Vagrants and Outcasts

Vagrants and Outcasts: Chinese Laboring Classes, Criminality, and the Spanish Colonial State in the Philippines, 1831-1898 is a scholarly work of history. Volume 1 examines the lives of working-class Chinese residents in the nineteenth-century Philippines. The text focuses on vagrants and outcasts who were viewed as threats to the stability of the Spanish colonial state.

The author analyzes how specific state policies created precarious conditions for these marginalized groups. This history explores how individuals adapted to their material environments and resisted colonial measures regarding taxation, registration, and migration. By focusing on those often ignored by traditional records, the book provides a detailed account of social struggle and survival within the Spanish colonial framework.