Prohibited games, prohibited people : Race, gambling, and segregation in early modern Manila

[Extract] Late seventeenth-century Manila was a colorful, cosmopolitan but segregated port city. Manila’s large Chinese population was made to live beyond the high walls that enclosed the Spanish quarter known as Intramuros, and apart from the city’s negro (blacks) and indio (indigenous) residents. As Carl Nightingale observes in his seminal history of urban segregation, the division of cities is a “dynamic, shape-shifting, unpredictable” process.2 Segregation in early modern Manila was shaped by concerns about mestizaje (the biological and social mixing of distinct ethnic groups) and tensions over the spiritual landscape that were most visible and antagonistic during the overlapping Chinese Lunar Festival and Lent.