Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2023-15: Jely Galang on the 19th century deportation of Chinese criminals in the colony's frontier

The state-sanctioned criminals had a checkered past in the history of the world in their banishment to sparsely inhabited terrains. Serving various state-ordered directives such as these castaways' rehabilitation, sending them to the far fringes also tests the limits of control of the state to newly acquired territories. The Spanish colonial government in the Philippines did the same during the nineteenth century: it invariably banished hundreds of Chinese criminals—vagrants, drunkards, beggars, idlers, pickpockets and unemployed—to far-flung places, especially in the southern part of the archipelago. 

In observance of the 40th anniversary of the Department of Geography as an academic unit at the University of the Philippines, the Department in tandem with the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) presents the 15th lecture for 2023 through the Heo/Geo Lecture Series. Dr Jely Galang will speak on Friday, 10 November 2023 at 5:30PM via Zoom. His presentation entitled Chinese Criminals and the Frontier in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, traces the historico-geographical morphology of these territories in the Philippines during the Spanish era.

Apart from being a form of punishment and a means to rehabilitate these social outcasts, deportation also served as a tool of the state in occupying and pacifying the colony’s “frontier” or sparsely populated areas which were usually newly-acquired territories that existed beyond the authorities’ direct control. This presentation will revolve around the following questions: Who were these criminals? What mechanisms were involved in their forced transportation? How did such measures contribute to the economic and socio-spatial transformations of the receiving locales?

Dr Jely Galang is an associate professor of History at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He currently serves as the Deputy Director of the UP Third World Studies Center and Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese Studies Journal. His research interests include the nineteenth century Philippines, Chinese in Southeast Asia, modern history of China and history of crime and punishment.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a rebranded forum for the intellectual sharing of ideas and practices of  geographers (academic, industry, alumni community) and geography-adjacent scholars for our students, staff and faculty. Jointly managed by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society, the forum has invited speakers who variously shared state-of-the art geotechnologies as well as provide intellectual provocations regarding new conceptions of space and place from disaster studies and participatory mapping, to geohumanities and island and archipelagic geographies. 

To participate in the lecture, please register using this link. Or you can copy this URL to your browser: https://tinyurl.com/4ubxmcxs

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HuG) research cluster of the UP Department of Geography.