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

The Spanish Jesuit Vicente Alemany, a keen observer of the república of Manila in his 1760s sequel to Francisco de Quevedo's picaresque novel El Buscón, portrayed all Europeans in Manila in a sarcastic but faithful way as "deserters, cabin boys, spanked [convicts], marcados, barbers, minions of the law, and more of this kind," while the americanos were all "vulgar people from the flea market [thieves] and from prison," the worst of whom were selected to serve in the militia and the marina (Andanzas del Buscón don Pablos por México y Filipinas, ed. Celsa Carmen García Valdés [Eunsa, 1998], 92–93). Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World sheds light on the lives of these people who had to cross the Pacific Ocean, mostly against their will. It follows their trajectories from rural villages in New Spain to the remotest presidios of Mindanao.

The author, Eva Maria Mehl, is associate professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has specialized on colonial Mexico and the Spanish Philippines. Under her maiden name, St. Clair Segurado, she has published on the history of the Jesuits in China and their expulsion from Mexico in 1767. Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World is based on her dissertation, which she defended in 2011 at the University of California Davis.

The Manila galleon and the transpacific connection it enabled are fascinating phenomena that have led a large number of scholars to focus on the interchange between Acapulco and Manila. Many historians of the early modern period emphasize the importance of reading the Pacific as a bridge rather than a barrier and understanding both sides of the ocean as a space of common agency. Traditionally, their main attention was set on the material exchange, yet in recent years the cultural and human exchanges have become attractive objects of study too. Especially, the subject of forced migration—in both directions—has aroused much interest on the part of scholars such as Tatjana Seijas and Stephanie Mawson.

Eva Maria Mehl also makes a strong case for the idea of an interconnected and intertwined transpacific world. Two decades after María Fernanda García de los Arcos's remarkable study, Forzados y reclutas: Los criollos novohispanos en Asia (1756–1808) (Potrerillos, 1996), Mehl tackles the subject of forced migration to the Philippines with an innovative view on human dynamics at the fringes of the Spanish empire. Transcending former studies, her book discusses the "larger significance that the deportation of recruits and vagrants had in the implementation of imperial policy in New Spain and the Philippines" (13).

Mehl identified 3,999 individuals who were sent to the Philippines via Acapulco as part of the defensive scheme of the Spanish empire. Facing a number of military challenges, the Philippine colonial government was in urgent need of these reinforcements and employed them as workers or soldiers. Yet, the governors in Manila continually complained about these individuals as they appeared to be worthless for any employment, being either unfit for service, sick, uncontrollable, or not up to the standard of "whiteness" of the time. By analyzing the reasons behind this predicament, Mehl offers a look not only at the lives of these individuals, their families, and their social context, but also at the institutional history of the Spanish empire at the height of Bourbon reforms. She thereby connects late–eighteenth-century ideas of Enlightenment in the Spanish empire neatly with Michel Foucault's analysis of discipline and punishment in early-modern Europe. Mehl provides a picture of the socioeconomic insecurities and dynamics of New Spain and displays the complex machinery behind the recruiting parties, the levies, and the transportation process to Manila.

To develop the argument, the book starts with an overview of the intertwined transpacific history since 1571, focusing on the connection via the Manila galleon and the flow of people across the...