
The identities we seek are not always the identities we end up with.
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Charles Fournier
Welcome to the historians TABLE this is season one, the first Asians in the Americas. Act two Culturally ADRIFT.
Diego Javier Luis
A flag featuring the Red Cross of Burgundy comes into view on the horizon against the low sun of the new year. The shore sentinels, guards tasked with keeping watch, spot a battered vessel scarred by months of combat with the sea. The sailors aboard this ship are now hardened survivors, hungry for the land that is their salvation. The sentinels guide the galleon along the treacherous rocky coast and through the channel that marks the entrance to the port of Acapulco. The cannons of the fort of San Diego fire a salute as the ship enters the bay. A great crowd of merchants, royal inspectors, mule train drivers, enslaved retainers, dock workers and miscreants awaits. Several skiffs launch to meet the galleon and ACcompany it to two palm trees on the beach where it moors and anchors. The first of the empty eyed survivors lower themselves into the skiffs. They come from all parts of Asia. The Philippines, the Spice Islands, the Bay of Bengal, India, China, Japan. But when their crusted feet touch the sun scorched sand, they have to learn to answer te Chino or China.
Julian Sapariti
And when they are crammed into a.
Diego Javier Luis
Church to hear mass, a few of these Chinols already long to be adrift once more.
Charles Fournier
When in search of an identity, oftentimes the identity that we pursue is not the identity we end up with. Identity can be complicated by where we are or who we're around. It's something that tends to evolve based on how we are labeled. Welcome to the first Asians in the Americas. I'm your host Charles Fournier. In Act 2, we look at the impact of labels on identity and how exploring a complicated history leads to complications in our labels and our identities. This is Act 2. Culturally adrift.
Julian Sapariti
Part of it was because my dad trained martial arts his whole life. He started learning judo and karate as like a form of self defense growing up in the Lower east side of New York. And he continued training and he learned Wing Chun as an adult. Wing Chun is a southern Chinese style of martial art and he started teaching me when I was really young just some of the basics of Wing Chun and Chinese style martial arts. And that was something that felt really special to me. It was like something that was part of my identity even though like my ancestors probably didn't do martial arts. Like that's not part of our family history, but it was part of my idea of what being Chinese was.
Charles Fournier
This is self identification. So often the labels we get come from other people's perceptions of us. Like when Diego was mislabeled as Mexican. Growing up in Nashville, the ability to point to our own identities, in contrast to what other people say is a big part of growing up, of creating a sense of self. Diego saw his brother embraced Cuban culture in the form of music, dress, and cigars. After a trip to Cuba, Diego found himself anchoring his identity to martial arts. It was an inheritance he got from his dad, and it helped create a connection to his family.
Julian Sapariti
We had our own sort of family mythology of what it meant to be Chinese. We saw martial art movies, we trained martial arts. We had family pictures of my Chinese grandfather. And we knew that that was like a fundamental piece of who we were.
Charles Fournier
This was only a part of what it could mean to be Chinese. There was so much more to know, like what his family's cultural perspective was while in China, or what it was like to live in or be from Guangdong Province, or how to speak the language. How we self identify sometimes becomes tied to any representation of a place or culture that we can latch onto.
Julian Sapariti
You can see how kind of twisted some of these ideas of identity are, because for me, like, it's also part of how you imagine it. It's symbolic, but it also meant so much at the time. It's like, this is what. This is part of me that's different, and that makes sense.
Charles Fournier
This is a balance. Martial arts made Diego different. It symbolized a connection to a heritage he didn't really know. And this is common. We often seek a quality of ourselves that helps us stand out, makes us unique. This is how we differentiate ourselves from others, forging that sense of individuality or self identification. But in that process, our desire to be unique and individual are competing with our desire to belong. So we seek others who've identified similar unique traits in themselves. For a young Diego venturing off to college, he sought out others who were in a similar trajectory of self identification.
Julian Sapariti
I think really, maybe it was beginning in college when I started seriously exploring the Asian side more when I joined this Asian frat. But I also started training martial arts more seriously. I didn't know what it meant to be Chinese. Growing up, there was no Chinese language spoken in the household.
Charles Fournier
So in the fashion of many young people seeking to find out who they are through their family's roots, Diego traveled to China a few times in college, and then he'd live there for a year after college. These trips were informative, and as Diego said last episode, you feel like you.
