Diego Javier Luis: The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History

The First Asians in the Americas offers a meticulous exploration of the history of Asians who crossed the Pacific Ocean to the Spanish Americas, primarily aboard galleon ships running from Cavite in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.The book traces the diverse paths taken by these individuals, who ventured into the interior of the Americas and beyond.These Asians were mainly enslaved people, along with a smaller number of free migrants, originating from the Philippines, India, Japan, China and other parts of Asia.During the Spanish-Portuguese Union (1580-1640), Spain had access to Portugal's existing slave network, resulting in the transport of slaves from various parts of Asia to Mexico via the Philippines.By focusing on the movements of these people, the author seeks to address gaps in previous research from three key perspectives.First, the book contributes to the study of colonial Latin American history, where the mobility of Asians from the Pacific side has been underexplored compared to the interaction with voyagers from the Atlantic side.Second, the book reshapes the history of Asian migrants in the Americas, which conventionally begins in the nineteenth century.The author positions the experiences of Asians who crossed the Pacific in the early modern period as a significant part of the broader narrative of the Asian diaspora in the Americas, rather than treating these experiences as a minor aspect within the history of the Spanish Empire.Third, the book provides a more nuanced understanding of how Spanish colonial authorities racialised Asians in the Americas, along with the varied responses of Asians to this racialisation.This is discussed particularly in relation to the fact that, in colonial Mexico, Europeans classified Asians into a single category, "chino/a", regardless of the Asians' ethnolinguistic differences.The book is an expansion of the author's recent research, seemingly developed from his 2020 doctoral thesis submitted to Brown University, titled "The Pacific Meets the Atlantic: How Early Modern Asian Mobility Transformed the Americas".Across its six chapters, the volume consistently focuses on human experiences, tracing journeys across various spaces.Chapter 1 begins with the social tensions in the Philippines during the early seventeenth century, which led some Philippine natives and other Asians to