive. On the contrary, officials struck at public places because colonial
authorities strived to raise awareness about the vagrancy problem, mak-
ing the eradication of this evil a common task. Not by accident many
men were caught after dusk in dark corners, taverns, or gambling dens.
Infractions were considered more serious if committed at night and/or in
public places. Authorities clearly made a connection between vagrants,
nocturnal activities, recreational places, vice, alcohol, lower classes, and
crime. Other times, though, the arrests did not seem to follow a clear
pattern. According to the testimony of their respective relatives, the levy
patrol took Francisco Reyes while buying supplies in the market for his
next trip as a muleteer, while the militia detained José Antonio de Luna
Frejo on his way to visit the Virgin of Guadalupe.33 Others were allegedly
taken to jail when returning from work, errands, or family visits.34
These criteria reveal a deep ignorance of the rhythms of work of arti-
sans and laborers and, in general, a lack of sensitivity for the daily strug-
gles of the poor. José Calixto Leonı́s, apprehended for drinking pulque at
four o’clock in the afternoon, admitted his fault but argued that he had
been distracted because “there were many calm periods” in his profession
as a gold-wire drawer.35 According to the collective protest of Manuel
Quirós, Dorote Rosas, and Nicolás Ramı́rez, prisoners in Celaya, authori-
ties failed to understand that in order to find employment it was necessary
to walk the streets: “we are at our job when God gives it to us, and when
He does not, as it is normal for all men, we go out to see where He has
something for us with which to go by one more day; and this is what
32 AGN Filipinas 31 exp.12 (1793). Participants in the game of five-stones, also known as
“knucklebones” or “game of jacks,” played with five small stones that were thrown up
and caught in various ways.
33 AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4 f.99 (1794). AGN Filipinas 30 exp.13 f.233 (1794).
34 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.5 f.216–228 (1785). AGN Filipinas 61 exp.10, 14–15 f.323–327,
347–358 (1788).
figure 4.1. This characterization of a vagabond in the early nineteenth century

visually represents the wariness of local authorities in Mexico City of individ-
uals who pretended to be beggars but were actually just loafing around with
no occupation. Colonial officials assumed that these men likely dedicated their
time and wits to morally questionable activities. Lithograph by Claudio Linati,
in Costumes et Moeurs de Mexique (London, 1830). Courtesy of SP Lohia Hand
Coloured Book Rare Collection in London.
we do when we are walking around, but we do not do any harm in our

town.”36
In the logic of colonial authorities, other compelling reasons to draw
the attention of police forces were drunkenness and gambling. These
activities were not considered amusement, but a form of corruption with
a negative impact on the productivity of the workforce. The moral note
was that these men were dissipating their income in lavish and economi-
cally useless activities. Arrom has seen behind the condemnation of these
behaviors in late colonial Mexico the development of a bourgeois con-
science and an ethic of hard work as well as the rejection of an aristocratic
culture that valued leisure.37
Urban consumption of pulque reached its high point in New Spain in
the second half of the eighteenth century, and enlightened observers and
officials consistently linked this habit to violence. At the drinking shops or
pulquerı́as men drunk, ate, gambled, played music, danced, and intermin-
gled with women. As a result, pulquerı́as were often the setting for fights,
rapes, adultery, prostitution, and other public disorders and scandals.
Alcohol lowered inhibitions and led to actions punishable from a moral
and legal point of view: assault, accidental deaths, or even homicide.38
Alcohol and other leisure activities conceivably proliferated among the
immigrant population to relieve the tension of their sometimes stressful
situation. However, although drunkenness was recognized as a trans-
gression, there are no cases where being inebriated was the reason alone
to be arrested, maybe an indicator of the fact that viceregal authorities
looked upon drinking with more benignity than the enlightened intellec-
tuals would lead us to believe. It is also plausible that people claimed they
were drunk to receive a softer sentence. William Taylor has found that
despite Bourbon rulings that tried to curb the detrimental effects of alco-
hol, the majority of community members in villages of central Mexico and
Oaxaca continued to participate in festivities where local judicial author-
ities seldom connected collective drunkenness to violent behavior.39
36 Received in Mexico City on November 11, 1794. AGN Filipinas 34 exp.1 f.8 (1794).
37 Arrom, Containing the Poor, 27.
38 The inebriated José Marı́a Jiménez got arrested for beating a man who interceded in
his fight with a woman. AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.50v (1801). Sebastián Castro was
jailed for engaging in a melee with other fellows while drinking brandy. AGN Marina
176 exp.1 f.52v (1801). About the popular consumption of pulque in Mexico City, see
Miguel Ángel Vásquez Meléndez, “Las pulquerı́as en la vida diaria de los habitantes de
la ciudad de México”, in El siglo XVIII: Entre tradición y cambio, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo
Aizpuru (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 71–95.
39 Taylor, Drinking, 57, 67, 99.
Gambling was a highly popular entertainment in the colony. Conquis-

tadors had been notorious gamblers. Indians and Africans mixed their
own games of chance with those of the Europeans to create a culturally
and ethnically diverse underworld. Government passed laws prohibiting
gambling but usually these were not obeyed.40 Putting forward clothing
and other saleable objects as security for a bet was a form of subsis-
tence for some individuals, but for authorities it was just another way
to divert attention from work.41 Gamblers bet on a wide range of activ-
ities, including cock fights, dice, card games, and fivestones. Because it
attracted groups, gaming represented a threat to public order as well.42
A predominantly male space, gambling provided a venue to step out con-
straints and where displays of bravado and cries for help to the Almighty
could border on blasphemy.43 Not surprisingly, authorities perceived the
gambling den or gaming table as an inauspicious place where potentially
rebellious men gathered.
Some of the individuals deported to the Philippines did have a job but
they were charged with a sexual conduct that was offensive to public
moral values. Sometimes it took very little to be taken prisoner, like
Ignacio José de Arias, who according to the captain of the Regiment
of Mexico Rafael Amar, was caught in a “disorderly gathering with
women where there was plenty of drinking,” not in the honest dance his
mother had purported it to be.44 Others had gone further in their mischief
and had compromised the honor of a woman by trying to undress her
in the middle of the street or in a tavern.45 For other individuals, the
accusation of having engaged in illicit sexual relationships out of wedlock
(incontinencia) came in addition to a charge of vagrancy.46 Another few
men were guilty of adultery, abuse, or even rape of a minor.
40 Perla Chinchilla Pawling, “Lo lúdico y lo profano,” in La rueda del azar: Juegos y
jugadores en la historia de México, ed. Ilán Semo (Mexico City: Ediciones Obraje,
2000), 55–91.
41 Alejandra Araya Espinoza, Ociosos, vagabundos, y malentretenidos en Chile colonial
(Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 1999), 17.
42 Miguel Chavarrı́a had been picked up in the street in November of 1801 when he was
in the company of eleven men playing truco, a trick-taking card game. AGN Filipinas
51 exp.16 f.257 (1802).
43 Javier Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial
Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 38.
45 Both José Marı́a Celis and José Anastasio Mendoza were in jail in Mexico City for this
reason. AGN Filipinas 38 exp.8 f.305 (1800). AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.68 (1801).
46 This was Juan José de Avila’s situation, who was ruled a vagrant and also accused of
incontinencia with his lady friend Catalina Dı́az because he did not agree to marry her.
AGN Filipinas 34 exp.13 f.346 (1795).
The elasticity with which the state employed the campaigns against
false beggars is one more sign of how far the colonial government
attempted to control the lives of its subjects. Since incontinencia could be
grounds for deportation to the Philippines, it can be interpreted that colo-
nial officials conceived the threat of transportation as a tool to discour-
age concubinage and other extramarital arrangements. But levies could
be utilized to promote marriage in other ways. For example, authori-
ties complied in letting go individuals charged with illicit cohabitation
on condition that they wedded the women they had dishonored. The
released could then “repair the offense inflicted to the insulted women”
and legitimate any offspring born outside the bond of marriage.47 This
arrangement not necessarily coincided with the desires of the allegedly
“insulted women.” Judicial authorities charged Ignacio Márquez with
incontinencia and admonished him to marry Gertrudis Lara, with whom
he had a daughter. Gertrudis refused and claimed that for four years Igna-
cio had beaten her frequently and stolen household objects to finance his
drinking and other vices.48
Offenses that could be defined as of sexual nature – bigamy, adultery,
fornication, and informal unions of shorter or longer duration – were
deplored by officials and they accounted for the second highest arrest rate
in the 1790s in Mexico City,49 even if the population in general tolerated
a good deal of it.50 The number of police arrests that involved illicit
coupling rose sharply in the 1790s as the colonial authorities initiated
a campaign to force couples living in free union to marry in a church
ceremony.51 That these offenses became a major force for arrest is not
only a symptom of the concern of authorities with these transgressions,
but also a manifestation of the extent to which the enforcement of poli-
cies of sexual regulation had failed. The culture of respectable consensual
union among persons too poor to marry – marriage could be an expen-
sive and annoying arrangement that required a parish, payment of fees,
witnesses, the parents’ approval, and a dowry – proved especially com-
monplace and adaptive in plebeian Mexico City.52 Particularly, different

49 José Sánchez-Arcilla, “Fuentes del Archivo General de la Nación,” Clio & Crimen 10
(2013):155–75.
50 Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists. Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial
Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 28.
51 Scardaville, “Crime and the Urban Poor,” 14. Boyer, Bigamists, 28.
52 Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial
Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 271.
forms of informal unions seem to have helped immigrants to cope with

the strain and angst of being away from home. The incidence of infor-
mal unions or common-law marriage was considerably higher among the
urban poor in the capital than in rural Mexico.53
The levies further illustrate that dirtiness and public nudity had entered
the radars of reformers and become the object of official apprehension.
Because officials associated material poverty with moral degradation,
naked individuals, or those wearing only rags or ragged clothing, could be
jailed for that reason alone. José Gavino Ramı́rez, arrested while wrapped
in little more than some cloth and old underpants, was “loaded with
vices because of the way he dresses [emphasis added].”54 The connection
between nakedness and vagrancy was another aspect of the shift from
poverty as virtue to poverty as epitome of all vices. In the understanding
of colonial authorities, the poorly dressed man had only himself to blame:
he was poor because he did not work hard enough, and he probably
lost his clothes in a gambling house. It was his responsibility to learn
a trade at a young age to procure his subsistence and conduct himself
with propriety.55 Officials responsible for the anti-vagrancy raids failed
to recognize that, more often than not, nudity was not a choice but a
result of destitution.56
Toward the end of the century, harsh new regulations targeted naked-
ness with the intention to produce valuable workers. Workers naked or
indecently dressed could not show up for their jobs at the Royal Tobacco
Factory or the Real Casa de Moneda (mint) or else part of their journal
would be deducted. Prescripts on the matter appeared in 1791, 1799,
and 1800 making nakedness illegal in the principal streets and plazas
and sentencing to the army those incarcerated for this crime.57 As Magali
Carrera has pointed out, the wording of the decrees is very illustrative
of the disdain colonial authorities had for the poor. For example, the
1791 ordinance stated that the lack of attire introduced dissolute and
intolerable manners while respectable dressing could only induce good
53 Scardaville, “Crime and the Urban Poor,” 167.

55 Formal written works of the time about the undeserving poor being at fault for their
distressed situation are Sempere y Guarinos, Biblioteca española; Villarroel, México por
dentro y fuera.
56 In January, 1795 José Matamoros maintained that “he was not a vagrant, as enough
efforts he has made to find a job with no success; that he is naked because he had to
sell his clothes to be able to eat in the prison where he is at.” AGN Filipinas 34 exp.13
f.364v (1795).
57 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Bandos 3423 exp.51 (1800).
behavior.58 Authorities saw nudity as a reminder of the animal and

instinctive side of humans and a threat to social harmony and modesty.59
Just as had vagrancy acquired a strong moral flavor so too it became
associated with a wide range of criminal behaviors. Robbery surfaces as a
charge among those men sent to the Philippines. Some forced recruits were
guilty of small thefts: clothes, a hen, a pig, or a bunch of coins. For many,
stealing was a way to finance gambling and alcohol habits; for others,
it helped to cover the basic necessities of food and clothing.60 Members
of the Mexican elite were singularly anxious about petty theft and its
eradication, and burglary was considered to be a plague among domestic
servants. In 1807, authorities contemplated punishing thieves by exposing
them in a public square with the stolen objects hanging from their necks,
so that people could identify them as criminals. Without such measures,
the Revisions Board of the Acordada reasoned that, “[masters] cannot
protect themselves against them, hiring them as servants not knowing who
they really are,” and thus introducing the enemy into their households.61
In 1809, when it was obvious that two decades of military levy to the
Philippines had not remedied the situation, authorities insisted on locating
the root of the larceny problem – and crime in general – in the tolerance
toward vagrancy and vice.62
Despite the fact that the 1775 decree stipulated that only felons of
“non infamous or shameful” crimes were to be included in the levies,
almost every year the number of vagrants sent to Manila had to be com-
plemented with a small amount of convicts of major offenses.63 Lethal
quarrels worried authorities and accusations of aggression figured in the
58 Carrera, Imagining Identity, 119.

59 On elite perceptions of nudity, see Norman F. Martin, “La desnudez en la Nueva
España,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 29 (1972): 261–94; and Araya Espinoza,
“De los lı́mites de la modernidad a la subversión de la obscenidad: Vagos, mendigos,
y populacho en México, 1821–1871,” in Culturas de pobreza y resistencia: Estudios
de marginados, proscritos y descontentos. México, 1804–1910, ed. Romana Falcón
(Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 2005), 45–
71.
60 Sixteen-year-old José Domingo Aguilar and fifteen-year-old José Márquez were con-
demned to several years of service in Manila. Aguilar, who used to roam the Plaza Mayor
and help costumers carry their shopping items, ran off with a hen, while Márquez stole
some clothing. It seems likely, though, that the real motive behind the conscription of
these two boys was not their offenses but their youth and good health. AGN Filipinas
51 exp.16 f.320 (1802) and AGN Filipinas 38 exp.6 f.180 (1800).
61 AGN Acordada 8 exp.22 f.339 (1807).
list of wrongdoings of these individuals. In the 1770s, Viceroy Bucareli

y Ursúa prohibited carrying short weapons like knifes, daggers, pointed
swords, or any blade after dark under penalty of public whipping and
eight years in prison. Still, many men were caught either for being in
possession of a banned weapon or for wounding others in a fight. Finally,
there were other, less common indictments for which an individual could
be condemned to the Philippines. The records refer to felons sent to the
archipelago for forging a receipt, for purchasing goods in the name of
another person, for impersonation, for smuggling pulque, and even for
homicide.64
Anti-vagrancy campaigns disrupted the activities of some economic
sectors, at least during the specific times when the roundups and trials
for vagrancy were in process. Because having a job was not enough
protection against impressment men fled to nearby towns at the slightest
rumor of a levy, leaving behind unattended jobs. Many individuals were
apprehended more than once, every time forced to be absent from work
for several days while struggling to certify their employment and living
whereabouts. Since many of those imprisoned for moral misdemeanors
did have a job, economic repercussions were to be expected. Patrons
who deposed in favor of their employees were an indication of the extent
to which local businesses were affected by the levies. José Carnicero
offered to pay off whatever debt Pablo Martı́n Flores might have incurred,
so badly did he need his services as a muleteer.65 Other patrons, in a
desperate attempt to dissuade authorities from taking the men away,
likely concocted economic obligations for their workers.66
This evidence questions the degree to which modern principles inspired
Mexican and Spanish reformers. Convict transportation illuminates
the paradox of Bourbon reformers who engineered an Enlightenment-
inspired method of social disciplining that instead of injecting new
vigor to the colonial economy by expanding the labor force, unwit-
tingly introduced dislocations to labor practices in Mexico City and
64 In January 1792, Manuel Córdoba had counterfeited an invoice. AGN Filipinas 28 exp.3
f.112v (1792). In December 1801, José Miguel Garcı́a had acquired some socks under
the name of a merchant in order to sell them at a profit. AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.343
(1802). In March 1790, Manuel Inclán was imprisoned because he had pretended to
be a magistrate and filed false complaints. AGN Correspondencia Diversas Autoridades
5386 exp.8 (1790). Although few and far between, convicts of homicide showed up in
Manila Bay as well. AGN Filipinas 27 exp.8 (1795).
66 The master of José Guzmán alleged his employee had pending dues, although the official
in charge suspected the claim was false. AGN Filipinas 16 exp.3 f.30v (1780).
nearby provinces in a pre-modern fashion. The mining regions offer a

good illustration of the disturbances caused by the levies. Skilled mi-
ners and smelter workers all dashed to the mountains at the news of
a levy. Expensive drainage systems could not be maintained and labor
shortages threatened to close down the mines. In areas like Pachuca,
Taxco, and Zimapan, whose local economy depended upon mining, such
events could be especially adverse. It was also to be expected that miners
recruited for the Philippines fell sick sooner than other soldiers because
of years working underground and breathing the dust of crushed ore. For
instance, Miguel Domı́nguez, a mineworker in Guanajuato, was detained
in November 1794 but the doctor stated he was unable to perform “hard
labor” due to his working history with metals.67 Viceroy Marquis of
Branciforte finally excluded miners from levies in the late 1790s to avoid
angering mine proprietors and landowners.68
Social Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Deportations

to the Philippines
Levies to the Philippines comprised mestizos, castizos (offspring of mes-
tizo and Spanish), Mexican-born whites (españoles), mulattos, and even
Spaniards born in the Peninsula, which denotes that forced transporta-
tion was not necessarily a means for colonial authorities to remove people
thought to be ethnically inferior. It also indicates that the late eighteenth-
century urban crisis of Mexico City affected a broad spectrum of the colo-
nial hierarchy. Vagrancy was a social problem rather than an affliction
specific to a particular ethnic group. Levies to the Philippines specifically
aimed at groups on the whiter end of the ethnic scale. Almost half of the
individuals levied to Manila were reported in judicial files as españoles,
and about a third, as mestizos. Castizos amounted to a total of 15 percent,
while peninsulares were around 5 percent of those punished with depor-
tation to Manila. These numbers seem to support Mawson’s and Garcı́a
de los Arcos’ assertions for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on
the concern of Spanish authorities about the introduction of Mexican
castas (mixed-blood groups) into the already fragile frontier society of
the Philippines.69
67 Miguel was hemophilic, with a damaged liver and a tumor. AGN Filipinas 30 f.149
(1794).
68 The question of enlistment in mining towns was reopened in 1804 when war against
Britain broke out again. Archer, “To Serve the King,” 245.
69 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 714; Garcı́a de los Arcos, Forzados, 77–78.
Indians were conspicuously absent in this process because they were

barred from joining the armed services and they were excluded as well
from military conscription.70 In the years 1721–28, out of 190 individuals
condemned to trans-Pacific exile identified by ethnic category only two
were Indians.71 In addition, the number of Indians accused of vagrancy
in New Spain was usually insignificant especially when compared to that
of Spaniards but also when set against the incidence of vagrancy among
other non-Indian ethnic groups.72 Paternalism imbedded Spanish legisla-
tion with respect to the discipline of Indians, but the Spanish monarchy
never quite resolved the tension between its wish to protect the native
populations of the conquered territories, its fear of the Indians’ alleged
capability for evil, and its interest in exploiting indigenous labor. Thus,
Madrid dictated that Indians found guilty of vagrancy should not be
exiled but destined to tasks appropriate to their status within the geo-
graphical limits of the kingdom, either by being placed in the poorhouse
or by being assigned to a textile factory or obraje.73
Indians might have been rarely deported to the Philippines, but judicial
authorities prosecuted them vigorously nonetheless. Indeed, while Cre-
oles and mestizos seem to have prevailed in the levies to the Philippines,
there was a more notorious presence of Indians and other castas in the
arrested population as a whole in Mexico City. Data from Haslip-Viera,
Lozano Armendares, and Scardaville indicate that from the late 1790s
to mid-1810s peninsulares and Creoles represented about 35 percent of
the total of individuals indicted. Since Creoles amounted to about half or
more of the capital’s population in the 1790s, it follows that they were
underrepresented in the arrest records.74 Peninsulares, on the other hand,
appear overrepresented since they constituted only 2–3 percent of the
population in Mexico City. Indians were no more than 25 percent of Mex-
ico City’s population in all cuarteles combined but they were overrepre-
sented in the arrest rate, accumulating a little over 40 percent of all cases.

71 Cáceres and Patch, “Gente de Mal Vivir,” 367.
72 For the years 1799–1800, MacLachlan’s data on individuals charged with vagrancy
include twenty-three Spaniards, seventeen mestizos, twelve mulattos, and zero Indians.
Criminal Justice, 115.
73 Arrom, Containing the Poor, 23.
74 Information on the demographic distribution of ethnic groups in Mexico City in this
paragraph is from Sonia Pérez Toledo and Herbert S. Klein, “Perfil demográfico y
social de la ciudad de México en 1790. Evaluación de tres zonas contrastantes,” in La
población de la ciudad de México en 1790. Estructura social, alimentación y vivienda,
ed. Manuel Miño Grijalva et al. (Mexico City: UNAM, 2004), 86.
Convicts of mestizo origin and mulattos appear in 14.8 percent and 4.4
percent of all trials respectively, a more balanced representation since
mestizos were 18 percent of the population of Mexico City and mulattos
another 7 percent.75 MacLachlan’s figures for 1799–1800 include cases
from the Acordada, which also operated in rural areas, and the sala del
crimen; his percentages show that European and Creole prisoners account
for 28 percent of the cases; Indians 33 percent; mestizos 22 percent; and
mulattos 17 percent.76
In actuality, ethnic classifications did not mean much. The records
of vagrancy trials unveil that there were discrepancies between ethnic
self-description and ethnic label ascription by the observer. Under the
category español there were included very pale mestizos, whereas Indian,
mulattos, and blacks could be mistaken for mestizos of darker color. This
further confirms that ethnic identity in the late colonial period was blurry,
notably fluid, and most importantly, culturally constructed. The ease with
which one could navigate from one category to another allowed both
authorities and those prosecuted to wield race as they saw fit. Consider,
for example, José Marı́a Giménez’s story. This tailor was apprehended
for being drunk and having punched another man in a dispute; although
he said he was an Indian, prosecutor Manuel Castillo Negrete judged
that “his presence, physiognomy, and features show he is not Indian
but mestizo,” and Giménez was sentenced to eight years in Manila.77 A
detainee who “looked like” a mestizo was only exempted from a levy
if he gave evidence of having paid the tribute, a requirement not easy
to produce when the individual was from out of town. Hence, Castillo
Negrete also condemned José M. Nieto, from Puebla, to eight years in
Manila because he did not have with him his proof of payment and “had
nobody [in Mexico City] who knows him but his master.”78
Social cleansing did not respect social boundaries. According to mag-
istrate Borbón, individuals of “first representation and dignity” should
not be exempted from the vagrancy campaigns because, “as far as
God, religion, the King, society, and our own tranquility are concerned,
we are all born with no exception.”79 In fact, a small proportion of
those conscripted for the Philippines came from elevated social strata,
75 Haslip Viera, Crime and Punishment, 59. Lozano Armendares, Criminalidad, 119. Scar-
daville, “Crime and the Urban Poor,” 19–20.
76 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 51–52.
77 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.50v (1801).
78 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.42v (1801).
79 AGN Filipinas 30 f.102–102v (1794).
like Juan Belluga, a prisoner of “illustrious birth” accused of vagrancy,

idleness, and libertine behavior.80 Tailors’ apprentices, carpenters, shoe
makers, weavers, silversmiths, gold-wire drawers, scriveners, bakers, con-
fectioners, bricklayers, and tobacco factory workers are the most fre-
quent professions associated with vagrancy trials, a clear indication that
these occupations were most vulnerable to the economic difficulties of
the time and the overall deterioration of living standards. That a handful
of Spaniards were captured in these levies also exposes the social decline
of a portion of the Spanish population in the viceroyalty. In comparison
with non-Spaniards, peninsular prisoners forcefully transported across
the Pacific were usually older than the average, more learned, and guilty
of moral/sexual offenses. For example, two merchants from Santander
and a secretary from Madrid were accused of “bad behavior and being
incorrigible.”81 A grammar teacher from Castile had supposedly “raped
a woman after giving her promise of marriage.”82 These three men were
between twenty-five and forty years old.
The demographic profile of the individuals deported to Manila is symp-
tomatic of the fact that the problem of white pauperism had acquired wor-
risome dimensions. The economy of New Spain was able to fit neither
Spaniards nor a growing Creole population into an economic position
consistent with their alleged racial superiority. This gave rise to a very
unsettling predicament for colonial authorities. By the late eighteenth cen-
tury, actual class standing no longer depended on race to the same extent
it had in the preceding centuries. Spaniards, Creoles, mestizos, mulat-
tos, and Indians could all be found in the lower classes. Race was less
important than class in determining who became involved in the formal
judicial process.83 Disorder and crime could come from all ethnic sectors,
including whites.
Downward mobility in Spanish America has definitely received less
attention than upward mobility, but it was a more frequent phenomenon
than usually thought. In the late colonial period, class identity surpassed
that of caste, creating a more flexible environment where mixed-blood
groups could more easily climb the social ladder.84 But Spaniards could

81 AGN Filipinas 27 exp.8 f.292 (1784). AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.29 (1801). AGN Filip-
inas 28 exp.3 f.101 (1791).
84 The literature on social mobility in colonial Latin America is massive. For the middle
and late colonial periods, see Cope, Racial Domination; Patricia Seed, “The Social
go downward despite being white if they did not have an occupation.

Because the colonial system rested on difference, the wealth and enti-
tlements of whites were of vital importance for the success of colonial-
ism. Transportation to a far-flung colony like the Philippines emerged
as a convenient method to deal with poor Creoles and Spaniards whose
eroded prestige undermined colonial order, but other methods were used
as well, such as secluding white paupers in institutions, shipping them
back to the mother country, or bolstering their privileges by offering
them assistance. Chandler and Francois, though, have proved that Bour-
bon efforts in assisting the poor in tight economies did not prevent the fall
of Spaniards into poverty.85 As Ann Laura Stoler has claimed in her study
about colonial Dutch Sumatra, poor whites occupied a “contradictory
colonial location,” sometimes holding privileges, sometimes excluded.86
It follows that behaviors branded as vagrancy in late colonial New
Spain were not a problem that could be circumscribed to the idiosyncrasy
of one ethnic group; rather, vagrant-like conduct was a symptom of what
elites identified as a new attitude of Mexican lower sectors: defiance.
Perhaps authorities concentrated on unmarried males with an unsatisfac-
tory employment history and no permanent address because young men
were more inclined to express their discontent through subversive actions.
More than half of those taken by the levy patrols were between fifteen
and twenty-nine years old. They resisted fulfilling social expectations of
obedience and respect toward parents and elders and struggled against
the obligation to become skilled in a trade, to get married, to have a stable
job, to settle in one place, and to spend money in compliance with the
dictates of “common sense.” They socialized at gambling houses, pul-
querı́as, brothels, and on the streets, stigmatized places where solidarity,
common identity, and irreverent attitudes were cultivated.87 It is indeed
Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62,
no.4 (1982): 569–606; and Bruce Castleman, “Social Climbers in a Colonial Mexican
City,” Colonial Latin America Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 229–49.
85 D.S. Chandler, Social Assistance and Bureaucratic Politics: The Montepı́os of Colonial
Mexico, 1767–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). Marie E.
Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance
in Mexico City, 1750–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
86 Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) stands as a superb discussion of elite
anxiety over the erosion of white prestige in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Dutch East Indies.
87 Romana Falcón (ed.), “Introducción: Un diálogo entre teorı́as, historias, y archivos,” in
Culturas de pobreza y resistencia: Estudios de marginados, proscritos y descontentos.
México, 1804–1910 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Universidad Autónoma de
Querétaro, 2005), 11–42.
possible that in these quotidian ways plebeians expressed their resistance

to the Bourbon social reforms, to a state that had failed to provide job
security and basic means of living, and to the critiques of colonial elites
of their ways of life.88
That women were excluded from convict transportation to the Philip-
pines proves that, besides social considerations, imperial and utilitar-
ian schemes were paramount in the inception of this project. As seen in
Chapter 3, Mexican officials used vagrancy laws to gain access to coerced
labor for military service and public works in Manila, but the physically
strenuous nature of these occupations ruled out the possibility of sending
women to the Philippines.
Notwithstanding that women were absent from vagrancy raids in New
Spain, colonial authorities saw female vagabondage as a problem and they
chastised it. Mexican women were disciplined since the sixteenth century
for wandering or more specifically, for being unattached. The importance
of family in colonial New Spain is revealed in the fact that women with
no ties easily became true outcasts. Single females on the loose, such
as those without a dowry and prostitutes, were a liability. Institutions
like the recogimientos de mujeres, quasi-conventual houses of refuge that
sheltered healthy female adults from all social classes, ensured that these
women were kept in a cloistered environment.89 In the eighteenth century
there were more than twelve recogimientos in Mexico City and another
dozen in the provinces. Half of these had been created in the 1500s and
1600s. Women could also be deposited in these institutions if found guilty
of theft, murder, adultery, or fornication; here they were supposed to
work on spinning cotton cloth, sewing, washing, cooking, and grinding
corn.90 If convicted of moral offenses or other minor crimes, women
could also be placed in depósito – literally, deposited – in the household
of an honorable family. There was no tradition in New Spain to punish
female criminals with deportation, presidio, or public works.91
88 Patricia Pérez Munguı́a, “Los vagos y las leyes de vagancia en Querétaro. Conti-
nuidades y rupturas entre la colonia y el siglo XIX,” in Culturas de pobreza y resistencia:
Estudios de marginados, proscritos y descontentos. México, 1804–1910, ed. Romana
Falcón (Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 2005),
73–97.
89 Josefina Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres: Respuesta a una problemática social
novohispana (Mexico City: UNAM, 1974), 156.
90 Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment, 117-ss.
91 MacLachlan, Criminal Justice, 28–29. Pike, Penal Servitude, 56–57. Castilian legislation
stipulated that female vagrants and beggars were to be placed in “virtuous homes where
they serve and learn good habits” (Recopilación de leyes, 359).
In the eighteenth century, population in the viceroyalty grew and so

it did the number of female vagabonds without families.92 Municipal
authorities in Mexico City arrested women for vagrancy, drunkenness,
and gambling almost as often as they arrested men, but none of them
were sentenced to the Philippines.93 By mid-1700s, though, the tendency
was for recogimientos and other early colonial institutions to disappear
or evolve into nunneries, houses for divorced women, female prisons,
schools and hospitals. Spain’s new anti-vagrancy laws dictated military
conscription, and for this reason, women, the youth, the elder, and the
men ineligible for military service were left out of the Bourbon state’s
reach. Other methods to supervise these groups were developed, such
as forced labor (in textile mills, bakeries, haciendas, or public works
projects) or confinement in an asylum – also known as houses of cor-
rection, workhouses, or poorhouses – to learn a trade and turn into
productive members of society.94
Catch and Release

Viceregal authorities conceived of anti-vagrancy campaigns in the early
1780s as an alternative to round off the dismal number of voluntary
recruits, but the raids produced a frustratingly small number of viable
candidates. In 1794, Sergeant Tomás Rodrı́guez de Viedma complained
about the little time officials were given to accomplish the roundups and
he expressed no optimism about the quality of the men he had arrested
because, “despite taking the greatest care in sorting them out, there will
always be some who lack the merits that are required and needed.”95
In 1801, José Lorenzo Guzmán was a healthy twenty-two year old man,
single, and with neither parents nor other dependents who could place
a complaint for his arrest. He had no permanent domicile, and he was
unemployed at the time. Pressed with the charge of vagrancy, he had
signed up for service in the regiment of Manila.96 But as levy officials
learned, ideal vagrants like Guzmán remained elusive.
In order to prevent flight, arrests had to be discreet and unpredictable,
but sometimes the announcement of the galleons’ arrival in Acapulco was
92 Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodriguez O., The Forging of the Cosmic Race. A
Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990), 245.
94 Arrom, Containing the Poor, 24–25, 118.
96 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.127 (1801).
enough to trigger panic. In January 1800, officials protested that they

could hardly catch anyone in the capital, since many men hid in nearby
towns while the levies lasted.97 Village authorities like Juan Bautista del
Castillo, subdelegate in Maravatı́o, Michoacán were likewise wary of pro-
claiming an edict that would spread the news too quickly. Del Castillo
believed that men would leave town as soon as they knew about the
levy, “because there is no one here who can keep a secret.”98 In 1788, a
criminal prosecutor suspected that vagrants sought employment in order
“to have a shield and be freed in case they were arrested.”99 Six years
later, municipal authorities still believed that, given time and opportunity,
these men would turn to “subterfuges, faked proofs, appeals, and eva-
sions which, nourished in libertinage, they know well how to use when
they are attacked.”100 To stay ahead of so slippery targets, officials were
apparently not adverse to pick up individuals who were peacefully having
dinner at their homes or sleeping in their beds.101
As time would prove, a broad definition of vagrancy did not neces-
sarily work to the advantage of colonial officials. The inability – or the
unwillingness – to better define who was really a vagrant and should go
to the Philippines ultimately hindered the comprehensive enforcement of
the anti-vagrancy campaigns inaugurated in 1783. This is somewhat sur-
prising because the avoidance of clear definitions could have enabled the
authorities of Mexico City to use their police power more extensively,
especially when they had to hastily produce a high number of men to
satisfy Manila’s military demands. Indeed, despite the existence of some
guidelines, the levy process undoubtedly involved a great deal of arbi-
trary rounding-up of individuals in its initial stages. However, although
levies were fast-paced and sometimes massive detentions occurred, the
latter were invariably followed by the liberation of many detainees. This
fact points out that a sense of justice performed a balancing act in the
execution of the conscriptions to the Philippines and that fairness was
built into the colonial judicial system.
On some years critical circumstances seem to have prompted local
authorities to conduct sweeping roundups where the amount of arrests

