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The Historian's Table
Act I: Complicating History
00:36:15
Diego searches for origins, both personal and historical
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- [00:01]
Charles Fournier
Welcome to the historians TABLE this is season one, the first Asians in the Americas. Act one Complicating history.
- [00:14]
Diego Javier Luis
They carry only hatchets and a bag of rice as they march into the damp mountains of Luzon, one of the largest islands in the Philippines. For weeks they scour the jungle for a dozen species of trees like the Banaba and the Molave. These towering tree trunks will become the rigging, masts, decks and hulls of the Manila galleons, the ships that connect Asia to the Americas. For hundreds of years, the Filipino loggers and builders hack narrow trails into dense, forested undergrowth. Along those claustrophobic paths, they haul entire forests to the port of Cavite, near the capital of Manila. These people are essential to maintaining one of the most important trade routes in the world. But their Spanish overlords consider them expend the 18 hour shifts, the meager rations of rice, the strain of the ropes and the enormous weight of the logs will be too much for many of these people. Makeshift wooden crosses line the paths leading out of the mountains. Hands from every corner of the world cut and assemble the wood into a high sided galleon frame. Under the hot sun, Chinese and enslaved East African caulkers smear the hull with enorm vats of pitch to seal it against leaks. Carpenters from Cagayan in northern Luzon fit the wood together with powerful iron nails imported from China and Mexico. Every day the morning bell tolls, mustering all to work, and everyone anticipates the merciful evening bell that sounds well after.
- [01:57]
Julian Sapariti
Vespers.
- [02:00]
Diego Javier Luis
After nearly two years, when they can't lift their hammers, saws, nails and buckets of pitch anymore, and when their faces sag from chronic sleep deprivation, when their work has consumed every last ounce of fat, they could finally behold their creation, for which they will receive no credit. The Spanish empire transmuted thousands of human bodies, minds and souls into the galleons. They were towering hulks, harbingers of a modern, connected world, and they consumed entire generations of Filipinos. The galleons had Catholic names like Espiritu Santo, which veiled the malicious charity of spiritual salvation thrust upon the fallen laborers for whom numbers and statistics of death and injury are a poor epigraph. And yet they are what remains.
- [03:01]
Charles Fournier
Origin stories inform much of our identities, both individual and collective. So when we add to those origin stories, we complicate our histories, we complicate our identities. But that might lead us towards a history and identity that's a little bit more honest. Welcome to the first Asians in the Americas. I'M your host, Charles Fournier. In Act 1, we look to origins, to the roots of histories. Here's Act 1. Complicating history.
- [03:47]
Julian Sapariti
It's just part of that searching for an origin thing. You know, you're never really gonna find that place where you truly fit in, especially as a mixed kid, but you want to go through that surge. And for me especially, because I never felt like I fit in.
- [04:04]
Charles Fournier
For Diego, like many of us, reflecting on his childhood begins with a reflection of his place in his family.
- [04:14]
Julian Sapariti
I grew up with my older brother, and he's someone who is very social and he's always was like the center of attention in the house, being the younger brother.
- [04:28]
Charles Fournier
Diego's childhood was a product of his parents attempts to adjust their child rearing strategies. Simply put, Diego's experience growing up was different than his brother's.
- [04:39]
Julian Sapariti
My older brother was raised speaking Spanish, but he didn't do too well in school when he was a kid. And so they thought, I mean, his teachers thought that was because, oh, he's bilingual, so he's having a harder time in school. Yeah, I mean, that was a belief then, you know, in the 90s. So anyway, my dad stopped speaking Spanish to him during those years, and that was when I was growing up. And so he didn't really speak Spanish to me.
- [05:07]
Charles Fournier
Diego only got words here and there.
- [05:11]
Julian Sapariti
Whenever we had salmon on a bagel, it was always salmon. It was never salmon.
- [05:17]
Charles Fournier
So Diego's Spanish was sparse, and other than English, he wasn't learning other languages that would help anchor him to a cultural identity.
- [05:26]
Julian Sapariti
My Chinese grandfather passed away when my dad was very, very young, so he didn't grow up speaking Taishanese or Cantonese. So, yeah, I mean, the language in the house was English.
