Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811 by Eva Maria Mehl (review)

Eva Maria Mehl's new book explores the history of the four thousand military recruits who were forcibly transported from Mexico to the Philippines to shore up Spain's precarious Southeast Asian colony in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War and the British invasion of Manila (1762–1764). Pushing beyond the anachronistic geographical borders of "colonial Latin America," Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World represents and contributes to the global turn in the historiography of the Spanish empire.¹ It is a welcome departure from the themes of silver, silk, and spices that have long dominated trade-centric studies of the Acapulco-Manila galleon.² Like Tatiana Seijas's recent work on Asian slaves in colonial Mexico, this monograph reflects a new interest in the humans who traveled aboard the naos de china and their transpacific lives.³ By illuminating the experiences of unwilling recruits, Mehl's work also destabilizes one of the greatest prevailing myths in world history: that Spain ruled over an immense empire for more than three centuries "without a standing army or much use of force."⁴

Readers lacking an in-depth knowledge of Philippines history will appreciate Mehl's first chapter that offers a useful overview of Spanish colonial rule in the islands from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. This chapter discusses the multifaceted Philippines-Mexico connections forged in this period and outlines the major Bourbon reforms implemented in the archipelago. In the five chapters that follow, Mehl draws on extensive archival research undertaken in Spain and Mexico to construct a rich social history of forced migration from Mexico to the Philippines from 1765 to 1811.

Mehl makes a convincing argument that forced migration during this period was "primarily a utilitarian and imperial tool that aimed at producing cheap soldiers and workers and strengthening the strategic role of the archipelago in the Spanish Pacific" (p. 192). The colonial government in the Philippines needed able-bodied men for its presidios strategically situated throughout the islands to defend Spanish sovereignty from pirates, rival imperial powers, and its own rebellious subjects. However, for Mexican elites, forced migration was also an instrument of social cleansing that attempted to rid Mexico's urban centers of men deemed undesirable and troublesome. The inherent incompatibility of these goals created enduring tension between successive Governors of the Philippines and Viceroys of New Spain (Mexico) as the latter responded to Manila's calls for healthy, white, and well-trained soldiers with recruits who were, in the words of Governor Basco y Vargas, "totally worthless and extremely despicable" (p. 1).

Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World provides the first detailed analysis of the processes through which Mexicans joined the armies deployed to the Philippines in the late eighteenth century. Most recruits were forced or coerced. Convicts accounted for at least 776 of the four thousand men dispatched to the islands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mexico's sala del crimen, the tribunal of acordada, and city magistrates all sentenced criminals to serve time in the islands. In the 1780s, the state adopted for the first time an anti-vagrancy levy that rounded up vagrants in Mexican cities with the express purpose of sending them to the Philippines. By this time vagrancy had evolved into "an umbrella category for many behaviors" that Mexican elites regarded as unacceptable (p. 159). 'Vagrants' encompassed men who were publicly naked, filthy, unemployed, and transient, as well as gamblers, drunks, men who sold food and other goods in the streets, and those accused of engaging in a range of indecent sexual acts and inappropriate sexual relationships. Yet Mehl speculates that the true number of convicts sent to the Philippines was considerably higher than what is stated in extant colonial documents. Many men who were arrested in anti-vagrancy levies would have been given the...