99 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.15 f.355v-356 (1788).
101 According to the testimonies of the arrested, so it happened with Pedro Calderón,
Pedro Almarás, and José Manuel. AGN Filipinas 61 exp.15 f.355v-356 (1788); AGN
Filipinas 34 exp.4 f.87v (1794); and AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4 f.88 (1794).
greatly mismatched the actual, more modest number of vagrants finally

shipped to the Philippines. My evidence on this matter pertains to two
particular junctures. The first one is the year 1786, el año de hambre,
in which thousands of individuals arrived in the capital from the coun-
tryside during the frost and severe drought that affected central Mexico.
That winter, at least 105 individuals were seized in vagrancy campaigns,
although I know of only fifty-two who were eventually sentenced to the
Philippines.102
Another point in time when circumstances were particularly grave for
the viceregal government was 1798–1801. At this time, regular troops
and militia from Mexico City were transferred to Veracruz following
Spain’s declaration of war against Britain in 1796. Although Mexico was
not invaded, the level of real danger increased as the British sought new
markets and pondered the invasion of Spanish American possessions.103
The continuous flight of deserters and the high mortality rate among
soldiers in Veracruz inspired viceregal authorities to intensify the anti-
vagrancy raids in the capital with the twofold purpose of reinforcing the
regiments in Veracruz and providing replacements for Manila’s military
units. In January 1801, sixty-five men were apprehended in one night
and another eighty-three a few nights later. In February, only one of
these unfortunates was condemned to the Philippines for vagrancy, two
had presented themselves as volunteers for the Regiment of the King
in Manila, and fifteen were waiting for their declarations to be taken.
The rest were set free.104 Often, vagrants from the provinces did not
measure up to the requirements either. In 1792, criminal prosecutor Alva
resolved that eleven men should be returned to the governor of Puebla,
and in November 1794 the judge of Valle de Santiago and Salamanca
(Guanajuato) was asked to revise some twenty judicial files.105
The reasons to release these men were numerous and diverse. As
said before, Indians were excluded and, in contrast with previous anti-
vagrancy decrees, the 1775 law also exempted married individuals from
service in Manila. Accordingly, magistrates quickly discharged those who
showed they had paid the Indian tribute or presented a wedding certifi-
cate. Still, the governor of the Philippines reported from time to time that

103 Archer, “Military: Bourbon New Spain,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, ed.
Michael S. Werner (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 460–61.
104 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.65–65v (1801).
he was arranging the return to New Spain of married draftees. Should

testimonies from relatives and friends uncover that the prisoner sup-
ported one or more family members, he would likely be allowed to leave
as well. Active membership in the militias and having criminal charges
pending judicial resolution were additional reasons not to be included in
the replacements for Manila.106 Officials liberated many individuals just
to detain them again months or years later, which evidences hasty and
slovenly procedures as well as the authorities’ commitment to preserve
social harmony by removing certain subjects from circulation.107
The specifications of the armed services for the acceptance of recruits
put many vagrants beyond the grasp of the Bourbon state because phy-
sical impairments made them ineligible. They fell under the category of
inválidos – not valid or useless – if they were too old or too young,
if they had some disease, or if they were not tall enough. Working in
haste – or with indifference –, recruiting officials could fail to notice some
handicaps. José Agustı́n de Aguayo was apprehended in Tepeaca when
going on a pilgrimage to a sanctuary.108 Upon physical examination it was
determined that he was deaf from birth and, therefore, in no condition
to perform military duties. On occasion, skin color could account as a
disability. In February 1792, a man from Puebla was spared for being
“mulatto of black color.” Interestingly, magistrate Alva and the officials
who had inspected him earlier in January thought of him as “mulatto of
non-black color.”109
Mexican bureaucrats and magistrates invested a considerable amount
of time, material resources, and human effort in discharging men who
should not have been captured in the first place. Frequently officials did
106 Manuel Mendoza had deserted from the provincial battalion of Oaxaca; he received
orders to return to his unit to work in the barracks for eight years. AGN Filipinas 51
exp.17 f.354 (1802).
107 Many Mexican plebeians were jailed multiple times. For instance, the prosecutor
released Pedro Calderón in 1787 after he promised correction, but he was convicted
to the Philippines one year later because his relish for pulque had not waned. AGN
Filipinas 61 exp.15 f.355v–356 (1788). In 1793, Ignacio Rosales was sentenced to
Manila for attacking a soldier in Puebla; he declared that his parents had bailed him
out at least once in the past. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.5 f.90 (1794). Juan Canduja had
been apprehended at different times in his life for theft, assault, incontinencia, and
vagrancy. AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.309 (1802). José Ramón Arisa was arrested for
theft in 1793 and 1794, and several more times for gambling. AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4
f.106–108v (1794).
109 AGN Filipinas 29 exp.1 f.21–21v (1792).
not adhere closely to the instructions given on how to execute levies.

Because of the galleons’ impending departure, the most common viola-
tion of the legal procedures was to ignore on a regular basis the three-
day term the detainees were entitled to for the presentation of witnesses
and verification of their whereabouts. Authorities were not oblivious of
the fact that, if given the three days, many of them actually managed
to justify they were not vagrants. In addition, judicial officers repeat-
edly neglected to take declarations under oath and to formulate charges.
They also favored verbal accusations, less time-consuming than written
ones.110
Some of these omissions are explained by the fact that officials were not
familiar with the procedure. In 1793, printed copies of the instructions
on annual levies were distributed again among police forces to dispel
doubts and errors.111 The carelessness of authorities also derived from
their own prejudgments. Sergeant Tomás Rodrı́guez de Viedma believed
that the “public voice and fame” was sufficient to press charges, rather
than initiating a more laborious judicial process.112 The routine activity
of levy patrols in certain locations also reveals these prejudices. In 1794,
the Audiencia reprimanded the alcalde del crimen Juan Rodrı́guez for not
following appropriate legal proceedings against Juan Ladrón de Guevara.
In his defense, Rodrı́guez argued that after witnessing many detentions
at cock games, gambling houses, and other places that conformed with
no formalities, he had no qualms in condemning Guevara to Manila
especially when his own relatives, “to whom it corresponded Guevara’s
vindication,” had informed on him.113
Immigrants in Mexico City were most defenseless in the face of irreg-
ular practices of police forces and judicial officials. It was harder and
lengthier for them to attest to their family circumstances back in their
provinces or to prove an Indian identity. Many of those caught in a
police raid had recently arrived in the city and they had neither relatives
nor friends who could vouch for them. Sometimes, though, the master
who had last employed them could give credence to their disposition and
ability to work.114 The silver lining was that a distant homeland gave

111 AGN Filipinas 31 exp.1 f.26–29v (1793). The habit of giving verbal orders to appre-
hend vagrants and troublemakers without any written confirmation likely added to the
confusion. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.3 f.68 (1794).
114 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.42v (1801).
these men the opportunity to fabricate a spouse, a widowed mother, or

a collection of single sisters, female cousins, and younger brothers to
provide for as an alibi. Prisoners knew that the tedious corroboration
of their stories by the magistrates could delay their transfer to Acapulco
until after the galleons had already departed.
The crusade that the subdelegate Juan Bautista del Castillo unleashed
against twenty-three locals of the little town of Maravatı́o, Michoacán
from August 1793 to March 1794 captures at a micro-level many of the
elements discussed here.115 The case is also an example of how different
levels of authority kept each other in check to halt arbitrariness. Between
fifteen and thirty years, these men were very well known in the village for
their capricious and annoying behavior. They frequented taverns, local
balls, and gambling reunions, and they had been in prison several times.
They created commotions late at night and they carried weapons. They
apparently were unfaithful to their wives and they harassed single and
married women as well as those secluded in recogimientos. Neighbors
complained about their belongings being stolen – clothing, sheets, food-
stuffs, and even kitchen utensils. A woman reported that one night she
woke up to find her kitchen populated with men playing cards and eating
her food.
Representing the interests of well-to-do social segments bothered by
these behaviors, Del Castillo launched a tendentious campaign against
the twenty-three residents of Maravatı́o. Initially, his case was solely
based on the declarations of the visitor’s lieutenant, the chief official
for the local branch of the tobacco monopoly, the collector of the alca-
balas (sales tax), a lawyer of the Audiencia, and several merchants. Del
Castillo conveyed that the deeds of these men were common knowledge
in Maravatı́o, “where nobody can keep a secret.”116 Therefore, he con-
sidered it pointless to pursue separate investigations and he presented a
collective accusation to the justice of Mexico City. But since all detainees
had denied the charges, the viceroy instructed Del Castillo to justify all
accusations individually and to grant the prisoners the prescribed three
days to “indemnify” themselves.117 After a year, Del Castillo’s mass
prosecution resulted in only two individuals convicted to Manila, one
of which suffered from a contagious illness that precluded him from
military service and the other was finally assigned to a regiment in the

116 Ibid., f.225 (1793).
117 Ibidem.
viceroyalty. The rest gave evidence of having an occupation and/or family

dependents.
The many months the zealous Del Castillo dedicated to substantiate his
investigation and comply with the legal requirements dictated by Mexico
City demonstrate how ardently the dominant sectors of Maravatı́o
despised certain behaviors. The trial documentation also brings home
that some of the individuals who irritated the neighbors may have been
not the problematic, capable of major crimes racketeers that populated
the minds of Del Castillo and the local elite groups of Maravatı́o, but more
like “happy and keen of singing” men who enjoyed drinking and strolling
the streets, as described by several of the most sympathetic witnesses.118
The subdelegate’s frustrated efforts to have convicted these subjects brings
to mind that not all judicial powers in New Spain agreed that exile to the
Philippines was the most reasonable punishment for mischief-makers.
The judicial outcome of Del Castillo’s offensive and more generally,
the careful efforts of judges to discern the justly from the wrongly accused
in vagrancy raids bespeaks a rather moderate Mexican criminal justice
system. Officials were repeatedly advised to execute levies with prudence
and good judgment to prevent a stream of grievances. In 1799, Viceroy
Miguel José de Azanza instructed the sala del crimen and the Acordada
to carry out levies of vagrants “without causing damage or giving rise to
justified complaints.”119 Prosecutor Miguel Bataller expressed to Viceroy
Berenguer y Marquina that inquiries with relatives and friends in the
countryside “could not be omitted,” even if these delayed the process or
brought down the number of sentences. Significantly, he made these dec-
larations in January 1801, shortly after he was notified that only five out
of eighty levied men had been adjudged to the Philippines that month.120
Notwithstanding, willingness to complete all legal steps, to collect appro-
priate evidence, to review a case, or to return the files to the proper
authority ultimately depended on the ethics of each individual bureau-
crat. As Maclachlan put it, the system could be “potentially oppressive
and in many cases may have been” but “concern for the abstract prin-
ciples of justice,” however, seemed to have been a factor in deciding the
future of these unfortunate victims.121
118 Ibid., fol. 322.

120 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.65–65v (1801).
121 Criminal Justice, 111.
Deportations, Family Repercussions, and the Weight of

the Community in Vagrancy Trials
Many Mexicans might have been spared from an unfortunate destiny
thanks to the fairness of Mexican judges, the loopholes that an indis-
criminate definition of vagrancy created, or the favorable testimonies of
friends, relatives, and associates but the process of rounding up ostensi-
ble vagrants for military service in the Philippines did throw many male
and female colonial subjects into different forms of disarray. While the
majority of individuals caught in these raids were unmarried males with
not known family ties, the paper trail of declarations of distressed and
grief-stricken relatives reveals that not few of them were active members
in family units. The removal of these men from family circles was a source
of emotional harm. Take, for instance, Marı́a Josefa Monroy, mother of
Agustı́n Vicente Mendoza, who voiced her indignation against the royal
justice “for bursting in my house at unearthly hours of the night to take
my son, and with no further justification or cause adjudge him to China,
which has brought me great pain.”122
In these cases, the execution of the levies played havoc with family
routines and structures. When husbands and partners were transported to
the Philippines, female-headed households emerged; not an uncommon
occurrence in Mexico City in the 1700s, where there was a swelling
presence of salaried and self-employed women who lived from their own
labor and sustained their own families.123 The disappearance of a male
provider in a levy severely affected widowed mothers from an economic
point of view, as they usually were left in charge of other family members
living in the household. Cases like Ana Marı́a Calderón’s, who found
herself in a desperate situation after not receiving the daily aid of her
brother, were common.124 Many times, another son had been drafted in
a previous levy or was serving His Majesty in a regiment, a circumstance
that only doubled the anxiety of the matriarch.125 The fragmentation of

123 Asunción Lavrin, “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Latin American Women. Historical Perspectives,
ed. Asunción Lavrin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 23–59; and Arrom, The
Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985),
129–34.
125 The widow Josefa Domı́nguez had depended on her two sons for eighteen years. But in
1794, one of them married and entered the royal service while the other one was levied.
families forced the regrouping of their members in newly reconfigured

units. The presence in the household of unmarried girls and women,
together with daughters whose spouses had been “gone for a long time
and [whose] whereabouts are unknown,” could exacerbate an already
tense situation.126 In some cases, the departure of the breadwinner meant
that the new head of the family unit had suddenly become responsible for
children and impaired relatives.127
Some of those who were apprehended or fled upon the announcement
of a levy left behind wives, girlfriends, lovers, and life partners. In addi-
tion to the emotional agitation of the separation, which indeed was as
harsh for men as it was for women,128 unmarried women generally found
themselves in a disadvantageous situation. Contemporary standards of
moral purity held the honor of any unwed woman known to have been
sexually intimate with a person of the opposite sex to be violated and
tainted.129 However, female honor was not only about chastity but also
about observing rules of conduct. A woman living in sin with a partner
could damage her reputation even if her virginity had already been lost
in a previous marriage. The widow Josefa Vega, for instance, admitted
sadly that “with word of marriage I offered myself to Ramón Barrientos.”
After Ramón departed for Manila, she was “left outwitted and without
honor because my frailty is now public, despite my good intentions, and
deserving my situation as much respect as that of virginity, because I did
AGN Filipinas 30 exp.7 f.127–127v (1794). The same year, the weaver José Atanasio
Montiel became the second son his mother lost to the levies. AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4
f.92 (1794).
127 When his son-in-law José Joaquı́n Peña was sentenced to Manila in 1794, Marı́a Rosa
Reyes acquired full responsibility over his four children. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.10 f.160
(1794). The visually impaired Nicolás Ramı́rez begged for the return of his son, who
had left him with two children. AGN Filipinas 28 exp.6 f.204 (1792). Pedro Almarás
had a sick brother and it is uncertain who assumed his care after Pedro left for the
Philippines. AGN Filipinas 34 exp.4 f.87v (1794).
128 While waiting in Acapulco for the arrival of the galleons, Manuel Andrade wrote to
his wife Manuela Rodrı́guez a letter where he expressed his love, encouragement, and
deep sorrow for their separation. AGN Filipinas 34 exp.9 f.240v (1795).
129 Classic studies for Colonial Latin America about the definition, changes and gendered
versions of honor are Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. Gender, Honor,
Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999); Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts
Over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and
Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame,
and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1998).
keep a honorable widowhood until now.”130 Josefa petitioned for his

return in 1788 but her request was denied.
If some colonial subjects suffered from sloppy conscription procedures
and the shattering of their families, others found in the seams of the
system courses of action to voice their disgust toward certain forms of
public demeanor. Commoners who testified in vagrancy trials displayed
a sharp understanding of the dynamics of the crusade against idleness,
and they skillfully turned the official discourse on vagrancy to their own
advantage. That Mexicans would testify against their peers is significant
taking into consideration that they could not ignore the consequences
that a deportation to the Philippines would entail for the subject and, if
he had one, his family. Their testimonies held great weight in shaping
the fate of other Mexicans because the community was a very powerful
colonial body. As social and cultural historians Cope, Boyer, Taylor, and
Van Young have concluded, community networks mattered much more
in the lives of New Spain’s inhabitants than the Church or the colonial
government.131
In urban colonial settings there was an extensive family model with
a wide net of relatives, but family was much more than just relatives.
Scholars have stressed that the compactness of the urban social space
meant a collective existence and resulted in communal ties more intense
and more complex than those established within traditional stem families;
hence the importance historians attribute to neighbors, relatives, work
associates, and clienteles.132 In late eighteenth-century Mexico City, a
considerable proportion of the popular sectors lived in rooms and other
spaces where also professional activities took place. Pulquerı́as, artisan
workshops that opened to the street, and multiple activities performed
outside (flirting, conversing, trading) offered abundant opportunities to
watch, to listen, and to learn about aspects of the life of others. In many
ways, the streets and public places were an extension of the private realm.
Not unlike other scenarios in the Spanish American world, the boundaries

131 Cope, Racial Domination, 68–85; Boyer, Bigamists, 1; Taylor, Drinking, 20–28; and
Eric Van Young, “The Raw and the Cooked: Popular and Elite Ideology in Mexico,
1800–1821,” in The Middle Period in Latin American History: Values and Attitudes
in the 18th-19th Centuries, ed. Mark D. Szuchman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989),
75–102.
132 Juan Javier Pescador, De bautizados a fieles difuntos. Familia y mentalidades en una
parroquia urbana, Santa Catarina de México, 1568–1820 (Mexico City: El Colegio de
México, 1992), Cope, Racial Domination, and Boyer, Bigamists.
between the public and private spheres were still very porous in Bourbon
New Spain especially among lower urban classes, making it possible for
one person to be familiar with the social and work routines of another.133
How your neighbor perceived you was of the uppermost importance
in late colonial times, especially for those charged with vagrancy. Author-
ities conducting investigations into the behavior of potential transportees
relied heavily on the testimony of relatives, neighbors, friends, acquain-
tances, co-workers, and employers. From the authorities’ point of view,
these witnesses were competent to evaluate the lifestyle and habits of a
detainee because they had shared experiences in working spaces and were
in daily coexistence in physically close housings. Did the accused have a
job? How long had he been working for his last master? Did he have any
vices or addictions? Did he support any family members? The deponents
knew if the prisoner had failed to attend work one day, if he was seeing a
woman, or whether he had dependent children. The trial of José Nicolás
Ramı́rez is an example of how authorities used community networks to
build a criminal case. After a levy patrol apprehended him in Puebla in
the fall of 1791, his father, his co-workers, his former lover, his employer,
a childhood friend, a neighbor, and even the local parishioner deposed
on Ramı́rez’s job at the tobacco factory, his relationships with women,
and his supposed addiction to alcohol.134
The reputation of an individual was put to a strong test when seized by
a levy patrol. Appearances, rumor, and the public voice were extremely
compelling tools in building – or destroying – a good name.135 The reasons
for the vigilant community to suspect a flawed character were publicly
known behaviors (público y notorio): failure to appear for mass, habitual
visits to the neighborhood’s pulquerı́a, roaming the streets late at night,
going absent from work, or simply being seen regularly in the street.
Mariano Paredes, for example, had seen José Ignacio Alcocer working
as a carpenter in Puebla for a while, but he stated that of late Alcocer
was an idler because he “dwelled in the corners.”136 Likewise, in Mexico
133 An extensive historiography has explored the dichotomy between private and public
or, more accurately, the absence of that dichotomy. For Latin America, see pages
91–124 of Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics
in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999), and Marı́a Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins. Men and Women
in Seventeenth-Century Lima (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
135 On reputation and rumor as judicial proof and its impact on the judicial system, see
Herzog, Upholding Justice, 197–220.
City, Juan Antonio Linares took for granted that Ramı́rez had not gone
to work at the tobacco factory for several days “because he had seen him
loafing about.”137
The community held the same leverage to certify the opposite, that is,
that a certain individual was a hombre de bien provided nothing in his
social conduct indicated an inclination to vice. At the end of the eigh-
teenth century in Mexico City, the concept of honor had transitioned
from a classic understanding exclusively based on birth or wealth to a
broader interpretation that associated decency with behavior and appear-
ances. In addition, honor was of high concern to both upper and lower
classes.138 Publicly known, recognized, and appreciated merits consti-
tuted new venues for all type of individuals to access honor. Deviances
could be tolerated but only if a veil was drawn over them and appear-
ances were maintained. Hence, for the defendants, witnesses, and prose-
cutors of vagrancy cases a hombre de bien had learned an unobjectionable
profession, lived according to moral standards, and enjoyed a reputable
conduct as a good worker and a good family provider. Having said this,
not everybody’s testimony could equally establish the innocence, guilt,
honor, or dishonor of an individual, since the depositions of Indians and
women were not considered as having the same value and credibility as
the testimonies of adult male Spaniards and Creoles.
The testimonies in these trials uncover that authorities and colonial
subjects alike loathed indolence and a record of professional instability.
Thus, a testifier described José Belluga in Real del Catorce, San Luis de
Potosı́, as a man “without judgment” because he did not persevere in his
occupations, neither as an executor nor as a judicial deputy.139 The dis-
tinction between the propriety of some lines of work and the despicability
of others was not exclusive to the governing elite. For example, in the
case against Luis Garcı́a, a neighbor who knew that he worked as a mule-
teer nevertheless deposed Garcı́a had never been employed. Evidently,
the witness did not consider Garcı́a’s job to be a serious occupation, and

138 On the importance popular groups gave to behavior and appearances, see Richard
Boyer, “Honor among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation,” in The Faces
of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lyman L. Johnson
and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 179–
200; Chambers, From Subjects, 161–70; Stern, Secret History, 14–15; Cheryl English
Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico. Chihuahua in the Eighteenth
Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 141–48; and Milton, The Many
Meanings of Poverty, 241–44.
associated his constant travel with the opportunity to drink and gamble
in every tavern along the way.140
Friendships and social and professional networks were a double-edged
sword for those who were in peril of being deported to the Philippines.
Some plebeians utilized the elite’s apparatus of dominance both to incrim-
inate enemies and to exonerate imprisoned individuals. Friends and col-
leagues could be supportive or they could be very malevolent, as hidden
envy, resentment, unresolved disputes, and personal gains could come to
the fore at this time. While some masters tried to retain their workers
by offering positive testimony about their conduct, employers could also
see the levies as an opportunity to free themselves of problematic and
unproductive employees. For example, Miguel Puchet Herranz, adminis-
trator of the tobacco and cigar factory of Puebla, was not too distressed
at losing in two years two laborers who in his estimation contributed little
to the growth of the plant. In the winter of 1792, when the first of these
two workers, the above-mentioned Ramı́rez, was taken in for inconti-
nencia, Puchet declared that he was an insubordinate and drunk worker
whom he had twice fired and twice rehired, every time being deceived
by Ramı́rez’s promises to correct his recalcitrant ways.141 In November
1794, Puchet swore that José Joaquı́n Peña, another of his employees
also charged with incontinencia, had not attended work for a year and a
half.142
The dynamics of the vagrancy campaigns created a space where Mexi-
cans could exercise their agency. Vindictive individuals could bribe a
levy official to place somebody else under arrest. This is what Bárbara
González allegedly did to José Ignacio Arce in 1794. In March of that
year, José Ignacio was seized in Chalco, southeast of Mexico City, and
sentenced to Manila for threatening Bárbara, who was a traveling mer-
chant (trajinera) in lake Chalco, with a jackknife. In the proceedings
he stated that during a dispute in which he threatened to slap Bárbara,
the woman retaliated with the hope that he dared to hit her, as the
next day he would be jailed even if it cost her twenty-five or thirty
pesos.143 Apparently, José Ignacio’s motivations to be in Chalco were
legal and economic. He maintained that he had been “bored and des-
perate, and . . . fugitive from the justice,” and that his only intentions

were to make Bárbara believe he would marry her to get at the 500 pesos
she claimed to possess.144 As the legal process unfolded, it was revealed
that José Ignacio, a married father of two in Mexico City, had illicit
relationships with Bárbara. His wife Marı́a Luz affirmed that she did not
know where he had been for the last twenty days. According to Marı́a
Luz’s allegations, José Ignacio habitually abused her both physically and
verbally, supplied food sparingly, and covertly sold their properties.
The tragicomic tale of José Ignacio Arce exemplifies some of the eco-
nomic difficulties and moral mores of many Mexican marriages at the
time, when extramarital infidelities, an earmark of husbands who spent
weeks or months working away from home, were a factor that compro-
mised the harmony of a couple. But it is also an example of the fact
that, for some women, the deportation of their partners to the Philip-
pines could bring unexpected and welcome opportunities. During the
interrogations, Marı́a Luz seemed to conduct herself with great calm, as
the transcriptions of her depositions evinced neither surprise nor sadness
at her spouse’s absence or actions. Although Marı́a Luz’s statement has
been transmitted to us through the officials who heard her testimony and
should, therefore, be taken with caution, her personal letters to José Igna-
cio, also included in the file, show no anguish or reproach for his actions.
The power she was deprived of during her marriage was regained when
he entered prison. José Ignacio pressed Marı́a Luz to locate Bárbara and
prove his innocence. However, either because she could not find Bárbara
or because she preferred not to help him, Marı́a Luz replied to José Igna-
cio that she had not been able to solve anything and suggested him to
accept his destiny.145 It can be speculated that Marı́a Luz was a wife who
did not feel helpless and heartbroken after her husband’s departure but
relieved to be freed from what had become regular miseries.
The elites’ discourse that described the need for social cleansing could
be used for very different purposes. For instance, Tomasa Rodrı́guez
resorted to commonplace arguments of the official rhetoric to establish
that her son was not a vagrant. She reckoned that if the levies aimed at
purging “this capital of the many idle and jobless individuals who are
harmful to the state and to the peace of the people,” her boy should not
be taken prisoner because he was an honest blacksmith who provided for
her and his three other siblings.146
144 Ibidem.
146 AGN Filipinas 38 f.199 (1800).
Conclusion
Deportations to the Philippines in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury were primarily a utilitarian and imperial tool that aimed at produc-
ing cheap soldiers and workers and strengthening the strategic role of
the archipelago in the Spanish Pacific – therefore the modest presence of
felons and the absence of women. At the same time, anti-vagrancy laws
addressed problems and misbehaviors that were specific to the region’s
economic and social context. To the dramatic increase of immigrants
in Mexico City and the heightened tension this brought about colonial
authorities and other elite sectors responded with a reinvented moral
logic. The levy for the Philippines in the Mexican viceroyalty targeted
individuals from all social and ethnic niches who embodied in themselves
and with their actions the social consequences of dire times: unemployed,
poor, defiant, and devoted to leisure activities that reformers despised.
Most of the deportees to Manila did not come from prison but directly
from the streets, their homes, the taverns, and the gambling dens. In
this manner, anti-vagrancy raids produced a type of convict that often
had some professional training and that in a different environment might
adopt a different attitude. From the fact that every year the courts exon-
erated dozens from the accusation of vagrancy and that Manila and other
posts persistently reported to be undermanned, it necessarily follows that
there were not as many vagrants and uprooted individuals in the viceroy-
alty as contemporary observers and reformers portrayed.
The levies also reveal that the troubled circumstances of the viceroyalty
gave legitimacy to the intervention of authorities in realms traditionally
under the purview of the Church or the guilds, such as the supervision
of individual morality and economic activity. The preservation of the
traditional family model and the institution of marriage were especially
important aspects of the lives of plebeian Mexicans that colonial offi-
cials and reformers sought to regulate, as shown by the handling of the
incontinencia cases and the ambivalence authorities manifested toward
banishing married men from being deported to Manila.
Notwithstanding that the release rate indicates that levies were prob-
ably not as despotic as they could have been, conscriptions to the Philip-
pines did cause tribulations to many individuals, and there was little
Mexicans could do to protect themselves in the face of this oppression.
Authorities could impose drastic changes in some family units and forever
change the lives of these men. The arrest of working individuals disrupted
economic routines of employers and employees, and families and couples

underwent significant stress. Drafts to the Philippines might have been a
practice of exceptional nature from a legal standpoint, but they were a
very quotidian event for the residents of Mexico City almost every fall.
In a context of renovated pressure on the part of powers that be, colo-
nial subjects found ways around the contours of the system to express
their grudges against other commoners, their distaste for certain behav-
iors, and their expectations about what a good member of the commu-
nity should be. Both the rulers and the ruled shared values and percep-
tions of social problems, including concern over an increasing crime rate,
the enforcement of a stricter work ethic, and the need to isolate and
remove the lazy and the vice-ridden lest a few bad apples spoil the whole
social barrel. Community networks served as a formidable instrument
that could be used in favor of, or against, an individual by virtue of
channels of action – anti-vagrancy campaigns – provided by the hege-
monic classes. Therefore, it could be argued that the forced transporta-
tion of convicts from Mexico to the other side of the Pacific existed in
part because colonial subjects believed deportation was an appropriate
penance. In the next chapter, the spontaneous requests of Mexicans to
banish to the Philippines their own relatives further reinforce the idea that
this method met the expectations of some about how certain behaviors
should be punished. Unprompted denunciations expose the legitimacy
that forced transportation enjoyed among some sectors of the colonial
population.
5
Spontaneous Requests for Deportation

Tribulations of Parents, Youngsters, and Wives
This chapter focuses on sixty-two cases of individuals who turned in their

sons and other relatives to the authorities requesting they be banished to
the Philippines. These files are relevant because the presence of this type of
deportee in forced transportations to Manila had been minimal in earlier
times; moreover, the historiography of other major contemporary convict
transportation processes has only rarely paid attention to the deportations
that were ordered at the instigation of relatives. Young Mexicans found
their bones in jail because their behavior countermanded family values:
they refused to study or hold a job, they disobeyed, they gambled and
got drunk with frequency, or in other ways damaged the honor of their
families.
The analysis of these cases reveals that the special predicament of the
colonial government in the Philippines was a factor in play in the deci-
sion of parents to resort to judicial authorities and in the resolution of
magistrates to issue a verdict of trans-Pacific transportation. Both parents
and authorities believed that distance from home and discipline would
reform these unmanageable youngsters. In their decisions, parents gave
consideration to how military service for the king in Manila would serve
the family honor. The documentation from the trials proves that judges
did not readily comply with transporting unlucky fellows to a permanent
exile, if not certain death; they weighed in concerns about preserving the
stability of the family and they refused to grant requests they consid-
ered founded on dubious or insufficient grounds. However, the magis-
trates’ realization that Mexican authorities were hard pressed to find mil-
itary personnel for the islands accounted for many sentences to overseas
deportation.
194
Spontaneous Requests for Deportation 195
Deportation processes initiated by colonials also reveal that viceregal

authorities were able to forge social consensus; that some Mexicans spon-
taneously went to magistrates to inform on their kin and countrymen
indicates that forced banishment to the Philippines was a one-sided impo-
sition only to a degree. Colonials upheld values related to work ethic
and moral behavior and they defended them by denouncing those who
violated them. The prospect of raiding vagrants to fill the military and
labor quota of a place that Mexicans had for centuries identified with the
antithesis of paradise did not appear as terrifying as it would be expected;
in certain circumstances and for some people, it actually seemed as an
appropriate and welcome method of punishment.
Parental Expectations and Unruly Youth in Late Bourbon Mexico

Mexican colonials who were neither members of the police forces nor
judicial officers turned in at least sixty-two individuals between 1774 and
1811 (see Table 5.1). This was not a novel practice. Whereas for the
seventeenth century Mawson has not encountered the circumstance of
individuals condemned by their relatives to serve as forzados in the Philip-
pines, we know that Mexicans occasionally petitioned for the deportation
of kin and other individuals in the early 1700s.1 In the aftermath of 1763,
requests from relatives acquired a new significance because forced con-
scriptions and the transportation of men to Manila were given unprece-
dented publicity, especially when vagrancy campaigns became routine
after 1783. The extraction of prisoners from jail to send them off on
their way to the Pacific did not go unnoticed, and every November and
December commotion surrounded the raids of the levy squads in gam-
bling houses and pulquerı́as. The traffic of handcuffed men conducted to
Acapulco escalated. The gossip and complaints of neighbors about the
ill effects of these actions on local and domestic economies contributed
to the celebrity of this instrument of repression. Numerous procedural
irregularities further fed the popular belief that authorities were desper-
ate to find human material, and that it was not difficult to get officials to
arrest and condemn an individual on flimsy grounds.
The reasons alleged to support a petition for deportation expose that
there were colonials who endorsed the official discourse and propaganda
1 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 696. Cáceres and Patch, “‘Gente de Mal Vivir,’” 363–392.
Scattered data found at the AGN also attest to spontaneous requests for banishment in
the early eighteenth century.
table 5.1. Mexican Convicts Who

Were Denounced to Judicial Authorities
of Mexico City by Relatives and Other
Community Members
Year Convicts2
1774 2
1780 1
1784 3
1786 3
1787 5
1788 6
1792 5
1795 6
1797 5
1800 1
1801 6
1802 5
1803 1
1804 2
1806 6
1807 1
1808 1
1810 2
1811 1
total 62
on the immorality of vagrancy. These requests are more significant from a

qualitative than from a quantitative point of view. The number of appeals
that actually made it to the desks of the magistrates – and of which, hence,
we have a trace – is not all too relevant because it does not tell the whole
story. It ought to be assumed that orthodox standards of social propriety
paved the way not only of those who eventually turned in their kin, but
also of the many others who were frustrated with their relatives for similar
reasons, even though they never took any legal steps and are therefore
inconspicuous in the sources. From the vantage point of these sixty-two
cases, Mexicans functioned as a policing community that collaborated
with the state in imposing a hegemonic model of comportment. The
2 These numbers do not include individuals of high social extraction who traveled to the
Philippines as recruits because their relatives obtained for them the status of “distin-
guished soldier.” I suspect too that kin or other individuals turned in several men who
embarked for Manila under the category of “convicts” (see Appendix).
petitions of family members demonstrate prejudices against vagrants and

other uprooted individuals as well as social ideals that prized dedication
to work, a proper conduct, and even marriage.
Parents were especially prominent among the petitioners. In their pleas
they poured their frustrations and the expectations they had for their
progeny. To better understand these grievances and assess how typical
they were of contemporary approaches to recalcitrant youth, I have read
them against studies on childrearing that religious figures, philosophers,
intellectuals, writers, and pedagogues composed in the 1700s in Europe.
In the early Enlightenment, the British philosopher John Locke established
a precedent with his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Locke
was concerned with the genesis of ideas; his refusal of innatism led him to
advocate an empiricist way of thinking concluding that the environment
was the primary means for children to acquire knowledge. For Locke,
education was training for a later station of responsibility in civil life.
A comprehensive education that developed reason and experience from
the earliest days would be decisive for the child’s future as a responsible
citizen, as sons would have to take their place in society and judge whether
to give assent to its constitutions and laws.3 Nearly every Spanish writer
on education acknowledged Locke’s influence, his treatise being printed
in Spain eight times before 1797.4
In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau advanced in his Emile, ou de l’Edu-
cation a new conception of the child as a human being qualitatively
different from the adult, and he urged for the need to learn about the
3 Geraint Parry, “Education,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philos-

ophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 610–12.
Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999), 80–
84.
4 In this chapter I have used the translation Educación de los niños (Madrid: Imprenta de
Manuel Álvarez), 1797 (translated from Locke’s English into French by Mr. Coste and
from this into Spanish by D.F.A.C.P.). Very popular Spanish works on education also
analyzed in this chapter are those written by the royal chaplain and bishop Dr. Juan
Elı́as Gómez de Terán (Infancia ilustrada y niñez instruida en todo género de virtudes
cristianas, morales, y polı́ticas, Madrid: Office of Antonio Marı́n, 1735 [Original from
1720]); [Unknown], Reglas de la buena crianza civil y cristiana: Utilı́simas para todos
(Barcelona: Imprenta de Eulalia Piferrer, 1781); the royal chaplain Dr. Manuel Rosell
(La educación conforme a los principios de la religión cristiana, leyes, y costumbres de la
nación española, Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1786); the pedagogue and writer Josefa Amar
y Borbón (Discurso sobre la educación fı́sica y moral de las mujeres, Madrid: Imprenta
de Benito Cano, 1790); and the auditor at the renta de correos (post office) Pedro Alonso
Rodrı́guez (Catón español polı́tico cristiano. Obra original para la enseñanza y buena
educación de los niños, niñas, y jóvenes, acomodada al carácter, costumbres, leyes, y
religión de la nación española, Madrid: Imprenta de Burgos, 1816 [Original from 1800]).
particularities of this stage. While Rousseau shared the Lockean the-

ory of knowledge, the French philosopher cautioned educators that their
intense preoccupation with preparing the child for adulthood led them to
neglect the formative years. Rousseau put forward the need for a natural
education that respected the nature, thinking, and feelings of the children;
human beings had the right to be educated and punished according to
their aptitudes and character. The Inquisition banned the Émile but it
circulated in Spain, and periodicals in Madrid published excerpts from it.
For those not versed in French, some of Rousseau’s ideas circulated in the
popular novel of Pedro Montengón, El Eusebio (1786), whose protag-
onist was modeled after the character of Émile.5 Other foreign authors
deserved as well several translations and editions in Spain in the 1700s.6
Locke’s and Rousseau’s notions of citizenship and civic virtue and
their contention that children were emotionally responsive to their envi-
ronment inspired Spanish politicians and philosophers to develop theories
about how to educate children and form valuable subjects of the empire.
But whereas the theories of Locke and Rousseau revolved around domes-
tic education under the guidance of parents and guardians, emblematic
figures of the Spanish enlightened pedagogy such as Campomanes and
Jovellanos espoused public, free, and open institutions that could pro-
vide education to a wider spectrum of the population.7 Hence, Spanish
reformers paid attention to the crucial role of education and the develop-
ment of educational projects that aimed at increasing the role of the state
and modernizing teachers, textbooks, and methodologies. In Spain, the
Bourbon government became aware of the need of free and compulsory
schooling to serve the majority of people.8
5 Joaquı́n Álvarez Barrientos, La novela del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1991),
205, 234–42.
6 For example, the historian and head of the University of Paris, Charles Rollin, and the
novelist and journalist Abbé Antoine Sabatier de Castres. I have relied, respectively, on
the following translations and editions: Educación y estudios de los niños y niñas, y
jóvenes de ambos sexos (translated into Spanish by Joaquı́n Moles, Madrid: Office of
Manuel Martı́n, 1781 [Original from 1726–28]) and El amigo de los niños (translated
into Spanish by Juan de Escoiquiz, Barcelona: Faustino Paluzı́e, 1888 [Original from the
1780s]).
7 John H. R. Polt, “Jovellanos y la educación,” El P. Feijoo y su siglo. Cuadernos de la
Cátedra Feijoo 18, no. 3 (1966): 315–38.
8 For an introduction on the place that education occupied in the minds of Spanish politi-
cians in the eighteenth century, see Carmen Labrador Herráiz and Juan Carlos de Pab-
los Ramı́rez (eds.), La educación en los papeles periódicos de la Ilustración española
(Madrid: CIDE, 1999) and Julio Ruiz Berrio, “La educación del pueblo español en el
proyecto de los Ilustrados,” Revista de Educación. Número Extraordinario 1988: La
Educación en la Ilustración Española (1988): 165–91.
Campomanes and Jovellanos attributed Spain’s economic decline to

ignorance; therefore, instruction was considered a powerful tool to bring
prosperity to the empire and ultimately, happiness to the individual.9
Political thinkers devised a wide-ranging education that exposed children
to rational thought while preserving the main tenets of Catholic moral
ethics. Jovellanos insisted on the need to provide buena crianza or good
rearing, defined as a combination of virtue – the natural obligations of a
man as a human being and the civil obligations of a man in society – and
useful sciences.10 The statesman from Asturias understood that the con-
tempt for manual work was a social factor in the economic waning of the
country; he therefore upheld that the core of education should be practical
knowledge in order to bring down the barrier between those who study
and those who work.11 Campomanes also endorsed a more pragmatic and
scientifically oriented education that valued experimentation and fostered
economic growth.12 The politician became the principal promoter of the
Economic Societies of the Friends of the Country, service organizations
that encouraged agriculture, chemistry, industry, commerce, and the arts
and sciences. In the estimation of these intellectuals, education prepared
subjects for their role in the workforce; education was the origin of all
social and personal advancement. Enlightened ruminations about rais-
ing children to be colonial subjects also included the Spanish American
colonies.13
That the Spanish eighteenth century teemed with these oeuvres is a
manifestation of the fact that there was a concern about the ignorance
and neglect of fathers and mothers on properly raising a child who
one day should become a serviceable subject of the Crown. But apart
from education being an important part in the schemes of Bourbon
9 See Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, “Bases para la formación de un plan general de

instrucción pública,” in Obras de don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, vol. 2 (Madrid:
D.F. De P. Mellado, 1845), 7–39, and Campomanes, Discurso, 1–11.
10 Jovellanos, “Memoria sobre la educación pública, o sea (sic), tratado teórico-práctico
de enseñanza con aplicación a las escuelas y colegios de niños.” In Obras publicadas
e inéditas de G.M. De J., edited by Cándido Nocedal. Vol. 46:1, 230–67. Madrid:
Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1963. 1792.
11 Ángeles Galino Carrillo, “Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, 1744–1811,” Perspectivas 3–4
(1993): 2, 6.
12 Concepción de Castro, Campomanes: Estado y reformismo ilustrado (Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, 1996), 140–44.
13 Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo have edited a collection of essays that focus on
the political aspects of education. Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo, Raising an
Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
reformers, a perusal of these treatises in the context of requests for depor-

tation to Manila brings to light that Mexican parents’ impressions and
concerns on the befitting methods to raise their offspring were in close
step with the doctrine that the authors of such works expounded. This
is not to argue that Mexican fathers and mothers read these or similar
books and acted upon them. Rather more interesting is the fact that in all
probability parents did not do that. Without necessarily being compelled
to by external forces, Mexican colonials shared the maxims of European
reformers of the time on what was an appropriate youth behavior and
what were the best ways to work toward it.
Just like Jovellanos and Campomanes sustained, parents thought that
their children’s lives should have a direction and a useful purpose.14 Pro-
genitors abhorred indolence because unoccupied time led strife with their
offspring; if children had too much time in their hands and lacked firm
discipline and focus, all sorts of recreation flourished. While some enter-
tainments were viewed as acceptable, others were a source of embar-
rassment for the family and a deviation from a philosophy of life that
exalted productivity.15 Petitions of parents and guardians evidence that
elite and working-class Mexicans alike had a strong work ethic and did
not like to waste their time. Gambling among adolescents at school was
not rare, classmates stripping each other of money and clothes.16 Pro-
fessors banished them from the classroom to the mortification of their
parents. Custodians also condemned alcohol because its abuse could lead
to public excesses and family shame. Gaming and drinking usually came
hand in hand, and both addictions were attributed to the influence of bad
friendships.
Employment was deemed to be the best preventive to keep individuals
away from trouble. Educators had a profound hatred for sloth, regarded
as the mother of all vices because its consequences affected the society
as a whole.17 Parents in New Spain expected their children to master a
14 For instance, Jovellanos heralded that every man “must embrace some profession or
career” after his instruction had finished (“Bases para la formación,” 692).
15 Walks and games that involved no monetary bets were considered licit, while drink-
ing, playing cards, gambling, dancing, theater, and shows fell under the category of
pernicious. Games and other forms of amusement had no value for the development
of the body and the mind, and thus were not appreciated as a tool of education. See
Rosell, Educación, 131–35; Sabatier, El amigo, 193–205; Reglas de la buena crianza,
79–85.
16 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.69, 85, 90, 113 (1801).
17 See Sabatier, El amigo, 90, and Gómez de Terán, Infancia ilustrada, 373. Alonso
Rodrı́guez condemned those who were not industrious. They damaged everybody else
profession, and many were prepared to use coercion to ensure results.

Examples are abundant. José Osorio liked to spend his time in pulquerı́as
until his father put him to work as a tailor, while José Mariano Ramón
Ordóñez’s uncle tried to cultivate his nephew’s interest in silversmithing
only to see him running off to Mexico City at the slightest opportunity.18
The mother of José Martel kept taking her son back to the tailor’s shop
where he worked as an apprentice every time he escaped from it. The last
time he had fled to Zacatecas for over a year.19 Others were given the
alternative of a military education, like Juan José Bernal, whose father
enlisted him as a cadet in the regiment of Sonora, and José Ignacio de
Torres Elosúa, who enrolled in the regiment of the Crown at his father’s
command.20
While for colonial bureaucrats idleness was the number-one transgres-
sion, from the head of the household’s perspective disobedience was the
most serious affront they had to endure. Indeed, disobedience could take
many forms. Against parental directives, these Mexican children refused
to take an occupation, or they were frequently absent from it.21 Others
were remiss in their studies and they repeatedly skipped school.22 To their
tutors’ consternation, some had goals and aspirations in life far differ-
ent from their families’ hopes and plans. For instance, Juan Fermı́n de
Oyarzábal exasperated his two brothers for not showing any application
to his studies, for pretending to marry an Indian girl, and for wanting to
be both a priest and a sailor.23 One of the things that infuriated parents
the most was a son who arrived late at night, or who did not show up
for days or weeks. That was the case of the father of Brı́gido Garcı́a,
who was profoundly upset because he did not know where his son had
gone to and because when Brı́gido appeared, he was naked.24 Parents
interpreted these unauthorized absences not as a bid for independence
because “to be unoccupied gives room for thinking, and consequently, for vice.” Catón
español, 318.
18 AGN Filipinas 17 exp.14 f.171, 174 (1782). AGN Filipinas 44 exp.10 f.182–208
(1795).
20 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.49 f.319–333 (1786). AGN Filipinas 30 exp.1 f.6–8v (1793).
21 The parents of Miguel Rubin de Celis tried to have his son learn the tailoring and
blacksmith professions, but Miguel kept quitting; his progenitors interpreted that he
“did not like the subjection.” AGN Correspondencia Diversas Autoridades 5386 exp.8.
Similar examples in AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Acordada 675 exp.7 (1788).
22 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.39bis f.254–254v (1786).
24 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.123 (1801).
but as libertinage and an ill use of freedom, and they resented the loss of
control over their offspring’s actions.25
Not unlike today, guardians in late colonial Mexico did not own the
magic recipe for good parenting. Eighteenth-century Spanish treatises on
education enjoined parents to inculcate early in their children the obliga-
tion to honor, respect, and obey progenitors, teachers, and the elderly.26
Fathers and mothers employed different models of education that were
implemented sometimes simultaneously such as economic support, affec-
tion, advice, admonitions, public and private education, and religious
instruction, but for some guardians none of these bore fruit. Both Luis
Martı́n and Pedro Garcı́a de la Lama lamented the futility of their efforts.
Martı́n had given his son Luis a Christian education and had tried to
“breed him since his most tender years until the age of twenty-four with
notions of honor and honesty.”27 In Veracruz, Garcı́a de la Lama had
been devoted to José Marı́a’s education with “all the attention that Chris-
tian charity and the feelings of a stepfather had inspired me.”28 After
teaching him how to read and write, arithmetic, and mercantile practice
in his own retail store, Pedro could not hide his disappointment when his
ungrateful stepson repeatedly escaped from home and counterfeited his
signature.
The example set by parents was thought to be more influential than the
teaching of any precept. The family was a key institution for socialization.
Parents’ behavior and conversations were believed to determine the learn-
ing process of children and the development of good or bad habits.29 A
regular component of a youth’s education was to work besides his father,
brother, or uncle in the family business, in hopes that the example and the
burden of responsibility would moderate wayward impulses. For exam-
ple, Luis Martı́n entrusted his son with the administration of his ranch
to “calm him down and teach him the manner to work and earn his
subsistence,” but when he left on a trip, Luis sold clothes, seeds, and
agricultural tools to feed his addictions.30 Other progenitors had fruit-
lessly attempted similar strategies with their seed. The Parrodi brothers
25 Examples can be found in AGN Filipinas 44 exp.10 (1795); AGN Filipinas 35 exp.7
f.281–286 (1802); and AGN Filipinas 61 exp.16 f.357–364 (1787).
26 Reglas de la buena crianza, 83–88; Sabatier, El amigo, 80; Gómez de Terán, Infancia
ilustrada, 276–280; and Locke, Educación, 96.
29 Locke, Educación, 122, 222, 342. Also Amar y Borbón considered the conduct of fathers
and mothers to be more crucial than that of educators (Discurso, 104–106).
were tasked with watching over their father’s mining enterprises in Chi-
autla, Puebla until they were prosecuted for their fraudulent activities,
and Garcı́a de la Lama had his stepson working in his store in Veracruz
with his other sales assistants.31 Parents also considered very persuasive
the example of brothers who had taken religious vows, expecting that
their edifying vocation and proximity to God would instill in their undis-
ciplined sons some temperance and direction in life. That was the case
of Juan Fermı́n de Oyarzábal, who came from Spain at the request of
his brother Luis, an affluent merchant in Mexico City, to be educated
by their sibling, the Franciscan José Joaquı́n, at the Colegio of Santiago
Tlatelolco. Juan Francisco, however, caused the community uproar by
disrespecting the friars and corrupting young students.32
The concept these parents had of a well-bred individual paralleled
the buena crianza championed by Spanish pedagogues Jovellanos and
Campomanes, for whom a moral education was integral. The parents
who brought authorities in family matters detested behaviors of their kin
that violated moral standards and damaged the family honor, such as
debts, thievery, public indecency, and marrying downwards. According
to the petitions for deportation, leisure consistently drove these young
men into mischief. These minors pilfered money and objects from home
or pawned their clothing to pay for their addictions and other expenses.33
Their irresponsible actions had economic, humiliating consequences for
their families. For example, three times Cristóbal Olivares had to bail
out his son from the casa de bandera in Mexico City in 1771, and Juan
Osorio declared to be deeply ashamed when chased down by his son’s
creditors.34 The youths’ recklessness had gone to great lengths for the
patriarchs Garcı́a de la Lama and Parrodi. Garcı́a de la Lama’s boy had
falsely used his stepfather’s name in order to solicit some money from
Lama’s merchant peers.35 The father of Juan Antonio and Teodoro Par-
rodi wanted to castigate the brothers because not only he thought of them
as a pair of drunkards and gamblers but they also had committed fraud
in his mining business, listing weekly expenses that never occurred.36
31 AGN Filipinas 44 exp.5 f.104v (1795). AGN Filipinas 35 exp.7 f.285 (1802).
33 Marı́a Dolores Garfias declared that his eleven-year-old son stole with regularity to
finance his gambling addiction. AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.349 (1802). Luis Martı́n
conceived of his son as “incorrigible” because he used to take household belongings for
similar purposes. AGN Filipinas 42 exp.9 f.79–93 (1807).
34 AGN Filipinas 8 exp.1 f.24 (1771). AGN Filipinas 17 exp.14 f.171 (1782).
Parents and other relatives very commonly charged their restive kin
with lasciviousness and lust, which to the magistrates they explained as
a result of deficient work ethic and overabundance of recreation. Juan
Francisco Vázquez, presented to the authorities in January 1800 by both
his brother and brother-in-law, was probably the epitome of shame for
a family.37 According to testimonies from Spanish upper-class women
living in Mexico City, in 1798 and 1799 Juan Francisco had assaulted
them in the street to expose his genitalia. He crawled under the platform
seats of the bullring to peak under the skirts of the ladies. And when public
functions were celebrated at church, he kneeled on the ground “rubbing
his face against the stones [and] raising his eyes” to the women alighting
from their carriages.38 In the eyes of the magistrates, his misdemeanor
was exceptionally grave because the presumed purity of an unmarried
woman could be compromised by such public offenses. Juan Francisco,
who once had a promising career as an amanuensis, was sentenced to
eight years in Manila.
Sexual liaisons with both married and unmarried women constituted
enough grounds for some Mexicans to sustain a request for deportation.
That these petitioners – and likely others that remain invisible in the
archival record – condemned extramarital relationships suggests that the
latter were hardly uncommon in late colonial Mexico, but also that some
colonials were no more lenient toward sex out of wedlock than author-
ities. Consider, for instance, the case of José Marı́a del Valle. His father
and the husband of his lover filed a joint report against him asking that
he be sentenced to the Philippines.39 A similar request was that from José
Marı́a Álvarez’s master, who brought his employee to justice seeking that
he be banished to China for “stealing a married woman.”40
Although some Mexican youngsters might not have held the state of
matrimony very dearly, some parents did value marriage as a source of
stability that could preclude many improprieties from happening. These
fathers believed it was their duty to procure a convenient union for their
offspring. The pyrotechnist Juan Manuel Albiro chose a woman for his
son José Joaquı́n, paid for the wedding, and even supported the young
couple for a year and a half.41 The reality, though, was that marriage
could not guarantee the fulfillment of certain expectations. Despite his

38 Ibid., fol.267.
father’s good intentions, José Joaquı́n developed the habit of verbally

and physically mistreating his wife and wasting in taverns the salary he
received at the cigar factory. Aggravated parents could find in transporta-
tion to the Philippines an opportunity to denounce sons who beat their
wives, who were unfaithful, or who injudiciously disposed of the family’s
belongings and money.42
Parents bemoaned offspring who remained unmarried after the age of
thirty, but a bachelor son was certainly preferable than one who dam-
aged the family’s social status with a downward marriage (malcasarse).
In Colonial Latin America, marriage patterns in general displayed a great
degree of social endogamy among landowners, merchants, artisans, mil-
itary officers, or government officials. Members of the Mexican elite
in particular definitely stressed the principle of marriage among social
equals.43 In this context, an angered Julián Antonio del Hierro, deputy of
the Mining Tribunal, turned in his son because he “insists in marrying a
young woman who is related in the grade of first cousins to two families
of mulattos and moriscos [offspring of Spanish and mulatto],” an act
he reckoned as disobedience and an insult to his authority.44 Wishing to
preserve the prestige and ethnic purity of his family, Hierro had in vain
offered his son “to marry him honorably.” Fears about the violation of
class and racial barriers could be sufficient basis for a petition to deport an
otherwise model son. In 1800, the accountant of the royal customs house
in Zacatecas, Antonio de Zaldúa, pleaded to Viceroy Lizana y Beaumont
that his son Cristóbal be stripped of his rank of cadet and sentenced to
military service in Manila because of his determination to marry a dancer
of the “lowest plebe.”45 Zaldúa’s seed had started an auspicious military
career and had exceeded his father’s expectations in other areas. Some
individuals were transported from Spain to the Philippines at the request
of their relatives for similar reasons.46
42 Cristóbal Olivares felt it was his moral obligation to report on his son because of his
waywardness and his offensive attitude toward his wife. AGN Filipinas 8 exp.1 (1771).
43 See Susan M. Socolow, “Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina,
1778–1810,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 209–51; Brading, Miners and Merchants,
111–13; John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon
Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1983).
44 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.39bis f.254v (1786).
46 The sergeant Antonio Rubio, boarded in Cadiz in June 1789, had expressed his desire
to marry a woman of a “low sphere,” which determined his parents to ask for his
deportation. AGN Arribadas 553.
The Last Resort of Parental Authority

Enlightened pedagogues acknowledged that some behaviors needed a
prompt correction but they generally advised against the use of severe
disciplining measures because, unless the reason for punishing was made
unequivocal to the child, the misconduct would not be amended.47 In
fact, when Mexican parents applied extreme methods to very stubborn
juveniles the results were as unsuccessful as when using relatively more
mellow strategies. Thus, Juan de Osorio and Luis Martı́n locked up their
male descendants with shackles at home but they both escaped, Osorio’s
son breaking the door and running away with the shackles still on.48 Some
desperate parents had already tried the exile option before resorting to
the Philippines. In 1801, an unidentified woman had her nephew sent
“to Yucatan and other places” because despite the fact that she had him
imprisoned several times, he persisted in wasting his salary and selling
his clothes.49 Juan Ignacio Batalón, shipped at his father’s request from
Spain to Maracaibo, Venezuela for his unrestrained behavior in a military
regiment, spent two years in jail before his progenitor decided to send him
to the Philippines in 1804.50 Similarly, the vicious ways of Juan Antonio
Ladrón de Guevara’s son had earned the youngster a sentence in the
armada of Havana, Cuba before his father petitioned for his removal to
Manila in 1802.51
Deportation to the Philippines was a recourse to which progenitors
turned when all hopes were lost and the tension at home had pushed
them to the edge, and so they presented it to their mischievous children.
According to a domestic servant, in 1795 the adolescent Mariano Arroyo
“used to live under the constant scolding of his mother, who apparently
47 Locke disapproved of beatings, whippings, and bad language, setting the tone for most
of the works written on the subject in the eighteenth century (Locke, Educación, 104,
187, 219). Later authors insisted that excessive and/or corporeal punishments instigated
by rage were counterproductive because a “soul governed by fear is weak.” Alonso
Rodrı́guez, Catón español, 23. Inspired by the rationality of the Enlightenment, late
eighteenth-century educators gave preference to the prevention of the misdemeanor and
the application of moderate methods, such as denying children their favorite meals,
their favorite games, or going for walks (Rosell, Educación, 120–22; Amar y Borbón,
Discurso, 121–22). The punishment had to be commensurate to the gravity of the
wrongdoing and the age of the child (Amar y Borbón, Discurso, 122).
48 AGN Filipinas 17 exp.14 f.174v (1782). AGN Filipinas 42 exp.9 f.82v (1807).
49 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.114 (1801).
did not love her son very much because she used to intimidate him all
the time with the threat of sending him to China.”52 It is interesting that
the terms “Philippines” and “China” had become interchangeable for
parents, and that they resorted to them as places with which to terrify
naughty children. The shadow of the archipelago’s giant neighbor, China,
allowed for the blurry and equivocal understanding Mexicans had of the
region. In the Mexican popular imagination, links were made between
the Philippines, China, barbarism, and the fear of the unknown, even
if this negative and foggy perception of the archipelago was not easily
reconciled with the reality of a cosmopolitan Manila.53
Significantly, parents had exhausted all other alternatives – sending
their loved ones to Manila was not an easy decision. For example, Luis
Martı́n felt that the behavior of his son had left him with no options and
declared, “I find myself in the need to unleash the final blow at him.”54
Parents regularly submitted their plight to the tribunals as if it were a
hopeless case and protested that all other methods of proper raising had
proved to be ineffective. The youngsters’ recalcitrance had crushed their
parents’ expectancy for rehabilitation. Because relatives had confidence
in the redemptive qualities of prisons, some had spent so much time in jail
they could not even remember how many times they had been arrested, or
for what reasons.55 The fear that their sons’ turbulent behavior could have
a pernicious effect on other siblings and precipitate the total perdition of
the boys themselves forced parents to make drastic decisions.56 The good
name of the family, moreover, was at stake. If a rebellious son was not put
away soon, he could jeopardize the reputation of unmarried daughters.

53 According to Reed, Manila was “a city of heterogenetic transformation, where men of
different races and cultural traditions mingled to trade and exchange ideas. Naturally,
the ebb and flow of merchants and sailors gave Manila a cosmopolitan character quite
distinct from the mission centers and small colonial towns scattered throughout the
provinces of the Philippines.” Colonial Manila, 33.
55 Juan Antonio Parrodi testified to having been in prison four times: for intending to marry
a mulatto woman; for having ridden a horse one afternoon; for illicit relationships with
a woman; and the last one, he never knew why. AGN Filipinas 44 exp.5 f.127 (1795).
In 1795, a young rascal from Guanajuato confessed he could not recall how many times
he had been incarcerated at his mother’s request for drinking and disobedience. AGN
Filipinas 34 exp.5 f.126 (1795).
56 The Indian Estanislao Juan Antonio from Mexico City indicated that the vices of his son
José Marı́a Esteban consumed the family assets to the detriment of his other offspring.
AGN Filipinas 37 exp.13 f.178–193 (1802).
This was the concern of Francisco Solla from Veracruz, who worried that
the behavior of his son Francisco Ignacio would make his daughters lose
“the esteem and reputation they enjoy.”57
Relatives seeking the Philippine solution had alienated themselves from
their own kin. Offspring had become the “other,” and parents did not
recognize their children anymore. In 1793, Antonio Romero referred
to his son Mariano Arroyo as “a monster, capable of any excess. His
character is deceitful, and underneath an apparent sincerity, he hides the
finest arrogance and cunning.”58 The parents of Antonio Santos made a
similar argument a few years later when they presented their son to the
authorities alleging, “although he seems, or pretends to be, fatuous, in all
his apparently disordered procedures he has shown complete and perfect
common sense.”59
When petitioning for deportation, parents and guardians pursued two
principal goals. First, they sought to control and reform their progeny,
or as Antonio de Zaldúa put it in 1800, to “contain, correct, and make
him learn a lesson.”60 Both government authorities and desperate families
had faith in the educational nature of military service and forced labor.
But, unlike colonial bureaucrats and military authorities, who had a rec-
ognizable political and military agenda in supporting the levies for the
Philippines, relatives were presumably moved by a genuine interest in the
well-being of the wayward youths. Hence, they even expected their chil-
dren to be thankful for the opportunity given. The second aim of parents
was to preserve the family repute, particularly important for individuals
from the middle and upper social strata. Royal bureaucrats, merchants,
and army officials all expressed their desire to protect their honor by
removing their sons from sight and to restore their social prestige by
having them perform a service to His Majesty in a military assignment
overseas.
How could exile in the Philippines accomplish these objectives?
Authorities and families agreed on the benefits of exposing these unman-
ageable young men to a harsh, remote, and alien environment. Criminal
prosecutor Count of Alcaraz expressed in 1809 his conviction that in the
Philippines, “because of the different climate, food, drinks, and clothing,
these individuals will get rid of their vices and distractions, becoming
57 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.16 f.362 (1787–1788).

59 AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.124v (1801).
more useful men.”61 Distance alone was presumed to operate miraculous

behavioral changes, as it was thought that an excess of family protection
had been a factor in the moral deviation of the youth. The deprivation
of love and affection, the loss of comfortable and familiar surroundings,
and a salutary separation from bad company would make them open
their eyes.62 In 1774, Luis de Oyarzábal requested that his brother be
banished to the Philippines because “the long distance from his relatives
and the lack of assistance will make him exert himself and moderate
the unreasonable and indolent temper he has shown until now.”63 Since
wealth had fueled their children’s addictions, well-to-do parents used
their power over the monetary flow to control their spoiled sons. In this
manner, Parrodi assigned no pension to his sons because “it would feed
the vices that were trying to be eradicated.”64
Expatriation should teach the offspring what parents at home were
unable to: discipline, obedience, and respect for their elders. Juan de Oso-
rio believed that in the Philippines his son “will curb, or they will make
him curb, his natural defiance and bad inclinations.”65 Parents placed
great expectations on the military routine and the authoritarianism of
troop commanders, such as Francisco Yano’s father, who reckoned that
if an army official could not dominate his son, it was not likely that himself
or his other son would be able to do so.66 Tiburcio Sedano considered that
military training, in combination with natural talent and a good blood-
line, could convert the rascal of his godson Belluga into a useful member
of society.67 In general, difficult experiences and hard work were sup-
posed to teach the deportees the constancy and self-discipline needed to
hold a job.
Relatives seeking deportation for disorderly sons also argued that a few
years in the Philippines would foster their loyalty to the Crown. Just a few
decades before Mexico won its independence from Spain, some Mexicans
still regarded service to the Spanish monarch as so honorable that even
incorrigible scoundrels could re-design their lives and give them a moral

62 AGN Civil 1844 exp.6 (1790).
64 AGN Filipinas 44 exp.6 f.148v (1795). Similarly, the father of Francisco Yano in Tex-
coco expected that his son would mend his ways because of the “short ration he receives.”
CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg. 4 (1792).
66 CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg. 4 (1792).
meaning if they became soldiers. In January 1795 the local authorities

of Valle de Santiago y Salamanca, Guanajuato were about to set free
an Indian they arrested by mistake but the latter declared his desire to
serve the King wherever it was needed.68 Furthermore, the wording of the
petitions suggests that military service in the Philippines came to carry
more prestige and merit than any other destination in the viceroyalty.
However, it is difficult to tell whether the argument of loyalty was a
candid motivation or a mere rhetorical strategy, since having a relative
serving the Spanish sovereign did great good to the reputation of a family.
In the decision to send kin to the Philippines class does not appear
to have been a distinguishing factor. Approximately a third of the par-
ents who resorted to trans-Pacific exile belonged to middle and high
social sectors. A functionary of the Ministry of Grace and Justice in
Madrid and the bishop of Astorga, Spain69 together with Mexican royal
officials employed in the post office administration, mining tribunal, cus-
toms, audience, and treasury were among the complainants. Mid-ranking
members of the military, such as the captain of the provincial regiment of
Toluca and the marshal of dragoons of Nueva Galicia also employed these
disciplinary measures, as did mineowners, ranchers, and landowners.70
A couple of prosperous peninsular merchants who had established them-
selves in the viceroyalty brought brothers and nephews from Spain to
assist them in the family business, only to end up turning them over
to judicial officers after several misdemeanors.71 Every so often affluent
matriarchs also appear in the records entrusting their offspring to the
judge.72
Although the documentary evidence is sparse, some Indians of aristo-
cratic origin seem to have understood deportation to Manila as instru-
mental for the reform of their children and beneficial for the honor of their
families. Cáceres and Patch refer to the case of Úrsula de Nájera, an Indian
cacica (noblewoman of the indigenous ruling class) who had her son
transported across the Pacific in the 1720s because he refused to pursue

69 The royal official Francisco Portero saw his son board in Cadiz in the fall of 1808
(AGN Filipinas 39 exp.5), whereas the bishop managed to have his nephew shipped
to the Philippines because of his “unruly” behavior in December 1789 (AGI Juzgado
Arribadas 287B).
70 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.1 f.1–3 (1804). AGN Filipinas 60 exp.7 f.100 (1808).
71 AGN Filipinas 8 exp.4 f.161–181 (1774). AGN Filipinas 30 exp.11 f.165.
72 Obviously a woman of means, the widowed Juana Ruiz from Mexico City offered in
1783 to pay for the subsistence of her son Ignacio Ortega while in Manila despite having
four other children to support. AGN Filipinas 17 exp.32 f.384 (1783).
an ecclesiastical career, stole from his mother, and was disrespectful.73

Almost a century later, Estanislao Juan Antonio, a member of the indige-
nous nobility of Ixcateopan, had his son José Marı́a Esteban imprisoned
twice for disobedience, gambling, and other disorders. The results were
very unsuccessful – the son had escaped both times – which led Estanis-
lao to demand in 1802 his expulsion to the Philippines.74 Although the
Indian mother of Vicente Lemuz did not share the same social standing of
Estanislao and Úrsula, in 1790 she also found herself forced to hand her
son to authorities because she had failed to keep Vicente from drinking
and gambling after her husband’s death.75
Estanislao’s and Úrsula de Nájera’s actions demonstrate that they both
believed to a great extent in the rightfulness of colonial judicial authori-
ties and the effectiveness of not only forced transportation to the Philip-
pines but also imprisonment. This concurs with a historiography that has
long rejected the image of passive, defeated Indians and has established
the resourcefulness of the indigenous people in the Spanish American
colonies, particularly with respect to their engagement with the Spanish
legal system.76 The participation of Indians in the judicial workings has
been interpreted as contestation, but the adaptation of tools of domi-
nance, such as resorting to deportation to the Philippines, could bespeak
not necessarily an act of defiance but merely the intention to advance
Indian aims in a context of domination.
The significant number of well-to-do individuals who relinquished
their problematic relatives to authorities reveals that wealthier segments
of society suffered the same daily problems as the common populace. The
frustration of members of the elite stemmed from the apparent inability of
73 Cáceres and Patch, “Gente de Mal Vivir,” 377–78.

