← The Historian's Table
The Historian's Table
Act IV: I Belong Here
00:37:11
We aren't always proud of where we come from - sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a country.
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- [00:01]
Charles Fournier
Welcome to the historians table. This is season one. The first Asians in the Americas. Act four I belong here.
- [00:12]
Diego Javier Luis
Catarina de San Juan died on January 5th, 1688. And the world held its breath. Or so it must have seemed. In Puebla, Mexico, the bells of the Jesuit church rang out before sunrise to announce a period of holy mourning. At first, the visitations to honor her corpse are noble. Restrained, she seems like a saint with her priestly robes and crown of flowers. Only she doesn't quite look like the paintings and sculptures of holy people adorning the churches, the cathedrals of Mexico. Katharina is different, darker, South Asian, a China. But she is also entirely familiar. Her Catholic fervor, her desire for spiritual solitude, all endear her to the public, at least to those who believe her story. As the sun climbs, more and more of the city's residents arrive to see Katharina. They come to pay their respects, to express their piety, to gawk out of morbid curiosity or out of a fascination for the exotic. Whatever the reason, the procession of visitors soon becomes a pushing, hollering mob that fights its way into Catarina's presence, destroying doors and any semblance of order in the process. They take flowers from the shroud, kiss her hands, kiss her face, touch her rosaries and cut pieces of flesh to keep as holy relics. In this compromised state, what is left of Catarina is packed into a coffin. People line the streets, the balconies, even the rooftops to spot the procession carrying her body to the Jesuit church, its final resting place. But there is just one problem. The church doors are too narrow. The pallbearers decide to extract Catarina's corpse to fit the coffin inside. When the crowd catches sight of Catarina's lifeless, yet holy body, they unleash chaos once more. They rush her. They claw and tear off her robes, yank at her hair, her flesh, nick the last flowers from her shroud, and someone even makes off with her shoes. These necromantic ornaments are worshipped, sold, and eventually forgotten. When these rabid spectators remember Katarina, they may think of her as a religious icon, or a formerly enslaved South Asian woman. Or as they saw her last, an exposed, ravaged, inert, virginal body hastily shoved back into a coffin. Only one person cared to document this scene. Catharina's Jesuit confessor, Alonso Ramos, an eyewitness. But Ramos harrowing description of the funeral has been entirely forgotten.
- [03:58]
Charles Fournier
We aren't always proud of where we come from. Sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a country. Too often we ignore parts of who we are or parts of our past that we are ashamed of. But we can't change who we are or where we come from or our past. So if we are being honest as individuals or as a nation, we have to face and acknowledge all of our past. Welcome to the first Asians in the Americas. I'm your host, Charles Fournier. In Act 4, we look to make the past more than mythology, more than something to cherry pick for our rhetorical or political convenience. This is act four. I belong here.
- [04:53]
Julian
So Diego and I are seven years apart. I graduated in 1999 and Diego graduated in 2006.
- [05:01]
Charles Fournier
This is Julian. You've met him several times through this whole podcast. As we were putting this project together, Diego and Julian took a trip to Nashville. And just to jog your memory from the prologue, Diego and Julian grew up in Nashville and went to the same middle school and the same high school. But they didn't meet until grad school at Brown University because even though they took the similar educational path, it was seven years apart. @ Brown, Diego and Julian bonded over their hometown, their similar schooling, the commonalities in their research, and how they were treated in their childhoods.
- [05:34]
Julian
Well, I've known Diego, I guess for like a good part of, I mean, going on a decade now. And I think a lot of what we've done together because I'm mixed race as well. My mom is Vietnamese, she came from Saigon, and my dad is like Italian and Scandinavian. So very mixed. And so Diego, a lot of what we bonded over was not only being from Nashville, going to the same schools, also sort of being weird looking in these schools, you know.
- [05:59]
Charles Fournier
So Julian and Diego traveled to one of their alma maters in Nashville to reminisce about their experiences and to speak with the outgoing headmaster. Here's Diego.
- [06:12]
Diego
But what I was aware of as I was going through Harding Academy in the early 2000s, these were the Bush years, post 911 was the very strong anti immigrant rhetoric that flowed among the students at the school. And you know, these were things as a kid, especially elementary or middle school kid, you basically just repeat what your parents say, right? And what was on the news, people entering the country, they could be terrorists, all this sort of thing. So me looking Hispanic, they, you know, the perception was I'm a Mexican, right?
- [06:50]
Charles Fournier
Diego is not Mexican.
- [06:52]
Diego
Regardless, that kind of perception was so influential to the extent that me with my own identity, I had no idea who I was. All I knew is that people were calling me Mexican. So I thought that's what I was. And so there was this one art Project where you make this ceramic cast that depicts where you come from and what I did for that, and I think my dad still has it in the house somewhere, is a Mexican sombrero and a flag that I thought kind of looked like the Cuban flag, but I actually made the Puerto Rican flag, which is perhaps the perfect metaphor for having this kind of colonized mentality of just utmost confusion. And, yeah, I mean, that was really complicated.
- [07:41]
Charles Fournier
Both Diego and Julian point to small negative interactions that they each cataloged in their adolescence that compounded and had big impacts on their senses of self and senses of belonging.
- [07:55]
Julian
I guess that's the trick of it, is to take seriously those small, what we call microaggressions now that add up to a very uncomfortable experience for me. Caused a lot of racial paranoia growing up, stemming from probably two dozen incidents which range from, like, things that probably weren't even a thing, to be honest with you. Like someone just mentioned Asia or something like this in conversation. And I would take offense to that. But because I had experienced more violent or, like, very outwardly verbally abusive incidents, they all kind of, like, piled up. But ultimately, that's like 0.005% of my time, of my childhood. Less than that, probably.
