"For the Honour and Good of the Republic": Institutional Enclosure in Spanish Colonial Manila, 1590-1790

In this study, I examine the place of institutional enclosures, including religious houses, colegios (schools, orphanages, and female reform houses), and hospitals, in Spain’s colonial project in Manila from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The immediate goals of these institutions, predominantly founded within the walled city of Intramuros, varied: they sought to regulate monastic life, educate the city’s orphaned and non-orphaned children, reform ‘scandalous’ women, and both physically and spiritually heal the city’s ill. However, the overarching objective of these institutions was to contribute to the creation and maintenance of an idyllic republic in what was represented as a remote but significant colony in the Pacific. This long-term approach to Manila’s institutions reveals how ideas about social propriety, reform, and urban order were not only a result of the ‘enlightened’ Bourbons across the Spanish colonies. Such expressions of colonial paternalism can be seen from the earliest foundations of Manila’s institutions at the end of the sixteenth century, and evolved and endured over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Manila’s institutional enclosures were perceived to benefit the republic because they had implications for the world beyond their walls; the supervised communities within the walls were to provide models of behaviour and morality for unenclosed city dwellers to emulate. Each institution offered a protected environment in which caste categories and gendered models could be constructed and regulated. Institutional administrators and inhabitants were involved in the process of delineating a caste system which would contribute to the creation of a racialized hierarchy in Manila. Administrations also emphasized models of femininity and masculinity that conformed to a monastic model of gender because the idyllic female and male religious represented a controlled, moral population. Despite the goal of establishing an orderly republic, the personal desires and ambitions of enclosed individuals could, and did, take priority over institutional rules, potentially causing scandal. Across this study, we see that institutional enclosure was not only a colonial projection and strategy, but was also an individual, lived experience for a range of women, men, and youths.Ph.D.2021-11-14 00:00:0