Session Abstract

Our panel will examine issues of social deviancy in the Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Asian Pacific in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In our papers we explore how various social sectors, the state, and the colonial church, defined and treated “marginal” individuals in Spanish America and the Pacific;  how normative behavior was perceived and enforced by the colonial governments; types of social discipline enacted by the state and Church; and how the treatment of deviancy in the dominant group and in marginal and mixed-raced groups affected state and social relations in the colonial context. Our papers specifically look at “vagabonds” in Mexico and the Philippines, mestizos de sangley in Manila, and vecinos moradores in Peru, and how such marginal groups related to representatives of the sacred, church officials, and how they negotiated or resisted forms of inclusion with the colonial state.