Tatiana Seijas. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico

Historians of New Spain often come across references to chinos in archival documentation. Until now, we did not have a dependable secondary source to contextualize these fleeting, ephemeral glimpses. In this readable and erudite book Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, Tatiana Seijas captures the chino experience in the viceroyalty of New Spain, where free and enslaved immigrants from the Spanish Philippines (or even far more distant lands) ultimately played a critical historical role in defining their own legal status within the developing vocabulary of race. Seijas offers the first comprehensive retelling of the chino journey, which began in numerous locations in Africa and Asia, then unfolded in a passage across the Pacific in the Manila Galleon to the port of Acapulco, and eventually led to settlement in locations such as Mexico City. Seijas begins the book by effectively introducing her historical context with a discussion of negotiated racial identity, freedom, slavery, and Baroque piety. She breathes life into these issues through the hagiography of the popular folk heroine, the China Poblana, whose real name was Catarina de San Juan. Catarina lived from the early seventeenth century until 1688. Her lifetime spanned the crucial years when chinos in New Spain, both free people and slaves, took advantage of the protected legal status of indigenous Americans, and eventually helped forge their own permanent transformation to indios, free Spanish vassals, in 1672. Drawn from hagiographic contemporary accounts, this discussion of Catarina highlights how her saintly life story included anecdotes that symbolically linked her, a woman of possibly Chinese or East Indian origins, to indigenous Mexicans. As Seijas notes, the historic Catarina de San Juan bears no resemblance whatsoever to the modern, colorfully dressed, indigenous national heroine known as the China Poblana. Instead Catarina was a very religious, resilient freed slave from Asia who dressed in plain wool. Most importantly, Catarina’s life resonates across the centuries as a representation of the global reach of early modern Iberian empires and the seventeenth-century transformation in chino status.

Archaeology · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Ethnology · Genealogy · Indigenous · Piety · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies