Download PDF | Diego Javier Luis - The First Asians in the Americas_ A Transpacific History-Harvard University Press (2024).
369 Pages
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
The terms asidtico/a and Asia (for Asian and Asia) do not consistently appear in Spanish colonial sources. In colonial Mexico, one phrase commonly used to refer to the lands across the Pacific was la china. Since people of Asian provenance became known as chinos upon arrival, Asian and Asia are the most accurate translations for “chino / a” and “la china” in Mexico. Thus, this book uses Asian and Asia in their contemporary meanings as shorthand for the great diversity of peoples in this history and the locales from the Indian Ocean World to East Asia, respectively.
Filipino is a similarly complicated term, since nothing resembling the contemporary Filipino national identity existed in the early modern period. In fact, during the late colonial period, Filipino often referred to Spaniards born in the Philippines and not to the land’s Indigenous inhabitants.’ Most often, Spanish sources characterized Philippine peoples as indios (Indigenous vassals) or moros (enslavable Muslim enemies). In some cases, colonial-era authors differentiated among specific ethnic groups like Tagalogs, Kapampangans, Visayans, Ilocanos, and so forth. When it is possible to identify the ethnicity of an individual or community, I use labels that privilege specificity. When this is not possible or when I refer to a group consisting of multiple ethnicities autochthonous to the Philippines, I use “Philippine” with a corresponding noun.
The goal is to avoid, as much as possible, reproducing the colonial rhetoric of “indio / a” (indiyo in Tagalog) unless the reference is to its specific employment in primary sources and / or Spanish colonial systems of categorization. This word is derogatory not only in contemporary Tagalog but also in many areas throughout Latin America.’ I have also placed the names of other castas (castes) of New Spain—including “chino / a”—in quotes to cite the language of colonial sources. In a similar vein, I refer to enslaved or formerly enslaved peoples by either first name or first and last names and not solely by their last names (e.g., “Catarina” in lieu of “San Juan”), which were often markers of possession.’ These are imperfect approaches to irresolvable issues of colonial nomenclature and power that, for the sake of intelligibility, are nonetheless essential to the narration of this history.
INTRODUCTION
AT 4:04 A.M. ON JANUARY 5, 1688, Catarina de San Juan breathed her last in Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico.' Her ascetic life of perpetual suffering had reached its holy and inevitable end. A few devotees carried the corporeal relic that was her body from her dilapidated home (containing only one small room) to the house of Hipolyto del Castillo y Altra “to have in death a more decent place” for the customary postmortem washing and shrouding,” In the blue light before sunrise, the Jesuit fathers rang the bells of the College of the Holy Spirit to announce her passing. They prepared a palm leaf and a crown of flowers to honor Catarina as a virgin.’
Word spread quickly, and by 5:00 a.m., the city had swelled with “innumerable people” from miles around hoping to catch a glimpse of the sacred corpse.* Nobles and the poor alike hurried to the home of Castillo y Altra, so that it looked like “a church on Maundy Thursday, where the public of the entire city enters and exits and performs the stations [of the cross].”* However, this orderly procession did not last for long. As eager spectators converged on the home, their patience waned, and they rushed the door. The doorframe groaned and split, and the pious mob crowded around the body, eager to kiss Catarina’s hands and feet, touch her rosaries, take flowers from her shroud, and even cut off her fingers and pieces of flesh to keep as holy relics.®
In this state, Catarina’s body remained on display until the next afternoon, when a religious procession arrived to inter her in the main chapel of the Jesuit college. According to one of her confessors and hagiographers, Alonso Ramos, “The large crowd that gathered and attended the burial is inexplicable . . . even on the rooftops, balconies, and windows of the houses that correspond to the doors of the temple of our College of the Holy Spirit, there appeared a multitude of men and women.”’ As the pallbearers approached the college, they needed to extract Catarina’s body from the coffin, which had to be rotated to fit inside the narrow doorway. When the crowd spotted her holy figure, they stormed in “to rob her of the few decorations that had remained on the deceased.”* They grasped the last shreds of her tunic, hair, and flesh and the final flowers from her shroud, and they even made off with her shoes.
Within the chapel, the undeterred Jesuits buried Catarina by a presbytery in a vault that also held stillborn infants—similarly valued for their purity. Two keys sealed the vault. In a speech given shortly after her interment, the Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera proclaimed that “all that the world adores as most precious, it makes holy, without claiming it, nor searching for it, [it found] a poor little china, slave, foreigner, who made us fill our tongues with her praises, our hearts with jubilation, and even our eyes with tears.””
But for all the acceptance she eventually found among Puebla’s denizens, Catarina continued to be a “a poor little china” (the colonial Mexican term used to refer to any Asian person) and a “slave, foreigner.” This was so although she had lived almost seventy years in Puebla, most of them as a free woman. Those who knew Catarina speculated that she might have been born on the Arabian Peninsula or lived in her youth as a princess of the Mughal royal family in India. The Jesuit Joseph del Castillo Graxeda’s conjecture was the least ambitious and, therefore, perhaps the most persuasive: “Catharina was native to the Mughal Kingdom. The place where she was born is unknown, and even she did not know it for being such a young age when she was taken from it.”"° As a child, Catarina had been a victim of a Portuguese slave raid in South Asia. She was eventually sold in Spanish Manila. Then, at the nearby port of Cavite, she was made to board a Spanish galleon destined for Mexico. The journey across the world’s largest ocean on an early modern ship, even one advanced for its time, lasted many months under horrid conditions. In 1621, Catarina disembarked at the port of Acapulco in chains and was sent overland to Puebla. There, she eventually gained her freedom and, through her piety, became a renowned symbol of holy virtue and global Catholic hegemony."
Despite her celebrity, Catarina—the person behind the reputation— remained an unknown and unknowable entity, a “Thesaurus absconditus” (hidden treasure) in the words of the Jesuit Antonio Plancarte.” For the funerary procession, Plancarte painted a dark, sealed box of Asian design and penned a poem to accompany it:
Here from china, you see my color; inside the gold I save as greater treasure, that hidden here you will find. Although the more turns you give the key, it will not open, none will understand it; since the cipher only God knows, for you [only] in his time will he reveal it."
According to Plancarte, the inner quality of Catarina’s soul lay beyond the human grasp. What those attending her funeral perceived, instead, was her exotic difference—her body “here from china” (meaning Asia) now laid out before them. Catarina remained inextricably tied to the thousands of hands seeking to defile and consume her, desiring to turn the key that would expose her interior, yearning for the total submission she withheld in life and reserved for the Holy Trinity alone. As silent as stone, Catarina had become her foreignness.
