Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians by Tatiana Seijas (review)

This well-researched book focuses on Asian slaves in Mexico through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Asian slaves, called ‘chinos’ in the primary documentation, represented a very small percentage of New Spain’s population during this period, and it is likely for this reason that they have received limited attention from scholars. Tatiana Seijas’ new book provides the most in-depth study of this group to appear in English to date. This alone makes the work significant.

In viewing changes in Spanish imperial policies and the legal, economic, and social conditions of New Spain through the lens of this numerically marginal group, the author provides added importance to her work. This strategy rests on a historiographical approach pioneered by scholars like the late Michel Foucault who argued that examining societies through the experiences of subgroups at their margins, like the chinos in colonial Mexico, yields a distanced panoramic perspective of societal development, in New Spain’s case the evolution of the most important colony in the Americas. Seijas’s study of Asian slave lives on the periphery of Mexico’s ethnically and racially complex population, and on a broader level, Spain’s far-flung imperial society, provides new insights into the social process of identity construction in Mexico, as well as Spanish imperial policy related to the Manila galleon trade and the institution of slavery.

One group of insights emerges from the author’s explanation of two transformations chinos in Mexico underwent between the mid sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. One is their transformation from Asian slaves to free Indians. In describing these changes the author enhances our knowledge of the evolution of identity construction in the Spanish imperial world, a process that began with collapsing all Asian slaves into one category, chinos. This overgeneralization resulted from Spanish officials’ ignorance of individual Asian slaves’ origins, as well as imperial officials’ desire for expediency in recordkeeping.

Another group of insights can be gleaned from Seijas’ treatment of the changes over time in the chino experience. These involve contributions of the Spanish state, the Catholic Church, and Asian slaves themselves in bringing about the major changes in chinos’ lives. Finally, the author explores what chinos’ transformation from chino slaves to free Indians teaches us about the racialization of the institution of slavery across the Americas.

This work offers us an additional insight into the colonial world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its treatment of how chinos fit into the dynamics and structures of the Mexican slave trade provides us with perspectives on the operation of the period’s transatlantic and transpacific trade systems.

Like all monographs, Seijas’s has some shortcomings. One involves its treatment of chinos’ social experience in colonial Mexico. The author’s treatment of this theme seems a bit too speculative, supported as it is by what seems too little primary documentation. For example, in partially basing conclusions about chinos’ social ties with Mexican Indians through marriage, the patterns Seijas discusses derive from just 165 slave and free chino unions that took place over more than a century, providing tentative results at best (p. 150, n20). Greater consultation of parish records in the two settings of primary focus, the cities of Mexico and Puebla de los Angeles, would produce much more reliable conclusions on chinos’ social ties not only with Indians, but also with the other racial and ethnic subgroups within New Spain’s population. These parish records are accessible in the archives of both cities, as well as in Church of Latter Day Saints reading rooms across the United States. Less significantly, the text suffers from too many instances of redundancy within and across chapters.

On balance, however, the pluses of Tatiana Seijas’s book far outweigh its minuses. I strongly recommend it for all levels of students of colonial New Spain’s complex society, as well as those seeking insights into the colony’s place...