Colonial Latin Asia? The case for incorporating the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific into colonial Latin American studies

Oxford University hosted a conference last year that brought together a small group of scholars to discuss Iberian Asia; to take stock of recent work and to ponder the future directions of research exploring the Spanish and Portuguese ‘presence’ in this world region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is striking about this meeting is that it centered on the question of whether an Iberian Asia ever existed. The organizers asked, ‘Can we conceive of an Iberian Asia just as some historians have recently done for the Iberian Atlantic?’ They shunned the term ‘colonial’ and spoke of ‘Iberian societies’ rather than Iberian colonies.¹

A reluctance to categorize Asia’s littorals zones, islands, seas, and peoples as colonized, or at least colonized by Spain and Portugal, is deeply rooted in a long and vibrant postcolonial intellectual tradition. The historiography of the Philippines frames the archipelago as a frontier zone that a weak Spain never succeeded in conquering. In the 1970s and 1980s, Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto’s (1979) and Vicente Rafael’s (1988) respective monographs recovered Indigenous Filipino resistance to Spanish colonialism, from mass armed revolts against governments and the powerful friars, to those rebellions more subtly embedded in and enacted through language and translation. William Henry Scott (1974) and James C. Scott (2009) documented the Spanish conquistadors’ and their Indigenous allies’ futile efforts to dominate the Philippines’ mountainous high-altitude zones. Archeological studies of the cordillera’s rice terraces have turned up more proof that multiethnic cimarrones fled the lowlands for the mountains to evade colonial rule, adding layers of evidence to what historians have mined from the empire’s paper archives (Acabado et al. 2019). More recently, John D. Blanco (2021) argued that Spain also failed to conquer the Philippines lowlands. Painting a picture of conflict rather than control, he emphasized how active missions were zones of protracted war. For Blanco, Spanish authority was weak even in Manila, the capital of Spain’s Asian empire, and a city that was more Chinese than Iberian. He rejects Hispanization as a historical phenomenon, and calls for ‘reorienting world history around the Sinicization of the Philippines and the Pacific [… and] Spain and Europe’s insertion and assimilation into a Sinocentric world economy.’

Such skepticism surrounding Iberian colonial rule in Asia and the Pacific is a productive place to think about the global Spanish empire and its legacies. Colonial Latin American studies recognizes the fragility of empire, but primarily in borderlands regions, and less often in its centers, in urban settings. Colonial Latin Americanists willing to wade into the literature and current debates about Iberian Asia might be prompted to question their presumptions of empire. What if our starting point was the posing of the question, what was Spanish or Portuguese about America? Might it enable us to see the Americas as more Indigenous, more Black, or more Asian than Latin? Thinking critically about the histories of Iberian Asia and Iberian America in connected and comparative perspective can only enrich our field.

And yet the usefulness of this skepticism has its limits. This provocation pushes back against the dismissal of Iberian empires in Asian and Pacific histories. While recognizing that there were many, overlapping Pacific worlds of which the Spanish Pacific was just one, I advocate for thinking and writing Iberian empires back into the histories of the Philippines, maritime Asia, and the Pacific world, and for bringing these sites in to the study of a vast colonial Latin America.²

Regardless of whether you endorse it or not, the Pacific turn in colonial Latin American studies is well under way. The field is expanding to include the Pacific Ocean and Spain’s Pacific island colonies; the Marianas, the Carolinas, the Philippines, and Taiwan. This Pacific turn is not entirely new. William Lytle Schurz’s The Manila galleon, first published in 1939, laid the foundations for sustained interest in the Spanish galleon trade that linked Acapulco and Manila ‘like an umbilical cord’ in the long seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its profound impact on material culture on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.³ The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of many studies of the political economy of Spain’s Asian empire, particularly in Spanish.⁴ The sea change in English-language scholarship on the Spanish Pacific occurred in the 2010s. Several monographs published that decade examined early modern transpacific lives, recovering the biographies of sailors, soldiers, slaves, pirates, missionaries, and other migrants who traveled across the ocean through Spain’s imperial networks. These were men and women whose lives were shaped by the Spanish conquest of the Pacific, and who contributed—willingly or reluctantly—to the formation of a Spanish Pacific world.⁵ Whereas an earlier generation of scholars of the Philippines graduated from big US Southeast Asian history and anthropology programs like Cornell’s, this new batch were trained as historians of Latin America or early modern Spain, or in Spanish literary and cultural studies programs. This meant that they were more engaged with the scholarship and debates in colonial Latin American studies, and drew on its archives and methodologies to present new insight into the Spanish Pacific. Of course, this journal has a finger on the pulse of the field. In the past five years, CLAR has published several articles exploring the history and culture of the early modern Philippines, covering Indigenous Filipino Tagalog poets who were devoted subjects of the Spanish Crown, Hispano-Philippine ivories, and miracles and missionaries in the islands (see, for example, McManus and Leibsohn 2019; Porras 2020; Castellví Laukamp 2020).