Today, Catarina de San Juan is erroneously known by another name, the China Poblana (the “china” of Puebla). In his 1897 book Historia de la Puebla de los Angeles, the Mexican historian Antonio Carrion conflated the China Poblana, a popular nineteenth-century form of dress that was a symbol of Mexican femininity, with the distant memory of an Asian woman who had once lived in Puebla.'* He wrote that the women of Puebla had known Catarina de San Juan as “la China, which they called her affectionately,” and thus, Catarina had become the China Poblana.” The allure of the castor (patterned skirt), white slip, white blouse, and shawl of the China Poblana melded with Carrion’s resurrection of an Asian-infused Baroque past. From this orientalist conflation of the two “chinas,” Catarina de San Juan shapeshifted into folklore."
The coordinated efforts to suppress Catarina de San Juan’s story shortly after her death enabled Carridn’s invention and others like it.’ From 1689 to 1692, Alonso Ramos published an ambitious hagiography of Catarina in three enormous volumes that commemorated his confessant as a religious icon and made a daring case for her beatification (figure I.1). Because it celebrated Catarina’s celestial visions and ethereal visitations with the Holy Trinity, however, Ramos’s hagiography aroused inquisitorial suspicion. Throughout the post-Tridentine (1563—) Catholic world, the worship of persons who had not been formally beatified or sanctified was strictly prohibited."* In the end, Ramos’s dream of crafting a holy figure to elevate Puebla as a sacred site of the Catholic world was not to be realized. He had overplayed his case by prematurely declaring that Catarina had performed miracles and other acts of God: only the Sacred Congregation of Rites and the pope could make this determination. Even one of the theologians who supported Ramos’s first volume warned that Catarina’s “visions, revelations, and prophecies” could make a reader “seasick.”” In 1692 the Spanish Inquisition banned Ramos’s magnum opus for “containing revelations, visions, and apparitions [that are] unfit, implausible, full of contradictions and comparisons [that are] inappropriate, indecent, reckless, and that sapient blasphemiam (that reveal or that nearly are blasphemies).””°
Ramos’s hefty three-volume work was the longest text ever published in colonial Mexico, and hardly anyone would read it.”! The New Spanish Inquisition confirmed the Spanish ban on printing and distribution in 1696 and dismantled the public altar in the little room where Catarina had lived.” Inquisitors then confiscated most of the remaining publications about her and burned them.”’ From the outstretched hands that had despoiled her body to the suppression of her devotion, Catarina had become a myth within a decade of her passing. In the words of Kate Risse, she was “too spectacular, too unorthodox, too popular.” She was also, I would add, too foreign.
Yet although Catarina de San Juan was distorted by her erstwhile hagiographers and modern eulogizers, she remains one of the very few Asians in the early modern Americas whose name has endured. In this sense, she is exceptional. Although thousands of Asian people traveled to and through the colonial world during this period, Catarina’s life was recorded with a level of detail afforded to few others of her time. Her commemoration is even more remarkable given that her identity as a formerly enslaved Asian woman made her an unlikely candidate for remembrance.
While she had achieved a rare degree of fame by the end of her life, in many ways Catarina’s story is also more broadly emblematic of other Asian peoples in the early Americas, about whom only fragments survive. Catarina was one of many people who boarded a Spanish galleon in the Philippines—either voluntarily or in captivity—and crossed the tempestuous Pacific to reach a strange land beyond the horizon. Once they arrived in New Spain, the haggard survivors of this journey faced a new challenge: the violent colonial realities of the Spanish Americas. Collectively, these free and enslaved Asians represented a new kind of migrant in global history, and their experiences shifted endlessly along a continuum between the two poles of coming and going, bondage and freedom, assimilation and foreignness, and recognition and repudiation.
How many of their histories have been lost to human memory or to infinite entombment as a decaying shred of discarded paper in the archives of a dead, Baroque empire? The experiences of Asian peoples in colonial Mexico and the Spanish Americas are neither folklore nor myth: they are history. The traces of their lives that can be recovered from the oblivion of time and the fickleness of human memory populate this book and constitute a history of unlikely survivals, perseverance against prejudice, and spectacular convergences of distant peoples.
The First Asians in the Americas is the first book to examine the mobility of both free and enslaved Asians to and through the Americas during the 250 years that Spanish ships sailed the Pacific Ocean between the Philippine port of Cavite and Acapulco, Mexico. The book’s scope is necessarily global, and its approach attends to the grain of lived experience. At the heart of this story are the desires both to understand what Asians made of their new lives in new lands and to uncover how regimes of difference making impacted the search for just treatment in a deeply race-conscious colonial world. Regardless of their origin, the vast majority of Asians who disembarked in Acapulco became known as “chinos,” like Catarina. This invented term slotted Asian peoples into New Spain’s casta (caste) system, alongside more familiar casta designations that variously defined AfroMexican and Indigenous peoples as “indios,” “mulatos,” and “negros.” Formally, becoming “chino / a” conditioned Asian peoples’ status within the New Spanish social order. It restricted their ability to work in certain trades and made them legally vulnerable to enslavement and the Inquisition.” Informally, in the ears of Spaniards, the word “chino / a” alone often conjured up the expectation of servitude, criminality, and un-Catholic behavior. Even Catarina’s popularity could not overcome her nature as a “china, slave, foreigner” in the eyes of her admirers.
Facing these perils, “chinos” recalibrated their social relationships and blended into existing Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities as they sought to secure their freedom, acquire sustenance, and live with dignity. From the bustle of Manila to the rural rhythms of the Costa Grande, and from the height of Spanish imperial power to the early struggles for independence in Mexico, this book tracks the little-known forms of Asian mobility that defined the deep entanglement of the Pacific world with the colonial lifeblood of the Spanish Americas. From archival shadows, it produces names, networks, and communities. And from the locked sepulcher of Catarina de San Juan, it offers not a new cipher as in Plancarte’s vision, but a multitude of epigraphs, attesting to the lives of other people—just as extraordinary and just as worthy of our attention, analysis, and empathy as Catarina—hundreds of years after they passed from earthly memory.
Through this history, it is my aim to offer three interventions: the first geographic, the second temporal, and the third methodological. First, I join a growing cohort of scholars invested in restoring the importance of the Pacific to the history of colonial Latin America, a field traditionally focused on the Atlantic.*° Rooted in the passage of Spanish galleons sailing between the Philippines and Mexico, the history of transpacific Asian mobility presents a strong case for adopting a Pacific orientation in the study of Latin America. Second, I make a chronological intervention in the long history of Asian migration to the Western Hemisphere. While the story of Asian migration conventionally begins in the nineteenth century, this book builds on a recent turn in the scholarship to the importance of the early modern period. The story that I tell unfolds between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To the history of Asians in the Americas, it offers a new inception, one in which mobility was free and forced.
