Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico

Abstract

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless slaves from culturally diverse communities in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia journeyed to Mexico on the ships of the Manila Galleon. Upon arrival in Mexico, they were grouped together and categorized as chinos. Their experience illustrates the interconnectedness of Spain's colonies and the reach of the crown, which brought people together from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe in a historically unprecedented way. In time, chinos in Mexico came to be treated under the law as Indians, becoming indigenous vassals of the Spanish crown after 1672. The implications of this legal change were enormous: as Indians, rather than chinos, they could no longer be held as slaves. Tatiana Seijas tracks chinos' complex journey from the slave market in Manila to the streets of Mexico City, and from bondage to liberty. In doing so, she challenges commonly held assumptions about the uniformity of the slave experience in the Americas.

El imaginario de lo chino en las revistas magazinescas chilenas de principios del siglo XX

“…Esta última acepción se cree que deriva fonéticamente de la palabra quechua čína, hembra, sirvienta (RAE, 2019). De esto se deduce lo que investigadores ya han señalado con respecto a la palabra chino/a, su concepción como sinónimo de lo asiático en la España colonial en América Latina, su utilización para referirse a la mezcla de razas y, sin lugar a dudas, de carácter inferior en la sociedad (Siu, 2007;Seijas, 2015;.…”

Comparative Orientalism in Latin American Revolutions: Antichinismo of Mexico and El Salvador

“…The messages of communist agitators, such as Jose Feliciano Ama, that rebellion would deflate the ladino elite and elevate Indian concerns, was a popular call to join the uprising. In addition to providing material and organizing support to El Salvador's rebels, the communists also created positive associations with Asia and China, as seen in Figure 6, a piece of peasant propaganda recovered in Jorge Schlesinger's (1946) Revolución comunista. In this hand-drawn map, El Salvador is placed in the context of a communist world in which allies in Asia provide support from across the Pacific, symbolized by a fleet of vessels crossing the Pacific Ocean.…”

Madalena:The Entangled History of One Indigenous Floridian Woman in the Atlantic World

“…87 Technically, this freedom hearing was about Madalena's rights as an American indigenous person in the Spanish empire. 88 She would have testified before the judges of the Casa, but these proceedings, and their judgments, are lost. She remained in the house of her former owner but her body no longer belonged to Bobadilla; her mind, and the knowledge she had worked so hard to gain in the last six years, were now property of the Spanish state.…”