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The First Asians in the Americas

A Transpacific History
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2023

About this book

“Essential reading.” —Erika Lee, author of The Making of Asian America

“A broadly thought-provoking book.” —Asian Review of Books

“Fascinating…[this book] indicates new avenues of research…[and] stands as a bellwether for shifting trajectories of analysis that invite micro-historical follow-up.” —H-Net Reviews

“[This book] offers an invaluable perspective… [it] not only intellectually satisfies the reader with a necessary and innovative view . . . but also makes us want to learn more about this essential and still insufficiently explored topic...will become a fundamental pillar within the discipline.” —Colonial Latin American Review

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons monopolized trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians made the treacherous transpacific journey each year.

Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the Americas, shedding new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, diverse ethnolinguistic populations officially became “chinos,” racialized as members of a single caste under colonial control. Luis shows how Asians resisted legal strictures, forging new connections across ethnic groups and continually adapting to adverse conditions.

Detailing an important era in the construction of race, The First Asians in the Americas vividly unfolds what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire and reveals the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history.

Reviews

Masterful…not only comprehensive and groundbreaking; it is a scintillating read. I couldn’t recommend this monograph more…a master class in reading the colonial archives against the grain.
-- Ernest Rafael Hartwell Sixteenth Century Journal

This book is a brilliant exercise of global microhistory and essential reading for anyone hoping to get a full picture of colonial Spanish America, Asian diaspora studies, or protoglobalization. The author never ceases to show empathy toward the people whose history he is carefully reconstructing from widely scattered fragments of evidence. Luis successfully conveys an emotional underpinning to the experience of the first Asians in the Americas in a way that any historian can appreciate and that, importantly, undergraduate and graduate history students should constantly be exposed to.
-- Rubén Carillo Martín Hispanic American Historical Review

A broadly thought-provoking book. …Although the modern Western use of ‘Asian’ is perhaps better (and arguably more benign) than the colonial use of ‘chino’ as an identifier, it suffers from much the same problem of ‘collapsing’ various ‘diverse ethnolinguistic groups’ to the benefit of some, perhaps, but the detriment of others. Luis’s book is a salutary reminder that all this started long ago.
-- Peter Gordon Asian Review of Books

Challenges [the] dominant framework to offer the most comprehensive analysis to date about the transnational migrations of approximately one hundred thousand Asians who traveled to the Americas from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth century…essential reading for scholars of Asians
in the Americas, Afro-Asian studies, and colonial Latin American history.


-- Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera American Historical Review

Fascinating…While expertly summarizing and engaging existing historical studies, the author also indicates new avenues of research…[This] book thus stands as a bellwether for shifting trajectories of analysis that invite micro-historical follow-up.
-- Rainer Buschmann H-Net Reviews

Drawing upon an impressive array of sources spanning two oceans, three centuries, and four countries, Diego Javier Luis examines the first sustained movement of Asians to the Americas aboard Baroque Era Spanish trading ships sailing from the Philippines to Mexico…With its beautiful prose, The First Asians in the Americas reminds us that history—at its best—functions as an exchange of past and present, in which ‘the archival records of peoples long gone come alive as they lift off from tattered pages and alight in our minds’.
-- Alexander Jin Pacific Historical Review

Through rigorous archival use, historical and cultural analysis, and an approach through critical race theory, [this book] offers an invaluable perspective… [it] not only intellectually satisfies the reader with a necessary and innovative view on these issues but also makes us want to learn more about this essential and still insufficiently explored topic...will become a fundamental pillar within the discipline.
-- Javier Zapata Clavería Colonial Latin American Review

A monumental work of scholarship…Devoted to tracking the experiences and transformations of Asians in the Americas, the book sheds much needed light on a topic that has until relatively recently remained one of the dark spots of global history.
-- Juan José Rivas Moreno Southeast Asian Studies

Diego Javier Luis has expanded our understanding of Asian transpacific migration by studying the lives of both the free and the enslaved, focusing on the processes by which Asians were racialized…will be of interest to any scholar interested in how transoceanic spaces of movement and encounter have worked historically, and how they have helped shape subaltern lives.
-- Ricardo Padrón International Journal of Maritime History

Offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of the lived experiences of Asians who crossed the Pacific in the early modern period…enlightening and thought-provoking.
-- Kaori Mizukami International Quarterly for Asian Studies

Brilliantly demonstrates that the experiences of Asian peoples in the Americas are, plain and simple, part of history…calls us to expand the US-centric model of Asian American studies, while boldly urging us to go beyond the earliest iterations of the ‘model minority’.
-- Paula C. Park Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

The First Asians in the Americas is essential reading for anybody interested in the histories of global migration, race, and colonization in the Americas. Through painstaking archival research in Spain, Mexico, the United States, and the Philippines, Diego Javier Luis offers a bold reconceptualization of Asian migration to the Americas and restores heretofore little-known people and communities to their rightful places in history.
-- Erika Lee, author of The Making of Asian America: A History

No clue is too small for this modern-day detective-historian. Diego Javier Luis has pieced together the most comprehensive and fascinating history to date of Asians in colonial Mexico.
-- Andrés Reséndez, author of Conquering the Pacific

A groundbreaking study of Asian diasporic experiences in the Spanish Empire. The decks of the Manila galleons, the coastal Acapulco-to-Colima corridor, and much of Pacific Mexico emerge here as spaces of Asian adaptability and social, cultural, and linguistic exchanges. Through the lens of global microhistory, Luis recovers and humanizes the history of colonial ‘chino’ populations in all their complexity.
-- Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, author of Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico

Diego Javier Luis has given us the first of its kind: a study of the transpacific Asian migration to the Americas under Spanish imperial rule. This book radically revolutionizes our understanding of race-making and mestizaje in the Spanish Americas and the Spanish transpacific.
-- Christina H. Lee, author of Saints of Resistance

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    A Note on Terminology

    ix
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    Timeline

    xi
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    Introduction

    1
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    1 The Fragile Convivencia of Colonial Manila

    29
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    2 The Pacific Passage

    68
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    3 Merchants and Gunslingers

    107
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    4 Contesting Enslavement in New Spain

    140
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    5 Trajectories beyond Central Mexico

    167
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    6 The Elusive Eighteenth Century

    199
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    Conclusion

    231
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    Appendix: The 1751 Review of the Crew of La Santísima Trinidad y Nuestra Señora del Buen Fin

    239
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    Notes

    257
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    Selected Bibliography

    327
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    Acknowledgments

    335
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    Index

    341
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 23, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9780674294950
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674294950
eBook ISBN: 9780674294950
Keywords for this book
slavery; enslavement; Peru; Central; North; South; immigration; refugee; racial formation; mestizaje; gender; violence; genocide; assimilation; conversion; Catholicism; resistance; Portuguese; merchants; Guadalajara; Chinese; Catarina de San Juan
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