Third, this book focuses methodologically on the racialization of mobile, non-Spanish communities in Hispanic colonies. Through the use of the word “chino / a”—and the numerous sociolegal repercussions of that designation—the colonial bureaucracy effectively collapsed the diverse ethnolinguistic groups that made the Pacific passage into a single, racialized collective. We have not yet completed the picture of how this legal form of difference making developed, or of how it impacted the day-to-day lives of Asians in the Hispanic World. Similarly, we have yet to uncover the full range of Asian responses to racialization. Many Asian peoples sought to differentiate themselves from “chino / a” stereotypes to achieve social mobility, while others engaged in multiethnic collaborations with Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities to mitigate the conditions of bondage. This book tracks the evolution of both colonial praxes of difference making and Asian peoples’ adaptations in the face of this adversity to reconstruct the human experience of long-distance mobility across the world’s largest ocean during the early modern period.
The Spanish Pacific
By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown had created the world’s first transpacific empire. The vessels that connected the Asian and American ports of this domain between 1565 and 1815 are widely known today as Manila galleons, though the name is somewhat misleading for several reasons. First, the port of Cavite, near Manila—not Manila itself—was the ships’ most frequent point of embarkation and disembarkation in Asia. Second, Spanish records from the period refer to the ships not as galeones de Manila (Manila galleons) but as naos de china (Asia ships). Third, the ships often varied greatly in size from small galliots to full-sized galleons, and during the last half century of the trade route, they consisted solely of mid-sized frigates. In total, this transpacific line comprised roughly 332 departures from Mexico to the Philippines and 379 from the Philippines to Mexico.”” The most consistent periods of transpacific navigation occurred from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, while significant disruptions transpired during the 1650s, 1670s, 1680s, 1740s, and 1760s. Of course, even during decades of relative stability, many ships never reached their destinations. Captaining a galleon on the formidable Pacific crossing certainly required a degree of hubris.
During the years of their operation, the Manila galleons constituted a critical lifeline from Spanish-held regions in the Americas to those in Asia. This enormous zone fell under the governance of Mexico City, the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In the eyes of one governor of the Philippines, Manila “is a fort or outpost of New Spain,” more a colonial Mexican territory than a Spanish one.” At the orders of New Spanish viceroys, Spaniards in the Philippines conducted diplomatic missions with nearby kingdoms, assigned missionaries to convert wary Indigenous populations, and launched violent incursions into neighboring regions with limited success. By the same token, New Spain “was as much an American entity as an Asian one.””
Over the past fifteen years, scholars in the new field of Spanish Pacific studies have argued that colonialism in the Americas cannot be fully understood without attending to the global nature of the sprawling Spanish empire.*° While this scholarship has begun to demonstrate the importance of the Pacific to the Hispanic World, the entanglements of Spanish imperial ambition, the fragility of colonial societies in Pacific littorals, and the experiences of free and enslaved Asian subjects remain imperfectly understood. The task at hand, then, is to delineate the human experience of the Spanish Pacific from the perspective of its most marginalized subjects.
It is now widely recognized that reaching Asia was the principal aim of early Iberian overseas voyages, beginning with Portuguese navigators who sought a route to India in the fifteenth century. The Genoese Christopher Columbus was no exception, though he sought to emulate Marco Polo by sailing across the Atlantic instead of traveling east from Europe. In 1493, he returned to Barcelona, claiming to have found a new route to Asia. Thereafter, generations of millenarian missionaries, imaginative officials, and covetous merchants continued the dream of reaching distant Asian kingdoms by sailing westward into the setting sun. As the American continents slowly gained recognition as distinct landmasses, they became an inconvenient obstruction separating the Iberian Peninsula from the silks and cloves of China and the Spice Islands.
The Pacific would similarly prove to be a significant barrier in the quest to reach Asia. Spaniards reluctantly acknowledged the ocean’s colossal size during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and consequently, most aspiring colonialists eventually reoriented their ambitions toward the Americas, their Indigenous populations, their natural resources, and the profitability of the transatlantic slave trade. Understandably, the Atlantic World has dominated oceanic historiographies of the Americas for these reasons. The Atlantic framework has produced a rich scholarly discourse on the multidirectional movement of people and ideas, the blending of borderlands between empires, and—more recently—the lives of African, Indigenous, and mixed peoples facing captivity or pursuing a tenuous freedom.*' Yet this framework struggles to accommodate the full global connectedness of the early modern world.”
An earlier generation of historians fostered a more expansive view of empire, though they were not without their limitations. The US seizure of the Philippines in 1898 ignited Anglophone academic interest in its new and distant territorial possessions. Perhaps the most prolific scholars of this wave of Pacific-facing research were Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson. From 1903 to 1909, they published a staggering fifty-five volumes of translated documents, manuscripts, and books pertaining to the Spanish period in the Philippines.*? Robertson was a librarian at the National Library of the Philippines in Manila from 1910 to 1915. On his return to the States, he helped create the Hispanic American Historical Review, and he served as the journal’s editor in chief from its founding in 1918 until his death in 1939.*4 Also in 1939, William Schurz published a groundbreaking monograph on the Manila galleons that drew attention to the Pacific as a generative force in early modern history, as well as the historical connections between the Americas and the Philippines.** This subject became more popular among historians in the latter half of the twentieth century, when world-system theorists began connecting the flows of silver from the Americas across both the Atlantic and the Pacific to the formation of a global economy and the rise of capitalism.*°
While the Pacific turn has its origins in historicizing long-distance economic circulation, it has recently come to encompass the movements of people, cultural exchanges, literary imaginaries, and institutional adaptations to transpacific trade.*” According to Christina Lee and Ricardo Padroén, Spanish Pacific studies conceives of a space that “is not precisely physical and certainly not natural” but that nonetheless “helped produce a social, cultural, and political space whose frontiers were ragged and whose borders were malleable.”** While limited in its reach, the Spanish Pacific created a new zone of global encounter and exchange that linked Asia and the Americas materially, demographically, and culturally. The transformative implications of these contacts for the early Americas have often been understated, but Déborah Oropeza makes a case for examining transpacific movement most explicitly: “if the Asian population that integrated into New Spanish society is not considered, then our vision of New Spain is incomplete.”*” This book is likewise grounded in the understanding that transpacific mobility is foundational to the history of the Spanish Americas.
The importance of the Pacific Ocean to the Hispanic World is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the 1601 map of the royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, “Descripcion de las Yndias ocidentales” (Description of the West Indies; figure 1.2).
Herrera y Tordesillas’s maps were the official cartographic representations of the Spanish empire at the beginning of the seventeenth century.” As Padron points out, the “Descripcion” reinforced the long-standing claim that all lands and waters between the two meridians designated by the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529) belonged to the Spanish Crown."' This enormous territorial assertion encompassed fully half of the globe and all the peoples residing therein. To represent this domain visually, the map put New Spain in the center, featured the Pacific prominently (although compressing its true size to extend the Zaragoza meridian on the left side of the map), and even marginalized the Iberian Peninsula (placing it in the upper right) to accommodate the colonial domain.” In the words of Padron, the map “make[s] central what was peripheral to everyone else.”
For Herrera y Tordesillas, the ships that made a Spanish presence possible in these far-flung possessions had allowed Spain to surpass the glory of the ancients.** In exemplifying this claim, he cited four key trade routes, the newest being the transpacific galleon line that connected Asia to the Americas. The addition of this route extended his conception of the “West Indies” from the Western Hemisphere all the way to Southeast and East Asia, since all Hispanic colonies were “western with respect to Castile.”” In this new imperial imaginary, New Spain became the crossroad of the Atlantic and Pacific, a nexus of grandeur, wealth, and new embarkations to ever more distant lands. In Herrera y Tordesillas’s conception, the nature of Spain’s early modern empire was unequivocally global.
Yet his projection reveals disturbingly little about the on-the-ground realities of this colonial world. In truth, Spanish presence was minimal outside of a handful of urban settlements. Spain’s outlandish claim to the entirety of the Pacific was actualized almost solely through the passage of a couple of ships sailing in either direction each year.** Strictly speaking, the Spanish presence in the Pacific during most of the colonial period existed within a narrow navigational corridor, a transpacific space “as shallow as the amount of seawater displaced by the weight of Iberian sailing vessels.”*’ In the words of Lee and Padron, “Spanish Pacific studies begins by recognizing that Spain’s presence in the Pacific was always slim, tenuous, and contested.”**
Despite the extremely limited scope of the Spanish encounter with the Pacific, it sufficed to facilitate “an unprecedented global mestizaje [intermingling and intermixture]” in the movement of thousands of free and enslaved Asians to the Americas for the first time.”” During their 250 years of operation, the Manila galleons confronted the most challenging seafaring conditions of their era to ferry merchandise and people between Cavite in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico. The survivors of this arduous journey were forever marked by it.
The people disembarking in Mexico’s torrid Pacific port had come from Gujarat to the southwest, Nagasaki to the northeast, and everywhere in between. Most sailors and free migrants were born on Luzon in the Philippines, while captives had often been ensnared throughout the Philippines or, like Catarina de San Juan, by Portuguese enslaving operations in the Indian Ocean World.*° Smaller concentrations came from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Japan, or China.
Though most remained in central Mexico after they disembarked in Acapulco, many dispersed further afield on long journeys to Central America, Peru, and even across the Atlantic to Spain. The pioneering scholarship of Edward Slack, Melba Falck Reyes, Héctor Palacios, Oropeza, Tatiana Seijas, and Rubén Carrillo Martin has established the study of these early Asians in Mexico as a distinct field of inquiry.*' Focusing primarily on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these authors have examined a wide range of questions pertaining to the scale of Asian transpacific movement, Asian integration within New Spanish society, Asian experiences under regimes of bondage, and the ways in which colonial institutions and officials adapted to the entry of this new population.
Despite these important advances, there is much left to uncover about the history of the earliest Asians who migrated or were displaced to the Spanish Americas. Fundamental questions remain unanswered: What propelled Asian mobility across the Pacific? How did the “chino / a” label emerge? How did Asians respond to incipient colonial forms of race making? Moreover, the full range of early modern Asian movement to and through the Americas has yet to be articulated. It extended far beyond Mexico, the geographic focal point for the current historiography. In addition, this movement continued into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which are regarded as periods when Asians largely disappeared from the archival record in colonial Mexico. How might these elongated trajectories reshape the emerging historical canon on Asians in colonial Mexico?
In answering these and other questions, this book takes an expansive archival approach to locate the extant shards of information on Asian subjects of Spanish empire. It draws on documents from archives and libraries across Spain, Mexico, the United States, and the Philippines. Often, the relevant fragments are few and far between: an examination of thousands of pages of accounting records at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, for example, turned up sparse notations on Asian galleon crews and port laborers in Cavite and Acapulco. These transactional memoranda— along with parish, matrimonial, criminal, licensing, manumission, inquisition, ordinance, and land-claim records—represent the canonical genres of social history for the colonial period. Where possible, as in the case of Catarina de San Juan, I paired these fragments with printed narratives, manuscript accounts, official correspondence, and private letters. As historians of transatlantic enslavement have long remarked, such a broad range is ultimately required to write the history of fundamentally marginalized colonial populations.”
In every instance, I endeavor to restore the human element to expansive yet vacuous imperial imaginaries, like that of Herrera y Tordesillas. In so doing, I rely heavily on the methodologies of global microhistory, which use the stories of highly mobile individuals to arrive at new metanarratives that challenge the Eurocentrism of traditional global histories.*’ In John-Paul Ghobrial’s formulation, global microhistory turns our attention to the border crossers, the links between movement and identity, and the space between belonging and unbelonging.”* The fragmentary nature of the Spanish Pacific archive lends itself to this approach, whereby minuscule details of individual lives—in the words of Matt Matsuda—“take on full meaning only when linked to other stories and places.”**? People embodied the Pacific connection to the Spanish Americas, and the varied ways in which they lived their lives defined the human realities of global empire in the early modern era.
Asians in the Americas
Traditionally, the historiography of Asian diasporic movement to the Americas has focused on the United States from the nineteenth to the twentyfirst centuries. These temporal and geographic biases are especially present in the field of Asian American studies, which has often overlooked hemispheric histories of Asians based in Latin America—to say nothing of those histories rooted in the early modern period. Early social histories of colonial Mexico did little to ameliorate this problem. They often sidelined the experiences of “chinos” due to the assumption that these people were demographically insignificant compared with Indigenous, mixed, and AfroMexican populations. And while the flourishing literature on early modern Asians in Latin America has done much to situate their experiences within the Spanish empire, this scholarship remains disconnected from studies focused on Asian diasporas more broadly. In fact, early modern Asian movement to and through the Americas is rarely described as diasporic.