- [05:38]
Charles Fournier
And this is not a critique of Diego's childhood. This is a reality of Americanization. Language is often a cultural access point both to a cultural future and to a cultural past. The removal of language from one generation to the next was so often, as can be seen with Diego's parents, intent, a choice focused on giving kids a better future. A byproduct of that can include a future of seeking cultural grounding.
- [06:13]
Julian Sapariti
I traveled a lot from a very young age when I was a toddler. Went to Spain twice, and for one of those times, it was almost a year that I lived there. Traveled a lot to the Dominican Republic for the summers, traveled to Chile, to Puerto Rico. I definitely felt like an outsider in those places because I didn't speak any Spanish at the time and I didn't dance well and if you're in the Caribbean and you don't dance like you're in trouble, you know?
- [06:42]
Charles Fournier
Diego, in all of his conversations about his childhood, did not seem resentful. Why should he? He had a great childhood with a loving family, but he still felt like he lacked a sense of belonging.
- [06:53]
Julian Sapariti
Being in a Spanish speaking community and not speaking Spanish, but having the name that I do and looking like I do, that was a really difficult experience, you know, and being called Mexican at school all the time, I'm like, I don't even know what that means.
- [07:05]
Charles Fournier
Diego is not Mexican. And it's not like Diego was suppressing or trying to hide his cultural background. He was a child. He just didn't have access to some of those cultural ties. But when his brother takes a trip, Diego sees firsthand how much travel and language can inform a sense of belonging.
- [07:27]
Julian Sapariti
My dad's a professor at Vanderbilt University. He took his students to Cuba, study abroad. And when he did that, my brother was maybe 13 years old. And he took my brother along with him. From that point, my brother was a Latino. Latino, Latino, Latino. He spoke Spanish. He, like, made an effort to never speak English. He spoke Spanish. He put up the Cuban flag in his bedroom. He had cigars around, you know, he became Latino when that happened. And he spoke Spanish with my dad, and I still didn't after that. They spoke Spanish, basically until he left for college. So there was some Spanish in the house, but it was not something that I was part of, really.
- [08:11]
Seth Boggess
So you talk about your brother comes back from this trip. Are you on that trip?
- [08:15]
Charles Fournier
That's Julian. He's our foil that I introduced in the prologue.
- [08:19]
Julian Sapariti
I wasn't on that trip. Are you kidding me? I was not on that trip.
- [08:21]
Seth Boggess
Eight year old in Cuba.
- [08:23]
Julian Sapariti
No, no, not at that time.
- [08:26]
Charles Fournier
This is something we'll return to again and again. The layers associated with identity and experience, they're complicated. So unlike his brother, Diego didn't speak Spanish at home. But as Diego sought more of a connection to his cultural history, in college, he learned to speak Mandarin and he eventually learned to speak Spanish. And for Diego, with language came a sense of identification.
- [08:49]
Julian Sapariti
I don't know if I thought of myself really as Latino at that time because I didn't speak Spanish. So I only really made an effort to start speaking and learning Spanish after college when I was living in China, ironically enough.
- [09:04]
Charles Fournier
We'll touch on Diego's time in China and Spain in Act 2.
- [09:07]
Julian Sapariti
Yeah, I probably should have spent my time actually learning Chinese better when I was there. But, you know, it's a language that you're around all the time. So I was like, oh, you know, it was when I was thinking about grad school too, and I knew I would need Spanish for grad school. And so I started speaking to my dad in Spanish. I mean, that was really one of the big changes that I made. I started listening to Spanish language podcasts, watching Spanish language movies, reading Spanish language books, and it was really like a self taught thing. I self taught myself to be a Latino somehow. And then I came back and came back to the US and entered grad school and I felt more Latino than I ever had before and I started making more Latino friends.
