This talk is about the lives and circumstances of Chinese laboring classes in the nineteenth-century Philippines and their journey of becoming “dangerous classes” that included vagrants, beggars, idlers, drunkards, pickpockets, the undocumented and “suspicious.” Using criminal records from Philippine and Spanish archives, I will discuss how the Spanish colonial government’s policies related to immigration, registration and taxation contributed to the plight of these lower-class Chinese and how the latter responded, through overt and subtle means, to these rather restrictive and exploitative measures. Their collective biography demonstrates the importance of including these “people without history” in the historical narrative, which commonly focuses on the affluent and the influential.