76 Social historians have assumed that Indians had a clear understanding of the power rela-
tions in which they were enmeshed and see litigation as an effective strategy of Indian
resistance. Indeed, Spanish colonial officials deplored their ferocious and tenacious liti-
giousness. For earlier colonial times, see Woodrow W. Borah, Justice by Insurance. The
General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of Half-Real (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 130–48; and Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples
and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1982), 115–21. For late colonial times, see Charles F. Walker, Smol-
dering Ashes. Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), 21–23. Indigenous women also used lawsuits to redress their
status in the household, the community, and Spanish-Indian relationships. See Susan Kel-
logg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700 (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 105–15.
their offspring to behave according to the demands of their social status.

Their petitions show that upper class and popular sectors were ideologi-
cally closer than the colony’s powerful would have liked to admit. They
both had failed in disciplining their rebellious children, and both their
offspring had caused similar problems with their irresponsibility and bad
conduct. Despite the fact that the official discourse linked vagrancy to the
urban poor and despised the “breakdown of customs” that supposedly
plagued the lower class, this social disease turned out to afflict also the
elite. It can be inferred from these petitions that disciplining the plebe and
instructing lower-class youths in proper morals could not be the only, or
adequate, solution, because the causes for these behaviors could not be
reduced to the particular idiosyncrasy of the populace.
Church members spiritually sanctioned transportation to the Philip-
pines. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the regularity of levies,
recruitments, and shipments to Manila had ingrained in the popular imag-
ination the pressing danger that foreign political powers could pose in the
archipelago. Priests who advised their flock to hand their sons to author-
ities further fueled the conviction that the levies could be used to punish
the unruly.77 Thus, ecclesiastical personnel participated in the education
of young Mexicans as they condoned this practice. Behind the encour-
agement of priests there was a familiar perception of the Philippines as
the place where Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Augustinians had
been developing a missionary field since the sixteenth century that linked
China and New Spain; it is not a too far-fetched proposition that in the
eyes of Church members, this adventurous, exotic scenario was an ideal
destination for energetic, aimless young men.
Mothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and grandparents handed over to the
state these youngsters almost as frequently as fathers did. This evidence
casts light on a multi-headed and extended family model in late colo-
nial Mexico where a patriarch not always held a central role. In theory,
the education of the progeny was the father’s responsibility. Judicial
agents supported the principle of patria potestas – paternal power –
that laid within the petitions for deportation. Criminal prosecutor
Sagarzurieta, for example, stated that the father “must dictate the rules
77 A woman in Mexico City presented her nephew for military service in Manila after being
advised to do so by her spiritual confessor because she could not control his addiction
to gambling. AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.113 (1801). Also in the capital city, the bachelor
of theology Vı́ctor Iturrigaray represented Juana Ladrón de Guevara to report her son
Juan José Chávez for being lazy, jobless, and vicious. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.14 f.242
(1794).
of the raising, education and punishment of the offspring.”78 A mother’s

testimony about her son would be dismissed if it contradicted her hus-
band’s. In reality, there were a significant number of Mexican women
who, because they functioned as leaders of their family, had a voice in the
fate of their children. Often the father had died, had migrated in search of
a job, or had left for other, unexplained reasons. Consequently, unmar-
ried and widowed mothers, faced with the task of raising several children,
had to give up their sons for “their inability to submit or control them.”79
If both the mother and the father were absent figures, other family mem-
bers assumed tutorial and disciplining responsibilities. Hence, judicial
records tell us about sisters who brought to authorities their frustration
over a brother who refused to take a job and imperiled the subsistence
of the family, like the previously mentioned case of Francisco Sierra from
Mexico City.80
The resort to forced exile to the Philippines as a means of dealing
with troublesome relatives came at the cost of relinquishing a significant
measure of parental authority. Nowhere was this more bitterly apparent
than when relatives tried to free those who had been arrested at their
request. For instance, José Bustamante’s attempts to regain guardianship
of his brother Manuel encountered the unwavering disapproval of the
magistrate who processed the case. Judge Alva formed the opinion that
José was incapable of retaining his brother’s custody. He blamed him
for not taking measures until it was too late and feared he would get
again tired of his brother should they be reunited.81 Alva not only took
into consideration the quality of character and circumstances of José;
he also argued that his brother’s laziness and squandering of the father’s
inheritance needed to be exemplarily punished to deter others from similar
wrongdoings.
The case of the Parrodi brothers also exemplifies that the public interest
moved magistrates more than the private concerns of the family. When
the patriarch entreated the tribunals for the release of Teodoro after his
oldest son Antonio had died in San Juan de Ulúa, Veracruz, magistrate
Sagarzurieta replied that “the insults, excesses, and vices these young

79 Both Josefa Márquez and Marı́a Teresa Villavicencio in Mexico City took their sons to
police headquarters for this reason. AGN Filipinas 19 exp.43 f.277 (1786). Juana Ruiz
was afraid that Ignacio Ortega, his “very vicious” second son, would corrupt his four
siblings. AGN Filipinas 17 exp.32 f.384 (1783).
boys were charged with, like inebriety, gambling, lecheries, are not only
offensive and personal to their father, but also to the public.”82 Author-
ities often challenged petitions for release in the name of purposes more
abstract than the individuals’ quotidian, specific-oriented plights.
Some times authorities estimated that these young men would be suf-
ficiently disciplined with just some time in prison and a severe warning,
regardless of the punishment their parents had originally asked for. In
these cases, judges dictated the terms of the new chance given to the indi-
viduals. Following the death of her husband, the mother of Pedro Serratón
in Irapuato, Guanajuato had lost control over her son and had him sen-
tenced to transportation to Manila. Pedro showed no interest in taking a
job, he regularly gambled and got drunk, he engaged in petty theft, and he
embarrassed women who walked by the door of his workshop.83 Pedro
saw his sentence suspended after he promised to learn a trade, but to
ensure that the resolution was observed Viceroy Count of Revillagigedo
charged the alcalde ordinario with nominating a master to whom Pedro
was to be apprenticed. Dedicated criminal prosecutors like Alva took
upon themselves the obligation to reprimand the youngsters. Thus, upon
the liberation of Juana Ruiz’s son Ignacio Ortega, Alva advised him to
moderate his comportment toward his mother and to adopt an honest,
prudent, and Christian way of life, or else be brought again before justice
to face the entire sentence.84
Relatives initiated a process that opened the door for authorities to
intervene and take over the education and social discipline of obdurate
youths. As one more step in the state-building process of late Bourbon
Mexico, the colonial administration adopted a disciplinarian role, becom-
ing a father for these errant offspring in the context of state efforts to
raise Spanish American children as colonial subjects. The apparent ten-
sion between the colonial state’s fostering of patria potestas only to later
take it away is closely linked to a political ideology that figured the
Spanish monarch as the father of all his subjects. Bianca Premo refers to
how the authority model of the patriarchal family was replicated at the
level of the Spanish empire, that is, the King as father and the colonial sub-
jects as children.85 The Bourbons understood paternal and royal authority

83 AGN Civil 1844 exp.6 (1790).
85 Children of the Father King, 10.
as not contradictory but as two sides of the same coin.86 Steve Stern has
drawn attention to the fact that colonials were receptive to the premises of
a paternalistic political culture webbed with patriarchal gender ideals and
values.87 Mexican parents who petitioned for their offspring’s deporta-
tion appealed to the paternal function of the state, entrusting authorities
with their children when they thought no other option was available.
However, deportation could not effectively address the roots of Mex-
ican youth’s unruly comportment. A four-to eight-year term of military
service or forced labor in the Philippines would not easily foster pos-
itive transformations, even more so when some of those banished to
Manila had already tasted the bitterness of exile in Havana, Yucatan,
or Venezuela, obviously to little effect. Much like colonial authorities
and social reformers, who blamed the behavior of the urban poor not
on their socio-economic context but on their moral deviation, parents
were prone to shake off any personal culpability in explaining the abhor-
rent actions of their kin. Some of them were convinced that their sons’
immorality was innate. Juan de Osorio, for example, accused his son of
being a naturally lustful drunkard and a swindler who “does not want
to put into practice his skills, to help at home, and even less to respect
his old father.”88 Therefore, exile and forced service targeted the offend-
ing juvenile as if he were the sole instigator. An essential inconsistency
in the discourse that trumpeted forced transportation as a punishment
was that, if vices were inherent to the individual, a disciplining experience
in the Philippines – or anywhere else, for that matter – could never redeem
these men.
Whether they admitted to it or not, parents were aware that the reasons
for mischief resided as well in family circumstances and breeding. Ideas
about child-rearing that held parents and other guardians responsible for
the behavior of youths transpired in the judicial files, and these ideas mir-
rored to a certain degree those of enlightened reformers and politicians.
In general, Locke, Jovellanos, Campomanes, and eighteenth-century
educational writers imputed the vices and defects of individuals to a
86 Steinar Saether, “Bourbon Absolutism and Marriage Reform in Late Colonial Spanish
America,” The Americas 59, no. 4 (2003): 475–509; Vı́ctor Uribe-Uran, “Innocent
Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides, the Punishment of Indians, and the
Law in Colonial Mexico, 1740s–1820s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006):
793–828.
87 Stern, Secret History, 305–07.
mala crianza (bad rearing).89 The education of children was the parents’
obligation not only to their offspring but also to their patria as educa-
tors of loyal and productive subjects of the Crown. Pedagogues advised
that this task started in early childhood because – employing the same
botanical jargon used with vagrants – children were like plants that could
easily be straightened when young; but once these plants grew crooked,
nothing could set them right.90
According to these notions, parents made two common mistakes.
On the one hand, fingers were pointed at mothers for being too car-
ing and indulgent with their offspring: too much familiarity undermined
parental authority and respect. For instance, José Mondragón presented
his nephew Manuel Molina because “the consent of his mother” had
fostered his laziness and habitual petty theft.91 Vicente Arce, husband to
an a elderly, invalid wife, asked for the restitution of his son, José Rafael,
saying that he had forgiven the young man’s mistakes, persuaded that
“he committed them knowing he enjoyed the favor of his mother.”92 On
the other hand, witnesses’ testimonies often singled out the frequency
with which fathers administered harsh punishments, including beatings,
domestic confinements, and incarcerations, and the fact that they were
regularly absent overseas or attending their business in remote provinces
of the viceroyalty.93 Works on education of the time criticized both the
soft and the iron-fisted approaches; intuition and common sense should
dictate a happy medium between forgiveness and strictness taking into
consideration the age and temperament of each child.94
Other factors in the deviant behavior of the youth were beyond par-
ents’ and guardians’ control. The economic and social changes of late
eighteenth-century Mexico created a challenging educational environ-
ment. The high mortality rate and the pressures of urban growth, rural
migration, and job competition ruptured many families. Orphanhood and
absent fathers who had become economic migrants seeking an income
far from home were frequent phenomena. Overwhelmed, unmarried,
89 Locke, Educación, 68. Campomanes, Discurso, 128. See also Rollin, Educación y estu-
dios, 2–6.
90 Alonso Rodrı́guez, Catón español, 18.
91 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Acordada 675 exp.7 (1788). Similarly, Parrodi wanted his
sons to be sent away “because by no means should they stay close to their mother, as it
will always be the same.” AGN Filipinas 44 exp.5 f.112 (1795).
93 The head of the Parrodi household, for example, spent long periods of time in Spain.
94 Rosell, Educación, 88. Amar y Borbón, Discurso, 115, 117–18 and 252; Alonso
Rodrı́guez, Catón español, 22.
abandoned, or widowed mothers often developed conflictive relation-

ships with their children. In 1783, Ignacio Ortega asserted that his mother
Juana Ruiz “everyday insults me in the most offensive terms, throwing
food in my face, and displaying other actions improper of a mother.”95
Beleaguered mothers burdened their sons with family responsibilities they
were not yet ready for, forcing them to grow into adulthood all too early.
As a result of these dislocations family members, stepfathers and other
individuals stepped in to assist single parents or to protect orphaned chil-
dren. But newcomers introduced changes in the relationships between
adults and minors and could cause serious friction within the family.
Indeed, a stepfather was regularly a source of problem. The oldest sons
struggled with the presence of an unfamiliar male in the household, and
mothers every so often favored their new partners to the detriment of
their own children. Forsaken wives, or immature young couples fre-
quently needed the support and protection of their in-laws, but such
relations of dependency could also be basis for contention.96 The inter-
vention of distant relatives who lacked emotional bonds with the young-
sters could become particularly problematic. After his mother’s death
in 1793, José Mariano Ordóñez fell under the tutelage of his uncle
Juan Ordóñez, official at the royal customs office in Puebla, but they
established a poor relationship – José Mariano affirmed that his relative
could not bear him and that he had prohibited him to address him as
uncle, so the boy repeatedly sought the protection of Palazuelos, a family
friend. In 1795, the uncle petitioned that José Mariano be banished to
Manila.97
Were these Mexican youths lazier, less willing to learn a profession
than earlier generations? Were they trying to resist the imposition of
Bourbon social and work ethics models? Or, on the contrary, were their
elders more intolerant and more prone to criminalize the conduct of
youngsters, imposing upon them rules of behavior that denied them the
experimentation proper to adolescence? To be sure, just like authorities
perceived that Mexican society was changing, so too did parents and
guardians perceive a change in their offspring. They were confused by
the failure of traditional child rearing methods and frustrated by the
frequency with which they had to turn to extreme corrective measures.
There was clearly a generational gap, but the behavior of these young men

96 AGN Filipinas 16 exp.2 f.19–22 (1780). AGN Filipinas 19 exp.18 f.65–66 (1785).
also exposes two ways in which the readjustments of Mexican society had
impacted a portion of the youth. Firstly, the improper friendships that
parents frowned on could be interpreted as a sign of the new interactions
and bonds that the flow of rural immigrants to the capital had created.
Secondly, that young men had lost interest and impetus to learn a trade
and become a skilled worker could be a reflection of the impoverished
economic conditions that had made it so difficult to find a stable job in
the city.
Whether the youngsters that populated these judicial files had changed
and were out of control or their parents had embraced new values that
led them to reject attitudes seen as acceptable in an earlier period, depor-
tation to the Philippines was a recourse that could not adequately tackle
the problem. The official discourse sang the mantra of the possibilities of
reformation for wrongdoers in the Philippines as the place where socially
despised behaviors could be punished and corrected. But neither the par-
ents nor the judicial authorities ever seemed to contemplate how exile
could reverse in-born defects or how banishment to the Philippines could
be the solution to a dysfunctional educational environment that would
likely remain unchanged upon the return of the deportee. Transportation
only bounced the problem from New Spain to another place.
Domestic Violence and the Power of Mexican Women

Whereas some wives tried to prevent the exile of husbands for fear of
economic hardship, a few others requested their spouses be recruited
for the Philippines because of their insupportable conduct. Obviously,
Mexican women realized that late eighteenth-century vagrancy laws and
the imperial dynamics deployed in the Philippines could be used to assert
power in their own household. In January 1780, Marı́a Josefa Alarcón,
wife of the shoemaker Manuel Antonio Cordero and mother of two
children, had had enough of her wretched life and resolved to turn in
her partner of years for the levies to Manila. She declared to criminal
prosecutor Merino in Mexico City that
Life in the company of my husband has been so perverse because of his constant
drinking, gambling, and depraved customs that my situation is unbearable, not
only because he has gambled all my clothes, leaving me practically naked, and
he is not willing to work for our subsistence, but also he has become insolent
up to the point of beating me several times, and even once locking me up in our
bedroom with the intention of killing me.98

The rationale in which Marı́a Josefa built her request bespeaks a tacit
understanding between herself and Merino about what obligations her
husband was expected but failed, to fulfill, namely to support her and
their children and stay away from gambling and drinking, conceptions
that can be found in other women’s appeals.
Requests for deportation to the Philippines were for these women one
among other routes they could pursue in a patriarchal system that was
otherwise geared against them. In the Spanish American colonies, both
canon law and civil law permitted the male head of the household to casti-
gate moderately all those who lived under his roof and authority – family,
servants, and dependents. Colonial society conceived of marriage as an
unspoken pact of mutual obligations where husbands provided finan-
cial support, respect, and protection and wives responded with obedience
and the accomplishment of household tasks.99 Husbands were allowed to
administer a certain amount of physical correction for transgressions such
as adultery or the dereliction of domestic duties like obedience, faithful-
ness, cooking, and sexual relationships. A patriarch would be neglecting
his obligations if he failed to discipline his household efficiently.100 The
Church recognized the need for this correction when they sponsored
the view that women lacked reason and were prone to temptation and
treachery.101
Authorities, social commentators, and public opinion in general dis-
approved of clear-cut wife abuse, and women had the recourse of secular
and ecclesiastical courts to defend themselves against abusive husbands.
Excessive or arbitrary domestic violence was considered immoral by the
Church and defined as a criminal offense by civil authorities, but because
there was no definition for moderate punishment, it was up to each
woman to decide how much she was willing to tolerate. While in ecclesias-
tical courts physical abuse – the primary reason for seeking divorce – was
insufficient cause for obtaining a separation, in the criminal justice sys-
tem violent husbands could and were punished with imprisonment, forced
labor, confiscation of property, fines, and exiles.102 Judicial authorities
99 Sonia Lipsett-Rivera, “Marriage and Family Relationships in Mexico During the Tran-
sition from Colony to Nation,” in State and Society in Spanish America During the
Age of Revolution, ed. Uribe-Uran (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 121–48.
100 Stern, Secret History, 212–13. Cheryl English Martin, Governance, 154.
101 Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of Conquest. The Gendered Genesis of
Spanish American Society, 1500–1600 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2005), 103.
102 Arrom, Women, 232–38. Kimberley Gauderman, Women’s Lives In Colonial Quito.
Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2003), 55.
in the colonies generally treated aggressors with benignity and explicitly

referred to the right of a husband to dispense corporal punishment as a
means of guiding the wife’s unseemly conduct.103 The litigation of Mexi-
can women proves that, far from powerless beings subordinate to males,
they were aware of the possibilities of using colonial courts to resist neg-
ligence and abuse.104 Furthermore, wives’ petitions to deport husbands
to the Philippines illuminate that women in late colonial Mexico had
expanded their panoply of judicial options to include forced trans-Pacific
transportation.
Conflicting views of the problem of domestic violence made a battered
wife’s position ambiguous; similarly, the outcome of requests for depor-
tation was not easily predictable, and it depended on factors that were
both external and internal to the magistrates. For example, in Mexico
City Juana Fernández accused her husband of marital abuses in 1780 and
had him deported to Manila.105 That same year, judge Merino refused to
condemn Marı́a Josefa Alarcón’s partner on the grounds that “it is noto-
rious the freedom in which these wives are left and the mistakes to which
they are exposed during the long . . . absences of their husbands.”106 Also
in 1780 Merino dismissed a petition from Juan Manuel de Albiro about
his son José Joaquı́n. The portrait of José Joaquı́n as a slothful, vicious,
and abusive son and husband failed to convince the magistrate, who
qualified the claim as “entirely despicable” because “for no reason the
law allows the disunion of marriages, as the results that can come from
a violent and not premeditated separation, or concealed divorce, are
inconveniences of much seriousness and weight.”107 Judge Merino agreed
that both the shoemaker and the pyrotechnist deserved to be disciplined,
but to his mind banishment to the Philippines was not the appropriate
punishment.108
103 Socolow, “Women and Crime: Buenos Aires, 1757–97,” Journal of Latin American
Studies 12, no. 1 (1980): 44–45. Uribe-Uran has argued that the violent behavior
of Indian husbands was seen with even more condescendence because natives were
considered naı̈ve infants. “Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs?”
104 Gauderman, Women’s Lives, 46–47, 127–28; Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “Violencia y
discordia en las relaciones personales en la ciudad de México a fines del siglo XVIII,”
Historia Mexicana 51, no. 2 (2001): 233–59; Stern, Secret History, 99–107; Boyer,
Bigamists, 123–24, 135.
107 Ibid., exp.3 f.24v-25.
108 Merino advised that if Marı́a Josefa Alarcón sincerely believed that her husband wanted
to kill her, “she should take her claim to where it is convenient.” AGN Filipinas 16
exp.2 f.21v (1780).
Pressure to collect able men for the Philippines guided the judgment
of some magistrates, while concerns about upholding marriage law and
punishing in a humane manner made other judicial agents waver from
granting women’s requests to deport violent partners to the Philippines.
The courts did not question the prerogative of women to seek judicial
assistance against domestic violence, but the trials betray that the sanc-
tity of marriage and the integrity of the family as a source of stability in the
colonial setting ranked high in authorities’ priorities. Magistrates made
decisions bearing in mind the sufferings of women not in the presence, but
in the absence of male family members whose work supported widowed
mothers, wives, unmarried sisters, and abandoned sisters-in-law. These
preoccupations of the colonial government were sadly incarnated in the
person of Juana Fernández. Juana found it very hard to strike a balance
between life with an intemperate husband and the pressures that colonial
society put single women under. In 1784, four years of loneliness, help-
lessness, and the humiliation of living of the charity of her mother-in-law
consumed Juana up to the point of begging for the return of her husband,
confessing that, “my husband is what I need the most.”109
Intra-Familial Machinations in Deportations to the Philippines

Officials in New Spain were aware that the populace deliberately used the
levies as a means to address private affairs, revenge, and unresolved dis-
putes. The 1775 royal ordinance warned against “corruption of witnesses,
prepotency, vengeance or malice in deeming idle and vicious [those] who
really are not,” so special attention was paid to the possibility that per-
sonal motivations were at play.110 In 1780, Merino regretted the extended
belief among the population that “merely by requesting the separation
of the husband, son or brother, this will be granted.”111 The cases I
have worked with certainly illustrate that the testimony of relatives and
acquaintances received serious consideration, and magistrates rejected
requests for transportation if accusations were not solidly substantiated
or if they appeared to reflect personal vendettas.
109 The prosecutor granted Juana’s petition and her husband returned in 1786. AGN
Filipinas 19 exp.18 f.65–66 (1785).
110 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Ordenanzas 2356 exp.10 (1775). Levies authorities in Spain
struggled with these complications since the 1750s. Especially in small towns and
villages, victims could be tools in the hands of judicial officers to avenge particular or
family affronts (Pérez Estévez, El problema, 188).
The courts routinely handled disputes over bequests that featured vil-
lainous stepfathers, uncles, and grandfathers, and they did so with a
magnifying glass. Alva was a sufficiently seasoned magistrate to posit in
1783 that, “many times parents proceeded against their offspring moved
by wicked, malicious and hidden reasons that are not easy to discover.”112
This proved to be especially true for stepfathers when a sizable inheri-
tance was involved. Juana Ruiz and her lover the priest José de Leiva tried
to have her son Ignacio Ortega sent to the Philippines in 1783, but Alva
was a thorough and conscious officer of the law. After gathering vari-
ous statements from neighbors, Alva concluded that the only intention
of Juana and father José was, “to take the boy away from his house and
his legacy to spend the latter among the mother, the priest, and rest of
their allies.”113 Ignacio had inherited from his father the not insubstan-
tial sum of 7,000 pesos. Alva was not the only judge who approached
the oral evidence of the proceedings with a critical eye. In January 1792,
Gerardo Ruiz, the oldest of three brothers, was on trial to be transported
to the Philippines. The prosecutor found strange that the only witnesses
testifying against his behavior and morals were the administrators of the
inheritance the siblings had received from an uncle, and he ordered a
second round of interrogations. It was then when José Ruiz affirmed that
the administrators wanted to get rid of his brother Gerardo because his
legal knowledge threatened to uncover how poorly they had handled the
Ruiz family’s capital.114
Overall, the verdict usually favored the prisoner if there were testi-
monies that signaled foul play on the part of a close family member.
The fact that an inconvenient relative could find himself the subject of
a deportation petition is emblematic of the shrewdness of Mexicans in
using transportation to the Philippines to take care of family matters.
For example, Mariano Melgarejo’s grandfather had presented him as
a delinquent to the judge but other family associates asserted that the
young man had a job and only a “little inclination” for pulque. His aunt
Gertrudis stated that 500 pesos had been the reason for Mariano to end
up in jail.115 Gertrudis’ deposition seems to have been decisive in the pro-
cess because shortly thereafter his nephew was set free. Another possible

113 Ibid., 398.
instance of the existence of a family plot behind a request for deportation

was the story of the Pérez de Villanueva brothers. The good name they
had forged for themselves in their native Puebla served them well during
the proceedings of the case. Deponents indicated that the oldest brother,
José, was about to reach the legal age to access his right of primogeniture
and that the Pérez de Villanueva siblings were victims to “the infamous
ambition” of their uncle, who allegedly wanted “to dispose of them and
deprive them of their inherited patrimony and entailed estates.”116
At times, the authorities’ compliance with a request hinged upon the
social class of the petitioner. Well-to-do families had the means to con-
vince authorities to relocate their offspring, as they offered to pay for their
sons’ prison stay in Mexico City, the military escort to Acapulco, food
on board of the galleon, and the costs of subsistence in the Philippines
for several years. Judges also gave greater credence to socially prominent
petitioners. For example, in 1774 magistrate Gamboa admitted that Juan
Fermı́n de Oyarzábal’s habits were not “so criminal as to deserve the
Philippines penance,” but it served him right because of his insubordina-
tion to his brother Luis, “whose formality, integrity, and accomplished
circumstances . . . I believe, for they are very well known.”117 The testi-
mony of Julián Antonio del Hierro was to be trusted because he was
“a man of truth, and he knows the purity with which tribunals should
be informed;”118 not fortuitously, he also happened to be a deputy of
the Mining Tribunal. On the contrary, the vicious and mercurial nature
attributed to members of the lower classes posed a problem for their reli-
ability as witnesses; as the friar inquisitor Manuel Fernández put it, “they
are all contemptible people, of very suspicious colors, given to idleness,
alcohol, and all type of vices. One day they seem to be united with those
they have dealings with, and shortly after they are quarreling.”119
Other factors could influence officials’ evaluation of pleas for depor-
tation. The courts were more inclined to grant petitions in the fall and
winter when victims could make the journey to Acapulco in time to
greet the arriving galleons, rather than having them detained in prison
for months with the consequent expenses and usage of space. The inter-
ests of the town council, as well as those of the owners of pulquerı́as,
116 AGN Marina 18 (1762).

118 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.39bis f.259 (1786).
119 AGN Inquisición 1046 exp.6 f.144 (1791).
wine-shops, and gambling houses, could put pressure on the decisions of

the tribunals, as they were worried about lost revenue if vagrants and
other customers were sent away.120
On the whole, the caution of judges points to a humanitarian and com-
passionate Mexican justice that protected these men from a punishment
disproportionate to their faults. Conscious of the traumatic consequences
of the Philippine experience, judicial agents imposed conditions for the
deportation of young men. On the one hand, the ungovernable behavior
of the adolescent had to be widely known, meaning that the testimony of
witnesses from the community and work environment had to be largely
unanimous. On the other hand, authorities insisted that relatives try other
corrective measures before handing them over the “problem.” In Merino’s
words, “it would be mandatory to certify that other courses of action have
been taken to correct [the youngster] and that none has been enough.”121
This is indicative of the magistrates’ mistrust on the efficacy of overseas
transportation. In the case put forward by Juana Ruiz, Alva had dictated
against her son Ignacio Ortega’s conviction to the Philippines with the
rationalization that by being sent away young individuals only acquired
more vices and “fell even deeper in the dark side of life.” Alva implied
that other correctional methods were better suited.122 Despite the peti-
tion of José Mariano Ordóñez’s uncle to deport the boy, the prosecutor
understood that while a change of life was needed, the charges did not
warrant a deportation to the Philippines. In the light of his youth and the
testimony of José Mariano’s friends and relatives, the judge eventually
determined that he would be better off out of prison and under the care
of the family’s friend Palazuelos in Puebla, with whom the youngster
seemed to have created strong bonds.123
Conclusion
Deportations to the Philippines were part of a social project designed to
repress certain behaviors in New Spain and to enlarge the armed forces in
the archipelago. However, Mexicans voluntarily presented their relatives
to the levy squadrons, so it is not a foregone conclusion that colonial soci-
ety was predominantly hostile to the execution of vagrancy campaigns.
120 Teitelbaum, “La corrección de la vagancia,” 127–28.

Fathers and mothers made use of the levies as a pedagogical strategy to

deter their progeny from further slipping into perdition at a time when an
unpredictable social and economic context rendered inefficacious more
traditional methods. In the midst of recurrent economic failures, soar-
ing social competition in more packed urban settings and an ideological
milieu that discouraged laid back attitudes toward life, unmanageable
youngsters found themselves in trouble more often than before. The all-
embracing social and ethnic affiliations of the deportees, among which
Spaniards and middle and upper social class individuals could be found,
signifies that contemporary prejudices against both mixed-blood and ple-
beian groups were founded on weak ground: bad behavior was not inher-
ent to a particular income group or ethnic segment but instead spread
across the social and ethnic spectrums of New Spain.
A repression tool like annual deportations opened up a venue for
Mexicans, not just parents, to take care of a variety of personal busi-
ness and retain – or regain – control of their lives. Residents of Mexico
City faced every day the failures of family and community cohesion. For
some, reporting relatives to the tribunals was one way to take charge
of complex relationships that had adversely influenced the circumstances
of their lives. It is particularly interesting that women figure conspicu-
ously among the petitioners seeking to pressure sons and husbands who
had gone astray. Some non-elite women, weary of the erratic and irre-
sponsible conduct of their male partners, treasured their physical and
emotional safety and found in the levies an outlet to do that. For elite
sectors, levies were instrumental as well in the production of honor and
social prestige by sending a son or relative to serve the King in the dan-
gerous, far removed Philippines. In the endeavor of colonial authorities
to control popular groups and to maintain public order, arbitrariness,
oppression, and fear were not the only or the principal means employed.
In social disciplining, the state garnered legitimacy and support from
colonial subjects. Mexicans helped the state to create and impose cultural
meaning.
Arguably, a further objective of the levies was precisely to coax Mexi-
cans into utilizing this conduit to vent their disgruntlements in challenging
economic and social times and thus avoid a more violent social outbreak,
but authorities were always careful in keeping a tight lid on these spon-
taneous initiatives. In fact, the cost of exercising agency was not trivial.
Those who of their own volition confided with authorities about their
relatives and peers empowered the state to intrude even deeper into the
intimate fabric of their lives. Once invited in to deal with troublesome
relatives, the state took over responsibility and impeded the petitioners
to continue making decisions about the fate of these individuals. Under
the watchful eye of the colonial state, unreasonable and opportunistic
petitions did not prosper easily. The colonial government proved efficient
in detecting and aborting personal vendettas that had the potential to
divert the levies from their main purpose, that is, to reform individuals
and provide military support to Manila.
6
Unruly Mexicans in Manila

Imperial Goals and Colonial Concerns
This chapter dwells on the lives of Mexican deportees in Philippine soil.