- [09:55]
Charles Fournier
Why does this matter, this seeking, this exploration and consideration of roots, especially roots from all sorts of places? Well, roots contribute to a sense of belonging and a sense of being. Our past often serves as a lens through which we view our present. And if we are cut off from our past, or if our present doesn't include traces of our cultural past, then we lose a lens to view the ways in which we belong in the present. Folks often feel more inclined to feel like they belong when history includes them. Belonging in the present is helped when history includes your past, your history, people that look like you are related to you. Excluding aspects of history contributes to the exclusion of people and ideas in the present. Julian talks about the impact of feeling out of place in his and Diego's home state of Tennessee.
- [10:47]
Seth Boggess
I still have this rural gas station paranoia we've talked about before, and that stems from just a handful of real incidents that happened in Tennessee when I was growing up, when I was a teenager, and I'll describe it. It's when you pull up to like a gas station in sort of a rednecky, rural white town that Nashville is surrounded by. But like, yeah, it's just kind of in the sticks and someone in a truck kind of pulls up and gives you a weird look. And you know, again, context of looking at history honestly and like understanding people having empathy with context. I see now that, like, why wouldn't they give me a weird look? Also my hair was like down to my shoulder. So it could be like an age hippie thing, kind of rural city divide. But I always, from when I was a young age, got called out for being different. And my main difference is the way I look, my hair, my eyes, my skin color.
- [11:40]
Charles Fournier
Julian had experiences of feeling out of place, but he no longer feels like he doesn't belong. He said it's because his sense of belonging is no longer centered around other people seeking other Folks, approval in belonging isn't the point. But this doesn't mean that a sense of belonging isn't still valuable. It just shows that a sense of belonging can come from connections to roots and history. Think of Diego's brother. When he returned From Cuba at 13, he leaned into Cuban identity, and that sense of belonging came from the experience of seeking, of traveling, of exploring his Cuban roots. Here's Diego.
- [12:24]
Julian Sapariti
You're never gonna find that place where you really fit in fully. But I think it's the searching that matters and, like, makes you feel like you belong at some point.
- [12:40]
Charles Fournier
For many, seeking leads to family histories, recipes, languages. For Diego, his seeking included some of those things, but it also included the history of the Manila galleons.
- [12:52]
Julian Sapariti
I mean, for me, part of it was always feeling inadequate because I couldn't speak Spanish. You know, inadequate to white people who called me Mexican, and I'm like, so weird. Just the layers there.
- [13:05]
Seth Boggess
You feel.
- [13:06]
Julian Sapariti
Yeah, well, yeah, no, it's. Yeah, but that's what it does to you. And also inadequate to Latinos who feel like they. They're talking to one of their own. And then I'm not able to be that image. So I think initially, at least, it was about addressing those anxieties, but it was also about growing up in Nashville, tennis, like, hearing that I'm part Chinese and part Cuban, but not understanding what that means. And I think it's just, like, something you have to do. You gotta find your roots. And maybe this is why I'm a historian, but I'm really driven by nostalgia or by a desire to remember or see something that was in the past but no longer really exists, at least in the same way.
- [13:51]
Charles Fournier
Seeking roots through led Diego to travel and research, and it gave him a more honest image of his history, and it likely gave him a more honest or holistic image of himself and his sense of belonging.
- [14:04]
Julian Sapariti
I think it's having done it, like, having lived in China and having seen what it means to be Chinese and seeing what it means to be Latino or Cuban, and understanding that you feel like you understand your family history better, and you feel like you understand where you come from, where your family came from better, and why your family members, like your ancestors, made the decisions that they did or why your parents made the decisions that they did, it does humanize them. I mean, all those people that came before, they made heroic sacrifices, but they're also, you know, human and driven by human motivations, and they're also imperfect people, you know, and so that definitely does humanize, but it's the also the realization that that comforting origin will never fall into place, will never truly be there. But the searching is important. That drove me also to look for this kind of. It's part of that quest, that search. Even though it's not my own family history, it's part of the history of the diasporas and the hemisphere. You know, it's still part of understanding my family in a way, by looking at people who came from similar places or made similar kinds of decisions.
- [15:30]
Charles Fournier
Let's take a look at that history.
- [15:32]
Julian Sapariti
You can't understand the history of the Americas without thinking about the Pacific.
