Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World

The British occupation of Manila and Havana (1762–1764) was a singularly important and well-known catalyst for Spanish imperial reform. Eva Maria Mehl recasts this familiar narrative by focusing on the 4,000 or so military recruits who departed Acapulco for the Philippines to defend the crown's possessions between 1765 and 1811. Her book outlines the recruitment campaign; its place within the broader Bourbon reform impulse; its effects on the men, their families, and Mexican society; and its limited achievements and resounding failures. In so doing, Mehl decenters imperial history by highlighting the primacy of New Spain and how demands emanating from Manila shaped policy decisions reached in Mexico City.Chapter 1 sets the stage by synthesizing scholarship on the interconnected history of the two colonies. Mexico played an integral role in the establishment of Spain's toehold in the Philippines. From the novohispano perspective, the archipelago was a hazy extension of the realm, a place associated with missionary fervor, Chinese luxury and Asian slaves, and banished convicts. Most importantly, Spain's remoteness left Mexico the roles of de facto metropole and conduit linking people, wealth, and ideas across two oceans.Manila's vulnerability spurred the crown to establish the veteran Regiment of the King in 1769 while also limiting the number of native troops to be mustered and mandating that New Spain supply an annual quota of 100 “honorable” white troops. Chapter 2 shows that 780 convicts were nevertheless dispatched to the Philippines and that many nominal recruits were likely pardoned criminals, a point that repeatedly drew the consternation of Manila's officials. Reading imperial correspondence, Mehl concludes that these shortcomings resulted from the Mexican government's attempt to balance competing demands for troops across an immense jurisdiction and the difficulties that recruiters faced in drawing men to the army and veterans to the Philippines. Such challenges spurred ever more coercive measures. As judicial punishment took on a more humanitarian and utilitarian hue across the Hispanic world, Mexican judges increasingly favored sentencing convicts of both minor and serious offenses to presidios in the hope that their service would benefit the viceroyalty and promote rehabilitation through military discipline.The following three chapters form the heart of the study. Chapter 3 details how the coyuntura of the 1780s—Manila's calls for troops in light of mounting British-Spanish tensions and New Spain's severe agrarian crisis—influenced the direction of the Mexican government's ambiguously conceived antivagrancy campaign, which sought to transform the poor, uprooted rural migrants and other undesirables into productive citizens. Manila would receive its troops, while Mexico would be rid of its rootless, sporadically employed, and libertine young men. Chapter 4 details how unfortunates were ensnared in the state's antivagrancy sweeps, actions that could trigger the temporary mass abandonment of small towns and mining districts. The apprehended were granted three days to demonstrate that they held gainful employment or supported a wife or other dependents. The paper trail left by these judicial proceedings, Mehl argues, reveals the state's blindness to the reality of the poor, the care that judges nonetheless accorded to an otherwise arbitrary detainment process, and the surprising extent to which society accepted novel ideals about time and work discipline. This emerging hegemony is revealed most dramatically in chapter 5’s analysis of 62 cases in which families denounced wayward relatives in the hope that military service in Manila—a physically taxing, if not deadly, sentence—would restore the family's repute and reform the individual. These appeals, which facilitated an unprecedented level of state surveillance in the lives of colonial subjects, demonstrate how the presumably plebeian problem of vagrancy extended to wealthy and middle-sector families.A final chapter outlines the contradictions that the levies produced in the Philippines. Overall, the recruits were agents of disorder, their unruliness and high desertion rates compounding the islands' own rising levels of vagrancy and criminality and spurring officials to reassess the value of previously suspected native groups as military auxiliaries.Such a brief review can hardly do justice to this wide-ranging, engaging, and deeply researched study. Mehl moves deftly between political and philosophical debates in Spain and Mexico while reconstructing the social, economic, demographic, and cultural ties that bound the Philippines and New Spain to one another. One could counter that in the interest of foregrounding the Mexico-Philippines nexus, Spain's influence in Mexico is occasionally downplayed. The book is also more compelling when showing how Mexico affected the Philippines than vice versa, which may be nothing more than a reflection of the nature of the intercolonial relationship itself. Some may therefore question the extent to which “the history of late colonial Mexico cannot be written without eyeing the Philippines,” but it certainly behooves specialists to heed Mehl's call and consider what might be lost from view when the Pacific connection is ignored (p. 270)

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• Decolonizing Spanish

  Open Access•Carlos Yebra López•TRANSMODERNITY Journal of…•2022

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