Although inconsistent record keeping means that we will never know the precise number of Asians who crossed the Pacific and reached the early Americas, we now know that this movement was not insignificant in its scope. Estimates of the scale of the transpacific slave trade and of free Asian migration vary widely, however. On the lowest end, Oropeza has calculated that 7,375-20,000 free or enslaved Asian peoples arrived in the Spanish Americas during the colonial period. On the high end, Slack has conjectured that a minimum of 40,000—60,000 and a maximum of 100,000 Asians arrived during the same period.” Slack’s range is often dismissed as improbable, especially because the basis for his measurement is unclear. Yet while it may overestimate the number of Asians disembarking from the galleons in Mexico, I believe Slack’s range comes closest to a realistic count of Asians who boarded a galleon for the Americas (including those who died en route) and their descendants who were born there during the early modern period.”
I arrive at this conclusion in the following manner. Seijas has estimated that 8,100 enslaved Asians were shipped to Mexico from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. This estimate, which seems probable, is based on a calculation that the galleons sailing to Mexico during this period each held sixty enslaved Asians on average.** Her total also falls within Oropeza’s proposed range for Asian captives who arrived in Acapulco: from 3,776 (a minimum of 32 captives per ship on approximately 118 vessels) to 10,000 (if the same ships were filled to capacity).”
Of course, these calculations do not account for the free Asians who continued to cross the Pacific until the end of the galleon line in 1815. According to anecdotes of desertions by Asian sailors, central Mexican notarial documents, and parish records from the midcolonial period, the number of free Asian migrants undoubtedly exceeded the number of enslaved Asians, especially since the transpacific slave trade in Asian captives had largely ended by the final decades of the seventeenth century. For the combined number of free and enslaved Asians entering Mexico before 1815, Carrillo Martin and Oropeza agree on an upper estimate of 20,000.
At the same time, I believe that an accurate account of the early modern Asian mobility to and through the Americas requires us to consider a few additional factors. Of chief importance are the thousands of itinerant Asian sailors (often at least a hundred per year) who disembarked in Acapulco or elsewhere along the coast and then sailed back to the Philippines at the end of the trade season. Also significant are the thousands of Asians who perished during the Pacific crossing due to storms, the bitter cold, exposure, shipwreck, violent punishment, contagion, and malnourishment. Furthermore, an untold number of Asians and their descendants were born in the Americas over half a dozen or more generations, and many of them are untraceable in colonial documents because they were of mixed heritage. Finally, several ships sailed directly to Peru during the sixteenth century and to San Blas, Mexico, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and including their crews yields a larger total. According to this view, Slack’s numbers might not be unreasonable if reframed as estimates for the total number of Asians who boarded galleons for the Americas and their descendants who were born there.
Such large estimates also prompt a new question: did these populations constitute early modern Asian diasporas to the Americas? Though diaspora can be used informally to refer to any dispersion or migration, the term has at least three formal characteristics: dispersal to two or more sites, a homeland consciousness, and the maintenance of a sociocultural identity distinct from that of the receiving community.® Invoking the diaspora studies framework allows us to shift our perspective from the top-down model of the Herrera y Tordesillas map to the bottom-up model of the life of Catarina de San Juan.”
However, the question presents a fundamental problem. If a migratory community must exhibit a documentable connection to a homeland (real or imagined) and, often, a desire to return to be considered diasporic, then it is nearly impossible to verify whether most marginalized populations of the early modern period qualify as diasporic. Colonial archives hold only traces of evidence that meets these requirements because their records rarely foreground non-European voices and never do so in an unmediated manner.” For enslaved people, the problem deepens.” Captives could almost never record a desire to return to their life before captivity, and most appear in the archive solely as names in notarial records, property in wills, or criminals in court cases.
Despite these limitations, there are some examples of diasporic activity among the first Asians in the Americas. The clearest cases often correspond to specific trades and geographies in which larger ethnolinguistic concentrations could be found, especially within the jurisdictions of today’s Mexican states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Colima, and Jalisco. For example, when Domingo de Villalobos, a Kapampangan Philippine trader of Michoacan, fell sick, he stayed in the home of another Kapampangan man named Alonso Gutiérrez, his friend and business associate. As a gesture of thanks, Villalobos gave a petticoat from the Philippine region of Pampanga to Gutiérrez’s Indigenous wife, dofia Mariana. It was an object of both material and sentimental value to both Villalobos and Gutiérrez from a homeland neither would see again. Before he succumbed to disease in 1618, Villalobos willed his possessions to his mother, Monica Binangan, who still lived in the Philippines, and he made Gutiérrez his executor.® Based on the importance of his friendship with a fellow Kapampangan man in Mexico and the enduring connection to his home and mother, Villalobos’s experience was diasporic.
Outside of a few cases of intra-ethnic solidarity like this, the broader question of communal identity is more difficult to answer. Although social historians of Mexico for a long time assumed that the “chinos” of Mexico were either only Chinese (an erroneous translation of “chino” in the colonial Mexican context) or Indigenous people of the Philippines (a misleading assumption), we now know that people categorized as “chino / a” were very diverse in terms of ethnicity, language, and social condition.” This variation means that there was little intrinsic to this population that made it a coherent community.® Instead, both the extreme difficulties of the Pacific crossing and colonial racial classification schemes generated new commonalities and social intersections where none or few had existed previously. Many people met in the commercial entrepét of Manila and remembered the names of the ships that had borne them across the Pacific, as well as the people they had known on board.
After their arrival in Acapulco, most Asian subjects received the designation “chino / a.” Though Spaniards on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Philippines clearly and consistently used the word to mean Chinese from China, in Mexico the label could apply to anyone perceived as originating from the lands across the Pacific—that is, coastal Asia. This linguistic invention was a uniquely Mexican orientalism that subsumed a population of enormous diversity into a new social identification system with adverse legal implications. It was the first time in the history of the Americas that Asian peoples were categorically racialized as belonging to a single group. Like the all-encompassing “indio / a” label that applied to Indigenous subjects of the crown from the Americas to Asia, becoming “chino / a’—the process that I term chino-genesis—similarly “speaks to the lack of Spanish interest in distinguishing the ethnic diversity of subject peoples.” There was no “affectionate” use of the term, despite Carridn’s claim that benevolent poblanos (people from Puebla) welcomed Catarina de San Juan as a “china.”
While the “chino / a” label formally racialized diverse ethnolinguistic Asian communities as an undifferentiated monolith, Asian people also learned to deploy the category at times to their own benefit. For example, a man named Juan Alonso appeared before the royal court in Mexico City in 1591 and argued successfully that restrictions against “indios” riding horseback should not apply to him, since he was a “chino.”® In other cases, “chinos” found new commonalities through their mutual displacement and frequently formed intimate bonds with other “chinos,” even those belonging to different ethnolinguistic groups.” They also founded confraternities that offered mutual assistance and selected each other as godparents for their children.” In specific circumstances, then, being “chino / a” served as a “strategic essentialism,” an expedient form of identity making in which established stereotypes are manipulated for the sake of both situational gain and broad solidarity among multiple groups.” “Chino / a” was a fluid category, one that indicated both foreignness and new articulations of identity and subjecthood.
Yet as Dana Murillo has observed, “social change or acculturation does not equal cultural annihilation.”’”” The extant documentation suggests that the first Asians in the Americas often retained a distinct sense of their identities, even as they received baptism, married across ethnolinguistic lines, emphasized their assimilation to Hispanic mores, conversed in Spanish and Nahuatl, and acculturated into existing communities of other castas. Thus a more flexible definition of diaspora is needed—one that is attentive to the limitations of colonial archives, the survival strategies of marginalized subjects, and the contingencies of early modern empire.
As scholars of diaspora studies have long noted, no “ideal type” of diaspora has ever existed.”’ In studying the great exodus of Chinese out of their homeland after World War II, Dominic Yang argues that the multifaceted nature of overseas movement—including the impossibility of return— need not preclude the existence of “diasporic” characteristics related to community formation, social integration, and memories of a homeland.” Yang’s intervention is also relevant to the early modern context and its attendant archival limitations. Communal cohesion occurred both within and in opposition to the formal requirements of diaspora.
David Ruderman’s reflection on the early modern period is particularly useful here. He defines the era “on the basis of intense communication and exposure to other groups and communities,” so that “the historian might be better able to speak about a common cultural experience while recognizing the perpetuation of distinct regional and local identities.”” This book incorporates both global synthesis and localism into the framework of mobility, which it treats as a broad construction that encompasses both assimilation and cultural continuity, voluntary and involuntary movement, permanent settlement and transience, and geographic dispersion and change over time. In tracking Asian mobility, rather than movement bound by social condition or geography, this book establishes a new chronology for Asian diasporic history. It situates the first Asians in the Americas as the earliest iteration of the more recent and better-known Asian migrations to the Western Hemisphere that began in the nineteenth century and that still define the commencement of Asian diasporic history.
Colonial Race Thinking
Spaniards understood Asians in the Hispanic World through comparative ethnography, based on Asians’ degree of perceived similarity to or difference from preexisting archetypes. This disposition toward categorization and stereotyping indicates that Asian subjects, like other marginalized peoples, lived in a deeply race-conscious colonial world. Understanding how these ethnographic discourses operated and how non-Spaniards negotiated and responded to them is essential in reconstructing Asian experiences in the imperial domain. And yet, this approach remains contested in colonial Latin American historiography. In the words of Stuart Schwartz, “There may be no topic in early Latin American history that has generated more interest and debate than the issue of race and racial identity.””°
While many researchers working in adjacent fields (such as Atlantic World history) have found great use for methodologies of racial formation, the efficacy of race as a category in colonial Latin America continues to generate debate and disagreement.”
Many of those who consider race anachronistic to the early modern period in Latin America have argued that early modern humoral theory and the fluidity of castas, for example, defy the rigidity of modern racialization. Rebecca Earle best articulates this argument. In an effective study on how food and climate affected perceptions of the body, she maintains that the early modern reception of Galenic philosophy in Spain enabled flexible thinking about inherent natures. Modern ideas of race, she argues, are therefore inappropriate because “Spaniards in the new world constructed lasting social hierarchies that served the interests of colonial rule without resorting to the idea that the bodies of the colonisers and the colonised were incommensurately different.””*
Similarly, Maria Eugenia Chaves concludes that early modern Spaniards marked difference in the colonial world by deploying a discourse that went beyond the frame of race making: “It seems to me that applying a conceptual criterion such as that of ‘race,’ for the sake of a coherent explanation . . . reduces the heterogeneity and dispersion of the colonial enunciative regimes to an order which is fundamentally foreign to them.””’ For Chaves, as for Earle, the term race treats as rigid what were actually fluid modes of perceiving and categorizing difference in the Hispanic World.
These apparent incompatibilities between early modern and modern conceptions of difference have been enormously influential in the field and, at the very least, have motivated historians to use extreme caution in discussing the applicability of race to colonial Latin America. For example, Robert Schwaller has declared that he will not use race to refer to early colonial Mexico “except in order to draw specific parallels with later concepts and beliefs”—although at the same time he notes that early modern Spaniards encoded stereotypes in language that “served to naturalize difference and entrench prejudice in racial ways.”*° His seeming ambivalence about the word reflects these broader tensions in the field.
What these claims about the inapplicability of race to early modern history have in common is an interpretation of race as a modern, biological determinant concerned primarily with hereditary descent and phenotyp- ical traits. Francisco Bethencourt has described this Enlightenment-era philosophical position as the “theory of race,” a codified, scientific system that relied on natural divides in humanity to justify discriminatory action.*! Reacting to definitions of this kind, Earle reasons that “the early modern Hispanic world provides little evidence for the existence of racial thinking.” ** This tendency to use Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment racial ideologies as foils to dismiss early modern operations of race is especially widespread in the field of colonial Latin American history.
However, as any ethnic studies scholar can affirm, modern conceptions of race are rarely immutable and fixed.*’ David Nirenberg expresses this position very clearly: “We premodernists often rely on the questionable axiom that modern racial theories depend upon evolutionary biology and genetics, in order to leap to the demonstrably false conclusion that there exists a truly biological modern racism against which earlier forms of discrimination can be measured and judged innocent.”* Destabilizing these basic assumptions about racial thought and its historical applications allows us to arrive at more nuanced and elastic understandings of race making in the early modern world.
Geraldine Heng’s theorization of premodern racial thought is the natural step forward from Nirenberg’s contention. Heng has constructed a powerful methodological tool for understanding how race functions in different times and places. She has argued that race demarcates “human beings through differences . . . that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.” In this formulation, race need not be rooted in biological or even physical markers: it can also refer to culture and religion, as well as intersect with class, gender, and sexuality. She continues, “Race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment.” These hierarchies may be fluid, contingent, and contested, but their existence is key. She concludes, “My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content.”* According to these criteria, perceptions of difference in colonial Latin America—and, indeed, in the early modern world—dqualify as “race thinking” or “racial formation” in countless forms.
Following Heng’s framework, I argue that the racialization of diverse Asian ethnolinguistic groups into undifferentiated “chinos” in the Spanish Americas was dependent on the Spanish perception of Asian difference from the model Hispanic and Catholic subject. As in Heng’s definition, these differences were “fundamental,” although some individuals found inventive ways to contest their legal implications in colonial courts. Furthermore, as colonial subjects, Asians were arranged in hierarchies of power managed by colonial institutions and influential Spaniards who selectively favored some phenotypical, social, linguistic, religious, sexual, and gendered traits over others. These hierarchies produced “differential treatment” and profoundly shaped the lived experiences of free and enslaved Asians in colonial societies.