- [15:38]
Charles Fournier
If you haven't taken a look at a globe in a while, I'm here to give you a little refresher. So often when thinking about origins in early colonial America, the conversation is here in the transatlantic connections with Europe and Africa. But there is something to be gained from looking at the other side of the Americas at the Pacific.
- [15:59]
Julian Sapariti
When you incorporate that into your history, it necessarily changes how you think about the history of the Americas. It's important, it's fundamental.
- [16:08]
Charles Fournier
A quick point of clarity. When Diego refers to the Americas, he's including all of the Americas. North, Central, south, all of them.
- [16:17]
Julian Sapariti
I think oftentimes, especially from the perspective of the US we have this idea of US Exceptionalism, like we're a country apart from the hemisphere. We call ourselves America, like there can't be any other America. We are the only America. And the reality, of course, is that the United States is in North America, which has several countries and is part of the American hemisphere, which includes two continents plus the islands in between. So that being said, you can't think about the US or the history of the US without thinking about its position within the hemisphere. So Latin American history is fundamental to thinking about the U.S. therefore, the history of Asians crossing the Pacific, going to Mexico and dispersing outwards from there is fundamental also to the history of Asian populations in the US.
- [17:11]
Charles Fournier
So rather than thinking of the typical east to west narrative tied to the Americas that takes place across the Atlantic, Diego is focusing on a West to east narrative across the Pacific. And the Trans Pacific routes that have a large impact on bringing Asians to the Americas are established by the pursuits of trade, conquest, and as Julian once explained, a kind of religiously driven, purifying madness. That's not how Julian sounds. This all contributed to the Spanish Empire having a pretty sophisticated understanding of the Earth by 1600.
- [17:44]
Julian Sapariti
Think about Columbus, 1492. They've been sailing the world's seas for over 100 years.
- [17:54]
Seth Boggess
This is where we insert a disclaimer that even though Diego casually mentioned Columbus, we do want to mention that he was a propagator of genocide. Okay, back to the story.
- [18:07]
Julian Sapariti
They had a very strong understanding of the world and its oceans by that point. There are a lot of things that needed to be ironed out. For example, they thought that there was a mythical southern continent. I mean, it turns out there is a southern continent, Antarctica, that they didn't know about at the time, but they thought that it was the same size as the continents in the northern hemisphere. If you were looking at a map in Spain or maybe in Portugal, let's say, largest European empires of their times, you would see a world that split between two spheres of influence. One half of the world given to Spain and the other half of the world given to Portugal by the pope by the end of the 15th century.
- [18:53]
Charles Fournier
I want to reiterate that this idea of the world split between these two European empires is a European perspective. The Chinese empire would see this differently. But because of this claim to the world by these empires, the Europeans set out to explore their claim. Like Diego said, their understanding of the globe was fairly strong, but there was still terra incognita, the unexplored explored portions of their maps. These spots on their maps were not left blank, but may have fantastical assumptions or sea monsters or whatever else in places. Still, their geographical claims as empires established some global connectivity.
- [19:35]
Julian Sapariti
It's really the first time you can really talk about a truly interconnected global system or global economy, too, because this was like the final oceanic frontier to connect the Americas with Asia.
- [19:52]
Charles Fournier
They connected for trade, for the spread of Catholicism, and for better food.
- [19:58]
Julian Sapariti
The Portuguese, they found the route to India, right? This was like a fantastic thing, because medieval people had been dreaming about the spices. Imagine you're a peasant, you're sitting around, you got nothing to put on your food. You know, you just eating bread and some meat. No, they wanted spices. They wanted to spice things up. They wanted. Yeah, they wanted. They wanted to have more interesting food. That was the whole impetus for Portuguese overseas exploration, to find the Spice Islands, right? So when the Portuguese found the route to India for the Spaniards, like, holy shit, we're way behind.
- [20:30]
Charles Fournier
So the Portuguese find a route to the Spice Islands, and in Spain's attempt to do the same by going the other direction, they land on the wrong continent. The Americas were a gap in Spain's understanding of the globe.
- [20:42]
Julian Sapariti
In 1492, they run into the Americas. It turns into be into this, like, inconvenient obstruction to get into Asia. That, you know, once they realize how big the Pacific is, they're like, okay, a lot of people end up settling in the Americas because that's too damn far to go. But some people still keep going. And that's where you get the Manila galleon route. Because when they get to Asia, they realize there's a hell of a lot of money to be made on those spices. The first trans Pacific voyage is accomplished by the Spaniards. It's sent out by Miguel Lopez de Legazvi, the Spanish conquistador that first invades and settles in the Philippines. And he sends out a couple of ships to go back to Mexico.
- [21:26]
Charles Fournier
This connection between the Philippines and Mexico across the Pacific was a brutal voyage. But this route, initially navigated by Andres de Orodoneta and Lope Martin, is made for the next 250 years by what are called the Manila galleons.
- [21:40]
Julian Sapariti
The Manila galleons were the Spanish ships that sailed between the Philippines and Mexico during the colonial period from 1565 to 1815. And they're essentially the ships that connected Asia to Latin America long before when we traditionally think about connections between Asia and the Americas writ large.
- [22:00]
Charles Fournier
And these galleons were not your measly one sail ships. No. For these ships to be able to take journeys with cargo in their holes that would last six months or longer, they had to be massive.
- [22:13]
Julian Sapariti
It's an old Spanish ship, larger than almost all of their time. They're three masted, they have two high sides, and they were the most advanced maritime technology of their time. I mean, it's really remarkable what they were able to do.
- [22:30]
Charles Fournier
For some historical context, the galleons are traveling back and forth from Manila in the Philippines, across the Pacific Ocean to Acapulco in Mexico. The reason for these locations is a result of an expanding Spanish empire that is seeking resources that include spices and slaves. While missionaries are spreading Catholicism, this is also taking place during the Spanish Inquisition.
- [22:56]
Seth Boggess
Let's have a definition break.
- [22:58]
Julian Sapariti
Okay. Inquisition.
- [22:59]
Seth Boggess
What is Inquisition?
- [23:02]
Julian Sapariti
Yeah, so the Inquisition was an institution that basically polices the line between accepted and not accepted religiosity in the Spanish Empire, in Spain and in the Spanish Empire. And so the Inquisition is there to police those bounds, to say, this is Catholic, this is not Catholic, and to basically punish people who are supposed to be Catholic, who are doing things that don't fall under Catholic dogma. Right. So that's what the Inquisition is doing.
- [23:32]
Charles Fournier
So the Inquisition decided if converts were practicing Catholicism properly or not. This might go without saying, but the Inquisition was not the most peaceful, but it is Worth mentioning that the Inquisition was not permitted to persecute indigenous people because they were given the special status of neophytes or new converts. So the galleons in use during this time were massive, and they needed a sizable crew, upwards of 200 to 250 people.
- [24:06]
Julian Sapariti
The people who were sailing those galleons, they were Asian, by and large. Over 70% on most Galleons, and they were mostly Filipinos. They could also be South Asians. They could be. They could be Japanese, they could be Thai, but most of them were Filipinos from the northernmost island of Luzon and from all over that island.
- [24:24]
Charles Fournier
Most of the Asians included on the boats were free sailors. But the second largest group of people were slaves who found themselves on the galleons because they were in the Philippines. And the galleons left from the Philippines.
- [24:37]
Julian Sapariti
A lot of those people are ending up in the Philippines because they've been enslaved by the Portuguese.
- [24:41]
Charles Fournier
At this time, the Portuguese are operating in Southern India, the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia, the Spice Islands, Nagasaki, and the list goes on. It's also worth pointing out that Portugal is ruled by Spain for several decades during the earlier years of the galleon route. So what does this mean?
- [24:58]
Julian Sapariti
It means you have a huge, huge diversity of enslaved people who are converging on Manila through these Portuguese slave traders.
- [25:07]
Charles Fournier
So Manila is a hub for trade that includes spices and enslaved people that have been captured by both the Portuguese and the Spanish in their conquests. Manila is also the port from which the Trans Pacific galleons leave to sail to Acapulco, Mexico. But wait, Mr. Narrator, you may be asking, what does this have to do with Asians in the Americas?
- [25:29]
Julian Sapariti
They were a byproduct of that broader global exchange. There was rarely a kind of intentional move to bring over all these Asian people to the Americas.
- [25:40]
Charles Fournier
But Asians were indeed making their way to the Americas.
- [25:43]
Julian Sapariti
So by 1620, you have anyone who's traveling on the galleon can take at least a couple of slaves with them. Even the lowest ranking sailors who are Spanish can trade in slaves across the Pacific. Many Asians are being enslaved by poor Spaniards, and it's largely them who are trading enslaved people across the Pacific.
- [26:04]
Charles Fournier
Poor Spaniards are able to transport enslaved peoples from Manila to Acapulco for trade. And because of the diversity of enslaved peoples in Manila, this results in a diverse spectrum of Asian people making the voyage on the galleons across the Pacific to America. And this voyage is miserable.
- [26:31]
Julian Sapariti
Can you imagine what it would have been like to be on a boat? I mentioned this large a Galleon is large, but in reality, like if you're living there, you know, it's not that much space and you got to share it with hundreds of other people. Most of the time you're sleeping on top of the deck. You're not sleeping in a cabin. You're totally exposed to the elements, you're in the sun all the damn time and you don't have enough food because there's no way the galleons could carry that much food. Why? Because the hulls were filled with Chinese products.
- [27:03]
Charles Fournier
Just a quick note. The main reason that Manila was such a useful port for the Spanish was because of its proximity to China. There is easy access to trade for Chinese products.
- [27:14]
Julian Sapariti
You know, everyone in the Americas wanted to get their hands on some silk. And I don't blame them. I do too. But you know what I'm saying, the holes were filled with that stuff. So there was no room for people who are actually living on the galleons to sleep in any kind of comfort. And a lot of people, even after they get to land, like their health had been totally destroyed. A lot of people died after they.
- [27:37]
Charles Fournier
Disembarked for the voyages that made the journey. Conditions were harsh because the trip crossed the Pacific Ocean. For frame of reference, I can rotate a globe in such a way that I can almost see only the Pacific Ocean. One historian, his name was William Schurz.
- [27:56]
Julian Sapariti
One who first wrote about the galleons, even called it the most dangerous oceanic voyage maritime route of its time. And that's because the Pacific is the largest ocean. And sailing it from the Philippines to Mexico, that took six months. Sometimes it took longer. So why was it so dangerous? Because the galleons, when they left the Philippines, they had to sail north. This is the currents, they go north. It's called the Kuroshio Current up by Japan. So you're in the North Pacific. This is a really sort of storm ridden part of the Pacific. And then they cross at a high latitude. What that means is that if the timing wasn't exactly right, you could end up with winter like conditions as you're going across the Pacific before you hit California or even further north, Oregon, Washington, what's now those states. Before sailing south, there was no place to stop to take on supplies.
- [28:57]
Charles Fournier
The inability to stop for supplies because of a rocky coastline or for tumultuous weather led to people suffering from scurvy and beriberi. If you don't know what these illnesses are, they're not great and would make a six month minimum journey across the Largest ocean on Earth, that much more grueling. So people suffer from these illnesses, but the galleon must continue its journey.
- [29:22]
Julian Sapariti
So finally, after hitting the north coast, they drop south. Still can't resupply until they get to Mexico. So it's like this agonizing part. Whereas the worst part of the journey, you have the least amount of food, the least amount of water, everyone is sick, you're within sight of land, but you can't benefit from that in any way because it's a rocky coast.
- [29:43]
Charles Fournier
This means that it wouldn't be safe to take the galleon to shore. The rocky coast forced the ship to continue south because landing would risk damaging the ship on the rocks, which could lead to loss of life goods. And the ship itself.
- [29:57]
Julian Sapariti
This is a hell of a lot of money at the time. They're not going to risk it by trying to go into a deep water area in what's now California. It was imperfectly known at the time, too. I mean, they thought California was an island, it was too dangerous. And then eventually they dropped south to Mexico.
- [30:16]
Charles Fournier
It's an arduous journey. And even if the ship weren't lost at sea, even if the ship makes it from Manila to Acapulco, there is no guarantee of survival. The ideal survival rate isn't great by modern standards.
