Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians

This monograph offers much more than the focus of its title on its little-known—and hence possibly suspect as marginal—subjects might be taken to imply. Out of fragments of the stories of 598 identifiable individuals, out of some 8,100 Asians (and more than a few globally traveled Africans) reaching central Mexico as slaves aboard the returning vessels of the famous Manila galleons from Manila in the Philippines between roughly the 1560s and the 1660s, Seijas has spun sophisticated insight into the laws and politics of Iberian (primarily Spanish, but indirectly also Portuguese) domains in both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds, the laws, politics, and cultures of Spain’s República de Indios, in the Philippines as well as in New Spain, and the beginnings of racialization of the Hispanic New World. The book’s subtitle alludes to the transcending conclusion: these Asians (except for the Africans arriving from Mozambique via Goa, the...