One of the most powerful arguments for historians approaching the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific as part of a vast colonial Latin American world is that many seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century subjects of the Spanish Crown conceptualized the archipelago and its peoples in these terms. Several new studies have illuminated how early moderns imagined the Spanish Pacific. Ricardo Padrón (2020) has mined maps and other cartographic literature to highlight the ways in which seventeenth-century Spanish elites—peninsulares and creoles alike—conceived of a Spanish dominion that extended west across the Pacific to the Philippines. Their early maps depicting a connected Amer-Asian continent gave way to maps that represented an easily navigable and conquered Pacific Ocean. Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos (2008) has examined how eighteenth-century military strategists in Mexico and Spain regarded the Philippines as crucial to the defense of Spanish territories and communities on both sides of the Pacific. The notion of the Pacific as a ‘Spanish Lake’ appears to be an early modern invention, and one that made an impact on the lives of colonial subjects (Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller 2014). Raquel Güereca (2016) highlighted how these vast Spanish Pacific politics influenced negotiations between colonial officials and the Indigenous communities living along Mexico’s Pacific coast, whom the empire depended upon to funnel men into militias to defend New Spain in the case of attacks from the sea.

Subalterns also envisioned the Philippines as part of a colossal Spanish empire. In a recent article, I explored the idea of vast early Latin America from below. I analyzed a rich, late eighteenth-century Inquisition case to recover how José Rodríguez, a young forzado from Mexico City who was forcibly migrated to Manila as a punishment for petty crimes, experienced and imagined the links between his colonial Mexican world and the colonial society he encountered on the other side of the Pacific (Flannery 2022). Men like Rodríguez played a part in bringing the Spanish Pacific into being. In the nineteenth century, Filipinos continued to conceive of the Philippines as part of a transoceanic Hispanic nation, and a global Spanish empire. The country’s national hero José Rizal wrote his most famous anti-colonial novels—Noli me tángere and El Filibusterismo—in Spanish. He spent time in Madrid advocating for imperial reform before he became a martyr for Philippine independence in Luzon.⁶ Speaking of Rizal reminds us that writing the Philippines into the history of colonial Latin America expands the field’s chronological scope to at least 1898, when Spain officially abandoned claims to sovereignty over the Philippines, along with Cuba and Puerto Rico. Discussions of the Age of Revolutions are sure to ramp up as we approach the 250th anniversary of the north American Revolution. As scholars in colonial Latin American studies engage with these conversations and contribute to contextualizing the North American colonists’ war for independence in hemispheric and global perspectives, it is necessary to remember and reflect on the fact that for many people living in territories where Spain and Portugal claimed sovereignty across the globe, this era was an age of imperial consolidation and expansion, and not only decline and collapse (Fradera 2005; Adelman 2008; Paquette 2009).

Another reason for incorporating the Philippines into colonial Latin American studies is a practical one. Anyone wanting to write about the history of the early modern Philippines needs to work with the archives that the Hispanic monarchy, the Catholic Church and missionary orders, and their respective global bureaucracies created to govern the islands. This requires specialist training in the logic of the archives and how to read and interpret the materials they preserve, which doctoral programs in Latin American history and adjacent fields provide. It is in the archive that we are compelled to confront the Spanish empire’s long reach through time, and the ways in which it continues to define how we investigate the past.

Significantly, the archive points to how the Spanish empire intruded into the lives of generations of people living in the Philippines and other islands in the Spanish Pacific, in multiple, uneven, and often significant ways. The extension of Spanish sovereignty to the Philippines involved the extension of a system of colonial difference from the Americas to Asia that divided the world into a republic of indios and a republic of Spaniards. Under this system of governance in the Philippines, as in the Americas, Indigenous vassals had obligations to the Crown in addition to certain privileges. Obligations included paying tribute in silver pesos or in kind (in locally produced goods, such as rice and wax), and performing tributary labor through the polo system, which was similar to the mita of the Andes. The imposition of colonial difference and the fundamentally extractive character of the Spanish government in the Philippines firmly place the archipelago within the colonial realm.

Chinese migrants in the Philippines emerged as a special category of people that stood outside of the two republics, but still within the Spanish empire’s ‘sliding scale of inferiority’ (Fisher and O’Hara 2009). Like Philippine indios, Chinese migrants and their descendants were obliged to pay tribute and were largely excluded from graduating from universities and entering the priesthood. Studies of the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines is a robust sub-field in its own right. Yet while these studies often take a connected or comparative approach to Chinese communities in other parts of maritime Asia and the Americas, they tend to be less engaged with research on race and calidad in colonial Latin America.⁷ Interrogating the complex dynamics of the integration and othering of Chinese migrants in the colonial Philippines stands to deepen our understanding of colonial difference in the wider Iberian world.