The performance of these men provides a window into the long-lasting
material, economic, and social consequences of the British occupation
in the archipelago. The chapter uses official sources to analyze the dif-
ferent ways in which these men did not measure up to expectations and
ultimately contributed to frustrate post-1762 imperial military goals. The
story of forced transportation of Mexicans opens up a venue to explore
the nature and limits of the Bourbon reforms in Manila and its surround-
ing areas. These men were constantly sick, they deserted very often, they
were inclined to vices, and they were accused of undermining the submis-
sion of native Filipinos. The performance of Mexicans was disappointing
at other levels as well because under the caste system these ethnic groups
were supposed to be moral examples for the rest of colonial subjects.
As a result, ethnic conceptions among colonial officials and religious
authorities in the Philippines betrayed a growing disdain for gente blanca
(white people, understood as individuals born in Mexico or Europe) and
an increasing appreciation of native Filipinos. The chapter also argues that
the presence of Mexican recruits and convicts in the Spanish Philippines
in the last decades of the eighteenth century created a difficult balance
between imperial and local agendas, as Manila authorities perceived these
individuals and their behavior as a hindrance in their efforts to execute
social reforms in the area.
In an attempt to transcend an imperial perspective that is inherently
partial and incomplete, this chapter pays attention to the fact that these
individuals were indeed valuable members of the community of Manila,
as their role as convict laborers in various public works executed in the
227
city (fortifications, public hygiene campaigns, and demolition of ruined

buildings) indicates. Several archival cases suggest as well that the moral
reform of these men in the context of forced transportation was not
preposterous.
Transportation Over Land and Water

The process by which recruits and prisoners were moved from central
Mexico to Acapulco and then across the Pacific merits attention. Condi-
tions were quite challenging and many either never made it or endured
long-term physical and psychological consequences. Transportation to
Manila was indeed the hard penance that authorities, parents, and other
relatives expected. The archipelago was harsher than other exile desti-
nations because the punishment started long before the convicts dis-
embarked in Manila Bay and because the possibilities to ever see their
families again were very slim. In the case of spontaneous petitions for
deportation, the ordeal started with the fact that some deportees knew
neither who had requested their transportation nor what their destina-
tion was. Mexicans were painfully aware of the implications of being
transported to the Philippines. Deportation to such a remote location
was much more than removing a subject from his homeland. Testifying
in favor of his brother Manuel, José Bustamante stated in Mexico City
that the Philippines was, “a long banishment and rigorous, civil death.”1
Speed, ruthlessness, and harsh conditions characterized convict trans-
portation. In Mexico City, the levies were carried out in the fall, usually
every November or early December. The process was lengthy: patrols had
to identify the subjects; magistrates had to investigate the appeals of those
arrested and/or their relatives; and officials of the Royal Treasury had to
produce the supplies for the trip to the Pacific coast. Following their
arrest, detainees sometimes spent weeks or months in prison waiting for
the announcement that the galleons had arrived in Acapulco. Deportees
had to reach the coast in January or early February for the galleons to
complete their westward crossing before the beginning of the southwest
monsoon in the Philippines.2 The galleons’ impending departure com-
monly drove officials to obviate legal safeguards such as the three-day
1 AGN Filipinas 24 exp.13 f.312v (1792). Sentenced to Manila as well, Sebastián Celis
presumed that he would never see his wife and family again. AGN Filipinas 29 exp.1 f.55
(1792).
2 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 135.
Unruly Mexicans in Manila 229
window the arrested had to provide evidence of an established occupa-

tion or the existence of a wife and other dependents. If the family was
really pressed by considerations of imperiled social status, they could opt
to have their relative put under custody at a hospital instead of prison in
order to conceal the fact that he was being deported.3 While the deportees
cooled their heels in jail, judicial authorities could revise the original sen-
tences depending on the military needs of the viceroyalty at the moment
and alternatively assign some of these prisoners to the castles of San Juan
de Ulúa or Perote, both in Veracruz, or Pensacola, in Florida.4 Military
authorities covered the recruits’ food expenses until they joined a regiment
in Manila and their prest – weekly wages – began.5
The process to transport recruits and prisoners from Mexico City to
Acapulco was complex. The 180 miles and the four-week journey that
separated Mexico City from Acapulco posed serious challenges to Mexi-
can authorities’ organization skills. Recruits and convicts were distributed
in divisions that departed the capital at staggered times and followed dif-
ferent itineraries. Besides security reasons, these arrangements obeyed to
the need of procuring provisions along the way; it was not easy to carry
enough foodstuffs and other supplies for all members of the cohort for
a month, and the parties would have to cross territories where water,
rations, and animals were hard to find. Authorities outsourced to several
individuals the allocation of beasts of burden, porters, and baggage that
were necessary to complete the trip.6 One or two officials, a small number
of sergeants, and a group of between fifteen and thirty dragoons escorted
each of the groups.7 Authorities did not consider advisable that such a
large company spent the night in towns because hostile reactions from
the local population along the way were expected. Instead, settlers were
required to provide materials to build some barracks in the outskirts of
populated areas for the cohort to rest.8
3 José Gómez Campos had his stepson placed in the hospital of San Hipólito in Mexico
City for seven months before the opportunity arose to send him to Acapulco in the winter
of 1801. AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.103 (1801).
4 AGN Filipinas 61 exp.16 363v (1787–1788). AGN Filipinas 30 exp.1 f.12v-13 (1793–
1794). AGN Filipinas 42 exp.16 f.204 (1810).
5 This was stipulated in the decree of November 2, 1783 that instituted annual levies in
Mexico City. AGI Filipinas 929 f.962.
6 These descriptions can be complemented with Garcı́a de los Arcos, Forzados, 163–72.
7 For example, in 1802 a group of thirty-four convicts were accompanied by one lieutenant,
one sergeant, two corporals, and fourteen soldiers. AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.237–353
(1802).
The grueling experience had short and long-term physical and emo-
tional consequences for many convicts. Recruits, volunteer veterans, and
convicts whose parents were prosperous – and benevolent – enough, trav-
eled to Acapulco by mule and with some extra underwear. But to save
in expenses authorities usually arranged for the rest of prisoners to make
the journey in shackles and by foot. Thus, before the maritime voyage
even started, convicts often had descended into a miserable physical con-
dition. On the Pacific shores the wait could be again long and painful.
If they missed the westbound galleon or in the event of the cargo ships
not appearing that winter, prisoners were assigned to public works in
Acapulco until the following year. They were to be retained in the local
presidio, a small precinct in the hottest and most humid months in a
“region very sick in the rainy season.”9 In 1785, José Zamora suffered
from sciatica and rheumatism, afflictions the doctors attributed to the
mule ride from Mexico City and the two years spent in the humid Aca-
pulco prison.10 Many were denied medical clearance to undergo the long
crossing to Manila. If they never recovered from their indispositions they
served their term in a hospital, but should their health improve, they were
assigned to public works in the Acapulco area until the galleons arrived.
Others ultimately managed to commute their sentence to military service
in the Caribbean and other locations in New Spain.11
A few obtained a pardon and permission to return to Mexico City but
they were released only after they had suffered the miseries of jail and
the long trip to Acapulco. That was the case of José Antonio de Luna
Frejo, married and employed at the tobacco factory of Mexico City when
detained in November 1794. The 160 miles from Mexico City to his
hometown Santiago de Querétaro had hindered him from demonstrat-
ing his marital status. One month later, the magistrates resolved that a
Frejo afflicted with cachexia had received enough punishment, and they
ordered, “his immediate release so that he could join his sad wife and
unhappy family.”12 Similarly, after six months in Acapulco, authorities
9 In 1794, approximately a hundred convicts remained incarcerated in Acapulco for at

least six months, from February to July. AGN Filipinas 30 f.99v (1793).
10 Zamora’s aunt Josefa Hernández requested for this reason that he be allowed to return
to Mexico City to heal from his indispositions. AGN Filipinas 19 exp.37 f.236–246
(1785).
11 In July 1794, prisoners of the Acapulco presidio were transferred to Havana, Pensacola,
Puebla, and military units in Mexico City. AGN Filipinas 30 exp.6 f.110 (1794). AGN
Filipinas 30 exp.15 f.264–294 (1794).
pardoned Juan José Chávez and reasoned that the miseries that awaited
him in the trip back to Mexico City would be chastisement enough.13
For others, a change of heart on the part of authorities came too late.
Upon revision of Miguel Javier Padilla’s file in August 1802, the criminal
prosecutor decided he should reunite with his family in Mexico City, only
to find out that Padilla had been shipped to Manila months before.14
Besides being a dreadful experience for convicts and their families,
the roundups, the conviction process, and the transoceanic transporta-
tion represented a remarkable cost for the colonial society. The process
required the participation of multiple echelons of the colonial bureau-
cracy – officials of justice, bailiffs, executive officers, assistants, and
amanuenses. The custody of convicts while in jail and in transit to the
Pacific involved several expenses: two reales for their daily sustenance,
espadrilles for the journey, medical assistance, ropes, shackles, mules, and
temporary huts to accommodate the escort and convicts en route. The
prisons’ administration consumed candles, oil and wax, as well as paper
for filiations. Opportunities for convicts to escape presented themselves
frequently and each time expenditures escalated because of the necessity
to send units to chase the fugitives.
Little is known about the life of these men on board of the galleons,
but those who finally set sail to Manila conceivably bore a long, boring
but relatively safe navigation. Upward of forty galleons were lost over
the 250-year span of the Manila galleon trade.15 But while the six-month
eastbound trip – the Manila-Acapulco route – was circuitous and diffi-
cult, the three-month journey from Acapulco to Manila was bearable,
even pleasant, and it was usually completed without incident.16 The long
time in the vessels represented an opportunity for Mexican recruits and
convicts to interact, probably for the first time, with people of Asian ori-
gin since Malay individuals, generally natives from the Philippine islands,
represented about 70–80 percent of the seamen employed. For eighteenth-
century galleons the population on board could amount to a total of 400
people, half of which were crewmembers; the rest of the human freight
was made of merchants, friars, and royal officials going out to their posts
in the Philippines, often with their families and servants. One severe
13 AGN Filipinas 30 exp.14 f.241, 256 (1794).

15 For more about the contemporary significance of shipwrecks and the economic and
human loss they represented in the seventeenth century see McCarthy, “Gambling on
Empire.”
16 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 246, 280–81.
trial of the galleon navigation was confinement in cramped quarters.

For some, diversions on board were limited as quarreling, blasphemy,
and all forms of gambling were prohibited.17 With no possibility to stop
for fresh supplies until the galleons were in the vicinity of the Mariana
Islands, in the eastern limit of the Philippine Sea, scurvy, poor hygiene,
and even mental breakdowns were usual companions of both seamen and
passengers.
The greatest challenge of the westbound voyage arose upon arrival
in the archipelago. The convoy of galleons had to pass through the
embocadero of San Bernardino strait between the islands of Luzon and
Samar. Rarely used for trade in pre-Spanish times, this is a narrow funnel –
embocadero in Spanish – that leads the way into a labyrinth of thousands
of islands and islets in the Sibuyan Sea that separates the Visayas from the
northern island of Luzon. The San Bernardino strait became important
after the arrival of the Spanish as a strategic but also dangerous location.
The ships moved around capes and banks, passed over reefs and hidden
rocks, crossed various channels and straits, and coped with unpredictable
currents and tides.18 The slow and careful navigation could take from five
days to five weeks before finally anchoring in the port of Cavite.19 If a
galleon had left Acapulco too late, the crew was likely to run into bad
weather from the Marianas upward and the monsoon winds in the Philip-
pines. Typhoons in this area may have overtaken about fifteen vessels in
the history of the line; survivors told about storms that lasted four days.20
Under such conditions, the galleons had to put into other harbors and
wait for a change in the winds before trying to enter the embocadero.
The delay could have disastrous consequences; hunger, thirst, and dis-
ease could take its toll on crewmembers and passengers whose supplies
were already in alarming low levels after a long voyage. Mawson has
documented a short-lived forzado-led mutiny in 1667 on board of the
galleon San José after a whole month of calm weather and just in sight
of the coast of the Philippines.21
17 Ibid., 209–10; 270–71.

18 Manuel Ollé, “The Straits of the Philippine Islands in Spanish Sources (Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Asian History 46, no. 2 (2012): 181–92. Schurz,
Manila Galleon, 221–22.
19 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 282.
20 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 255. James F. Warren, “Weather, History and Empire: The
Typhoon Factor and the Manila Galleon Trade, 1656–1815,” in Anthony Reid and
the Study of the Southeast Asian Past, ed. Geoff Wade et al. (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012),
183–220.
21 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 710, n. 84.
BATANIS
THE PHILIPPINES
0 150
BABUYANIS Miles
Aparri
Lingayen
Gulf P H I L I P P I N E
S O U T H
Dagupan
LUZON
S E A
C H I N A
MANILA
Baiaan Cavite
Corregidor
S E A
MINDORO
dino Strait
Sibuyan San Bernar
MASBATE
Sea SAMAR
VISAYAN ISLANDS
Calamianes
Visayan
Sea Tacloban
CUYO PANAY
IS LEYTE Leyte
lloilo SULUAN
Gulf HOMONHON
CEBU DINAGAT
r a it
PALAWAN
St
BOHOL o
NFGROS
NEGROS iga
r
Su
MINDANAO SEA
S U L U S E A
Misamis
M I N D A N A O
Davao
Zamboanga
Moro Gulf
o
ag
p el
N O R T H hi
B O R N E O rc
A
l u C E L E B E S S E A
Su
map 6.1. Map of the Philippines.

The map features the San Bernardino strait between the islands of Luzon and
Samar, one of the most treacherous passages of the Manila galleon route, as well
as the names of the presidios that Mexican recruits and convicts were assigned
to.
Imperial Schemes vis-a-vis Local Concerns about Social Reform

The approximate 4,000 recruits and convicts who were forcefully trans-
ported to Manila between 1765 and 1811 were a very noticeable pres-
ence in the colony because, if their number was modest, so too was
the percentage of Mexican and Spanish population in the Philippines.
These men became noteworthy in the overall head count and so did
their performance. With a population of about three million for the
whole archipelago, the area that comprised Manila and its suburbs had
between 110,000 and 150,000 inhabitants by the early 1800s, of whom
70,000–75,000 were native Filipinos, 25,000–30,000 Chinese mestizos,
and 10,000–12,000 Chinese. Peninsulares and Mexicans amounted to no
more than 4,000 and maybe as few as 2,500.22 Further contributing to
the authorities’ disquiet was the fact that according to official counts the
numbers of Mexican and Spanish civilian residents intramuros remained
in the low hundreds throughout the decades.
The majority of the recruits for the annual rotation joined the ranks of
the Regiment of the King, Manila’s most important infantry unit, which
totaled close to 1,300 grenadiers and fusiliers in the 1780s;23 the rest
joined other dragoon regiments in the islands. As for the convicts, it
was usual for the governor of the Philippines to decide on their duties
depending on the current needs of Manila and the health of the arriving
individuals. These assignments could include military service, labor in a
presidio, or, less frequently, domestic service at homes and convents.24
Military service in the islands implied a paltry salary; living conditions in
barracks, quarters, and hospitals were strenuous because military infras-
tructures offered little comfort.25 Nonetheless, those assigned to mili-
tary service enjoyed a privileged status as soldiers and a lighter work-
load than forced laborers. Judging from the fact that affluent Mexicans
and Spaniards requested that their convicted sons be attached to the
Regiment of the King, it is prudent to say that soldier was the most hon-
orable of all possible positions. Less frequently, Mexicans were admitted
22 In 1810, Comyn alluded to 140,000–150,000 people in Manila and the surrounding

area, of which 4,000 were Spaniards (Estado actual, 4). Linda A. Newson handles more
modest figures: 110,000 for all ethnic groups and 2,500–3,000 whites in 1805. See
Conquest, 130, 132.
23 Galaup recorded the existence in Manila of two companies of artillery each with eighty
men, three companies of dragons each with fifty soldiers, and one battalion of 1,200
militiamen. Travel Accounts, 375.
24 Garcı́a de los Arcos, Forzados, 233.
25 As noted in Martı́nez de Zúñiga, Estadismo, 150–52.
to serve in coastguard ships that patrolled the archipelago to prevent con-

traband trade, assist merchant vessels under attack, and watch for coast
safety.
The fate of the majority of convicts was confinement in one of the
archipelago’s fortified military settlements. Manila and Cavite quartered
deserters and convicts of serious crimes.26 In Manila inmates toiled in
repairing the fortifications and at the furnaces of the royal foundry.
Here prisoners used local iron and Mexican bronze to forge grenades,
cannons, hand weapons, and firearms to supply artillery units in the
Philippines and even New Spain.27 In the early 1780s, this factory was
manufacturing canons to rebuild the San Diego fortress in the port
of Acapulco, a seventeenth-century fortification that had been destroyed
by an earthquake in 1776.28 Laborers at the foundry also engaged in
non-military projects, like the crafting of the major bell of the cathedral
church of Manila.29 In the presidio of Cavite, the primary shipyard of
the colony, Mexican convicts mingled with mestizos and indios to cut
wood and manufacture ropes and sailcloth.30 If there was no project
that required convict labor at the time, corporals in the presidios of
Manila and Cavite were instructed to allow the prisoners no spare time
and wear them out by having them “move rocks or logs from one place
to another.”31 The most dreaded presidios were Calamianes, Misamis,
and Zamboanga due to their remoteness in the southern limits of the
archipelago and the real danger of Muslim activity. In Zamboanga, the
high rainfall and elevated temperatures were responsible for an especially
high mortality rate.
Discipline and life conditions in the presidios of the Philippines were
in general very rigorous. Isolation was not absolute since there was a
continual stream of labor gangs going out to perform public works and
women and wives coming in for visits. The severity of the disciplining
methods, though, seems to have increased over time. Governors believed
that soldiers who spent time in a presidio became even more annoy-
ing and unproductive when they were back in their regiments. Basco y

28 AGN Filipinas 10 f.424 (1774).
29 The master founder received this commission in 1781. CSIC ser. Consultas riel 467
leg. 3.
30 Galaup, Travel Accounts, 375.
31 Such directives were included in sets of instructions that Basco y Vargas elaborated for
the daily usage of the corporals in these two presidios. AGI Filipinas 928 (1781).
Vargas blamed the mild punishing regime that governed the prisons of
Manila and Cavite, and in 1781 the governor obtained from Madrid
approval to place a sergeant and six corporals in both presidios to cas-
tigate haughtiness and slackness “as they wished.”32 Apparently, Basco
y Vargas obtained more than he wished for because six years later he
deplored the cruel and inhumane work routine of these presidios that
only resulted in numerous hospital visits and a strain on the colonial
finances.33 Prisoners also suffered from poor hygiene, the rudimentary
state of prisons’ medical facilities, humidity, and lack of space.34 Hos-
pital records reflect their frequent comings and goings and long stays,
especially in the ghastly Zamboanga.35 Aware of the bleak circumstances
in which presidio prisoners worked, Manila authorities usually excluded
indios from being assigned to these places.36
At these locations, local authorities reported that Mexican soldiers and
convicts underperformed considerably due to the climate of the islands
and a fondness for local pleasures. The heat and the heavy rains were the
nemeses of colonial authorities because, according to Governor Rafael
Marı́a de Aguilar, they “destroy, render useless, and . . . consume the
big shipments of people that arrive from New Spain.”37 From May to
November, torrid and rainy months with recurrent typhoons followed the
hot and dry season.38 European observers described the heat in Manila
as “unbearable.”39 Governor Berenguer y Marquina believed that the
tropical climate of the archipelago could be fatal to those not born in
the islands unless they adapted to a “very orderly diet and method of
life.”40 Throughout the decades, military commanders were appalled by
the easiness with which the reinforcements newly arrived from New Spain
deceased in the Philippines where, in Governor Arandı́a’s words, “to die
happens frequently, to return very little.”41
32 Ibidem.
35 CSIC riel 1168 leg.3 (1773).
37 CSIC ser. Consultas riel 301 leg. 8 (1794). Diego Martı́nez de Araque, fiscal of the
Audiencia of Manila, made similar observations in 1778. AGN Filipinas 13 f.180 (1778).
38 David Joel Steinberg, The Philippines: a Singular and a Plural Place, 4th edn. (Boulder:
Westview Press, 2000), 147.
39 Galaup, Travel Accounts, 371.
Insubordination, gambling, drunkenness, theft, and desertion were

continually associated with Mexican soldiers in the governors’ communi-
cations with Mexico City and Madrid.42 Governors and officials related
that recruits gambled and ended up corroded by tuba, an alcoholic drink
from the nipa palm.43 The disinclination of Mexican soldiers to for-
malize their relationships with local women allegedly encouraged the
proliferation of indias and mestizo women of ill repute.44 Local authori-
ties reported on recruits flirting with crime, specially stealing.45 Sodomy
was a sporadic occurrence among the reinforcements but with potentially
grave consequences for the offenders, who faced capital punishment.46
What the perspective of colonial authorities in Manila does not explain is
that alcohol, gambling, prostitution, stealing, and other forms of violence
were usual occurrences in Spanish overseas regiments; they constituted
valve escapes for soldiers under the pressure and dismal conditions of
life in military garrisons.47 In particular, the loneliness of Mexican and
Spanish recruits, suddenly transferred to a country that was ethnically
and culturally alien to them, might have also driven them to embrace not
very healthy lifestyles.
According to Manila’s authorities, these evils caused moral and phys-
ical damage to the rest of the troops and the native population. Officials
reported that Mexican recruits spent most of their time in hospitals and
prisons where other soldiers had to be their custodians. Some military
officers accused them of complicating the execution of routine tasks.
For example, Lieutenant Colonel Torres claimed that Mexican recruits
had stolen the ammunitions and military supplies they were supposed
to guard; Torres could not furnish the royal ships because “there are
42 In July 1774, Governor Anda y Salazar protested to Viceroy Bucareli y Ursúa that
most men coming from New Spain were “too vicious.” AGN Filipinas 10 f.415–416
(1774). In the 1780s and 1790s, governors and other local authorities in the Philippines
continued to refer to the decadence and indiscipline of troops and officers. AGI Filipinas
927 (1781). AGI Filipinas 787 (1788). CSIC ser. Consultas riel 302 (1798).
44 Martı́nez Zúñiga asserted that the abundance of public women was a result of the
presence of foreigners in Manila and other ports (Estadismo, 280–81).
45 CSIC ser. Consultas riel 301 leg.8 (1796).
46 Sexual intercourse was never proved for corporal Miguel Trujillo and the soldier José
Morales, but a court martial ordered they be imprisoned “for the satisfaction of the
public vengeance.” AGI Filipinas 362 (1785). Morales, a “good looking and charlatan
fellow,” had been charged with unauthorized absence from his post the previous year.
AGI Filipinas 361 (1784).
47 Marchena, Ejército y milicias, 263.
always items missing at the time of delivery.”48 The arrogant attitude of

Mexicans and Spaniards was believed to “contaminate other soldiers”
and cultivate indiscipline.49 The dilemma for the colonial government,
as Governor Basco y Vargas put it, was that severe punishments would
further reduce the number of military effectives available for the islands’
defense.50 In 1799, the troops were reduced to a skeleton force, and
Governor Aguilar was pessimistic about finding a solution, “because in
bodies where the delicate dignity is lost being arrested is a repose . . . but
an excess of fatigue for the officials of honor.”51 The impact that recruits
and convicts had on the local population had been of concern for colo-
nial officials in Manila since the seventeenth century; religious and civil
authorities in the archipelago expressed their discontent with forzados
who escaped upon arrival, disappeared among native villagers, and had
a propensity to mistreat the indigenous population.52
A high desertion rate also torpedoed the utility of Mexicans in the
Philippines. Official accounts referred to these imported troops’ vicious
nature and inherent “desire for freedom” as motivations to abandon their
ranks. In the officials’ minds these transgressions were predictable man-
ifestations of the wayward nature of Mexican transportees. Authorities
also interpreted that the copious natural resources of the countryside and
coast had a significant weight in their decision to defect.53 Rarely did
officials consider how derisory salaries and draconian conditions might
have contributed to swell desertion numbers and force soldiers to prey
upon the local populace. In fiscal Viana’s memorial of 1765 we have
one of these few instances. The magistrate advocated a pay increase for
Mexican recruits and officers because “to present themselves with clean-
liness and decency in the streets they have to commit a thousand lies and
chicaneries that discredit the military and make it little commendable
among the residents.”54
Military authorities in the islands vacillated between the obligation to
punish the act of going absent without leave and the need for military
effectives. In the 1770s, debates on how to discipline defectors soared.
Edicts announced presidio, lashings, and death penalty for those who

49 CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg.5 (1798).
52 Mawson, “Unruly Plebeians,” 704, 720.
54 Viana, “Demostración,” chapter 3.
deserted their companies, but reluctance to apply the capital punishment

prevailed.55 During the governorship of Anda y Salazar (1770–76), regu-
lar pardons were issued and rewards were offered for turning in runaway
soldiers.56 In the Philippines, the practice of forgoing death penalty on
deserters who had committed no other crimes followed a local timetable
and preceded by more than twenty years Madrid’s authorization to gov-
ernors in Spanish America to do the same.57
Authorities linked Mexican deserters to the seeming increase of
vagrants in the Philippine countryside and urban perimeters. The pre-
occupation with uprooted peasants had started with the British invasion
in 1762. Because the colonial government prioritized the reconstruction
of Manila, it took many years for the Spanish to reestablish their con-
trol in the nearby provinces. Civil and religious authorities reported the
long-lasting effects of the military conflict in the rural areas: domestic
trade interrupted, peasants unable to pay the tribute, fields destroyed,
cattle slaughtered, and irrigation systems ruined.58 In addition, scores of
prisoners released from jail by the British poured into urban and rural
settings; murders, thefts, attacks on plantations, and highway robberies
soared. Twenty years later, widespread perturbation persisted about the
extraordinary abundance of vagrants and the fact that many of them
sought shelter in abandoned houses in the capital.59 Projects for reha-
bilitating vacated residences came forth in the 1780s, precisely when
the largest numbers of Mexican recruits and convicts landed in the
55 AGI Filipinas 927 (1778). CSIC riel 2016, leg.4 (1760–1894). See also, Marı́a del Valle
Álvarez Maestre, “La guarnición de Filipinas durante el gobierno de Valdés Tamón
(1729–1739),” in España y el Pacı́fico, ed. Antonio Garcı́a-Abásolo González (Córdoba:
Dirección General de Asuntos Culturales, 1997), 221–43.
56 The indult was granted after the defector agreed to several years of military service in his
former unit or other of his choice. AGI Filipinas 927 (1778). The soldier had to produce
the money for the reward. AGI Filipinas 360 (1780).
57 This authorization was issued on 1798. CSIC ser. Cartas leg.6.
58 Opened in 1771, the “Expediente formado sobre averiguaciones del estado de las provin-
cias en punto a ladrones” [hereafter cited as “Expediente formado sobre averigua-
ciones”] (CSIC riel 208 leg.14), contains reports dated as late as 1787. The file includes
accounts produced by the Real Audiencia of Manila, corregidores, municipal judges,
superiors of religious orders, bishops, and the archbishop of Manila. For an overview of
agrarian, material, and social consequences of the British occupation, see Luis Camara
Dery, Pestilence in the Philippines: A Social History of the Filipino People, 1571–1800
(Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2006), 220–28.
59 For instance, the corregidor of Tondo referred to a “great multitude of vagabonds that
infect all neighborhoods of the city.” AGI Filipinas 791 (1786). The town council of
Manila wrote to Governor Berenguer y Marquina about the “innumerable confusion of
vagrants that inhabit this capital and its neighborhoods.” AGI Filipinas 787 (1788).
Philippines and when governors displayed the greatest displeasure about

their performance.
In the opinion of colonial authorities in the Philippines, the problem
of vagrancy was very consequential because of its association with rural
and urban delinquency. For instance, the continuous theft of cattle and
horses that impaired the supply to Manila and Cavite was attributed
to landless peasants, convicts, and other wanderers. Provincial judges
informed about gangs of highwaymen assaulting travelers and merchants,
preying on haciendas, convents, residences, and royal warehouses, and
often committing homicides.60 Banditry revealed to be a blot very difficult
to eliminate because indio and mestizo gobernadorcillos lacked human
and economic resources to combat criminality. In addition, ambiguous
ties connected native local authorities to the outlaws: often times they
were family-related, they frequented the same cockfight games, or they
received bribes from those who they arrested. Bandits easily found refuge
in the mountains where dwellers helped them hide.61
In Governor Anda y Salazar’s opinion, an important part of the pro-
blem of vagrancy was the fact that Mexicans and Spanish disbanded
after finishing their military or prison terms “all over the islands, even the
most distant, looking for subsistence.”62 This was specially the case in
the 1780s and 1790s when the larger replacements that had arrived years
earlier were being discharged. The efforts to place these individuals under
strict surveillance reveal that they had become a burdensome presence.
The capture of “Europeans and americanos who are without occupation”
was ordered periodically until in 1802 Governor Aguilar attempted to
enforce a new regulation that obligated unemployed Mexicans to spend
the night in headquarters.63 It became customary for governors to retain
them in prison or to assign them to military duties until the galleons were
available for departure in Cavite.64
To be sure, other reasons contributed to vagrancy and delinquency
in the archipelago in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The
reformist winds that reached the Philippines after the British withdrawal
intended to accomplish the economic self-reliance of the colony, to liber-
alize trade, and to increase the state sources of revenue. These economic
changes, though, came at high social cost and aggravated living conditions
60 CSIC riel 4558 leg.211.

61 CSIC riel 208 leg.14.
63 CSIC riel 935 leg.2 (1792, 1793). CSIC riel 206 leg.2 (1802).
64 AGI Filipinas 926 (1774). CSIC riel 310 leg.22 (1817–1818).
in some regions of the archipelago. Free trade, for example, stimulated

the development of a commercialized agriculture in the Philippines. The
backbone of the Bourbon economic program in the islands at this time
was the monopoly of tobacco, which allowed the Philippines to remit
revenues to Spain and to export the production of cigars. The clearing of
forested land for tobacco pioneered the way for other commercial crops –
especially abaca and sugar – to be cultivated in interior and mountainous
regions of the colony.65 Yet, contemporaries perceived the forced culti-
vation of tobacco in privately managed plantations and its exclusive sale
to the government as very harmful for indios.66 The state control on the
production and trade of tobacco often created the necessity and oppor-
tunity for peasants and other laborers to embrace smuggling and black
marketeering.67 In addition, the fiscal pressure that Madrid applied after
1763 and particularly during the 1780s led to growing rural discontent
and anti-colonial uprisings in the Philippines.68
The fact that Manila developed a program against vagrancy similar
to that of late colonial Mexico demonstrates that enlightened principles
of order, economic rationality, and productivity inspired social reformers
not only in Europe and the Spanish American colonies but also in the
Philippines. In the estimation of the Audiencia of Manila, the suburban
municipalities of Manila, known as extramuros, had become receptacles
for a heterogeneous flow of indios driven from the fields, urban servants
dismissed by their masters, deserters, “lazy Spaniards,” and other “for-
eigners” (forasteros).69 While these ethnically complex and functionally
65 Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 76. In the 1800s, commercialized agricul-
ture had a major impact on land tenure and social stratification in the countryside, as
landlords forced rural dwellers to abandon subsistence farming in favor of new crops.
Onofre D. Corpuz, An Economic History of the Philippines (Quezon City: University
of the Philippines Press, 1997), 112. An enlarged landless peasant class and the ecolog-
ical effects of the new agricultural orientation have been connected to an increase in
rural criminality. Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society, and the State in the Nineteenth-Century
Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996), 14–18; and also
of Bankoff, “Bandits, Banditry, and Landscapes of Crime in the Nineteenth-Century
Philippines,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (1998): 319–39.
66 Martı́nez de Zúñiga condemned the practice (Estadismo, 252–254) just like Galaup did
(Travel Accounts, 280).
67 CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg.2 (1787). Alluding to these reasons, civil and ecclesiastical
authorities in 1788 recommended the suppression of the tobacco monopoly. AGI Fil-
ipinas 787 (1788). On the economic distress experienced by small farmers, see Comyn,
Estado actual, 55–63; and José Cosano Moyano, Filipinas y su Real Hacienda, 1750–
1800 (Córdoba: Monte de Piedad, 1986), 330.
68 Fradera, “Historical Origins,” 308.
69 CSIC riel 208 leg.14 (1776).
diverse extramural communities were crucial for the metropolitan pri-

macy of Manila, authorities saw a “multitude of unknown peoples,” a
Babylon of confusion and ugliness where crime was easily concealed.
Mixed unions diluted physical differences, prompting a local magistrate,
Pedro Galarrada, to decry in 1774 that indios and mestizos “all look
the same.”70 The ethnic intermingling forged a cultural and biological
uniformity that paradoxically engendered chaos for officials struggling to
identify ethnic categories.
Colonial officials felt anxiety toward individuals struck by war, eco-
nomic transformations and other life miseries, and they believed that the
forced inactivity of those gathered around the city suburbs was actually
idleness. For that reason, multiple decrees attempted to regulate vagrancy
in the Philippines in the late eighteenth century on the grounds that it
was detrimental for the colonial society as a whole. Manila’s municipal
authorities tried to force into a settled existence those who led nomadic
lifestyles, who were not included in the official count of the population,
or who had no occupation by compelling them to register in the census.
Should they refuse, they would be assigned to perform military service or
labor in a presidio, or sent back to their home districts.71 Vagrancy cam-
paigns could further colonial agendas as well. For instance, the deporta-
tion of vagrants from Manila to Zamboanga helped advance a colonizing
program against the Muslim south, further illustrating how the resis-
tance to Spanish sovereignty in Mindanao and Borneo determined impe-
rial policies on the islands.72 Bourbon vagrancy reforms were apparently
as ineffective in the Philippines as they were in New Spain. At the turn
of the century vagrants were still associated with rural and urban delin-
quency, and banditry remained a major socio-economic phenomenon in
the Philippines throughout the nineteenth century.
Legal regulation of popular entertainment offer another way to exam-
ine the elite’s uneasiness toward the hordes of Manila’s suburbs, and
particularly the Mexican recruits and convicts. Enlightenment-based ide-
als of orderliness and productivity were behind perceptions of moral
decline and social disorder in the Philippines, but so was the idea that
the infamous conduct of Mexicans corrupted the lower sectors of the
70 CSIC riel 208 leg.14 (1774).