- [30:30]
Julian Sapariti
Let's say the crew is between 200 and 250. I would say maybe around 50 people die. That's actually on a pretty safe crossing. There are many crossings where hundreds of people die or the ship sinks, or even when the ship makes it, hundreds of people die.
- [30:46]
Charles Fournier
To give you an even more clear idea of how dangerous this journey was, here's the story of one ship in particular. The 1656 crossing, which lasts until 1657.
- [31:01]
Julian Sapariti
Almost everyone on the ship had died. And there's these sentries on the coast. They're the ones who are watching for the galleons. And they send messengers back to Mexico City and announce that a galleon has arrived and all that. Anyway, they're always looking for galleons. So they see this derelict galleon just floating past, and they don't see anyone living on board. And eventually the thing crash lands in what's now Honduras. And a handful of people, it turns out, had survived that. And then they just flee into the countryside because, like, they just died. We know about some of the details of that ship because one of the survivors was an enslaved Asian.
- [31:42]
Charles Fournier
His name was Diego de la Cruz.
- [31:45]
Julian Sapariti
He ran away after the galleon stops in Honduras finally, and he's on the run for two years. And then eventually he shows up in the colonial capital of Guatemala called Santiago. And he shows up because he's broken into an indigenous woman's home. And he takes all of their clothes and he runs off with them. And then this is in the middle of the night. The woman wakes up. She runs down the street to get what's like the equivalent of the sheriff, another indigenous man, and says, hey, this black guy broke into my home and took all my clothes. And so they go out looking for this black guy, and they come across this Asian man who has this bundle of clothes that look suspiciously like this woman's clothes and her whole family's clothes. So they arrest him. They turn him over to the Spanish authorities, and as they're interrogating him, he says, you know, because they start, they call him a mulatto. And then he says, no, I'm a chino. I was born in the Philippines. I was on the ship where pretty much everyone died. And then I've been on the run for the last couple of years.
- [32:56]
Charles Fournier
In this story, this man Diego gets labeled and relabeled. He may have been black because so many people were mixed, but he calls himself a chino, and the authorities refer to him as a mulatto. But really, this is the limit of categorization. Folks are more complicated than a label. Still, in the midst of the confusion, when the Spanish authorities realize Diego is from the Philippines and that Diego identifies as a Chino, they have him whipped and sold. If Diego was labeled differently, there may have been different reactions. The galleons ran for 250 years. Because of them, approximately 20,000 Asians made the voyage from Manila to the Americas. By including this trans Pacific history of the Americas with what we already know about the transatlantic history of the Americas, we are inevitably complicating our understanding of the past. Because an honest history of the Americas isn't just an elementary school rhyme about Columbus followed by the pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock. An honest history includes the Asian slaves that survived the voyage across an unforgiving Pacific Ocean, and points out that Columbus, in his efforts to be like Marco Polo, got lost and propagated genocide. For Diego, an honest history includes his own seeking his efforts to establish a sense of belonging through language, through his own roots and through his research. And this research, this history that complicates our view of the past has an impact on our own individual histories. If we are honest and look at our origins, our roots, it's likely we'll find it's messy, complicated, and that's okay. Next time in Act 2, we look at chinos in the Americas.
- [34:59]
Julian Sapariti
And so chino became the word that when any Asian arrived in the Americas, they were called chinos.
- [35:07]
Charles Fournier
And the impact of travel and the development of labels and identities in new.
- [35:12]
Julian Sapariti
Spaces at that age, you're having this really uncurated experience of travel that you have to depend on each other so much and it creates really, really intense bonds.
- [35:33]
Charles Fournier
I'm Charles Fournier. This episode was written and produced by me. This podcast is based on the book the First Asians in the Americas, written by Diego Javier Luis, who also aided in editing and voiceover. Original music from this podcast is from Julian Sapariti. Mixing and mastering was done by Seth Boggess. This podcast is funded by Tufts University. Please take a moment to leave a rating and write a review. And when someone asks, hey, are you listening to anything good? You can tell them definitely go check out the first Asians in the Americas. Thank you for listening.