Convicts orConquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific

The lexicon and creole formation

“…It encompassed the colonial territories of Spain north from the Isthmus of Panama to today's United States, the Caribbean islands, and later also the Philippines. Soldiers who were (forcibly) assigned to the Philippines were recruited or captured throughout that territory (Mawson 2013(Mawson , 2016. But even if we stick to the area that is Mexico today, our confidence that the supposed archaisms are still in use today is fully justified.…”

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

“…It was also common for convicts to work side-by-side with other coerced or free labour, at least nominally so, including on imperial Russian infrastructural projects and on the public works of Angola and Mozambique.Just as transportation was connected to enslavement and indenture, in numerous contexts and in various ways convicts and penal colonies also intersected with the mobility, work and military service of armies and navies 87. During the early modern period, the Scandinavian and Iberian powers (Portugal and Spain) transported convicts and soldiers on the same vessels, and worked them together in presidios and on plantations, to such a degree that until very recently the former have been almost entirely obscured to historians.Portuguese and Spanish convicts were also sent into military service following commutation of sentence 88. As Ryan Edwards explains, independent Latin American presidios often retained a blended penal/ military function.…”