Julian Sapariti
Understand your family history better, and you feel like you understand where you come from, but it's also the realization that that comforting origin will never fall into place, will never truly be there.
Charles Fournier
Traveling to the homeland feels like returning to a place that you've never been. It has been called genealogy tourism. This idea of quote, unquote, returning to your familial origin might feel familiar because family stories or pictures can give us a sense of what things might have been like. But our experience will never match what our family experienced. So this effort to maintain an identity that is tied to a history or culture or time we never knew is tough, damn near impossible. When Diego went to China, even though he knew he was connected to China because his grandfather came from China, Diego still felt like an outsider.
Julian Sapariti
I experienced a lot of racism in China. People pointing at you and saying, oh, foreigner, there goes a foreigner. Or assuming that I'm from Xinjiang. So the assumption was that if you look kind of vaguely ethnic by, to US standards, you might be from Xinjiang, which means you could be dangerous like a terrorist. So, I mean, it was kind of isolating. And I also struggle with the language. Mandarin in Chinese is. I think it's easy to learn it to a basic level, but getting beyond that can be pretty challenging.
Charles Fournier
So Diego went to China, was in China speaking the language, but he didn't fit in. And though he stood out, Diego fell into a routine. He would walk the city every weekend and he worked in an office, which was nice because he had community, even if he wasn't embraced elsewhere. Not being embraced, as you'll see throughout this episode, also leads Diego to seek community in other places and with people that he may not have expected to find community with. So next and most important to his childhood self, Diego went to Thailand to train Muay Thai at a gym called Dragon Muay Thai. Muay Thai is the national sport of Thailand. It is a martial art referred to as the science of eight limbs, because fists, feet, elbows and knees are all put to use.
Julian Sapariti
The training was one on one with all guys who had been fighting since they were. Since they could walk, basically. And it was from early in the morning. It was like eight hours a day of training because it's a profession for.
Charles Fournier
A lot of people in the midst of all of this training, just brutal stuff. Diego was able to find opportunities to explore the island through the juice lady.
Julian Sapariti
The juice lady stand was in between the hostel and the gym. So I would stop there every now and then and we started up conversations. And she knew a little English enough that we could, like, communicate some basic things. She wasn't Thai, though. She was in Thailand by Herself, she was maybe a few years older than I was, and she was there with her brothers and had to, like, support them all on her juice stand. Anyway, she had a motorcycle, and at night after training, she'd just kind of like drive me around and I could see a few things.
Charles Fournier
Listener, I want to pause here. This is one of those moments where Diego's search for community leads to a serendipitous friendship. Diego and the juice lady are strangers in a strange land. Such a circumstance allows for a unique bond and sense of community. The odd thing about Diego's time in China and traveling around seeking a sense of belonging was that it led to Diego's desire to learn Spanish and travel to Spain.
Julian Sapariti
This guy that was working for the same company, I remember we all got together, like all the folks from the US who were part of this company to celebrate Thanksgiving in China. We were in Nanjing, and this guy told me that he walked something called the Camino. And it was like such this eye opening experience and changed his life and all that stuff.
Charles Fournier
So Diego went to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago.
Julian Sapariti
It's like a pilgrimage, but it's really like a walk that crosses the entirety of Spain. I started by the French border. I walked the northern coast until I hit a town called Villaviciosa. And then I went from there down into the mountains into Asturias. I walked through there and then to the end of the pilgrimage, which is a town called Santiago de Compostela, and then after that to the sea.
Charles Fournier
People walk the Camino for a wide range of reasons, but for Diego, at 22 years old, to walk over 1,000 kilometers over the course of 44 days, the Camino was an opportunity to experience a life beyond what he had previously known. And this was helped by the strangers he met.
Julian Sapariti
One of the people I met is a crazy German woman, 19 years old at the time. I remember meeting her a few days into the walk. She had like a school backpack, no water bottle, like, completely unprepared for the walk, and was like, totally by herself, didn't know anybody, and I think just really needed a mom. And I was the mom, and I gave her a water bottle, like, looked out for her. She lost clothing, lost her passport. I always was the one to go back and pick up the stuff that she left behind, but was really just a crazy German person from Berlin that was totally unshackled and like totally liberated.