In contrast to the historiography of the Americas and the Atlantic world where slavery and the slave trade are a key focus of research, enslavement and human trafficking in the early modern Pacific world remain poorly understood. The privileges that Indigenous subjects gained by virtue of being native Catholic vassals of the Spanish monarch included protection from enslavement. Nancy van Deusen (2015) and Tatiana Seijas (2020) have shown that enslaved Filipinos were among those who petitioned and litigated for liberty on the basis of indio identities. In doing so, they contributed to the formation of a global Indigenous-ness. Lúcio de Sousa’s (2019) deeply researched study of the Portuguese Jesuit slave trade in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people in early modern Japan suggests that historians are yet to fully explore evidence of Asian slavery in the empire's archives. I argue in my forthcoming book that Spanish colonial government’s efforts to protect native, baptized subjects from being seized and enslaved by pirates was key to the colonial bargain and imperial legitimacy in the archipelago. Further efforts to recover the history of slavery in Iberian Asia are valuable, even urgent in their own right, but they also promise to advance our knowledge of the evolution of slavery and abolition in the Americas, and to develop a more holistic knowledge of slavery and freedom across the global Spanish empire.

The Pacific turn has been an organic one. Presentist concerns affect our interest in the past. As I wrote this, alarmist headlines reporting a Chinese spy balloon floating across the United States of America dominated the international news media cycle. The rise of China as a global superpower rivaling the United States of America, and the escalating militarization of the Pacific, has surely buttressed an interest in (and funding for) research into China and historical interactions and exchanges between Asia, the Americas, and Europe. At the same time, multiple currents in the historiography of colonial Latin America and in history more broadly have also nurtured a growing interest in Spain’s Asian empire and the Spanish Pacific world. Atlantic history encompassed a growing interest in the histories of Latin America’s multiethnic port cities: urban centers that were hyper-connected to others through maritime traffic and trade in commodities and people.⁸ Studies of colonial and cosmopolitan Havana, Cartagena, and Boston prompt us to ponder Lima, Manila, Macao, and consider the consequences of their entanglements in transoceanic networks. Moreover, the global turn and the field’s enthusiasm for histories that break out of the confines of area studies geographies have also facilitated Pacific history’s upswing. The rising tide of blue humanities scholarship has also primed us to rethink oceans, to write history from the perspectives of the ship, the ship-wreck, and the more-than-human oceanic and amphibious animals that inhabited seas and shores and shaped colonial histories.⁹

And we cannot dismiss the extent to which scholars’ individual experiences and biographies influence what questions we ask of the past. Carline Hau (2020) linked a growing interest in the Philippines’ transregional connections to the mobility of Filipino workers. Filipinos have been long been part of ‘global labor migrations, roaming the sea lanes as marineros’ from the era of the Galleon to the age of the supercargo ship, with the Philippines being the world’s principal supplier of maritime workers since the 1990s. As a white woman of settler colonial stock raised in Kamay, the stolen land of the Dharawal people that British conquistadors named Botany Bay, my curiosity about the history of other empires and their enduring consequences drifted back from the Americas to this side of the Pacific.

And yet, despite all of these convergences that encourage inquiry into the Spanish Pacific, there are real barriers to continuing to bring the Philippines in to colonial Latin American history. The academic job market and graduate training in history and its kindred fields continue to be structured around geographically defined area studies. When the increasingly rare academic job opens up in colonial Latin American studies, it can be challenging for Spanish Pacific specialists to convince job committees that they are an ideal fit for the position. Moreover, doctoral candidates aspiring to investigate the history of the Philippines during the long period of Spanish rule might struggle be to accepted into Latin American history programs that will equip them with the expert skillset required to access and interpret sources of the archipelago’s history. The language requirements for Latin American Studies programs might also exclude Filipinx students who are not native speakers of Spanish. Leiden University’s Cosmopolis initiative offers a model for decolonizing our field. This two-year master’s program in the history of colonialism and globalization includes a foundation year in which students from Asian and African countries are trained in reading and analyzing Dutch sources through an intensive language program. Creating more opportunities for Filipinx scholars to write the history of the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific is a prerequisite for its flourishing. Embracing a vast colonial Latin American studies that critically engages with the global Spanish and Portuguese empires and wider Iberian worlds will bring new voices and perspectives to the field, in addition to new insights into the history and afterlives of Spanish and Portuguese colonialisms.

Notes

1 ‘International conference: What was Iberian Asia? New perspectives on Spanish and Portuguese exploration 1500–1700,’ Oxford University, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/event/international-conference-what-was-iberian-asia-new-perspectives-on-spanish-and-portuguese-expl.

2 Matsuda (2012) recognizes multiple Pacific worlds.

3 Schurz 1939; as cited in Gascoigne 2014, 29. For material culture and the galleon trade, see Baena Zapatero 2013; Priyadarshini 2018.

4 See María Lourdes Díaz Trechuelo’s many articles exploring Philippines history, in particular, those published in 1963 and 2001. See also Fradera 1999; 2005.

5 See López Lázaro 2011; Seijas 2014; Mehl 2016; Owens 2017; Varela 2016.

6 See his edition of Antonio de Morga’s, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas […] obra publicada en Méjico el an̄o de 1609 (1890). See also O’Campo 1998; Anderson 2005.

7 See for example, Gil 2011; Chia 2006.

8 See Barcia’s recent ‘state of the field’ essay (2021).

9 See for example, Moraña 2022: several chapters in this edited volume focus on the Pacific.