71 Edicts from 1741 to 1823 (but especially from 1760 to late 1780s) insisted on the need
for all residents of the city and suburbs to be included in the census or else be returned to
their town of origin. CSIC riel 2016 leg.4; AGI Filipinas 692; and CSIC riel 210 leg.17.
72 CSIC riel 311 leg.1 (1758).
native population.73 Civil and religious authorities heralded the notion

that some individuals – drunkards, gamblers, cockfight players – were
threats to the public harmony and were more prone than others to break
the law.74 The Audiencia, which also acted in a governmental, adminis-
trative, and advisory capacity (real acuerdo), looked upon cockfights and
card and dice games with suspicion because their participants allegedly
“associate and prepare to go out and steal;” many thefts were attributed
to gamblers who suffered gaming losses.75
Underprivileged Mexicans and Spaniards living in Manila and its envi-
rons were promptly included in these reflections. Their transgressions
were seen as a natural continuation of the irregular existence they had
led prior to deportation. Despite legislation that only allowed gambling
in public open places on Sundays and other holidays, in the late 1780s
Fray Francisco González, provincial of the order of St. Augustine, decried
the fact that indios found Spanish card games so amusing that they fre-
quently incurred debt and abandoned their occupations, with the result
that “the land [filled] with thieves.”76 Decrees restricted the sale of wine
and prohibited the consumption of alcohol in the late evening, but the
thirst of Mexican soldiers for the local coconut wine stimulated indios
to promote its illegal sale.77 The reiterative character of these statutes
denotes that government attempts to intervene in the colony’s social and
moral order yielded little success.
Relocated Mexicans in the Social, Political, and Ethnic

Dynamics of the Philippines
Mexican soldiers and convicts became one more component of the com-
plex, fast-evolving social, political, and ethnic Philippine arena in the late
colonial period. The following pages illustrate the different ways in which
this happened. For example, the shortage of Mexicans and Spaniards in
the Philippines might have been inconvenient for the schemes of colonial
73 According to Charles Walker, inhabitants of Bourbon Lima similarly developed a per-

spective on luxury and consumption, progress and decline, and social hierarchies and
sovereignty that was built on both classic Enlightenment themes and Peruvian sensibili-
ties and preoccupations. Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism. The 1746 Earthquake-
Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008),
18.
74 CSIC riel 208 leg.14 (1774). CSIC riel 2016 leg.4 (1763).
75 CSIC riel 208 leg.14 (1776).
77 CSIC riel 2016 leg.4. CSIC riel 210 leg.17.
authorities, but this very same shortage created avenues for the social
empowerment of other local subordinate ethnic groups like indios and
Chinese mestizos. Recruits and convicts were also associated to local
attempts of subversion against the colonial state. In addition, their pres-
ence stirred the conceptual foundations of the existing ethnic hierarchy
in the Spanish Philippines and fueled reflections about the connection
between climate, race, and behavior. Hence, the study of forced depor-
tees in the Spanish Pacific allows for an examination of the Philippine
colony as a complex political and social space.
Mexican – and to a lesser degree, Spanish – recruits and convicts were
supposed to alleviate the military shortcomings of this remote outpost
of the empire, but the government of the colony unremittingly com-
plained about the paucity and uselessness of these reinforcements in
regular army battalions. Already in the 1750s the small number of the
replacements concerned Governor Arandı́a, who considered it unfortu-
nate that so few Mexican recruits established roots in the archipelago.78
Colonial officials in Manila at this time invariably described Mexi-
can soldiers as living in sorrowful economic conditions, walking bare-
foot, and begging in the streets.79 In 1772, Governor Anda y Salazar
reported to Viceroy Bucareli y Ursúa that barely eighty “white men”
were enlisted in the Regiment of the King, which “in case of neces-
sity could be a problem as experience has shown.”80 Thirty years
later, the status of military units had not improved.81 Governor Basco
y Vargas’ decision in 1784 to send back to Acapulco about forty
recruits and convicts for having caused wasteful expenses, for being
very sick, or for displaying unmanageable behavior was not an isolated
incident.
Light-skinned individuals from Mexico and Spain did little to fulfill
authorities’ expectations about overturning the perceived ethnic imbal-
ance on the islands. The colonial administration of the Philippines
had hoped that the country’s natural resources would encourage these
men to settle down and strengthen the flow of non-indio blood in the
islands.82 Governor Anda y Salazar, for example, encouraged those who
had displayed a “regular” modus vivendi to establish themselves in the

79 AGN Filipinas 3 exp.10 f.166–179 (1754). AGN Filipinas 6 f.18–21, 377–377v (1758–
1759).
islands.83 But not only did their numbers remain small throughout the
decades, but it also appears that at the beginning of the nineteenth century
most of them had vanished from the records and mixed with the Philip-
pine population through predominantly informal temporary liaisons with
local women.84
In the eyes of Philippine authorities, the most important and discom-
fiting consequence of the undersupply of Spanish and Mexican soldiers
was that at critical junctures the defense of the colony had to be placed
on the shoulders of indios and other non-native, non-European groups.
In 1757, the dearth of gente blanca had forced Governor Arandı́a to
allow native Filipinos and castas to enlist.85 In later decades, the predica-
ment of the Philippines became apparent during the Spanish participation
in the United States War of Independence (1779–83) and the War with
Great Britain (1796–1802 and 1804–08). At each of these international
engagements Manila made urgent requests for men to Mexico City but
apparently to no avail. In December 1779, Governor Basco y Vargas
decided to employ 400 mestizos to serve in Manila and Cavite to com-
pensate for the lack of Spanish veterans. The governor also reasoned that
since mestizos adapted better to the hot climate of the islands, deaths, sick-
ness, and other problems that afflicted the Spanish veteran infantry would
be mitigated.86 Soldiers from the urban militia Real Prı́ncipe, established
in 1779 for the offspring of Chinese fathers and native Filipino mothers,
guarded the important gates of the city, manned the bulwarks, watched in
sentinel posts at government offices and military buildings, and escorted
Mexican and Spanish convicts serving in the galleys.
Basco y Vargas’ successor, Berenguer y Marquina (1788–93), found
himself in a similar quandary. In 1788, Governor Berenguer y Marquina
recalled several companies of mestizo troops to supplement the Regiment
of the King. In Cavite, a veteran company of Malabar (India) militia-
men garrisoned the plaza alongside said regiment. Two years later, in
anticipation of renewed hostilities with Britain, the governor resolved to
form nine militia battalions of indios with 1,000 men per battalion. The
unsolved tensions behind this decision surfaced not much later. By 1793
Berenguer y Marquina’s appraisal of the provincial militias had turned
into glumness because in his estimation, the habits of indios and mestizos

84 Garcı́a de los Arcos, Forzados, 238.
86 AGI Filipinas 915 (1779). Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 77–78.
and the difficulties in finding qualified Spanish veterans to instruct native

militiamen inhibited successful training.87
The military organization of Manila might have depended to some
degree on non-European groups, but colonial authorities measured a
successful imperial policy of defense on the amount of European and
American recruits that could be accounted for in the military forces. In
July 24, 1801, Governor Aguilar protested to the viceroy of New Spain
that “being the situation of this colony the most critical ever, so the
assistance received is the most insignificant ever.” During his mandate
(1793–1806), this governor expressed to Madrid his despair about the
fact that indios filled the majority of positions in the veteran regiments.88
Especially in the 1800s, the amount of auxiliary forces that were available
for circulation in the military circuits of the empire was not abundant.
The continuous confrontations with Revolutionary France, Portugal, and
Great Britain translated into consecutive trips of the galleons docking at
Manila Bay with no recruits on board. In 1809, Manila reported that
only 100 Mexicans figured in official counts, most of them serving twice
the time they had initially committed to.89
The shortage of usable Mexicans and Spaniards in the Philippines was
an impediment to the schemes of colonial authorities but created avenues
to social empowerment for some local groups. In fact, Chinese mestizos
became a major factor in sustaining Manila’s reformed defenses after
1763. For example, Antonio Tuason was behind the rapid formation and
deployment of the Regiment of the Real Prı́ncipe after he partially funded
these military units. This Chinese mestizo also brought forth substantial
financial sums in 1772 for an expedition to the southern provinces in the
war against the Muslims, who were now emboldened by Britain’s success
in 1762–64 and had begun assaulting the Visayas.90 Historians have
reasoned that the Regiment of the Real Prı́ncipe provided leadership,
social networking, economic power, and a political platform for some
members of this ethnic group.91 Membership in this militia carried the

88 In 1797, Governor Aguilar wrote to Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, at the time prime
minister of Spain, on this matter on two occasions, on April 20 and June 24. CSIC ser.
Consultas riel 301 leg.8. In July 20, 1804, he expressed similar concerns to Antonio
Porcel in Madrid (ibid.).
89 Governor Folgueras noted that there had been a “long stretch of years that had gone by
without getting recruits” from New Spain. AGN Filipinas 59 f.107 (1809).
91 Wickberg, Chinese, 25–30. Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 72, 95. De Llobet has
postulated that after the creation of the Real Prı́ncipe the status of Chinese mestizos
legal protection of the fuero militar and exemption from tribute, polos,
and servicios; in other words, the militia yielded access to economic and
social status and military rank.92
Slack has asserted that after 1762 the Philippines’ defensive policy
began to prioritize a global component, with native and Chinese groups
becoming more instrumental than ever for the protection of the islands.93
I, however, see to it that Philippines’ authorities concentrated on intensi-
fying the presence of Mexicans and Spaniards in the military ranks. That
this undertaking turned out to be unattainable, along with the awareness
and resourcefulness of indios and Chinese mestizos in taking advantage
of new social, economic, and military opportunities, allowed for these
groups to acquire greater visibility in the military and social fabric of
the archipelago.
Evidence indicates that Spaniards and Mexicans were involved up to
a certain extent in the complex and shifting political and social arena of
late eighteenth-century Philippines. Upper-class Mexicans and Spaniards
formed the colonial elite of the Philippines; estranged from the Malay
population, they shared occupations, economic interests, and a well-off
lifestyle in intramuros.94 On the contrary, the newcomers, impoverished
Mexicans and peninsulares were accused of undermining the submission
of the natives. In 1774, authorities from Bulacan, Tondo, Laguna Bay,
and other areas surrounding Manila reported with consternation that dis-
charged soldiers and deserters were providing indios military training for
the weapons that had been disseminated all over the territory during the
British war.95 There were suspicions that Spaniards and Mexicans were
leading indigenous rebellions,96 although it is more realistic to assume
that their ignorance of the Tagalog language would have limited their
ability to communicate and sympathize with indios.97
progressed from that of foreigners to that of subjects of the king, which placed them in
a propitious situation to challenge Creole political hegemony. De Llobet, “Orphans of
Empire,” 38–41, 66–68.
93 Ibid., 93.
94 Merchants of the trans-Pacific trade, government officials, and members of the ecclesi-
astical hierarchy made up the socially, economically, and politically privileged groups
of the colony. Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Grupos étnicos,” 67–68.
96 In the summer of 1807, Spanish deserters and vagabond indios were incriminated in a
rebellion in the mountains of Ilocos. Montero y Vidal, “Events in the Filipinas, 1801–
1840,” in Philippine Islands, ed. Blair and Robertson, vol. 51, 1801–1840, 28–31.
97 This is what happened in the armed forces, where language difficulties meant that
soldiers and officers recently arrived from New Spain or the Iberian Peninsula were
Some historians have been tempted to hypothesize that Mexican sol-

diers played a substantive role in the development of Philippine national
identity and in the conspiracy of Captain Andrés Novales, who pro-
claimed independence for the Philippines in 1823. After Mexico’s inde-
pendence in 1821, the colonial government in Manila designed an over-
haul of the bureaucracy in which peninsulares were promoted into the
higher ranks of the administration, displacing Creole and Mexican offi-
cers now regarded with increasing distrust. Garcı́a de los Arcos has noted
that the Regiment of the King, which had absorbed a large percent-
age of Mexican recruits and deportees between the 1770s and 1811,
became the bastion of discontent supporting the Novales mutiny.98 A
few dozen convicts of infidencia arrived in the Philippines as well between
1810 and 1821, and there is evidence that local authorities were worried
about their subversive behavior in the islands.99 However, any connec-
tion between Mexican deportees and the rebellion is tenuous at best,
as the circumstances of the rebellion were more complicated than they
might appear at first glance. As Ruth De Llobet has indicated, while
the Filipino Creoles did feel the impact of Mexican independence, the
Novales revolt was a response to a series of political and economic
tensions within the archipelago and Manila. In addition, Creoles on the
islands developed a permeable and fluid ethnic identity different from the
more rigid and homogeneous understanding of Creole in Latin America,
where it generally identified those of Spanish descent born in the New
World.100
The presence of Mexican soldiers and convicts in the Philippines, their
substandard performance, and the increasing conspicuousness of indios in
the colony’s military schemes complicated the ethnic perceptions that cir-
culated in late eighteenth-century official discourse. Local officials often
less likely to establish a rapport with native Filipino enlisted personnel than with those
of Spanish descent born in the Philippines. Carmen Godı́nez Marı́n de Espinosa,
“El ejército español en Filipinas durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX: Inestabilidad
y levantamientos,” in El lejano Oriente español: Filipinas (siglo XIX). Actas, ed.
Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Antonio Garcı́a-Abásolo González (Seville: Cátedra
General Castaños, 1997), 506.
98 Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Criollismo y conflictividad en Filipinas a principios del siglo
XIX,” in El lejano Oriente español: Filipinas (Siglo XIX). Actas, ed. Paulino Castañeda
Delgado and Antonio Garcı́a-Abásolo González (Seville: Cátedra General Castaños,
1997), 586.
99 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Reales Cédulas Originales y Duplicados 415 exp.18 (1818).
100 De Llobet construes Filipino Creoles as an ethnic group of mixed ancestry: Philippine-
born Spaniards, Chinese mestizos, and, to a lesser degree, native elites. De Llobet,
“Orphans of Empire,” 1–30, 283–88.
poured criticism on the character of peninsulares and had ambivalent

feelings at best toward the Mexican reinforcements: they were “good
soldiers but inclined to vices.”101 After the events of 1762–64, Mexi-
cans’ loyalty was of great value when measured against the treacherous-
ness of indios and Chinese. Officials peppered their reports with terms
like “courageous,” “vigorous,” “obedient,” and “disciplined” to describe
Mexicans.102 However, Mexicans proved too weak in the eyes of author-
ities to refrain from indulging in their addictions. Their odious behav-
ior altered officials’ impression of indios to the extent that the latter
were now commonly described with the most favorable terms afforded
to them under the colonial ethnic hierarchy. In this context, colonial
officials gained a new appreciation for indios’ allegiance, relative lack
of corruption, and better adaptation to climate and food. Praising the
indios’ fidelity and sacrifice in the militias, some governors even claimed
that units of native Filipinos – under European supervision – were prefer-
able to any company sent from Mexico or Spain.103
Local officials thought that there was an intimate connection between
immorality, delinquency, and the climatic conditions in the islands.
Authorities were sure that high temperatures and uncomfortable atmo-
spheric moisture had more far-reaching effects on Mexicans and Spanish
than on indios, and that climatic factors accounted for why the for-
mer wallowed in sloth and addictions until their health irremediably
deteriorated.104 There was also general consensus on the fact that ameri-
canos endured the adjustment to the native food regime and weather more
successfully than Spaniards because they had been raised geographically
closer to the Philippines.105 Authorities and contemporary commenta-
tors thus seem to have perceived the bodies of indios, Mexicans, and
Spaniards as different.106 For friar Martı́nez de Zúñiga, climate figured

102 In 1765, Viana described Mexicans in this fashion: “they get into the greatest danger
with the same joy with which they go to a dance; in the marches and guard duties, under
the sun, under the rain, and in the most miserable prostrations they are always happy
and with good spirits, . . . and, well, they are very obedient.” Viana, “Demostración,”
chapter 3.
103 In 1794, Governor Aguilar described in romanticized terms to Viceroy Count of Campo
de Alange the frugality of indios and their tolerance of heat, humidity, hurricanes,
thunder, and earthquake. CSIC ser. Consultas riel 301 leg.8 (1794).
105 The Consulado and the colonel of the Regiment of the King Juan Cencelli expressed this
viewpoint. See, respectively, AGI Filipinas 787 (1788) and AGI Filipinas 929 (1779).
106 This supports recent scholarship that claims that forms of the racialized body emerged
in colonized territories as a result of Europeans’ encounter with the New World’s
as one important ingredient in a recipe for ungovernability in the Spanish

Philippines, along with the notorious presence of Islam and a too lucrative
commerce that annulled the drive to pursue other economic enterprises in
the islands: “all are merchants; leisure reigns; there is a multitude of idol-
atrous people, heretics and moors; [they are] located in the torrid zone
and [they are] prone because of the climate to vices, so [the Philippines]
cannot enjoy as much order as other populations.”107
Important as they were for the development of ethnic ideologies in
the Philippines, anxieties about the tropical environment being detrimen-
tal to whites from temperate zones were part of the larger eighteenth-
century trend of discussing ethnic dynamics in light of the environment.
The linkages between climate, ethnicity, and comportment of Mexicans
and Spanish mirrored contemporary European theories of environmental
determinism that assumed that the environment determines physical and
moral character. This tradition was derived from antiquity and was recir-
culated in the sixteenth century by Jean Bodin and during the eighteenth
century by Montesquieu, Georges-Louis Leclerc, and Comte de Buffon,
among others.108 Climatic and geological theories about the origins of
human institutions, while not universal among enlightened thinkers, were
of great consequence for Spanish America. Inspired mostly by Buffon,
scholars such as Cornelius De Pauw, the Abbé Raynal, and William
Robertson defended in one way or another that Spaniards and American-
born Spaniards organically degenerated in the American climate.109 Their
climate and inhabitants before a modern science of race appeared in Europe in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technol-
ogy, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and
Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006), 65, 93–94.
107 Estadismo, 266. Martı́nez de Zúñiga also wrote that the population was resigned to a
justice system that could do little to establish lawfulness.
108 For origins of climatic theories in Hippocrates and Aristotle, see Clarence J. Glacken,
Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought and Ancient
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), 266–74. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World. The History of a
Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 40–44. For
an overview of enlightened theories of environmental determinism, and specially an
overview of Buffon’s ideas, see David Allen Harvey, The French Enlightenment and
Its Others. The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 136–43.
109 Gerbi, Dispute, 3–34, 52–79; Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New
World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 46.
characterizations of the nature and peoples of the New World stirred the
response of Spanish American clerics, many of them Creole Jesuits in
exile, who ardently defended the Creoles’ capabilities.110
Those in favor of environmental determinism allocated to climate a
decisive role in the process of ethnic differentiation and, whether wit-
tingly or unwittingly, they provided splendid justification for European
colonial empires in the tropics.111 A climate-induced “lethargic languid-
ness” justified the need for European military, civil, and religious guidance
to encourage native productivity.112 In the official discourse, indios, lazy
and indolent by nature, could not procure their own subsistence and often
chose to steal rather than work.113 During the apogee of the economic
reforms in the colony in the 1780s, public assessments on the indolence
and lack of ambition of the natives came from all representations of
local power but also from the Crown. Madrid drafted instructions for
the incoming Governor Berenguer y Marquina on how to indoctrinate
indios on work ethic and adequate methods to cultivate their land and to
manufacture products.114 In the logic of the colonial capitalism process,
the emphasis on the laziness of the natives rationalized the mobilization
of indigenous labor in the benefit of the Bourbon state.115
One of the incongruities of this ethnic discourse in eighteenth-century
Philippines is that the putative influence of the climate could validate the
subordination of indios as easily as it could underscore their prowess. The
incongruity of childlike indios who could simultaneously be treacherous
and belligerent exposes the difficulties of military and religious authorities
in forming an understanding of the indigenous population; it also explains
why the colonial state was leery of the same people they partially relied on
110 Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 204–65.

111 Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun, “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial
Enlightenment,” in Postcolonial Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 240–80. Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlight-
enment. Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 249–52. Gerbi, Dispute, 41.
112 In 1788, the Consulado, the town council of Manila, bishops, and religious provincials
all touched upon these issues when composing the reports on the state of the islands
that Governor Berenguer y Marquina had requested. AGI Filipinas 787 (1788).
113 CSIC riel 208 leg.14 (1774).
114 AGI Ultramar 582 (1787).
115 The capabilities of Filipinos were denigrated in the mid-eighteenth century through
various myths and stereotypes that justified oppressive colonial practices. See Syed
Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native. A Study of the Image of the Malays
Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology
of Colonial Capitalism (London: Frank Press, 1977).
to defend the archipelago. It was not uncommon for high-ranking authori-

ties to refer to indios as naturally cruel and perfidious individuals.116 The
legislation reflected this conception, and right after the British occupa-
tion indios were forbidden from using firearms and blades.117 Probably
to not much avail, since in 1774 the Provincial of Augustinian Recollects
and one corregidor noted with a mixture of admiration and wariness
that the indios’ practice and marksmanship with fire weapons had given
them critical advantage over gobernadorcillos who were equipped only
with swords, spears, and daggers.118 Regardless of the fact that mili-
tary officials commended the natives’ performance in the militas, some
civil and ecclesiastical authorities voiced the opinion that Spaniards and
Mexicans were sorely needed despite their troublesome behavior because
indios had become a threatening presence due to their discontent with
the tobacco monopoly and their access to firearms when they joined the
militias.119
Convict Labor and Urban Reforms in the Philippines

Mexican recruits and vagrants may have frustrated some of Spain’s impe-
rial ambitions in the Philippines, but with their manual labor they became
integral components of reconstruction projects and enlightened urban
reforms in late eighteenth-century Manila. The numerous town-planning
regulations that sought to control colonial bodies and space are clear
proof that elite concerns in Manila paralleled those of Bourbon legisla-
tors in Spain, Mexico, and Peru.120 With these initiatives, legislators in
Manila were reacting both to local circumstances, such as the material
and social chaos that followed the British occupation, and to the spread
of European principles of aesthetics and hygiene. Mexican deportees can
be found in the middle of social order concerns that agitated Philippine
dominant sectors at this time.

117 Governors Francisco Javier de la Torre and José Antonio Raón y Gutiérrez issued edicts
on this matter on April 23, 1764 and August 8, 1765, respectively. CSIC riel 2016 leg.4.
118 CSIC ser. Consultas riel 208 leg.14.
120 Recent titles on the process of urbanization and empire building in colonial Spanish
America are Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City. Urban Life in the
Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Manuel Lucena
Giraldo, A los cuatro vientos: Las ciudades de la América Hispánica (Madrid: Marcial
Pons, 2006). Future literature should search for a synthesis and comparison across
centuries, regions, and oceans that includes the Spanish Pacific.
Urban reconstruction projects and the role Mexican vagrants had in

their implementation prompt us to reconceptualize draftees and convicts
as workers, a move that recalls revisionist scholarship on convict labor
in the former British colony of Australia. In the late 1980s, historians
addressing the transportees to Australia shifted emphasis from crimi-
nals to convict workers in order to highlight the productive labor of these
individuals in the antipodes. These scholars underscored that the majority
of transportees were young, fit men and women with skills useful to an
expanding colonial economy, and that they were guilty of only minor
offenses in their home country. In other words, this literature presents
British male and female convicts as Australia’s first workforce.121 More
recently, Clare Anderson and Anand A.Yang have focused on the rele-
vance of convicts from British India in building the economic infrastruc-
ture of European outposts in the Indian Ocean.122
Although somewhat idealized, this interpretation is necessary to render
an impartial account of the contributions of convicts to the formation of
colonial societies. More particularly, this scholarship offers a suggestive
alternative to the more depressing perspective of Mexicans causing havoc
as they passed through the archipelago. This perspective enables us to
think of prisoners as ordinary workers, albeit convicted ones, and as
individuals capable of positive achievements in a penal transportation
setting. Many of these men performed a military service in the army;
others were condemned to forced labor in diverse locations where they
assumed their part in the social and economic fabric of their destination. I
do not have evidence to support that the labor of these convicts aided the
Philippines’ economy by working in the fields or at colonial manufactures
like they did in Australia. Nonetheless, in this section I broaden the
characterization of these men as merely disruptive pieces of the defensive
and military machinery of the archipelago to include an analysis of other
tasks of social and economic nature in which they also participated.
121 Economic historian Stephen Nicholas and his team of collaborators were the pioneers of
this reappraisal of the convicts’ place in Australian history with Convict Workers. The
responses to their research have varied greatly, from bitter criticism, mostly from the
historians they railed against, to inspired continuations of their line of interpretation,
such as the volume edited by Ian Duffield and James Bradley, Representing Convicts:
New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labor Migration (London: Leicester University
Press, 1997) and Deborah Oxley’s Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to
Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
122 Anderson, Convicts; Anand A. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in
the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14,
no. 2 (2003): 179–208.
Immediately after the British stopped bombing the bay, Manila’s

authorities tasked convicts with reconstructing and cleaning the plaza.
From the 1770s to the 1790s, Manila’s system of fortification assumed
most of its present shape. The assessments of municipal engineers and
other official logs attest to extremely busy years, with intensive campaigns
of public works that continued, albeit at a more moderate pace, into the
nineteenth century.123 Public works also targeted civilian buildings that
symbolized Spanish power on the islands, such as warehouses, accounting
offices, hospitals, the royal palace, and the foundry. The records of the
colonial administration denote that the tropical climate imposed many
restrictions on the architectural development of Philippine urban envi-
ronment and that colonial officials constantly battled to keep military
and civil structures in good repair. Another factor in the decline of civil
and military constructions was the damage caused by the annay insects,
similar to that inflicted by termites. Year after year, convicts annexed
ravelins and parapets to the walls, restored and relocated gates, mended
ceilings to prevent leaks, rebuilt dikes, and deepened moats.
Authorities in Manila viewed street cleaning and the removal of waste
as fundamental for a healthier environment and a more beautiful city.
Therefore, the purification of the seat of government was at the forefront
of the governorship’s commitments after the conclusion of the siege by
the British. In 1764, Governor Francisco Javier de la Torre charged urban
residents with clearing the “total state of abandon” of their homes or else
paying a penalty of twenty-five pesos, in addition to fifty lashes if they
were mestizos or indios.124 In 1772, the fronts of many houses were still
cluttered with rubbish, while piles of debris from the repairs blocked the
streets. The city government urged Manila citizens to raise their horses,
cows, pigs, dogs, and hens in their houses. Later regulations prohibited
throwing garbage and dead animals in the streets, using public spaces as
latrines, or allowing sewers to disembogue into the streets.125
Untidiness, though, continued to be a worrisome problem for authori-
ties. In 1781, Governor Basco y Vargas ordered the sergeant of the Manila
presidio to assign convicts to “beautify the city, clean the streets, pull up
undergrowth, [remove] mud, stones, old house remains, and everything
he wanted for the benefit of the king’s service and the common good.”126
The hollow impact of these regulations, which were reprinted several
123 AGI Filipinas 915, 926–27, 929. AGI Ultramar 583. CSIC riel 1164 legs.1 (1780) and
3 (1810–11). For the period 1800–05, see AGI Filipinas 917.
124 CSIC riel 2016 leg.4 (1764).
125 CSIC riel 2016 leg.4 (1772). AGI Filipinas 692 (1787).
times between 1764 and 1806, matched the poor results of similar efforts
in Mexico City, which indicates that Bourbon policies produced only
modest transformations in the urban geography of the Spanish American
colonies and the Philippines.127
Other convict projects with a similar enlightened flavor aimed at facil-
itating the circulation of goods, people, and air, such as the paving
and widening of the streets. At the close of the century, new granite
stones from Canton, China, sped up the traffic of merchandise in city
avenues that until then had been impassable in the rainy season and cov-
ered with dust in the summer.128 Free-roaming animals caused holes in
the streets that hindered human transit and commercial development.
In 1772, homeowners were made responsible for filling hollows all the
way from the façades of their houses to the middle of the road. Besides
obstructing pedestrian and mobile circulation, the mushrooming of ven-
dor stands and their temporary structures constituted a sanitary problem
that induced municipal officials in 1787 to dictate measures for the “free
entry of the winds so that they take away filthy vapors that cause plagues
and contagions.”129 In 1797, Governor Aguilar informed Madrid that
chaotic clusters of shops still comprised “a weaving of hideouts that
shielded every wicked and criminal.”130 Authorities also used convict
labor to build new avenues, such as the one that surrounded the city
walls and had become a favorite place for Manila inhabitants to leisurely
walk or ride their carriages.131
Initiatives to address urban insecurity also involved Mexican convicts.
The British attack had damaged several residences that progressively fell
apart from neglect because the owners, usually members of the most
respected echelons of society, had moved to the extramuros. This trou-
bled the office of the governor in various ways. First, the deteriorated
residences caused “the greatest deformity to the public aspect,” as stated
by Governor Pedro Sarrió in 1787.132 Second, the numbers of Spanish res-
idents in Manila was coming down alarmingly.133 And third, the deserted
127 Historians have pointed out the limited impact of reformist European ideas in medicine
and public health in colonial Spanish America. Knaut, “Yellow Fever.”
128 Martı́nez de Zúñiga, Estadismo, 125.
129 In 1787, Intendent Ciriaco González Carvajal also ordered retailers to remove perma-
nent canopies and replace them with half curtains. AGI Filipinas 692 (1787).
133 In 1785, Governor Basco y Vargas caustically remarked to authorities in Madrid that,
despite the copious amounts of money invested in the fortification of the city, “ungrate-
ful” Spaniards were leaving Manila and indios, blacks, mulattos and other castes were
edifices allegedly became refuges for vagrants and other individuals who
were blamed for the daily rate of robberies in the city and who deserved
to “live in the most faraway places removed from the sight of the rest”
of city residents.134 The colonial government exhorted owners to restore
the edifices but the properties were seldom claimed. Ironically, Mexican
outlaws became instrumental in fighting the lawlessness of Manila when
local officials employed forced labor to level the walls of said resi-
dences.135
There was also an aesthetic and political rationale behind the urbaniza-
tion efforts in post-1762 Manila. Street paving, for instance, was meant
to present a beautiful sight to citizens, according to Governor Aguilar.136
The city was the military stronghold, the seat of the colonial government,
the womb of the Catholic faith, and the residential quarter of Spaniards
in the Philippines.137 As a cosmopolitan place and crossroads of people
of many different nationalities, the enclave was a showplace for Spanish
imperial prowess. For Philippine legislators, the international reputation
of Manila rested on the eradication of animals freely defecating in pub-
lic areas, jumbled conglomerations of shops, debris blocking the streets,
derelict buildings, stagnant water, and petty criminals. Ultimately, in
Governor Aguilar’s judgment, the reforms contributed to “beautifying
this city and its extramuros so that other nations can see that at remote
distances the Spanish Empire has a city of such good policy.”138 There-
fore, urban reforms in Manila could only serve the political ambitions of
the metropolitan authorities in Madrid.
The Long Way Back Home

