Urban Outcasts Facing Adversity: A Plebeian Culture of Resistance and Resilience in Seventeenth-Century Spain

In early modern societies, urbanization and concentration of employment in cities gave rise to other phenomena such as urban centers attracting people with diverse aspirations. The expectations of these individuals who aspired to better jobs and life opportunities were not always met by the results, having to enhance their capacity to tackle quotidian adversity and poverty. The balance between immigrants’ (male and female) aspirations and the available life chances frequently broke down, which periodically gave rise to surges in poverty that exacerbated the already chronic harsh conditions encountered in cities by workers. This affected the most fragile segments of society intensively, particularly the urban lumpenproletariat. This chapter deals with the reconstruction of the plebeian culture of resilience, underscoring how urban indigents had their own capacity to take part in historical change, and that they not only did so through resistance. This research moves beyond the traditional historiographical approaches based on a wide range of views of the lumpenproletariat and solely focused on it as a dangerous class. In contrast, this chapter argues that, through their forms of behavior, life strategies, adaptability and conflicts, individuals established both values and, should the situation arise, relational models that configured a dynamic, creative, polysemic and resilient plebeian culture.