Charles Fournier
For Diego, who went to a private school growing up and then to Emory University on the trajectory to become an academic, he was often used to a level of decorum and structure, even to tell stories to me and Julian. Diego was cautious and had to be plied with drink.
Julian Sapariti
Pacifico.
Charles Fournier
Still, this German woman, Emily, introduced Diego to another way to experience the world. They walked together for a couple of weeks before going separate ways. But once the end of the Camino was near, Diego and another unshackled and liberated German friend stopped and waited for four days for Emily to catch up so that they could finish the walk to the coast together. Diego felt obligated to finish the walk with Emily and the others that he had walked with.
Julian Sapariti
The people you meet and you walk for. For that period of time, they're like family, you know? And when you're walking with people, it's such an intense experience physically. And also at that age, you're having this uncurated experience of travel that you have to depend on each other so much. And it creates really, really intense bonds doing a walk like that.
Charles Fournier
This sense of self or self identification grows in these kinds of experiences. For Diego, walking the Camino was tremendously influential to who he was and how he saw himself in the world. And much of this was tied to where he was and who he was with. And this experience stuck. According to Julian, when he first met Diego, all he could talk about was the Camille.
Julian Sapariti
But I remember you were going all you. Every other conversation was about the Camino when I first met you, because it was so. It was particularly significant for me because I was a walk in Spain and I was speaking Spanish. My Spanish was fine, but not great, but I was speaking Spanish all the time. I was learning some words of German. And you're just meeting all these wild characters, like out of a Coen Brothers movie.
Charles Fournier
And over the course of the Camino, Diego had grown. He was viewing the world with these new people in a different way. By the end, he was doing things that he had never considered before.
Julian Sapariti
So we got to the last town. It was by the sea. And very few people continue walking to that. So it's really like only the crazies are left by that point. I remember we got there and there were no beds left in the hostel. So I remember we were hanging around. We were probably drinking a little bit. And I remember going around asking someone, so, like, where do the people in this town stay when they have nowhere to stay? And the person pointed to an abandoned building, was like, I guess you can go there. And so we, like, broke into this abandoned building and climbed up to the. I guess it was like an attic crawl space area. And just slept there, and then we hitchhiked and bummed around for a while until we got back to Madrid.
Charles Fournier
Each of these trips changed Diego, and to an extent, it allowed him to gather a sense of belonging in a transient state with a community of people that he would not have identified himself with previously. The Camino almost tops off these experiences.
Julian Sapariti
I think with that kind of experience, you. You can't judge anybody, you know, you have to take everyone as they are, and they take you as you are. And I think that there's something really comforting and liberating about that too. You don't have to try to act or behave in any particular way, because everyone is a pilgrim, everyone is traveling the same way, everyone is staying in hostels or outside somewhere. And there's a kind of equalizing thing that happens with that.
Charles Fournier
Practicing martial arts, living in China, walking the Camino. These experiences make up a big part of who Diego is. In his efforts to connect with roots or grow awareness of where he came from, Diego created new experiences with strangers in strange lands. Each of these experiences are unique to a specific time and specific place, and they can't authentically be repeated. What Diego experienced was not what his ancestors experienced. What he sought was not necessarily what he got. But this act of seeking is important, and it seeped into his academic research. The ability to self identify is a luxury, and the act of having an identity thrust upon you isn't new. Just as Diego is labeled and categorized in his travels, people who have moved or been forced from place to place throughout history have acquired or been given, often not so kindly, names from whoever held power in that moment decided to give. This is not to say what Diego experienced is what people in his research experienced, not at all. But Diego's experiences influenced how he approached this research and how he looked at people who navigated being labeled specifically with the label Chino in the Americas. And to better understand the creation and impact of the term chino, we need to consider some of the early examples of race making and labeling. The Spanish during the Spanish Empire, labeled groups of people, often in an effort to differentiate themselves from who they were. Not the Spanish, along with much of Europe at the time, categorized their own identity through religion.
Julian Sapariti
Whiteness emerges through a variety of means during this period. One, it's connected to old Christian blood. Someone who did not have ancestry that was Muslim, someone who did not have ancestry that was Jewish, someone who did not have ancestry that was pagan. So if you could prove purity of blood, then you were entitled to certain privileges and rights that other people who did not have purity of blood, could not have. And that's based on lineage. That, over time, becomes connected to an idea of whiteness. Whiteness also gets defined by who is deemed enslaveable in colonial societies. Spaniards could not be enslaved in colonial societies, but who could be enslaved were people who were not white, who were not Spaniard, not European.
Charles Fournier
So by creating the category of whiteness, the Spanish were justifying their ability to enslave any number of people. Going Back to the 15th century of European slave raids.
Julian Sapariti
It begins through the Canary islands. You have the first slave raid going into west Africa. So you have an emerging enslaved population From a very early period that's black from Africa over the course of the colonial period, goes down the coast of Africa, begins with west Africa. But then largest numbers of enslaved people to come to the Americas from west central Africa. We're talking about Angola, we're talking about Congo, and elsewhere in that area. Indigenous people can be enslaved. They're eventually protected because they're formerly vassals, crowned, they're designated as vassals who pay tribute. And therefore they shouldn't be enslaved. But they were enslaved. And indigenous people were defined in opposition to Europeans, at least initially. And then, of course, Asians can be enslaved. Asians have a wide variety of skin, but they were enslaved under various justifications. They were either at war with the crown. If they were Muslims, they could be enslaved. And if they were previously enslaved by the Portuguese, they could be legally enslaved by the Spaniards. But what that means is that basically anyone who's Asian could be legally enslaved by the spaniards.
Charles Fournier
This emerging definition of whiteness, which occurred all across Europe, Places itself in opposition to all of these people, defined as other. And it contributes to the Spanish empire's justification of enslaving a wide variety of these folks that are African or Asian or indigenous. The empire's labeling of the other continued. In the Americas, there are different words.
Julian Sapariti
That are used to describe colonial subjects. In the Spanish empire, you have negro, which refers to black people. Indio, which refers to indigenous people. And then you have other words that refer to mixes. Mestizo is a Spanish indigenous mix. Mulatto is a Spanish black or sometimes indigenous black mix. And so chino became the word that when any Asian arrived in the Americas, they were called chinos. Chino literally means Chinese in Spanish. But regardless of one's background, where they came from, Whether they were Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, southeast Asian, or Indian, etc. No matter where they came from, what language they spoke, they were called a chino.
Charles Fournier
The reason for the term Chino is likely due to the fact that China was the most recognizable place on the map. People who were living in Mexico for the most part, knew very little about Asia. So rather than distinguish all the other different places people lived, they chose to disregard diversity for the label chino. And the label chino forced something unique to happen between these strangers in a strange land who found themselves sharing a label.
Julian Sapariti
On the first level, it's a top down imposition. These people did not think of themselves as chinos. And there are so many differences of all these people who are now called chinos. But regardless, when they come off those boats, they become chinos, right? So something important happens there, and it determines how they're experiencing colonial society. And by virtue of that, now they're starting to have some more things in common that they didn't have before by virtue of being called the same name and being lumped into the same category. And what's really interesting that starts happening is a lot of them start forming friendships across ethnic and linguistic lines. They start marrying. You have Filipinos who are marrying Indians, for example, people from the Bay of Bengal marrying Chinese people. You have all these kinds of interconnections that did not happen to the same intensity before. And I think that's part of the colonial experience as part of living in the Americas. On the one hand, that's a beautiful thing, right? You know, love finds a way, like people find connection, and under terrible, brutal conditions, they're doing the same kinds of labor and they're finding connections through that. It's happening, you know, sort of against how colonialism seeks to divide and control people.
Charles Fournier
As a quick note, because this happens too often when discussing history, I want to draw attention to this moment. Diego is not saying that labeling all Asian people in the Americas as chinos was okay because people were now able to marry folks they wouldn't have married before. But this isn't to say that this labeling was only bad. The reality of taking an honest look at history is having to dwell in the murkiness of humans. To essentialize the labeling as simply good or bad would be a disservice to the humans of that moment who suffered and loved and lived through sadness and happiness. They still felt the whole spectrum of human experience. And the term chino was how some Asians came to terms with their new condition in the Americas. They took their new circumstance, good or bad, and created community.
Julian Sapariti
Asians themselves begin to think about their own identities in different ways, too. You have different kinds of connections that are starting to happen that didn't exist before you get all these kinds of interactions. And that's why I think about colonial Mexico as this global place that was the center of the Atlantic and the Pacific during the colonial period. That's where you have this global crossroads. People from all over the world meeting each other, collaborating in various ways, marrying each other, and getting into conflicts with each other.
Charles Fournier
Beyond the social impact of the chino label was the legal impact. Chino was not only a racialized term, but a mark of what rights these people had or didn't have.
Julian Sapariti
It has a lot of sort of legal repercussions being called chinos. It wasn't just, you know, oh, look, there's a bunch of chinos getting off the ship now. They're part of the caste system, the colonial caste system, which was a way to categorize and ultimately control the various groups of people that lived in colonial society. In the Spanish Americas, all of the.
Charles Fournier
Groups mentioned earlier that were defined by their race were part of this caste system. For chinos, their position in this caste system meant a few things.
Julian Sapariti
One, it means they can be legally enslaved in the Spanish empire. And so that's a big thing because. And again, this is longer part of the story. But in Asia, most Asians were called indios. In the Philippines, the indigenous inhabitants were considered part of the Spanish empire, and as such, they're called indios. So as indios, they had formal protections, even if, in reality, they weren't really protected. In many ways, they weren't supposed to be legally enslaved, except for under a few specific justifications. And so when some of these indios become chinos in the Americas, that basically means that their enslavement is accepted outright. They had no formal protections.
Charles Fournier
I want to reiterate what Diego just said. People could be given different labels depending on where they were in the world. An indigenous person in the Philippines can go from being called an indio to a chino if they leave the Philippines for the Americas. This also means that they could go from a group that shouldn't be legally enslaved in the Philippines, even if they were, to a group of people that can be enslaved in the Americas. Being a part of this caste system also meant that they could be targeted by the Inquisition.
Julian Sapariti
The Inquisition in the Americas. I mean, it had. From the Spanish perspective, it had a big job because people like, what did conversion mean in the Americas? It means a missionary splashing some water on someone to say, okay, you're now a Catholic. You've been baptized, but are they, you know, do they really keep Catholic customs Are they firm believers in God and Jesus and all this? And over the years, missionaries to their great disdain, realize that, okay, a lot of these people are not actually Catholic. And so where Chinos come in is a lot of them had previously been Muslim or they held other beliefs that were definitely not Catholic. So many of them ended up before the Inquisition. And as Chinos, they could be legally prosecuted in ways that as indios in the Philippines, they could not.
Charles Fournier
And the list goes on.
Julian Sapariti
The other thing that happens when they enter the caste system is there are many, many laws regulating what kinds of jobs you could do and what kinds of jobs you couldn't do, what kinds of guilds you could join and what you couldn't. If you could carry weapons legally, if you had to pay certain types of tribute, there were all kinds of laws. So what it meant is that you actually had a harder time making good money if you were a Chino. So anyway, that's to say that when Asians first arrive in the Americas in large numbers, they're immediately racialized in this collective way that sought to just clump everyone together, irrespective of ethnicity or religion or whatever it may be. And you have people trying to distinguish themselves from that. But the broad trend is, and now everyone is a Chino, and they have to come to terms with that.
Charles Fournier
Something Diego said above stands out in how the caste system worked and how people are identified. Folks could pay to change what they were able to do.
Julian Sapariti
Who counts as white can vary drastically. And there's even a kind of legal document that emerges at the end of the colonial period in Latin America called the Gracias al Sakar. And basically what that is, is you can pay money to be counted as white and receive all the privileges of being white, no matter. Well, not no matter who you were. But if you check certain boxes, let's say you could be legally considered a white person. There's a broader conversation to be had about passing, and especially the experience of being mixed and to what extent you identify with your white side or not.
Charles Fournier
There's a part of this conversation that complicates how we talk about history. There was a certain amount of social mobility for chinos in the Americas. And when thinking about the idea of passing or paying money to move up a hierarchy of labels, people may simplify the actions as horrible or wonderful. To condemn people for trying to move themselves out of a bad situation or to glorify people for getting out of a bad situation is just too simple. If we're trying to be honest about history.
Julian Sapariti
There were Asians in Mexico who sought to make themselves, on a legal and social level, almost indistinguishable from the colonial elite. And the way that they did that was, one, some of them owned slaves. Two, some of them petitioned for licenses to do things that other Chinos had been legally prevented from doing. One of those things is to carry weapons. We'd call that open carry in the US that could be a harquebus. So like an early rifle, it could be sword and dagger. These are sort of the common arms that were carried. And that marks one's status. You know, carrying weapons, you're like a member of the lower elite. By doing that to trade in different goods or to travel, Chinos had been kind of restricted in their mobility and what kinds of businesses they could be involved in. So having an allowance to do all those things is to say is to show that I'm not like the rest of these people. I'm not like other Chinos. I'm a special kind of Chino, or even not Chino at all. Like, I'm Asian, but I'm not a Chino. You can't treat me like a Chino. I'm not going to pay tribute like the other Chinos do. And some of them marked that by marrying indigenous women, or in some cases, marrying Spanish women and having lots of kids, a Catholic marriage with them, and baptizing their kids and all that stuff.
Charles Fournier
There were also some who chose to pay tribute that indigenous people did so that they could integrate into those communities. The fluidity of labels and categories was present.
Julian Sapariti
So there are certain things that a free person could do if they found themselves at the right place at the right time and had the desire to do that, to begin to try to incorporate themselves into the lower elite. Oftentimes they had records of military service as well, so they were treated as veterans, like as exceptions. For that reason, too.
Charles Fournier
Chinos had to create a new sense identity in the Americas. The nature of the space they were in, the people they were around, the religion they converted to, and the caste hierarchy they found themselves in all contributed to something new. An identity that they didn't necessarily seek out. But a unique identity categorized under the term Chino, which created a sense of community among strangers from different backgrounds in a strange land. The first Asians in the Americas were a byproduct of colonial pursuits combined with the blending of cultures. And isn't this a way to understand our own identities as a byproduct of the time and place in which we live and of the strangers we form communities with. Diego's identity is still something he is continuously navigating. It is a complicated blend of his desire to be a well respected academic. His traveling exploits, his family history, his childhood of being constantly labeled and the labels other people place on him and his own pursuit of seeking identity have led him to create communities with people he didn't expect to identify with. Which is important for how he could begin to understand how Chinos found and created community under this new label in the Americas. So what does this mean for how we look at history? It means that looking at history with a level of empathy may give us a more honest view of people in the past because they were still humans. It also means that projecting identities onto the past may disregard the complexity of the past. The figures we explore in history are not monoliths. They are complex human beings. And even if we want to put a label of hero or villain into the history books, we may want to reconsider next time. In Act 3, we look at a mutiny and a massacre.
Julian Sapariti
The governor orders them to stay in place, but he says no, we're going to go after the Chinese, we're going to pursue them into the countryside and we're going to destroy them. There's and when his soldiers don't want to follow his command, he says, what chicken has sung to your ear? With 25 men we can conquer all of China.
Charles Fournier
And the reality that there are no heroes in an honest history, just humans.
Julian Sapariti
The idea of heroism, you know, you have to do some gymnastics to get to the capital H. Hero. I do still think there's like valor even in the most brutal circumstances. Again, it's the context.
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. Thank you for listening.
The Historian's Table: Act II – Culturally Adrift
Release Date: November 5, 2024
Introduction
In Act II of "The Historian's Table," titled "Culturally Adrift," host Charles Fournier delves into the intricate relationship between historical labeling and personal identity. Drawing from the experiences of Diego Javier Luis, the episode explores how external labels shape self-identification and community formation among Asians in the Americas during the colonial period.
Diego's Journey of Identity Exploration
Diego Javier Luis shares his personal journey of seeking identity, heavily influenced by his family's engagement with martial arts. He reflects:
"We had our own sort of family mythology of what it meant to be Chinese. We saw martial art movies, we trained martial arts. We had family pictures of my Chinese grandfather. And we knew that that was like a fundamental piece of who we were."
— Julian Sapariti [03:55]
Growing up in the Lower East Side of New York, Diego's father trained in various martial arts, instilling a unique cultural identity that Diego embraced, despite it not aligning directly with his ancestral history. This self-identification through martial arts became a cornerstone of Diego's sense of self, illustrating how individuals often latch onto available cultural symbols to forge their identities.