In the Hispanic World, race thinking colloquially and institutionally positioned wealthy, white Spanish Catholic male lives above all others. Individuals with these markers had never been and never would be legally vulnerable to colonial regimes of bondage in the Americas.*” There could never be a so-called just war or a colonial war of extermination against them.** Requirements of probanzas de limpieza de sangre (proofs of blood purity [needed for travel, advancement to nobility, and proving innocence before the Inquisition]) did not threaten them, since they were of documentable, old Christian stock (and even considered themselves the descendants of the Biblical Tubal, the grandson of Noah). They did not suffer from any of the exclusionary economic or social restrictions that were fundamental to the ordering of colonial society. According to Antonio Feros, “(The idea of Spain] existed primarily and fundamentally not in the laws or institutions or state but in its people—the descendants of the original inhabitants of Hispania.”*’ These notions of a Spain and a Spanish people were themselves racial imaginaries.
The existence of a privileged class of wealthy, white Spanish Catholics clearly indicates that race thinking structured and ordered the fundamental operations of colonial society, even if the process of determining who could be defined as belonging to that class was sometimes imprecise and variable. Indeed, there is a growing cohort of scholars of colonial Latin America who agree and study the relations of power between colonial groups through the analytical framework of race. Jorge Cafiizares-Esguerra argues that the sometimes nebulous distinctions among Spaniards, Indigenous peoples, and Black people began to rigidify in the late sixteenth century when American-born Spaniards postulated “clear-cut racial distinctions and [began] to construct separate bodies for Indians and Creoles.””° Any deviation from the Hispanic standard marked an individual or community as other and vulnerable to adverse perceptions and laws, often driven by fear of un-Hispanic activity, conspiracy, violence, and even rebellion. Miguel Valerio describes this discourse of fear and its repercussions (including confinement, brutal labor regimes, torture, and executions) as constituting a veritable “anti-Black culture” in colonial Mexico during the early seventeenth century.”' Ann Twinam summarizes this point well: “Spanish America . . . was universalist and racist in its assignation of blackness as an inferior category justifying discrimination. It was constructionist in that it recognized variable statuses between white and black and brown and Spanish and African and Native and permitted movement among categories.”°* Fluidity, then, does not discount the operations of race.
Movement between racialized categories required assimilation, which consisted of undergoing holy baptism, adopting a Spanish name, celebrating Catholic holidays, entering a monogamous and heterosexual Catholic marriage, following Catholic cultural and sexual prohibitions, wearing Spanish clothes, becoming ladino / a (Spanish-speaking), and instructing one’s children in the tenets of the Catholic faith. Integration necessitated a public excision of most non-Hispanic and non-Catholic cultural signs, which often entailed a renunciation of a pre-Hispanic and preChristian past and heritage. Rather than challenging the applicability of race, this incorporationist model of governance illuminated and accentuated the traits that could mark colonized populations as other.
However, this growing scholarship on race in the Spanish empire has yet to incorporate the Pacific or “chinos” into its analytical frame. Juan de Medina, an Augustinian missionary writing in Manila in 1630, provides one of the clearest examples of the racial implications of incorporationist imperial thinking:
and if these very bad-tempered people [Zambales and Chinese] were settled and tied down with laws and civilization, they would come in time to lose their natural arrogance and gain different customs; because if animals incapable of reason are domesticated with treatment and lose their strength, men capable of reason will do much better. We have an example in the Blacks [negros], that being a people that seem the scum of the earth, so untamed [bozales] when they are brought, that even though they seem greater beasts than they really are, in the end, in dealing with civilized people, they come to learn the comportment of men; because how much better did the Indigenous peoples [indios] of these islands [the Philippines] do in whom much ingenuity has been discovered for all that has been taught
them?”?
According to Medina, if Spaniards could domesticate animals, then they could assimilate Black people, and if they could Hispanicize Black people, then the Indigenous Zambales of the Philippines and the Chinese could be brought into the fold as well. Through his comparison of racial others to animals, Medina delivered an optimistic assessment of the colonial mission. These peoples could change their inherent natures through contacts and dealings with “civilized people” —that is, Spaniards. Racial discourse, therefore, developed not in isolation but relationally.”*
Similarly, the scholarship on the “chinos” of New Spain has yet to seriously consider the implications of early modern racialization for the lives of Asian subjects. While this important body of work has unpacked the rhetoric that justified Asian enslavement and studied the categorical exclusions of casta society, it has not considered these developments in the context of race or engaged with the idea that race making was itself a historical process that drove overseas movement and determined the lived experience of transpacific mobility. To examine the first Asians in the Americas through the lens of race thinking is to study, for the first time, how the confluences of ethnographic discourse, colonial inclusion (or lack thereof), Spanish fears of multiethnic coalitions, the threat of enslavement, and the liminality of social advancement came to structure social and economic possibilities for Asian peoples. The processes by which Asians became visible, stereotyped, and subordinated in Spanish colonial societies exemplify how forms of racialization both emerged and came to justify systemic discriminatory action. From the tactics of ethnic extermination used in Manila to the wholesale bans on “chino” weapon bearing in Mexico, the ramifications of these discourses cannot be understated. Difference was often inscribed spatially as well. Whether confined to an urban ghetto or a textile mill (obraje), Asians experienced the genealogies of spatial control and segregation meant to encourage conversion and orderly behavior in the colonies.” As “chinos” within the casta system, Asians had become yet another homogenized mass of potentially rebellious others in need of oversight and control. Many “chinos” sought to contest this negative characterization by creating new nodes of collaboration across ethnic lines or by asking the colonial administration for specific privileges based on merit and service.
As Kris Manjapra reminds us, “Racialization is as much about the fact of survival and vital reclamations among the colonized as it is about the social violence inflicted by colonizers.”°° Like other colonial subjects, Asians consistently negotiated their second-class statuses for individual and, occasionally, mutual benefit. Challenging the colonial order took many forms and could range from attempts at social advancement to outright resistance to enslavement. These tensions—sometimes coherent, sometimes contradictory—are at the heart of this history. Uncovering them elucidates the many structural and individual challenges that Asians faced in the Hispanic World and how they sought to resolve them.