Most of the recruits and convicts who are known to have returned to
New Spain did it branded as inútiles (useless) before their military service
or prison term was over. The category of inútil generally referred to
individuals with severe medical conditions – that is, gout, chest pains,
instead populating intramuros. AGI Filipinas 362 (1785). An earthquake in 1772 had
also contributed to the abandonment of ruined buildings.
134 Governor Sarrió uttered these words in 1787. AGI Filipinas 692. Street lighting, an
invaluable ally in policing the lower class, reached areas of shady behavior in the late
1790s, when Governor Aguilar planted the first oil street lamps on iron pedestals in the
principal plazas of Manila. CSIC ser. Consultas riel 301 leg.8 (1797).
135 CSIC riel 210 leg.17 (1793–1806). CSIC riel 471 (1783).
137 Reed, Colonial Manila, 51.
chronic diarrhea, and inguinal hernias. For example, in 1806 Governor

Aguilar informed Viceroy Iturrigaray that he had decided to do without
the Mexican Melchor Garcı́a de Leiva, who was afflicted with a dementia
aggravated by a drinking habit and the “torrid climate.”139 Some inútiles
had lost a limb, and a few others experienced problems of hearing and
sight.140 Those enrolled in navy duties suffered from typical diseases of
men of the sea, namely the loss of teeth due to scurvy.141 But inútiles were
also “incorrigible vicious men” who had caused significant commotion in
the colony, who had generated “pointless expenses,” and who had dam-
aged the military service.142 Interestingly, Governor Aguilar explained
in 1804 that these individuals needed “a change of environment and
scenery.”143 By doing so, the social problems posed by these Mexicans
were tossed back to New Spain in an ironic boomerang effect.
Those who had been recruited as military replacements could expect
to receive upon return no recognition for the services rendered in the
western Pacific. Likewise, those who had been deported as convicts had
no program of social reintegration in place awaiting them in the viceroy-
alty. Some were given the opportunity to resume military duty in a reg-
iment in New Spain, and at least one returning deportee brought a wife
with him.144 Many, though, continued to live in miserable conditions that
closely resembled those for which they were apprehended years before. In
1794, an ordinance established that inútiles who were returned to Mexico
should be detailed to public works, the Mexico City Poor House, or pre-
sidio. Upon medical examination, five individuals who had arrived on the
galleon in December 1796 were set free because of serious indispositions,
while another thirteen were declared healthy enough to perform forced
labor in Acapulco. This decision spawned a cascade of appeals from dis-
concerted, tired men. When José Ignacio Tello received notice that he
would be carrying dirt to close a swamp for the remaining nine months
of his six-year sentence, he begged his brother-in-law to intercede on his
behalf. “After the many pains I have experienced,” Tello bemoaned from

140 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Indiferente de Guerra 417 exp.3.
143 AGS Secretarı́a de Guerra 6901 exp.1 f.39 (1804).
144 In 1784, seven individuals joined the ranks of the Regiment of the Crown after returning
from Manila. AGN Filipinas 19 exp.6 f.13–14. Governor Sarrió informed Viceroy
Bucareli y Ursúa about a wife boarding in Manila with her ex-convict husband. AGN
Filipinas 13 exp.6 f.147 (1778).
Acapulco, “I am now subjected to such humiliation; it is sufficient that

I have gone to Manila and behaved well.”145 In September 1797, Tello
and three others were assigned to serve at the Poor House and various
hospitals in Mexico City instead.
The fact that there is only a trickle of documents that provides informa-
tion on the recruits and convicts who made it back to New Spain suggests
that most of them stayed in the Philippines. Such a denouement was to be
expected since the majority had no family, property, or occupation to go
back to. Some had fallen so sick over the years that they had to remain
in the Philippines whether they wished to return to Mexico or not.146
Many others died in the archipelago without their families having knowl-
edge of it until much later, if at all. Cases like that of Marı́a Espinosa de
los Monteros, who did not hear about the demise of her husband José
Vázquez in a shipwreck until eight years after the fact, surely were not
uncommon.147
Correcting an Imperial Perspective

In assessing the contribution of convicts and recruits to Philippine soci-
ety, it would be too easy in the light of the evidence hitherto presented
to corroborate the arguments of some Filipino historians who lament the
negative, long-lasting consequences of their country’s Spanish and Mex-
ican heritages.148 The performance of men who had neither motivation
145 Married and father of two children, Tello had been accused of desertion and condemned
to military service in Manila in 1792. AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Indiferente de Guerra
417 exp.3 (1797).
146 AGN Indiferente Virreinal: Filipinas 796 exp.33 (1795).
147 Mexico-born José Vázquez had been banished to Manila in 1774. About two decades
later, Governor Berenguer y Marquina notified Viceroy Count of Revillagigedo that
Vázquez had been discharged for inútil and was on his way back to his homeland in
1782 when the vessel disappeared in the Pacific Ocean. AGN Filipinas 29 exp.2 f.75
(1792). In 1788, the Inquisition initiated a judicial process in Mexico City against José
Aldabalde only to find out that the subject had died in the Philippines years before.
AGN Inquisition 1046 exp.6 f.130–146 (1788).
148 In many Filipino universities current standard textbooks are works from historians
who wrote a history of oppression and resistance against foreign domination and who
blamed the Philippines’ social and economic challenges on the legacy of Spanish policies.
Some examples are Teodoro Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses (Quezon City: University
of the Philippines, 1960), Renato Constantino’s A History of the Philippines. From the
Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975), and Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto’s Pasyion and Revolution. Popular Movements in
the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979). In
conversations with Isaac Donoso, native of Alicante, Spain and editor of More Hispanic,
nor military training thwarted Spanish plans to transform the Philip-

pines into an imperial stronghold in the Pacific Ocean. While authorities
in Mexico City attributed redemptive qualities to forced labor in a far-
flung location, the leadership in Manila had already warned in the early
1760s that the severe disciplining methods of local officers were working
no miracles on the Mexican replacements and that these men destroyed
themselves in less than a year because of their bad habits.149 Over the
years, Manila’s prognosis about the reformation of these men was not
more optimistic. In a letter to Viceroy Bucareli y Ursúa, Governor Anda
y Salazar avowed that by deporting rogues to the Philippines “the goal of
these men’s service is not attained, as it is very true that those who are bad
they do not improve here but grow in their iniquities.”150 Over the next
few decades, reports of authorities in the archipelago were unanimous
in their characterization of unmanageable recruits and convicts and the
ways in which they disturbed the local social order.
Because the civil and religious colonial government produced these
sources, the reports convey an imperial perspective and have evident lim-
itations. The documents penned by authorities in Madrid and colonial
administrators in Mexico and the Philippines portray these men as work-
ing pieces of the Spanish imperial machinery in the Pacific Ocean. And in
this regard, particularly governors and military officials in the archipelago
had good reasons for not reckoning these men highly. But the testimonies
of Philippine officialdom about the appalling comportment of these men
could have been fueled by hopes of convincing Mexico to send more
and better reinforcements. Governors could have desired to highlight
the accomplishments of their rulership by overstating the weak state of
defenses they had inherited from their predecessors. Also, governors and
their subordinates reported on the behavior of recruits and convicts dur-
ing their terms but not on their deeds after they were discharged from
service or finished their prison sentences.
Since there is little direct testimony from recruits and vagrants them-
selves, in order to offer a more comprehensive and even-handed construc-
tion of the actions of these individuals in the Philippines it is necessary
to apply some corrective to the imperial perspective that permeates these
I learned that most of the historians who contributed a piece to his compilation were
reluctant to join a project that they feared would further glorify the Spanish inheritance
in the islands.
149 This was, for instance, the opinion of the bishop of Cebu. AGN Filipinas 6 exp.11
f.377 (1760).
150 AGN Filipinas 10 f.415–416 (1774).
sources. In fact, in the accounts of officials in Manila we can catch sight of

these men not only as soldiers and forced laborers but also as individuals
extricated from their milieu and forced to live in a strange, outlying land.
Every so often colonial sources disclose that the performance of deported
individuals was not always dishonorable. Both Andrés Alcántara and
Juan José Piña, for instance, made their way up in the Philippine military
until they joined the reputed company of grenadiers in the Regiment of
the King.151 Reports of local authorities also bring to light that military
service in the Philippines was anything but an ordinary or uneventful
experience and that it likely left a mark in the lives and characters of
some men. Six years after he arrived in Manila as a soldier, Juan de Dios
Ibarra was sergeant of the marine artillery of Jolo and Mindanao and
had dodged being captured by British and Muslim vessels a number of
times.152 José Vázquez was less fortunate. Santiago Jac, captain in the
company of Malaysia, reported that six months of hard labor in Cavite
persuaded José to present himself to serve in said company in 1775. José
remained in this unit until he drowned with the San Pedro seven years
later.153
Declarations of parents and relatives constitute an even better vehicle
with which to move beyond the colonial gaze. Statements from parents
are arguably largely free of imperial political agendas and more directly
concerned with the exiles themselves than the testimonies of authorities.
After all, there was a family bond between parents and deportees, and
parents were involved in the reformation of their kin in a more conscious,
intentional manner. Their testimonies shed a more candid light on how
the experience in the Philippines might have changed these men and, more
specifically, whether the behaviors that authorities and relatives found so
despicable had been mended or not.
Some parents – and wives – only desired to teach these young men a
lesson, and they likely planned on requesting their return in due time. Car-
ried away by frustration and rage, these relatives resorted to deportation
as a wake up call. They did not thoroughly reflect on the consequences
of their actions until weeks, months, or sometimes years later, when it
was not possible to either reverse the sentence or avoid physical and emo-
tional consequences for the deportees. That is one plausible explanation
for Marı́a Dolores Garfias to present for the levies to Manila a son who at
151 CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg.4 (1797). CSIC ser. Cartas riel 211 leg.5 (1798).
153 AGN Fillipinas 29 exp.2 f.78 (1791).
the time was only twelve years old. A few weeks was enough time for her
to realize that he was too young to endure such a punishment and asked
instead to commend him to her parish priest. Yet Marı́a Dolores’ appeal
came too late to spare the child the trip to Acapulco.154 Time and distance
brought about a change of heart for Juana Ladrón de Guevara as well. In
December 1793, she turned in her son Juan José Chávez and described
him as an unbearable rascal who refused to learn a trade and spent his
time at parties and drinking. Five months later, she pressed for his com-
ing back, now portraying him as a playful adolescent eager to enjoy life
whose only mistake was to have gone out dancing one night. She declared
then that, far from wanting his removal, she had only intended “to make
his life a misery to see if he would amend his ways.”155
By contrast, other parents adopted a more uncompromising stance.
Estranged from their offspring, they gave a long and careful thought as
to how they wished to address the future fate of their rebellious heirs. For
instance, when the patriarch of the Parrodi family turned in both of his
sons for defaulting in the family’s mining business he had meticulously
crafted a plan for their punishment. Aware of their cunningness and abil-
ity to deceive, the paterfamilias instructed his legal representative to “not
let my sons fool you with false promises.”156 He later solicited authori-
ties to proceed with his sons “with no compassion whatsoever.” Parrodi
requested that the eldest, Juan Antonio, “go to China, and Teodoro be
presented to the King as a private soldier for five years in Havana so the
two of them would not be together.”157
The moneyed position of elite parents allowed them to invest time
and resources in monitoring their sons’ performance. For example, the
member of the Mining Tribunal Julián Antonio de Hierro arranged for
the castellan of San Juan de Ulúa, Veracruz to inform him of his son’s
doings every six months, and instructed him to retain the young man
“until he showed unequivocal proof of correction.”158 Hierro asked
154 The minor had already left Mexico City in the cuerda de presos (string of prisoners).
AGN Filipinas 51 exp.16 f.349 (1802).
157 Ibid., f.112v. The father’s careful plans, however, did not pan out. Juan Antonio,
presumably “the more wicked of the two,” was assigned to Havana when the Manila
galleon did not appear in 1794, but he died in the spring of 1795 in San Juan de
Ulúa, Veracruz. The mother then asked for the release of Teodoro, but her testimony
about his son’s repentance was dismissed in the light of the seemingly more persuasive
declarations of her husband to the contrary.
158 AGN Filipinas 19 exp.39bis f.261 (1786).
authorities to “treat my son with the maximum rigor, . . . and punish

him very seriously at the slightest sign of disobedience.”159 These parents
demanded additional disciplinary measures if behavioral standards were
not met. A cutback in the subsidy to the youngsters was the first course
of action;160 ensuing steps were substantially harsher. Twenty-year-old
Francisco Ayerdi arrived in Manila in 1786 to serve eight years as a dis-
tinguished cadet and to correct his addiction to drinking and other defects
“in his private and public conduct.” In November of that year he had
already been demoted from cadet to private with the consequent shame
and change of “treatment and living conditions.” His father Francisco
Antonio canceled his allowance after receiving negative reports about his
behavior. Since the boy failed to respond to his father’s threats, his parents
determined in 1792 to leave him in the Philippines “until God remembers
about him.”161 Increasingly dissatisfied, the patriarch requested in 1793
that the youth be transferred from Manila to Misamis, in Mindanao.
A few of these young men, however, made military or ecclesiastical
careers in the islands that satisfied their forebears. In 1772, José Anto-
nio Correa’s mother was very pleased to know that her son had blos-
somed from a degenerate son into a well-educated priest who earned a
doctoral canonry and had become a member of the cathedral chapter
of Manila.162 In 1807, seven years after the royal customs accountant
Antonio de Zaldúa requested the banishment of his heir to the Philip-
pines for his determination to marry a ballerina, the elderly, retired official
longed for Cristóbal’s return because, having reached the rank of sergeant
in Manila, he had given “enough proof” of his correction.163 However,
Cristóbal chose to continue his military career in the archipelago despite
his father’s plea; Antonio then praised his son’s Jesuit education and other
qualities to procure from Viceroy Lizana y Beaumont a recommendation
for Cristóbal’s promotion.164 Antonio F. Garcı́a-Abásolo González has
also documented the case of Pedro Miguel Cordero, who had been con-
victed to military service in the Philippines for two years in 1713. Cordero
later became a bread maker and gave alms to convents, hospitals, and
159 Ibid., f.260v.

160 In Mexico City, the merchant José Gómez Campos relied on reports from his agents
in Manila to adjust the economic assistance to his stepson “according to the behavior
they observed in him.” AGN Marina 176 exp.1 f.104v (1801).
poor widows in the 1720s.165 A handful of similar stories prove that

redemption in the Philippines was possible, even if elusive. At least some
men had more rewarding experiences in the islands than the negativity of
colonial and imperial reports would lead us to believe.
The officials in charge of vagrancy campaigns in New Spain described
those whom they arrested as useless individuals with a toxic influence on
the rest of society, and Manila authorities were concerned as well about
such individuals’ corrosive sway on the local population. These negative
characterizations could have been just a matter of perspective. On one
hand, many of these supposed vagrants were unemployed individuals
caught at a bad personal or economic juncture in their lives at a time
when theft was a way to complement meager earnings. Testimonies of
parents, sisters, uncles, and wives who turned in these men often revealed
dark personal motives and grudges held against rebellious, unfocused
youngsters who had caused intense family trouble but who were not
considered major criminals by their accusers. It is conceivable that some
of these individuals could find new motivations to thrive in a different
environment. While half of them were rural immigrants with few to none
urban skills, many others stated in court that they had been trained in
one or more trades. A few were silversmiths and scribes, and two had
done some studies in medicine and Law.166 These attributes could serve
them well in the Philippines. On the other hand, indios, Chinese, Spanish
mestizos, and Chinese mestizos might have valued the company of men
who defied the empire’s social norms and authority and who brought to
the Philippines a broader view of the world.
In fact, the cultural influence of these Mexican transportees in the
Philippines cannot be underestimated. As Tim Coates has pointed out in
his study of degredados in the Portuguese empire, convict transportation
was more than a simple transfer of people: the exchange of cultural traits
was part of this process.167 The forced migration of Mexicans proved
to be not temporary as it had been officially projected but permanent.
Desertions, deaths, and assimilation into the local culture contributed
to make this emigration indefinite. Many deserters and those who
165 Garcı́a-Abásolo González, “Formas de alteración social en Filipinas. Manila, escenario

urbano de dramas personales,” in Un océano de intercambios: Hispanoasia (1521–
1898). Homenaje al Profesor Leoncio Cabrero Fernández. Vol. 1, ed. Miguel Luque
Talaván and Marta Manchado López (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación
Internacional, 2008), 279–83.
166 See, for instance, AGN Filipinas 28 exp.3 f.47–137 (1791).
were discharged must have blended into the rural native communities
and adopted traits of Malay culture. Garcı́a de los Arcos has suggested
that these men introduced linguistic elements in the archipelago and
spread the acceptance of agricultural products such as corn, cacao, and
tobacco and that in doing so, they acted as cultural vehicles of Mexican
influence alongside royal officials and members of the religious orders.168
Furthermore, Mexican soldiers and convicts might have played a part in
the creation of Mexican-native Filipino communities. While little misce-
genation occurred between Mexicans and members of the principalia, a
good portion of the Spanish mestizos emerged from the unions of Mexi-
cans with women from popular indigenous groups. Because they usually
outnumbered the peninsulares, these mestizos constituted the largest non-
Asian group in the archipelago and one important counterbalance to the
Chinese cultural influence.169
Conclusion
The presence of these men in the Philippines was unquestionably detri-
mental for the aspirations of the Spanish empire. The shortage of
Mexicans and Spaniards and their unwillingness to submit to any type
of discipline prevented Madrid from building a stronger colony on the
fringes of the empire. While local authorities considered that a more bal-
anced ethnic distribution was essential to tighten the grip in the colony,
the colonial government had eventually no other option than to approve
for more indios and mestizos to join military divisions, an outcome that
neither Madrid nor Manila desired in the context of the racial dynam-
ics of the time. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the
attempt to expand, strengthen, and professionalize the military effectives
in the islands had a bleak outcome similar to that of military Bourbon
initiatives in New Spain and, more generally, in Spanish America.
But besides considerations about military defense, the actions of
recruits and convicts in the archipelago provide an unexpected window
through which to study broader developments in the Spanish Philippines,
namely Bourbon attempts to intervene in the social, moral, and economic
order of the islands from the 1760s to the 1810s. The Spaniards had
been unable to restore order in many of the areas affected by the British
invasion; in this context, the addictions, misdemeanors, and frequent
168 Garcı́a de los Arcos, Forzados, 230–47, 251–60.

169 Garcı́a de los Arcos, “Grupos étnicos,” 65–66.
desertion of Mexican and Spanish recruits aggravated a social scenario

already quite unsettled. From the point of view of the colonial administra-
tion, the newcomers became part of existing social challenges, such as the
local battle against alcohol, gambling, vagrancy, and crime, and a general
sense of volatility. That Mexicans and Spaniards were held responsible
for subverting the colonial domination over the Philippine native pop-
ulation indicates that disloyalty to the government was an important
concern. The British occupation destabilized Manila for a long time, as
proven by the involvement of Mexican recruits and convicts in the repair
of destroyed buildings, the mustering of a substantial military force of
European and Mexican origin, and the diverse attempts to address urban
and social disorder, dirtiness, and delinquency.
Soldiers and vagrants forcefully transported to Manila also constitute
a vantage point from which to observe the importance that the pursuit of
beauty, hygiene, order, moral propriety, economic rationality, and better
quality of life had acquired in the schemes of colonial authorities in the
Philippines. Classic Enlightenment themes dressed the process of renova-
tion that endeavored to heal Manila after 1764 and in which Mexicans
had a noteworthy, albeit twofold, role. Precisely because in the Philip-
pine colonial society the government and elite sectors shared with New
Spain similar enlightened aspirations about productivity and moral recti-
tude, the conduct of these individuals could only be perceived as a very
troubling problem. Like in New Spain and Europe, authorities strove
to provide the city residents with a comfortable, efficient, and enjoyable
environment. Therefore, reformist legislation in late eighteenth-century
Philippines illuminates the nature and extent of Bourbon reforms in the
Spanish empire and how the particularities of each colonial setting forced
the government to make some adjustments that limited the impact of
these measures. This chapter reinforces my contention that the Spanish
Philippines can greatly enrich the debates that animate Colonial Latin
America historiography.
Mexican and Spanish recruits and convicts were much more than failed
soldiers and laborers and disappointing sons. They became one more com-
ponent of the complex, fast-evolving political, ethnic, and social Philip-
pine arena in the late colonial period. First, those deported to Manila
participated in shaping the future of this colonial milieu, as they advanced
cleaning and rebuilding programs as members of forced labor gangs. Sec-
ond, they were associated to local attempts of subversion against the
colonial state. Third, because authorities could only squeeze a limited
usefulness from the replacements that arrived from overseas, Mexican
and Spanish recruits were linked to the creation of avenues for the eman-
cipation of subordinate ethnic groups like indios and Chinese mestizos.
And finally, their presence also stirred the conceptual foundations of the
existing ethnic hierarchy in the Spanish Philippines and fueled reflections
about the connections between climate, race, and behavior. Mexican and
Spanish deportees were individuals with ambitions that sometimes were
fulfilled with the opportunity to pursue a military or ecclesiastical career
in the Philippines; they were also men with the understandable desire to
start a new life and who eventually became part of the ethnic and social
fabric of the colony by acculturating and intermixing with local women.
Conclusion
The process by which about 4,000 Mexican recruits and convicts – and
a few Spaniards – were shipped to the Philippines between 1765 and
1811 can only be explained in the context of an intricate web of imperial
agendas, reformist pursuits of colonial governments, and local ambitions
and hopes of community members. The origins, development, and con-
sequences of this enterprise betray a complicated interplay of military,
judicial, social, and ideological factors that spanned across the captaincy
general of the Philippines, the viceroyalty of New Spain, and the Span-
ish metropole. Forced transportation of recruits and vagrants ultimately
aimed at strengthening the position of a physically and conceptually
remote Spain in an increasingly threatened Pacific, but the project was
first and foremost part of the unique history of trans-Pacific relationships
that had been knitting together two Spanish colonies in opposite sides of
the Pacific Ocean since the late 1500s. In fact, the shipment of military
reinforcements and vagrants convicted to forced labor in the Philippines
operated according to dynamics that best served, not the larger impe-
rial schemes of Madrid, but the interests of the colonial government in
Mexico City.
The movement of soldiers, convicts, and vagrants across the Pacific
Ocean sheds light into the multiple ways in which the Spanish Philip-
pines participated in the broader Mexican and Iberian world. For exam-
ple, the interdependence between convict transportation and military
recruitment that characterized the Spanish and Mexican military oper-
ations in the Atlantic façade of the empire was also a trademark of
the defensive system in the Philippines. The difficulties of the vicere-
gal office in scrambling able bodies to man the Atlantic and Pacific
267
outposts reveal not only the interconnectedness between the defensive

links of the empire but also that the military obligations of New Spain
extended across two oceans. Trans-Pacific forced transportation lays bare
that the overlap of imperial and intracolonial circuits allowed for the
flexible circulation of recruits and convicts to the places where they
were needed, but this overlap also signaled that the military security
of the empire was precarious in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
Multiple obligations besieged viceregal authorities and prevented them
from providing enough soldiers to Manila; Mexico City had to resort
to convicts – vied by all presidios in the areas administered by New
Spain – and vagrants, who were poorly suited to protect the Philip-
pines because of their lack of military training. The army and navy
defenses of Manila remained vulnerable; moreover, the imperial demands
in the Spanish Pacific aggravated the fragile situation of the Atlantic
posts.
Convicts since the early 1600s and vagrants after 1783 were con-
demned to deportation to the Philippines; involuntary long-term residence
in the archipelago was tantamount to punishment. Innovations in social
control schemes in New Spain at the end of eighteenth century and, in
particular, the institution of annual levies were related to larger social and
economic changes in Mexico City. Vagrancy campaigns were a response
to an evolving intellectual atmosphere characterized by consternation
about criminal activity and its connections to poverty and vagrancy, as
well as concerns about unproductivity and its repercussions for the state.
Although the Spanish metropole was undergoing similar social, cultural,
and economic transformations, Madrid rarely punished vagrancy with
overseas deportation. Therefore, transportation of vagrants to the Philip-
pines was an exceptional form of punishment not only in the colonial
judicial system of Mexico but also in the context of the Spanish empire’s
administration of justice. This fact highlights the niche the Philippines had
in the Mexican imagination as a locale for the discipline of convicts, and
it points to the existence of linkages between Mexico and the Philippines
that were distinctive to the Pacific region.
The fate of these men provides a vantage point from which to examine
the social and urban reforms that enlightened politicians had instigated
to increase state intervention in the colonials’ lives, not only in New Spain
but also in the Philippines. By virtue of a new discourse on vagrancy and
laziness many impoverished and unemployed Mexicans came to be seen
as a disease for the social body that needed to be uprooted. Similar gov-
ernmental initiatives that criminalized vagrancy, drinking, and gambling
Conclusion 269
in Manila and its immediate environs quickly placed the relocated recruits
and vagrants under a critical gaze again. These initiatives of social control
reveal that the colonial center of Manila was inserted in the same intel-
lectual web of reformist endeavors that knit the Spanish Atlantic colonies
to the Iberian Peninsula. The study of the banishment of Mexicans to
the Philippines further illustrates the interconnectedness of the Spanish
colonies because the presence of Mexican recruits and vagrants who were
poorly trained and unwilling to submit to neither military nor working
discipline was not inconsequential for the military defense of Manila. In
addition, relocated Mexicans were perceived as an active ingredient in the
increasing social, political, and ethnic tensions brewing in the Philippines.
An imperial agenda to rebuild the Spanish power in the Pacific
Ocean and colonial projects of social reform engulfed convicts, vagrants,
and recruits alike mostly against their will. Notwithstanding, Mexicans
enjoyed room to maneuver and in fact, they were instrumental to the
state in creating cultural meanings. Power was exercised not only ver-
tically but also horizontally. Ruling classes and colonial subjects shared
an apprehension over an increasing crime rate and a desire to enforce
a strict work ethic. The Mexican colonial state obtained cooperation
through the creation of legitimacy, and authorities benefited from the
divisions among commoners. When members from marginalized social
groups requested a deportation or when they testified on the behavior
of those arrested, they judged their community fellows’ behaviors by
drawing on arguments of work ethic, honor, reprehensible conduct, and
the protection of the republic similar to those of the official discourse
on which the levies were grounded. A judicial system whose arbitrari-
ness was bearable explains why Mexicans resorted to it when social and
familial circumstances pushed them to the edge.
Racial purity, understood by colonial authorities as people of Mexi-
can or Spanish descent, was a requisite in the transportation of men who
would be employed as soldiers and forced workers in the Philippines.
This is despite the fact that since the late sixteenth century the Spanish
government in the islands had recourse to readily available native labor.
The work of indios had been essential to supply Manila and its hin-
terland with agricultural and pastoral provisions. Indios had been also
required to provide compulsory labor under the polo for the construction
of Manila at first and later for the extraction of timber and work in the
shipyards. The determination to collect only gente blanca for shipment
to Manila also persisted despite the problems that Mexican and Spanish
vagrants and recruits originated in the Philippines since the early sev-
enteenth century. Within the parameters of the racial hierarchy that the
Spanish had introduced in the archipelago, the possibility of arming the
indigenous population and tasking them with the defense of the colony
never quite entranced local authorities. It then appears obvious that one
of the reasons for the long existence of forced transportation of Mexicans
to the Philippines was the intention to mexicanize Manila and the areas
of the archipelago controlled by the Spanish as if these were an appendix
of New Spain.
With this book and other recent titles that consider the Pacific Ocean
as a region much connected to the historical evolution of the Spanish
American colonies, the study of colonial history of Mexico and the Span-
ish Philippines is moving beyond standard enclosures. The Spanish Pacific
world is also emerging as an important part of the history of the Spanish
empire in the Americas. Just as the history of Manila and the areas under
Spanish political or religious control was inextricably linked to the vicere-
gal authorities in Mexico City, the history of late colonial Mexico cannot
be written without eyeing the Philippines. This remote colony shaped
the thoughts, actions, and choices of Mexican authorities and subjects.
Calibrations about how to supply Manila’s armed forces were behind
the inception of annual social campaigns in Mexico City; considerations
about the predicament of the Philippine colony were a factor in the shuf-
fling of convicts and soldiers in the presidio circuits of New Spain; and
parents and wives thought of exile to “China” as the panacea for solving
unmanageable family conflicts. In the bodies of these soldiers and con-
victs two processes converged at the end of the eighteenth century: the
Philippines’ quest for better military protection, social order, and ethnic
rearrangement, and the crusade of Mexican elite sectors against vagrancy
and the despicable behaviors of the plebe. From this point of view, the his-
tory of the transportation of Mexican recruits and vagrants to Manila is
trans-Pacific and epitomizes that the historiographies of colonial Mexico
and the Spanish Philippines should look at colonial and provincial spaces
as deeply interlaced with each other during the two centuries and a half
that the Manila galleons were in service.
The history of forced transportation in the Spanish Pacific thus
enhances our understanding of the Mexico–Philippines relationship. After
the Spanish authorities deemed the situation in the Pacific as critical in
1762, decisions regarding the renovation and strengthening of the Philip-
pine defense system naturally fell as a plum on New Spain’s lap. The
transfer of Mexican manpower and the punishment of criminals was part
Conclusion 271
of an extensive and complex system of intracolonial ties that determined

both the position of the archipelago as an extension of New Spain and the
centrality of the viceroyalty in defining said interconnections. Mexico City
sent to Manila bureaucrats, missionaries, secular clergy, and the monies
to defray costs of administration in the Philippines; Mexico City’s whole-
sale merchants monopolized the Manila trade; and well-off Mexicans
imported Asian slaves. In this transoceanic relationship, the Philippines
were not a passive interlocutor at the other end of the galleons’ line.
On the one hand, authorities in Manila applied pressure to their coun-
terparts in Mexico City by continuously complaining about the small
numbers of reinforcements that landed in the archipelago. This pressure
eventually motivated the viceregal office to initiate the deportation of
vagrants, subsequently unbalancing the overall condition of New Spain’s
presidio system as thousands of soldiers and convicts were channeled to
the Pacific Ocean instead of to Mexican presidios. On the other hand,
the Philippine government developed their own military stratagems by
admitting indios and Chinese mestizos to the militia ranks at the end of
the eighteenth century.
New Spain was a viceroyalty that exercised metropole-like functions
in the Spanish Pacific at the same time that it maintained a more tra-
ditional colonial relationship with the Iberian Peninsula in the Spanish
Atlantic world. Commercial, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, ethnic, and cul-
tural relationships bounded Mexico City to Madrid with ongoing com-
mercial exchanges that linked regional markets in Mexico to transatlantic
commerce; an imperial bureaucracy and ecclesiastical personnel that was
largely peninsular; the transfer of Castilian laws; the creation of blood
and social hierarchies in New Spain that echoed those of Spain; the ship-
ment of soldiers and convicts from Cadiz and other peninsular ports;
the forced migration of African slaves; and the transmission of Spanish
enlightened ideals and programs of reform. New Spain thus emerges as
a truly transoceanic viceroyalty whose political, economic, social, ethnic,
and cultural fabric was the result of reaching east and west. Further-
more, the relationship Mexico City sustained with the Philippine colony
shaped the viceregal office’s connections to the wider Atlantic world;
Pacific affairs consumed effort, money, and manpower that the viceroy-
alty was in need of to maintain the presidios in the Atlantic coast and
the Caribbean region. Interconnectedness was an essential feature of the
internal dynamics of the Spanish empire. Far from isolated, the various
imperial components were interrelated and dependent one upon the other,
colonies upon metropoles and colonies upon colonies.
By rescuing the Spanish Pacific World from the geographical, politi-

cal, and cultural periphery that has been relegated to, the center of the
Spanish empire shifts from Europe to America and from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. The Bourbon bids to control the moral and social behav-
ior of colonial populations and to consolidate the military role of the
Philippines were subordinated to the interests of Mexican and Philippine
authorities, who in turn were driven more by local circumstances than
imperial considerations. Therefore, I maintain that compromise and coop-
eration ruled colonial life and molded the relations between colonies and
the metropole more profoundly than the subordination to Madrid did.
Paradoxically, despite the fact that for Spanish politicians and reformists
the imperial defense of the Philippines had acquired a renewed strategic
importance after 1762, the involvement of Spanish imperial authorities in
the military developments in the Pacific Ocean was limited. Spain had no
option but to let Mexico lead, sustain, and ultimately define the nature
of the umbilical cord with the Philippines and had no control on the
individuals who were transferred from one place to another within the
empire. The Philippines might have been a periphery or frontier in the
Spanish empire – Imanuel Wallerstein graded the islands as an “external
arena” in the core-periphery scheme he created for a world system in the
sixteenth century.1 But this periphery was an important constituent in
the organic whole that was the Spanish enterprise in the East and West
Indies.
After the recognition of Mexican independence in 1821 the communi-
cation line that was the galleons stopped, but the Philippines did not seek
to join hands with an independent Mexico and remained under Spanish
imperial control. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Spain
should be able to retain the Philippines. In the two brief periods when the
Constitution of 1812 was implemented in Manila (1812–14 and 1820–
23), Philippine-born Spaniards, Chinese mestizos, and to a lesser degree,
native elites wholeheartedly embraced claims for self-government. Dis-
criminatory practices against Mexican and Philippine-born army officers
and government officials in favor of peninsulares sparked various upris-
ings, revolts, and conspiracies in the 1820s.2 However, several factors
1 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I. Capitalist Agriculture and the Ori-
gins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), 336.
2 De Llobet, “Orphans of Empire,” 1–30, 292–94.
Conclusion 273
allowed for the colonial relationship between Spain and the Philippines
to survive until 1898. On the one hand, the small size of the Creole pop-
ulation living in Manila and the fact that this group stayed distant from
the interests of the Malay majority in the Philippines may explain why
Filipino Creoles did not lead a unified insurgent movement against Span-
ish colonial authorities at the time when the colonies in the continent did.
Furthermore, Creoles in the Philippines did not hold the same grievances
against peninsulares as Mexican Creoles in New Spain because the num-
ber of Spaniards of European descent in Manila did not start growing
until after 1821. On the other hand, opening the political space for the
changes proposed by the Cadiz Cortes in 1812 ran up against the oppo-
sition of ecclesiastical authorities and religious orders in the Philippines.
After all, Bourbon officials had not been able to curb the power of the
Church in the archipelago in the way they did in the Mexican viceroy-
alty. By the early nineteenth century, the Philippine polity was still based
upon many rural communities ruled by friars who, besides being repre-
sentatives of Spanish authorities and intermediaries between these and
the local population, were also responsible for education.
The reconfiguration of imperial rule that had started in the Philippines
at the end of the eighteenth century also had direct bearing on the fact
that this colony withstood the domino effect of the independence of much
of Spanish America.3 In 1821, a modernized colonial administration and
an auspicious economic situation likely mitigated the aspirations of Fil-
ipino Creoles, Chinese mestizos, and Mexicans living in the Philippines
to break the umbilical cord with Spain. Bourbon reforms had been suc-
cessful enough to reorder the fiscal, administrative, and military basis of
colonial rule, and they proved fundamental for the continuity of Span-
ish power in the archipelago. Direct communications with Manila had
improved with the creation of the Royal Company of the Philippines, and
the establishment of new fiscal structures, especially the intendancy sys-
tem and the tobacco monopoly, enabled the colony to remain financially
viable after the crisis of the situado system in the 1790s.4
3 Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, “Imperial Transition in the Philippines: The Making of a Colonial

