This panel examines how families, minors, and women across the Iberian-American worlds forged forms of belonging that exceeded imperial ideals of order. Rather than treating law, family, and social hierarchy as stable frameworks imposed from above, it argues that Afro-descendant and Indigenous actors actively produced identities through mobility, community justice, and the negotiation of urban and frontier spaces. The everyday practices of women, minors, and households, often defended before colonial courts, reshaped moral authority and social status beyond prescribed models of Catholic family life.

Iberian elites promoted the early modern Catholic family, resembling the modern nuclear household, as the foundational unit of their expanding American societies. This ideal followed a sacramental life course and centered on a married patriarch and matriarch who governed a household of legitimate, baptized children. Grounded in the belief that Catholic morality would radiate outward from this structure, officials expected it to integrate diverse populations into Iberian cultural norms. They also hoped it would limit racial mixing, particularly between Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, thereby facilitating the conversion of Indigenous communities and discouraging cross-racial alliances that might foster revolt. Yet, like many prescriptive elite models, this vision of familial and religious life rarely corresponded to lived realities.

Spanning northern New Spain, the Platina region, and southern Brazil, the papers in this panel foreground mobility as a central analytic: the movement of bodies, property, reputations, and legal claims across courts, neighborhoods, and borderlands. Justice emerges not merely as an institutional system but as a community-driven practice through which families and children navigated conflict, asserted rights, and defined belonging. Menores de edad—Spanish heirs and Indigenous principales—in sixteenth-century Pánuco demonstrate asymmetrical frontier power relations; legal minority was treated as a flexible category altered to support the dispossession of Indigenous communities. In seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Mexico City, domestic tensions were made into public judgments through the denunciations and trials of unmarried households for amancebamiento when intimate relationships defied community-based moral orders (moral callejera). Free Black women in seventeenth-century Puebla defied colonial spatial hierarchies by establishing kinship and economic networks within Indigenous-designated neighborhoods, forming temporary Afro-Indigenous solidarities that were targeted by civil suits and Inquisition trials. Indigenous women’s litigation in the Platina-region during the eighteenth-century contested racialized moral identities, negotiated sexual normativities, and mobilized justice to redefine family and identity through delitos de lujuria (crimes of lust). These four papers address how colonial governance operated through negotiation rather than unilateral control, capturing the strategies through which women, Black and Indigenous actors, and minors defended and redefined their alternative moral worlds, communal lifeways, and enduring forms of belonging. By connecting legal and social history with histories of race, gender, and empire, the panel will engage scholars of Latin America, colonial studies, and comparative slavery, as well as anyone interested in power, resistance, and everyday governance.