The Structure of This Book
By the time the Hapsburgian Cross of Burgundy first appeared off Philippine shores in 1521, Asian places and peoples had already enraptured European imaginations for hundreds of years.” The lures of spice and silk led Iberians to take up the cross and the sword to invade those distant lands for commercial gain. To access those gateways to wealth and opulence, Spaniards invaded the Philippine Islands. The islands possessed few resources that inspired mercantile interest, but they represented a crucial crossroad that linked Spanish American metropoles to Asian markets. As Spaniards accumulated years of experience in the Philippines and neighboring regions, officials and missionaries struggled to decipher the enormous social and cultural complexities of the peoples they encountered. They tried to resolve their confrontation with unfathomable difference by imposing their own standards and expectations of civilized, Hispanic behavior on Indigenous and foreign populations.”* Yet these incorporationist ideals failed in the Philippines, where the minimal Spanish population—even in the heart of Manila—deployed exclusionary and often violent tactics as a means to manage non-Spanish populations resisting assimilation.
Chapter 1 opens with the climax of these tensions in Manila—the Chinese uprising of 1603, the suppression of which was among the most violent episodes of its era. Thousands of Chinese residents in Manila, militants and bystanders alike, fell to the blades of the colonial coalition army composed of Spanish, Japanese, Tagalog, and Kapampangan warriors. These massacres decisively recalibrated the possibilities of colonial collaboration, regimes of labor and bondage, and the frequency of Spanish flight from the city in ways that increased the already growing numbers of free and enslaved Asians sailing to the Americas. The year 1603 was a watershed moment of racially motivated violence that substantively influenced the emergence of one of the most important patterns of long-distance migration and displacement in the early modern world. Beginning with this flash point, the book proceeds geographically, tracing the Pacific, Western Hemispheric, and Atlantic trajectories of Asian subjects like roots sprouting from a blood-soaked seed.
As Asian sailors, criados (servants), enslaved people, and free travelers boarded the Manila galleons for Mexico, they faced a grueling journey: the Pacific passage. Chapter 2 examines the repercussions of this jarring dislocation. Asians, irrespective of ethnicity, most often occupied the lowest rung of the shipboard hierarchy as grumetes (cabin boys). Under horrific conditions, they performed menial tasks that were essential for the survival of everyone on board. Shipboard labor structures, along with the omnipresence of maritime religious rituals, forced Asians of all ethnicities into close proximity and mutual dependency. It was on board the galleons, I argue, that the process of gathering disparate ethnic groups under a single socioracial category began. When the voyage’s survivors arrived in Acapulco, most of them were legally classified as “chino / a,” again regardless of their ethnolinguistic identity. As “chinos,” they entered the sistema de castas (caste system), becoming vulnerable to enslavement, the Inquisition, a wide range of socioeconomic restrictions, and negative stereotypes that framed them as disloyal and criminal.
As they trudged from the Pacific coast to the highlands of central Mexico, the newly christened “chinos” (sometimes called “indios chinos”) often tried to distance themselves from the legal penalties associated with these labels. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the strategies whereby both free and enslaved “chinos” negotiated the repercussions of their legal statuses. Chapter 3 argues that free “chinos” in central Mexico tried to circumvent negative social perceptions and racialized laws by submitting petitions for exceptional treatment. Through petitions for licenses to trade and possess weapons, free “chinos” presented the Real Audiencia (Royal Court) of Mexico City with evidence of Hispanic and Catholic assimilation. If awarded, the licenses opened new possibilities for social mobility. However, they did little to curtail acts of discrimination by local magistrates and petty officials who consistently disregarded and negated privileges conferred to individual “chinos.”
While privileged “chinos” struggled for recognition through formal channels, the enslaved had to find alternative means of negotiating and contesting the conditions of their bondage. Though the field of Afro-Asian studies in Latin America has yet to consider the early modern period, Chapter 4 contends that the history of enslavement in colonial Mexico marks the beginning of Afro-Asian convergence in the Western Hemisphere. During this period, “chinos” responded to the brutalities of enslavement specifically by collaborating with other enslaved populations. In conjunction with Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, enslaved Asians ran away, blasphemed to protest unjust treatment, and formed hybrid spiritualities that went far beyond the precepts of Catholic dogma. They were neither passive nor voiceless subjects.
Although most of the first Asians in the Americas remained in central Mexico, some individuals traveled much farther through the empire: reaching the present-day borders of Oregon to the north and the Andes to the south, and even going across the Atlantic to the Iberian Peninsula. Chapter 5 follows their trajectories, which were hemispheric and global in ways many other early modern mobilities were not. As distance from New Spain increased, so too did the instability of central Mexican labels, legal precedents, and stereotypes. In South America and on the Iberian Peninsula, the categorization of Asians as “chinos” was less consistent, and Asian peoples found themselves better able to use other categories for social and legal expediency. In Lima, for example, many Asians were counted among the city’s Indigenous population in a tribute register from 1613-1614. Similarly, in Seville, Asians frequently appealed as Indigenous subjects for charity that would allow them to return to Asia by crossing first the Atlantic and then the Pacific. In these distant locales, Asian populations were also generally much smaller than in Mexico—which presented unique challenges for these subjects, who sometimes lamented their social and cultural isolation. Given these local distinctions, we cannot look to Mexico alone to build a complete picture of Asian experience in the Spanish Americas or in Spain.
Over time, the demographic composition of Asian populations in the Americas changed significantly. The greatest shift occurred after 1672, when Queen Regent Mariana of Austria signed an emancipation order into law that freed all “chinos.” In Chapter 6, the book takes a temporal turn to the aftermath of emancipation. A prevailing thesis in the historiography suggests that Asians disappeared from Mexico in the eighteenth century, given that the “chinos” of the so-called casta paintings produced in this period are Afro-Indigenous and not Asian. However, I argue that Asian people not only remained visible in Mexico until the end of the colonial period but also adapted to shifts in coastal economic development and new trade routes that eventually undermined the primacy of the Manila galleons. Despite lower rates of migration, Asians continued coming to and going from Acapulco and other Pacific ports until the Mexican Wars of Independence (1810-1821). The last Asian participation in the galleon trade coincided with the early stirrings of Asian labor conscription in 1806 and the modern indenture of East and South Asians in the Western Hemisphere. The interimperial competition that brought about the end of the Manila galleons simultaneously enabled the emergence of these modern migratory trajectories.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Asians arriving in the Americas defined a new chronology that predates the canonical histories of Asians in the Western Hemisphere more broadly. The Pacific World and Asian mobility were fundamental to daily life in colonial Mexico and beyond. These spheres were intricately connected politically, economically, and socially. People made this global colonial world cohere, and through the ways they chose to live their lives, they created new realities, imaginaries, and identities. These stories are immediately relevant to the founding of an Asian America, and incorporating them into its study requires a significant recalibration of Asian American origins and their connections to Latin American history.
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