Discourse about Spanish Rule,” in Endless Empire. Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse,
America’s Decline, ed. Alfred McCoy et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2012), 148–59.
4 Fradera, “Historical Origins,” 307–20; and Fradera, Gobernar colonias (Barcelona: Edi-
ciones Penı́nsula, 1999), 110–11.
With the end of the galleon trade, which was a money-losing business
in its last two decades, change certainly came more rapidly. It became
then apparent that late-eighteenth-century reformers with an interest in
profit and fiscal viability had established the basis for an export-oriented
economy in the Philippines. The development of Philippine agricultural
and mineral resources was the logical replacement for the loss of the
Manila connection, and it allowed the archipelago to benefit from the
new markets that industrialization and general economic growth in
the wider world created in the nineteenth century. After 1821, imperial
strategies continued to evolve in an effort to maintain Spain’s presence in
the Philippines, and the colony transitioned from a closed imperial mer-
cantilist system to a new imperial space open to free trade. In 1834, the
Crown formally recognized free trade, opening Philippine ports to unre-
stricted foreign commerce. A commercial agriculture fully developed. By
the 1840s, almost 90 percent of the total export revenue came from six
Philippine-grown cash crops: sugar, tobacco, abaca fiber and cordage
(Manila hemp), indigo, coffee, and cotton.5
The peculiar relationship with Mexico ended, and a new period in the
colonial history of the Philippines started that would last not even sixty
years. The forced migration came to a halt and trade between Manila
and Mexico became marginal, the commercial initiative in the islands
passing to the hands of foreign traders. The Mexican nation would have
to rework the terms of their subsequent connections with Asia. From
then on the Philippines reported to the Council of the Indies in Madrid
instead of to the viceroy in Mexico City. Spain was left with the challenge
of directly governing a territory that was remote for more reasons than
just geography. Because Mexican silver no longer passed through the
archipelago, Spain had to find new sources of revenue to pay for the
colonial administration. The small number of Creoles was only one sign
of the fact that, after centuries of privileging a migration of individuals
of American and European descent to the Philippines, Spain had barely
managed to touch the population of the archipelago and sculpture its
political, social, and cultural structures.
Finally, a study on the transportation of recruits and convicts from
Mexico to the Philippines suggests that there might be a wide scope of
trans-Pacific linkages yet to be explored. The long-lasting trade between
Manila and Acapulco necessarily functioned as a vector for exchanges
other than commercial. Royal officials, merchants, military personnel,
5 Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society, 75–77.

Conclusion 275
sailors, missionaries, convicts and anybody who ever crossed the Pacific
ocean in the galleons pushed to the West the borders of New Spain,
incorporated the Philippines in their mental horizons, and expanded –
geographically and culturally – the definition of the viceroyalty. Surely
the world did not seem such a big place to those who abridged the
ocean between Acapulco and Manila. Indeed, to the people who lived
in such a global empire, and particularly to those who were involun-
tarily relocated, trans-Pacific connections were not only evident but also
inescapable. Therefore, our approach to the history of the Spanish empire
and the territories administered by Spain needs not only to be geographi-
cally comprehensive but also to transcend the political, jurisdictional, and
economic borders with which the Spanish monarchy defined captaincies,
provinces, and viceroyalties.
Appendix
Recruits, Convicts, and Deserters Sent to Manila

from New Spain and Spain, 1765–1811
Recruits and Convicts

Year1 Veterans2 Convicts3 Deserters4 (from Spain)5 Annual Totals
1765 100 3 103
1766 100 3 103
1767 80 5 85
1768 4 4
1769
1770
1771
1 I have included the years when no galleons did the Pacific crossing to give a sense of the
long interludes that sometimes elapsed between shipments.
2 Officials rarely distinguished between “recruits” and “veterans” in their counts, merging
them both in one single amount. However, based on some years when the differentiation
was made, it can be argued that about 30 percent were regularly veterans and 70 percent
were young recruits.
3 In order to highlight that convict transportation intensified from the 1780s onward, the
table displays prisoners deported to the Philippines right after the British occupation
ended in 1764. The majority of these convicts, especially after 1783, were vagrants. The
column includes Mexicans who were spontaneously denounced by their relatives or other
community members. The column does not include infidentes.
4 Because an undetermined amount of recruits and veterans were actually deserters, this
number should in all likelihood be higher than 254. Orders were issued in 1790 and
1809 to send Mexican deserters to Manila, but I have no information on how many were
actually shipped and when. Wayward soldiers sent to the Philippines for crimes other
than desertion are not included in the “Deserters” count.
5 Recruits and veterans sent from Spain are not included in this count because I have not
found neither solid nor reliable numbers on them. However, correspondence of Philippine
authorities on the performance of these men in the islands suggests that the number of
peninsular military replacements for the period under study was in the hundreds.
277
278 Appendix
Recruits and Convicts

Year Veterans Convicts Deserters (from Spain) Annual Totals
1772 451 [155?] 451
1773
1774 242 2 77 14 335
1775 191 37 228
1776 180 4 26 210
1777
1778 161 3 57 221
1779 100 3 57 160
1780 440 11 451
1781
1782
1783
1784 45 3 48
1785
1786 55 55
1787 34 34
1788 41 19 131 191
1789 4 4
1790
1791
1792 397 38 435
1793
1794
1795 359 14 373
1796
1797 104 31 135
1798
1799
1800 27 11 38
1801 61 13 74
1802 65 57 1 123
1803 2 2
1804 4 40 44
1805
1806 6 6
1807 7 1 8
1808 7 7
1809 68 68
1810 2 2
1811 1 1
totals 3,219 [2,923] 336 254 190 3,999 [3,703]
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Index
Acapulco, 54, 57, 94, 95, 235, 244 Anda y Salazar, Simón de (governor of
Andrés de Urdaneta reached, 33 Philippines), 67, 93, 237, 239, 244,
Asian and African migration via, 54–55 259
convict labor in, 87, 230, 257 Año de hambre (1785–86), 125, 158,
point of arrival and departure of 180
galleons, 62, 178 Anson, George (commodore), 62
transportation of convicts from Mexico Arechederra y Tovar, Juan de (governor of
City to, 91, 102, 183, 195, 223, Philippines), 61, 62, 64, 66
228–30 Army, in New Spain
transportation of convicts from Veracruz fragility of, 96
to, 114, 115 Asian slavery, in New Spain. See chinos
Acordada
abolition of, 127 Banderas de recluta
and alcaldes de barrio, 128 in New Spain, 98, 148, 156
and capital punishment, 107 in Spain, 98
and convict labor sentences, 107–08, Basco y Vargas, José (governor of
156 Philippines), 70, 76, 236, 238, 245,
and ethnicity of those arrested, 174 254
and levies of vagrants, 156, 184 complaints about recruits, 1, 146, 155
and number of processes, 107, 131 Beccaria, Cesare (criminologist), 29, 103,
and presidio sentences, 109 104, 106, 128
and rate of releases, 132 Bentham, Jeremy (philosopher), 29, 103,
and social class of those arrested, 132 106
and thievery, 170 Berenguer y Marquina, Félix
and vagrancy, 127, 158, 159 as governor of the Philippines, 41, 90,
establishment of, 127 95, 236, 245, 251
jurisdiction of, 127 as viceroy of New Spain, 95, 130, 184
prison of, 116 Bourbon reforms
Administration of justice. See criminal in New Spain
justice system military, 85. See also ejército de
Alcaldes de barrio, 128, 131 dotación; ejército de refuerzo;
Alcaldes ordinarios, 107, 127, 132 militias, in New Spain
Americanos, 72, 75, 82, 240, 249 social, 30, 119, 128–31, 268–69
303
304 Index
Bourbon reforms (cont.) and the quintas, 98

in the Philippines, 227, 264 and the United States War of
after 1762, 67–73 Independence, 96
and imperial rule after 1821, 273–74 China, 73, 255
before 1762, 59–66 confounded with the Philippines, 163,
ecclesiastical, 65–66 185, 204, 207, 261, 270
economic, 70–72, 240–41 links with New Spain, 58, 212
military, 72–73 links with the Philippines, 48–49
social, 241–43. See also Spanish plans to conquer, 35
Enlightenment, and reforms in Chinese mestizos, in the Philippines, 39,
Manila 41–42, 73–74, 76, 234, 244, 272.
in the Spanish empire See also militias, of Chinese
after 1762, 59, 68 mestizos, in Manila
before 1762, 60, 63–65 Chinese, in the Philippines, 39, 40–41, 54,
social, 19 73, 84, 92, 234, 249
British from Fujian, in Manila, 48–49
capture of Havana, Cuba, 3, 59, 67 Chinos, 12, 54–55
capture of Manila, Philippines, 3, 67–68, Climate
239, 265 and racial ideologies, 244, 250–51, 266
threat in Manila, Philippines (before in the Philippines
1762), 62–63 effects on architecture, 254
Bucareli y Ursúa, Antonio Marı́a de effects on indios, 249
(viceroy of New Spain), 76, 112, effects on mestizos, 245
171 effects on non-natives, 86, 92, 208,
and recruits to the Philippines, 93, 94, 236, 249–50, 257
148, 244, 259 Concubinage, 23, 50, 127, 142, 168
Buena crianza (good rearing), 199, 203 Convict labor. See also Acapulco, convict
labor in
Calamianes, Philippines, 82, 235 in British Australia, 253
California, 77, 89, 110, 111 in central New Spain, 108–09. See also
Campomanes, Pedro Rodrı́guez de Acordada, and convict labor
(statesman) sentences; sala del crimen, and
and Bourbon reforms, 69, 70 convict labor sentences
and criminal law, 104 in Havana, Cuba, 87, 89, 91, 109, 111,
on education, 198–99, 203, 215 112, 113
on vagrancy, 138, 141 in Manila, Philippines, 252–56. See also
Capitalism, 21, 121, 124, 142, 251 convicts, Mexican, in the Philippines
Casas de bandera, 98, 99, 146, 147, 148, in New Orleans, 87, 89, 113
152, 203 in Northern New Spain, 109, 110
Castillo, Juan Bautista del (subdelegate), in Pensacola, Florida, 91, 113, 144, 229
174, 179, 183, 184, 284 in Puerto Rico, 88, 91, 109, 111, 113
Cavite, Philippines, 240, 260 in Spain, 102–03, 105
and the Manila galleon trade, 34, 232 in the Indian Ocean, 253
military defense of, 62, 64, 75, 245 in Veracruz, 88, 91, 109, 111, 115–16,
presidio of, 82, 235, 236 229
Charles III (king) Convict transportation
and convicts to the Philippines, 90, 149 and intra-American circuits, 16, 110,
and reforms, 59, 68, 69, 88, 111 112–16
and the abolition of casas de bandera, from Spain to North Africa, 15, 102
148 in the British empire, 24, 25, 27, 28
and the creation of militias, 72, 86 in the French empire, 24, 27, 28
Index 305
Convict transportation (cont.) among recruits in the Philippines, 1, 237,

in the Portuguese empire, 25, 26, 28 257
to the Philippines, process of. See and family repercussions, 168, 200, 211,
Acapulco, transportation of convicts 218, 219, 261
from Mexico City to; Acapulco, and its criminalization, 127, 137, 151,
transportation of convicts from 166, 243, 268
Veracruz to arrests for, 159, 164, 166, 174
Convicts despised by parents, 194, 203, 214, 215
civilian, 100, 110, 111 despised by the community, 50, 129,
in the Philippines, Mexican. See also 190
Philippines, presidios female, 178
affected by climate, 236 Dutch, the. See Philippines, Dutch threat
amount of, 2
amount of in ratio to population, 234 Ejército de dotación, 63, 85, 97, 98, 99,
and urban reforms, 252, 254, 255–56 113
as workers, 253 Ejército de refuerzo, 85
cultural influence of, 263–64 Enlightenment. See also climate and racial
destinations, 234–35 ideologies; levies of vagrants, and
life conditions, 235 the Enlightenment
military/ecclesiastical careers, 262–63 and attitudes towards poverty, 136, 141
return to New Spain, 256–58 and education, 197, 198, 199, 206, 215,
in transit. See depósitos de presidiarios 216
military, 111–12. See also deserters and human nature, 102, 150
peninsular, 2, 113–14, 115–16 and penal discourse, 102–06, 128
Creoles (Filipino), 73, 248, 273, 274 and reforms in Manila, 241, 242, 252,
Creoles (Spanish American), 189, 273 255, 265, 268
and poverty, 132, 176 and reforms in the Spanish empire, 59,
crime of in ratio to population, 173 66, 69
in Manila, 234 and utilitarian punishment, 103, 104,
in militias, 100 106
in the army, 99 and vagrancy, 135, 138, 141, 145, 152
in the Philippine administration, 44 in New Spain, 78, 129. See also Bourbon
Criminal justice system reforms, in New Spain, social
and death penalty, 107 Esquilache riots, 138, 140
and offenses of sexual nature, 168 Ethnic categorizations, 174
and utilitarian punishment, 102, 152
expansion of, 128–31, 133, 158 Family
fairness of, 179, 184, 224 and newcomers, 217
in Spain, 104, 105, 106 extended model of, 212
links to military recruitment, 81, 98, female-headed, 185, 213, 217
102, 148 institution for socialization, 202
prevalence of presidio sentences, 30, 109
violent husbands and, 219 Gambling. See also vagrants (false
beggars), and gambling; levies of
Depósitos de presidiarios, 113, 114 vagrants, and gambling
Deserters, 2, 105, 112, 113, 180, 238–39 among recruits in the Philippines, 147,
Domestic violence, 219, 220, 221 237
Downward mobility, 175 and family repercussions, 211, 218, 219
Drinking. See also pulquerı́as; vagrants and its criminalization
(false beggars), and drinking; levies in New Spain, 127, 128, 151, 167, 214
of vagrants, and drunkards in Spain, 137
306 Index
Gambling (cont.) in extramuros, 39, 241

in the Philippines, 243, 265, 269 in intramuros, 255
and vagrancy, 134, 142, 163, 164 in military units, 73, 245–46, 264
and women, 178 in presidios, 235, 236
arrests for, 158, 181 interactions with Mexicans, 247
at the casas de bandera, 99, 147 loyalty to the Spanish, 73
despised by parents, 200, 203, 211, 212 population of, 42, 43
despised by the community, 50 Spanish perceptions of, 41, 248–49,
on board of galleons, 232 251
punished with military service in Infidentes, 92–93, 248
Veracruz, 100 Inútiles, 181, 256–57
Gambling houses, 153, 176, 182, 192, 195,
224 Japanese
Gente blanca, 15, 227, 245 in Manila, 39, 52, 92
Gente llovida, 52, 91, 100 in New Spain, 57
Guatemala, 87 in Spain, 58
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de (writer),
Havana, Cuba, 87, 91, 95, 97, 215, 261. 104, 109, 141, 198, 199, 200, 203,
See also British, capture of Havana, 215
Cuba
military forces in, 63, 86, 206 Keicho embassy, 56–57
presidio El Morro, 87, 92
shipbuilding in, 64 Levies of vagrants, 119, 134
Honor. See also levies of vagrants, and among elevated social strata, 174–75
honor and agency of colonials, 187, 190–91
among lower classes, 189 and arbitrariness, 179
and deportation, 13, 208, 210, 225 and carelessness of officials, 181–82
and hombres de bien, 157 and castizos, 172
and military service, 102, 194, 209, 234 and community’s testimonies, 185,
and public behavior, 188, 189 187–90, 269
and youngsters’ behavior, 194, 203 and convicts of infamous crimes, 149,
of unmarried women, 167, 168, 186–87 154, 170
Howard, John (prison reformer), 29, 103, and drunkards, 23, 154, 166
104, 106 and españoles, 172
and gambling, 23, 154, 166
Incontinencia, 116, 167, 168, 181, 190, and honor, 188, 189
192 and Indians, 154, 173, 180
Indians, 130, 189 and married men, 180
agency of, 210–11 and mestizos, 172
and domestic violence, 220 and mulattos, 172
as convicts, 88 and occupations of victims, 175
as part of lower social classes, 132, 175 and offenses of sexual nature, 167
crime of in ratio to population, 173–74 and peninsulares, 172, 175, 176
in the northern territories, 89, 110 and prudence of officials, 183, 184
Indios (native Filipinos), 39, 41, 42, 56, and rural migrants. See migration/
66 migrants: and levies of vagrants
and friar curates, 66–67 and teenagers, 160
and polos y servicios, 38, 83, 84, 269 and the 1775 decree, 138–39, 148–49,
and tobacco monopoly, 241 155, 180
as available labor, 77, 269 as a pedagogical strategy, 225
corrupted by the Spanish, 243 as a relief to social pressure, 151–52
Index 307
Levies of vagrants (cont.) promise of, 175, 186

as an exceptional punishment, 193, 268 upheld by authorities, 154, 168, 192,
during the año de hambre, 180 220, 221
economic disruptions caused by, 171 upheld by parents, 197, 204
Enlightenment and, 17, 19, 98, 118, versus informal unions, 168–69
152, 172 Mayorga, Martı́n de (viceroy of New
establishment of, 146, 148 Spain), 1, 147, 148
exclusion of women from, 154, 177 Mestizos. See also ethnic categorizations
family repercussions of, 185–87, 191 in New Spain, 53, 99, 132, 144, 172,
in numbers, 157, 158 173, 174, 175
in sociability areas, 164–66 of Chinese descent, in the Philippines. See
in Spain, 138–41 Chinese mestizos, in the Philippines
poor results of, 178, 179 of Spanish descent, in the Philippines,
procedures of, 155–56 42, 263, 264
rate of releases, 179, 180, 183 Mestizos de sangley. See Chinese mestizos,
supported by colonials, 193, 195, 196, in the Philippines
269 Migration/migrants
Lizana y Beaumont (viceroy of New Spain), and family repercussions, 216, 218
95, 205, 262 and informal unions, 169
Locke, John (philosopher), 197, 198, 206, and levies of vagrants, 125, 161–62,
215 182–83, 192, 263
López de Legazpi, Miguel (navigator), 33 and living conditions in the city, 124
Lorenzana, Francisco Antonio de causes of, 119, 121–22, 161
(archbishop), 145 numbers of, 125
of Asians to Mexico, 43, 54. See also
Mala crianza (bad rearing), 216 chinos
Manila galleons. See also Cavite, of Chinese to the Philippines, 41
Philippines, and the Manila galleon white illegal. See gente llovida
trade Military (in New Spain)
and the return route, 33 fragility of, 100
and trade, 2, 5, 6, 34–35, 70 Militias, 100, 181
as a communication line, 271, 272 in Cuba, 86
building of, 38, 82, 83 in New Spain, 86, 96, 97, 100–01,
crews of, 15 180
cultural connections established by, 10, in the Philippines, 245, 249, 252
32, 49, 78, 270, 274 in the Spanish empire, 96
life on board of, 231–32 of Chinese mestizos, in Manila, 52, 73,
loss of, 44 76, 245, 246–47, 271
missionaries on board of, 58 Misamis, Philippines, 82, 235, 262
passengers on, 1, 12, 17, 275 Muslim pirates, 61–62, 82, 83
sibyls predicting arrival of, 44
westbound voyage of, 228, 231, 232 Nakedness
Mariana Islands, 45, 92, 93, 232 and its criminalization in New Spain, 23,
Marquis of Branciforte (viceroy of New 151, 169–70
Spain), 95, 172 despised by the community, 133, 147,
Marriage 201
and extramarital infidelities, 191 Nao de la China. See Manila galleons
and honor of women, 168 native Filipinos. See indios
and the 1776 Pragmatic Sanction, 131 North Africa, presidios, 103, 105, 136
as a pact of mutual obligations, 219 Northern New Spain, 21, 87, 89, 107
downward, 205 Nuestra Señora de Covadonga (ship), 62
308 Index
Parents Polos y servicios, 38, 66, 83, 84, 247

and disobedience, 201–02 Poor House, Mexico City, 107, 108, 146,
and drinking. See drinking, despised by 173, 257, 258
parents Population
and gambling. See gambling, despised by in New Spain’s countryside, 121
parents of Chinese mestizos in Manila, 74
and indolence, 200–01 of indios in the Philippines, 42
and maxims of enlightened reformers, of jailed individuals in Mexico City,
197, 199–200 107
and reform of youngsters, 194 of Luzon and Visayan Islands, 61
paying costs of deportation, 223 of Manila, 39, 234
requesting deportation of sons. See of Mexico City, 121, 122, 173
requests for deportation, by fathers; of New Spain, 97, 122, 125
requests for deportation, by moters; of Spain, 105
requests for deportation, from of the Philippines, 234
middle and high-class sectors Poverty. See also Enlightenment, and
requesting return of deported sons, attitudes towards poverty
260–61, 262 and charity, 30, 119, 135–36, 145
Patria potestas, 212, 214 and criminality, 119, 143, 151, 268
Penal system in central New Spain, 120–21
in New Spain, 26, 95, 112 poor relief in Spain, 135–36, 143
in the Spanish empire, 105 Presidio system. See also convict labor;
Peninsulares, 247. See also vagrancy, Northern New Spain, presidios in
among peninsulares; convicts, and convict transportation to the
peninsular Philippines, 89–90
and the ejército de dotación, 99 and presidiarios, 87
crime of in ratio to population, 173 flexibility of, 95, 117, 268
in Manila, 234 intra-colonial circuits, 109–11
in the Philippine administration, 44, 46, overlap of imperial and intra-colonial
248, 272 circuits, 112–13, 268
in the Philippines, criticism of, 249 Puerto Rico, 52, 85, 86, 110
in the Philippines, small number of, 40, Pulque, 162, 164, 166, 171, 222
264 Pulquerı́as, 128, 166, 176, 187, 188, 195,
in the Regiment of the King, 72 201, 223
Philippines, the, 4
after 1821, 272–74 Quintas, 98
and relationships with New Spain,
43–48, 270–72 Recogimientos, 177, 178, 183
as a place for punishment, 91–93, Recruitment
206–09, 228 and anti-military attitudes, 100
as a place for reform, 150, 218 and links to convict transportation,
Dutch threat in, 35, 36, 50, 71, 84 267
impact of Spanish rule in, 42 and links to judicial punishment, 80–81,
mexicanization of, 11, 15, 46, 48 94, 97, 100, 102, 117, 118
Muslim presence in, 36, 37, 61, 74, 242. and Spanish American Creoles, 99
See also Muslim pirates and use of coercion, 99
presidios in, 82, 235–36 for militias, 100–01
shipbuilding in, 84 for the Philippines, 101–02
Spanish missionaries in, 38–39 in New Spain, 98–102
Spanish settlement in, 36–38 in Spain, 98
Index 309
Recruits, in the Philippines and levies of vagrants, 156, 184

affected by climate, 236 and presidio sentences, 109
after finishing their terms, 240 and social class of those arrested, 132
amount of in ratio to local population, and vagrancy, 158, 159
234 jurisdiction of, 127
and desertion, 238 San Bernardino (strait), 232
and local women, 237 Sangleys. See Chinese, in the Philippines
and military careers, 260 Santı́sima Trinidad (ship), 70
and sodomy, 237 Santo Domingo, 60, 87, 95
and the conspiracy of Captain Andrés Sempere y Guarinos, Juan (jurist), 104,
Novales, 248 109, 141, 169
and vagrancy, 239 Situado, 45, 47, 64, 85, 273
bad habits of, 237, 259
cultural influence of, 263–64 Tobacco factories, 169
from Spain, 86 and capitalism, 121
number of, 2, 80 and smugglers, 114
perceptions of, 249 source of employment, 132, 145
problems caused by, 1–2, 147 workers arrested in levies, 162, 175,
return to New Spain, 256–58 188, 189, 190, 230
shortage of, 81, 93, 94–95, 244–45, 246 Trans-Pacific migrations, 49–58
undermining submission of indios, 247 Tutino, John (historian), 121, 122
Regiment of the King, 180, 245, 260
and the conspiracy of captain Andrés Urban crisis, 30, 119, 120, 122–26, 146,
Novales, 248 172
creation of, 72 Urdaneta, Andrés de (navigator), 33
replacements for, 1, 234
scarcity of white men in, 244 Vagrancy. See also Enlightenment, and
Regiment of the Real Prı́ncipe. See militias, vagrancy; vagrants (false beggars);
of Chinese mestizos, in Manila Acordada, and vagrancy; sala del
Requests for deportation, 194, 228 crimen, and vagrancy
by fathers, 261, 262 a social problem, 172, 176
by grandfather, 222 among Indians, 172, 173
by mothers, 224, 260–61 among peninsulares, 143, 175, 176
by parents, 220 and criminality, 79, 120, 126, 129, 133,
by sisters, 161 134, 143, 151
by stepfathers, 202, 203, 222 as an umbrella category, 151, 159
by uncles, 224 charge of, 3, 90, 114, 155, 157, 178
by wives, 218, 220 female, 177
from middle and high social sectors, 223 in early colonial New Spain, 143
in numbers, 195 in Manila and environs, 240–42
personal motivations behind, 221, 225 policies in Mexico, hardening of, 134,
Revillagigedo, Count of (viceroy of New 143
Spain), 90, 94, 112, 130, 214 policies in New Spain, hardening of,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (philosopher), 103, 131
197–98 ratio to other crimes, 158–59
Vagrants (false beggars)
Sala del crimen and drinking, 134, 163, 164, 166, 167
and alcaldes de barrio, 128 and gambling, 164
and convict labor sentences, 107–08, 156 and professional mobility, 160, 189
and ethnicity of those arrested, 174 and robbery charges, 170
310 Index
Vagrants (false beggars) (cont.) and military defense, 87, 91, 97

and state factories, 145 presidio San Juan de Ulúa, 88, 92, 112,
and the Esquilache riots, 138, 140 115, 213, 229, 261
as harmful to society, 149–50 regiments of, 63, 86, 96, 100, 112,
as military conscripts, 118, 140, 145 180
definitions of, 134, 137, 142, 179, 185 Viana, Francisco Leandro de (fiscal), 75,
exiled to frontier territories, 144 77, 238
punishment of, 103, 138 Villalba, Juan de (lieutenant general), 85,
sentenced to forced labor, 108, 140, 86, 100
144–45 Villarroel, Hipólito (judge), 134, 145
versus true beggars, 136–37, 146
Venezuela, 110, 206, 215 Yucatan, 38, 206, 215
Veracruz, 202, 203, 208. See also convict
labor, in Veracruz Zamboanga, Philippines, 61, 82, 235, 236,
a way station for convicts, 76, 114–15 242

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Nearly 4,000 Mexican troops and convicts landed in Manila Bay in

Eva Maria Mehl is an assistant professor of Latin American history

EVA MARIA MEHL

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

List of Illustrations page ix

Appendix: Recruits, Convicts, and Deserters Sent to Manila from

for their technical assistance and prompt emails, and particularly to my

In 1780, 177 Mexican recruits arrived in the Philippines onboard the

vagrancy if the individual voluntarily signed up for military service in

Toward a Historical Narrative of the Spanish Pacific World

8 I thank Ruth De Llobet for her illuminating insights on this matter.

tenure patterns, labor, agriculture, and other ecological circumstances in

serious obstacle to the success of the system of navigation and com-

11 Walker, Spanish Politics, 76, 105, 116–17, 131.

dominate with their economic power the trans-Pacific transactions. Yuste

16 J. R. W. Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast

Currently, some studies in Spanish imperial history and colonial

by Cambridge University Press; Mercedes Maroto Camino’s Exploring

of similarly broad geographical contours, Fabio López Lázaro has argued

half of the eighteenth century and a description of the logistics involved in

modern times. The interconnectedness of Spain’s colonies thus makes

Horizontal Relationships Between Colonies in the Spanish Empire

cannot adequately reflect the historical importance of the richly textured

31 Rafael Bernal. México en Filipinas: Estudio de una transculturación (Mexico: UNAM,

in 1762, Spanish American presidios, as strategic outposts in need for

of power within the Spanish empire. The connections between colonial

imperial agendas were ultimately recast to accommodate local and

judgment to prevent a stream of grievances, and some magistrates stood

43 Colin M. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Berkeley: Uni-

46 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present

social consensus to achieve social order.47 Scardaville, Beezley, Martin,

disobedient sons, and those engaged in concubinage or adulterous rela-

Early Modern Western Empires and Convict Transportation

servitude in the Portuguese imperial enclaves of Brazil, Cape Verde, São

50 Anderson and Maxwell-Stewart, “Convict Labour,” 108.

Brazil.54 The autonomy – or dependence – with which colonies carried out

62 Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 84, 119.

origins of the men and women transported to British America and

result of two interconnected processes. Firstly, by the end of the eighteenth

material, economic, and social consequences of the British occupation in

Intertwined Histories in the Pacific

The transportation of manpower occurred amidst other economic and

The Challenges of Founding a Spanish Colonial Society in Asia

6 Nicholas D. Pisano, The Spanish Pacification of the Philippines, 1565–1600 (Kansas:

restrictions culminated with a total ban of this commerce in 1631, albeit

11 Schurz, Manila Galleon, 361–87.

Moluccas and China.23 Muslim pirating attacks were a constant source of

and colonial authorities working in the islands were naturally inclined

29 Phelan, Hispanization, 150.

to send out more settlers.39 By mid-seventeenth century, Manila counted

39 Antonio Garcı́a Abasolo, ed., España y el Pacı́fico (Córdoba: Dirección General de

Chinese ever to be established outside mainland China.45 Most of them

45 Wang Gungwu, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities,”

Christianity proved to be an advantageous move for the mestizos. Reli-

49 Slack, “Arming Chinese Mestizos,” 64–66.

consequences of the process of Spanish cultural assimilation, old and

New Spain and the Philippine Connection

economic importance. The remoteness of Manila was singularly daunting

commissary of the Inquisition in the Philippines arrested had to be sent

Furthermore, Mexican domination of the commerce with Manila, more

62 Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique, 267–68.