Reciprocal Mobilities

In the last few years, early modern historians have looked at Spanish borderlands as lived places where Indigenous people were not the backstage crew but rather the subjects of the play. This book analyzes Indigenous and colonial mobilities in the borderlands of the Spanish colonial Philippines. Instead of using the conventional categories of borders and states, Mark Dizon proposes a rethinking of colonial relations in terms of how people moved about. The so-called mobility turn brings cross-cultural interactions between Spanish colonizers and Indigenous communities to the foreground. Unlike conventional imperial history, which assumes the idea of a state territorially expanding and conquering the periphery in a one-dimensional, unilinear manner, Dizon argues that colonial encounters between Indigenous islanders and Spanish officials are better understood as part of a series of contacts that happened in multiple places across time. As a result, reciprocal mobilities and frictions question state-centric tales of conquest, thereby problematizing conventional center-periphery models (pp. 1–7).The book under review is the result of a thorough investigation of international archives in Madrid, Valladolid, Ávila, and Seville (Spain) and Manila (the Philippines). By reading archival sources against the grain from an interdisciplinary perspective, Dizon explores entangled mobilities that involved Indigenous actors. How did Indigenous practices, such as kinship ties, spirit beliefs, and mutual visits, shape colonial interactions in the archipelago? How did Spanish and Indigenous actors construct their own complex network of local loyalties, friendship, and alliances in the early modern Philippines? How did Indigenous voices and agency refashion our understanding of Spanish domination from the eighteenth century onward?To answer all these questions, the book is organized in four chapters, in addition to an introduction that offers the main theoretical and methodological guidelines of the research, some final reflections, and a bibliography. The book also includes maps illustrating the interior of central Luzon that help readers situate themselves in the local context. Chapter 1 analyzes the initial contacts between Augustinian, Dominican, and Franciscan friars and Indigenous borderland communities. The nodal point is not conversion but movement, which was crucial in the consolidation of ties between missionaries and potential converts. Mutual visits shed light on reciprocity and the formation of alliances. Borderland interactions come to the fore, thereby challenging the inherent tendency of historical sources to portray mobility as a unidirectional penetration of the interior frontier. Chapter 2 delves into the antagonistic side of borderland exchanges in the provinces of Cagayan and Pampanga: military expeditions and raids, which were an essential part of frontier movements. Like a Roman limes, military forts were built and expeditions were carried out to prevent raids on Spanish missions and towns. Based on missionary accounts and government reports on Indigenous raids, Dizon aims to demonstrate that mutual exchanges, cultural adaptation, and mobility continued through the use of violence and force. However, commerce and contact between Christians and animist hill people did exist in such a way that, as Dizon points out, “upland traders and raiders were often one and the same people” (p. 86). Chapter 3 demonstrates that going to war was not always the best option. Along with missions and forts, the Spanish created roads to gain control of the unconquered hinterland of Cagayan Province. By opening the borderland, the construction of a road through the center of Luzon would bring those remote, inaccessible communities closer to Manila, which theoretically could facilitate the conversion of animists to Christianity. In practice, although royal roads fostered mobility, these were Indigenous pathways rather than imperial roads where locals played a preponderant role (p. 151). And sometimes mobility also brought with it unwanted movements. Chapter 4 deals precisely with the epidemiological consequences of greater mobility and resettlement projects in the borderlands. Like in Peru, where Andean peoples living in different ecological niches were affected after being resettled in the reducciones, in the Philippines population movements had also detrimental epidemiological effects on both Spanish and Indigenous people as they entered different ecological zones.In conclusion, while “thinking with the feet” (pp. 5–6), to use Dizon's metaphor, helps us shape a decentered history of interior borderlands in eighteenth-century east-central Luzon, one can't avoid asking about other borderlands down south, particularly on the islands of Mindanao and Sulu, where powerful sultanates challenged Spanish intrusion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, on December 1, 1749, Mohammed Azim ud-Din I, better known in Spanish sources as Alimuddin (sultan of Sulu from 1735 to 1748, and again from 1764 until his abdication in 1774), was baptized as Fernando I, in honor of Spain's own Ferdinand VI (r. 1746–59). This ritual of submission was commemorated with great pomp and flair, although the Jesuit missionaries mistrusted the sincerity of the recent convert. As soon as Alimuddin put his feet on Sulu, he returned to his old faith. Rituals and ceremonies were vital to the Spanish in the exercise of political power and the formation of alliances, no matter how sincere they were. All this said, Dizon's pathbreaking book paves the way for a broader and comparative study on borderlands that includes other regions in Southeast Asia and the Philippines

Economic geography · Geography · Mobilities · Reciprocal · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy