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The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 - with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan - and 1815 - the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.
List of contents
Acknowledgements, List of Figures,Introduction. Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón, 1. An Early Transpacific Account on the Spice Islands by Andrés de Urdaneta (1536). Jorge Mojarro, 2. Domingo de Salazar's Letter to the King of Spain in Defense of the Indians and the Chinese of the Philippine Islands (1582). Christina Lee, 3. Juan Cobo's Map of the Pacific World, 1593. Ricardo Padrón, 4. A Royal Decree of Philip III Regulating Trade between the Philippines and New Spain (1604). Natalie Cobo and Tatiana Seijas, 5. Manila's Sangleys and a Chinese Wedding (1625). Miguel Martínez, 6. Don Luis Castilla Offers to Sell Land in Manila (1629). Regalado Trota José, 7. Idolatry and Apostasy in the 1633 Jesuit Annual Letter. John Blanco, 8. The Will of an India Oriental and her Chinos in Peru (1644). Leo Garofalo, 9. Francisco de Combés's History of Mindanao and Jolo (1667). Ana M. Rodríguez Rodríguez. Translation assisted by Cortney Benjamin, 10. Between Fiction and History in the Spanish Pacific: The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690). Nicole Legnani, 11. A Moluccan Crypto-Muslim before the Transpacific Inquisition (1623-1645). Ryan Dominic Crewe, 12. Constitutions and Rules of the Beatas Indias (1726). Kathryn Santner, 13. The Poetics of Praise and the Demands of Confession in the Early Spanish Philippines: Notes and Documents. Vicente L. Rafael, 14. The Pacific Theater of the Seven Years' War in a Latin Poem by an Indigenous Priest, Bartolomé?Saguinsín (1766). Stuart M. McManus, 15. A Prohibition on Digging Up the Bones of the Dead (1813). Ino Manalo, Index.
About the author
Christina Hyo-Jung Lee is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her latest book,
Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first scholarly study to focus on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines, from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. Ricardo Padrón is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph,
The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of "the Indies."
