The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815. A Reader of Primary Sources ed. by Christina H. Lee and Ricardo Padrón (review)

This book grew out of an interdisciplinary symposium organized in Princeton in 2018. Scholars of Latin American studies, mostly from US universities, joined efforts to create a canon of documents translated to English that could be used in undergraduate and graduate courses. This collection is a new addition to the series of early modern histories that began to come out when scholars of literary and cultural studies discovered the wealth contained in the documents of the Spanish colonial period. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s extensive research on the connecting power of the movement of people, animals, and objects was a major inspiration for the group that initiated the series under the leadership of Christina Lee and Julia Schleck. This volume testifies to the immensely fertile approach taken up by Spanish Pacific Studies of exploring multiple cultural objects and phenomena from a wide variety of sources, covering territories as distantly separated as India and Europe, including regions in Asia, the Americas, even Africa.

As the editors explain, the field would have been too large for a viable project, and a few parameters had to put in place. A clear theme was the Spanish presence in the Pacific from 1521 to 1815. Contributors would then have a free hand in choosing the sources, provided they fit into the broad spectrum and time frame prescribed by the theme, avoided those frequently used in historiography, and more importantly, brought out new perspectives in line with the approach of Spanish Pacific Studies. In addition, scholars had to commit to translate the documents into English.

The output does not disappoint. It accomplishes what it intended in terms of chronology, geography, and connectedness. The 15 chapters are preceded by extensive introductions that provide context but also initiate avenues for discussion. The collection includes four sources from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, six documents from the mid seventeenth century, and five more primary sources from the late seventeenth century up to 1813. Most documents were written in the Philippines; two were connected to New Spain. There is a will from Peru and a royal order from Spain. Sources take many forms: among them we find travel accounts, Latin poetry by a native priest, regulations for religious without vows, missionary accounts, and a manual for confessors.

A few examples can illustrate the merits of this volume. One of the outstanding documents is a manuscript now at the Hispanic Society of America written by notary public Diego de Rueda y Mendoza in 1625, summarizing the history of the Chinese community of Manila and describing a Catholic wedding among Chinese. The narrative contains much evidence of cultural appropriation and transcultural identities. The modern reader will be surprised to discover how much current wedding rituals owe to such distant times. Another unique document is a map commissioned in 1593 by the Dominican Juan Cobo. In the map, China occupies a central position and all inscriptions are in Chinese. Ricardo Padrón draws an insight into how Cobo intended to win over the Chinese by interlacing cartographic assumptions and cultural beliefs from Europe and China.

Filipino cultural historian Regalado Trota José contributes a sequence of documents of land sales among elite indigenous inhabitants of Manila, dating as far back as 1613. There are documents in Spanish and Romanized Tagalog, as well as Tagalog written in the indigenous script, Baybayin. These sources prove how much there is still to learn about pre-Hispanic land ownership. They also throw surprising light on how the local population adapted to the Spanish legal system—we learn for example that some of the witnesses refused interpreters because they spoke fluent Spanish. Ryan Dominic Crew discovered in Mexican archives the Inquisition records from the 1620s and 1640s of a Portuguese-Moluccan, living in Manila with his wife, an Indian woman, who was accused of sexual misconduct and, more seriously, of being a...