"Tan diferente, dañosa y contraria": Race-Making in the Philippines and Repercussions in the Americas

• In Event: Re-Imagining Colonial Latin American History through Trans-Pacific Spaces

Abstract

The death of Spanish governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas at the hands of Chinese (sangley) mutineers in 1593 gave rise to a discourse of expulsion that relied on notions of inherent characteristics different from an implied Hispanic norm. This discourse and the Spanish fears informing it ultimately resulted in military campaigns of extermination, the most dramatic of which occurred in 1603 and 1639. The fledgling Spanish garrison was unable to combat an exponentially larger Chinese force, so Spaniards incentivized Filipinos and Japanese to carry out their vision of a Philippines free of a large, unconverted Chinese population. This paper argues that understanding how Spanish discourse and colonial practices racialized Chinese in the Philippines is an important starting point for understanding why certain “chinos” (Asians) later succeeded or struggled in New Spanish society. This line of inquiry places racial formation in the Philippines—as a unique site of encounter across Spanish empire—at the center of the Asian Trans-Pacific experience and provides new explanations for Filipino social successes in the Americas and why the term “sangley” did not transfer across the Pacific. The seventeenth century brought about increasingly rigid forms of perceiving difference across the Spanish empire, and the early-modern chino diaspora to the Americas represents another form of encounter, an encounter among ideologies and bodies simultaneously circulating and colliding across the Viceroyalty of New Spain's vast expanse.

Author

• Diego J Luis, Brown University