The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 -- with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan -- and 1815 -- the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

Inhabitants of expansive, densely populated convents in colonial Latin America often enjoyed surprisingly luxurious, privately owned accommodations. Although known as cells (celdas), these dwellings consisted of multiple rooms occupied by nuns, their female relatives, servants, slaves, and young girls sent to the convents for their educations. Kathryn Santner takes the convent of Santa Catalina de Sena in Arequipa, Peru, as a case study in Money and a Room of One’s Own: Convent Cells and Self-Fashioning in Colonial Peru, examining two spaces within convent cells in particular: the estrado (women’s sitting room) and the oratory. These spaces reveal the role of convent cells in individual nuns’ self-fashioning within the cloister as well as the variety of social practices that took place within the multigenerational, multiethnic households of the colonial celda.

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In 1726, a Chinese mestiza woman named Ignacia del Espiritu Santo (1663–1748) sought ecclesiastical approval for a beaterio, or house of religious retreat for women, that she had founded in Manila. It was the first such community intended for women of native, sangley and mestizo origin. With the help of unnamed Jesuit collaborators, she composed a constitution for the community, called La Compañia, outlining criteria for admission and a series of requirements meant to structure the community’s life of prayer and austerity. Kathryn Santner places the text in the context of female religious life in colonial Manila.

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