Exclusion: A Fugitive Chino Slave in Seventeenth-Century Guatemala

• In Event: Exclusion Among Runaway Communities in the Americas, 1600-1800

Abstract

Throughout the seventeenth century thousands of enslaved people from diverse parts of Asia were trafficked across the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Asian slaves, known as chinos, constituted a significant minority of the enslaved population in colonial Latin America during this period. This paper explores how belonging to this minority shaped unfree people’s opportunities for running away. It reconstructs the experiences of the chino slave Diego de la Cruz, who escaped from his master in the port town of Ampala (present-day Honduras) after crossing the Pacific as chattel aboard the Manila galleon. De la Cruz traveled long distances through what is today Guatemala in his quest for freedom, however his efforts to live as a free man ultimately failed. De la Cruz was excluded from indigenous communities, and in 1659 indigenous villagers handed the fugitive slave over to Spanish authorities to be punished.

This paper makes an important contribution to studies of running away, as well as to recent scholarship on Asian slavery which has emphasized that Asians were largely integrated into colonial society as indios. This case study then highlights the limits to subaltern solidarity and coalition building across racial and cultural divides.

Author

• Kristie P Flannery, Univ. of Texas at Austin