The Spanish Colonial Labeling System
Charles Fournier elucidates the historical context of racial labeling under the Spanish Empire:
"The Spanish during the Spanish Empire, labeled groups of people, often in an effort to differentiate themselves from who they were. Not the Spanish, along with much of Europe at the time, categorized their own identity through religion."
— Charles Fournier [18:07]
This system categorized individuals based on race, religion, and lineage, establishing a hierarchy that facilitated control and justified the enslavement of various groups. Terms like "negro," "indio," and "chino" were employed to classify and manage the diverse populations within the colonies.
The 'Chino' Label: Origins and Implications
The term "chino," Spanish for "Chinese," became a blanket label applied to all Asians arriving in the Americas, regardless of their specific ethnic or linguistic backgrounds:
"Chino literally means Chinese in Spanish. But regardless of one's background, where they came from, whether they were Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, or Indian, etc., no matter where they came from, what language they spoke, they were called a chino."
— Julian Sapariti [21:27]
This oversimplification disregarded the rich diversity among Asian populations, forcing disparate groups into a singular identity. The label "chino" not only erased individual cultural distinctions but also imposed a collective identity that had profound social and legal ramifications.
Social and Legal Repercussions of the 'Chino' Label
Being labeled as "chino" placed Asians within a rigid caste system that dictated their social standing and legal rights:
"Chinos had to create a new sense identity in the Americas. The nature of the space they were in, the people they were around, the religion they converted to, and the caste hierarchy they found themselves in all contributed to something new."
— Charles Fournier [32:05]
Legally, "chinos" were subjected to restrictions that indigenous "indios" were not. They could be enslaved, prosecuted by the Inquisition, and faced numerous laws limiting their occupational and social opportunities. This stratification not only marginalized "chinos" but also fostered intra-group connections as individuals sought solidarity amidst shared oppression.
Fluidity and Resistance within the 'Chino' Category
Despite the oppressive nature of the "chino" label, some individuals navigated the system to assert their distinct identities or improve their social standing:
"There are Asians in Mexico who sought to make themselves, on a legal and social level, almost indistinguishable from the colonial elite... Some of them owned slaves... petitioned for licenses to do things that other Chinos had been legally prevented from doing."
— Julian Sapariti [29:22]
This fluidity allowed certain "chinos" to ascend the social hierarchy by aligning themselves with the colonial elite, marrying into different ethnic groups, or leveraging military service for status. However, these actions also highlight the complexities and moral ambiguities faced by individuals striving for betterment within a rigidly structured society.
Diego's Academic Reflections and Historical Insights
Diego's personal experiences with identity and labeling profoundly influenced his academic pursuits. He approached his research with empathy, understanding that historical figures were multifaceted individuals rather than monolithic heroes or villains:
"Looking at history with a level of empathy may give us a more honest view of people in the past because they were still humans. It also means that projecting identities onto the past may disregard the complexity of the past."
— Charles Fournier [32:05]
This perspective underscores the importance of nuanced historical analysis, recognizing the diverse experiences and identities that shaped historical events and social dynamics.
Conclusion: Empathy and Complexity in Historical Identity
Act II of "The Historian's Table" emphasizes the intricate interplay between external labels and personal identity. Diego Javier Luis's journey illustrates how historical labeling systems like the "chino" category imposed by the Spanish Empire not only shaped individual identities but also fostered community among marginalized groups. The episode advocates for an empathetic and multifaceted approach to history, urging listeners to appreciate the complexities of human experiences beyond simplistic categorizations.
Notable Quotes
"When in search of an identity, oftentimes the identity that we pursue is not the identity we end up with."
— Charles Fournier [01:59]
"You can't judge anybody, you know, you have to take everyone as they are, and they take you as you are."
— Julian Sapariti [15:52]
"The reality that there are no heroes in an honest history, just humans."
— Charles Fournier [34:32]
Final Thoughts
Diego's exploration of identity through martial arts, travel, and academic research offers valuable insights into how historical labels impact personal and communal identities. By examining the term "chino" and its implications, the episode sheds light on the broader themes of race, identity, and community formation in colonial societies. This nuanced exploration invites listeners to reflect on how historical contexts continue to influence contemporary understandings of identity and belonging.