- [08:37]
Charles Fournier
When looking back, Julian emphasizes that these weren't the only experiences to be had in his childhood, but they were things that contributed to the direction his life.
- [08:47]
Julian
Took, and most of it at a place like Harding. Confederate general, name aside, white flight school history aside, was one of the most special, idyllic places you could be educated as a young person. But we did have this baggage of, like, little shitty things that happened to us that kind of haunted us to the point where we way overcompensated, even in our schoolwork and stuff like that. As PhDs many years later and now walking through that campus, it's a place where people will alleviate those little shitty things that happen to kids that look like us, so they won't carry around that baggage. And they can just purely love Harding or hate Harding on its academic or athletic merit or whatever it may be.
- [09:30]
Charles Fournier
Part of this is due to efforts made by people like David Skeen, the outgoing headmaster. Diego and Julian have been speaking with David over the last few years about efforts to incorporate diversity and inclusion in this school.
- [09:44]
Diego
I contacted Dave Skene, the headmaster. It must have been late 2020 or 2021 at some point. And it was because I saw on this Facebook group Harding Academy alumni, that there was this enormous controversy over the change of the mascot.
- [10:02]
Charles Fournier
Diego remembered that their mascot, the general Was a confederate general who would be at every sporting event. And someone had proposed to change that mascot.
- [10:10]
Diego
Somebody had posted that this was a thing that was going to happen. And then all these parents and former students start posting and just start tearing apart the idea like, this isn't Harding. Harding has always been generals. You know, this is part of the tradition and history of the school. What on earth are you doing? And I had the opposite reaction. I thought, wow, okay, that's pretty cool.
- [10:33]
Charles Fournier
The shift in the mascot, though, the most visible change, isn't the only change in the school.
- [10:39]
Diego
So Dave comes in, all this happens in 2020. And what he's tried to do at the school is really change the culture of the school.
- [10:47]
Charles Fournier
The things that Diego and Julian remember included comments from classmates along with school festivities that turned cultures into caricatures. So this cultural shift looked to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment by.
- [10:59]
Diego
Assigning new readings, by hiring or prioritizing the hire of faculty of color, for example, giving out more scholarships. So they're thinking about diversity very broadly, right? Not only in terms of race, ethnicity, but also class, religion, basically expanding the ways in which harding can be a diverse place to go to school.
- [11:19]
Charles Fournier
So Diego reached out to Dave. In their conversations over email and zoom, Diego talked about his background and his experiences at Harding. Dave listened.
- [11:29]
Diego
Dave was actually listening, and he shared with me his strategic plan for harding and where they want to take the school and how far the school has come already. I think that's the first step with any of these things. You have to learn who the constituents of the school are, what are their experiences, what do they want, where do they want to see the school, for example. And I think just being listened to, even though in reality, probably not a whole lot changed between that first conversation and now having that kind of personal connection and getting to see the school a couple times now, with Dave walking around the campus, seeing old teachers, they're so excited to see, you know, what I've done with my life, where I ended up after Harding. There's something in that that I think is just really special.
- [12:23]
Charles Fournier
But there's something about this experience, about reflecting on his schooling and on engaging with efforts to make school what he may have wanted when he was there, that anchors Diego to Nashville.
- [12:34]
Diego
Everyone deserves to be proud of where they come from. And this was sort of kind of stain on my view of Nashville, I think, for a very good reason. And much of Nashville is still like this. But knowing that harding is a little bit different from those days just feels good.
- [12:48]
Charles Fournier
Like much of what We've discussed over the last few acts, identity and belonging and history are complicated. Diego and Julian's relationship to their old school cannot be simplified as good or bad. Their experiences are complex and fall on a spectrum. But part of their reflection on their schooling and their relationship with Nashville includes a need to look at themselves holistically, honestly. And this awareness has been a process.
- [13:17]
Diego
I think oftentimes for mixed people, you do have to do a lot more choosing. And I think we're trained to think that we have to choose something for you, like Italian or Vietnamese or Scandinavian, right? Or for me, like, am I gonna be Chinese today? Am I gonna be Cuban today? Am I gonna be. Well, I didn't know at the time, but now I know. Lithuanian, Jewish. But anyway, so I think we're trained to think that we have to choose, right? Because only one thing is really legible at a time.
- [13:46]
Charles Fournier
And it sometimes takes traveling to gain insight into a sense of belonging or not belonging.
- [13:51]
Diego
It took me going to China and realizing that I'm not Chinese in the way that people living in China are Chinese. That made me turn more to the Latino side. But I think this is part of the experience of being a mixed kid is you're like a cultural chameleon. And as part of this exploration, you go drift towards one side more at different occasions.
- [14:18]
Charles Fournier
For Julian, part of this exploration as a teenager came in the form of how he portrayed himself through his music.
- [14:25]
Julian
I grew up with so much like racial shame as a kid, deep, deep psychological stuff that as a songwriter, which I started doing when I was 15 and started doing professionally when I was like 17 or 18, senior in high school. All through my 20s, I never wrote a protagonist. And these are autobiographical songs. So myself, I never wrote myself as how I look to other people. So my mind and my artistic mind, however songs work or creative writing works, could never see myself the way I actually look, the way lights reflects a pigment on my skin which is say brown or darker. It was always like a blue eyed, maybe brunette or blond haired man is who I would picture singing these songs. It was like complete disassociation.
- [15:12]
Charles Fournier
This started to change after Julian saw a photo of the Georgigawa Orchestra, a swing band of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. This launched Julian into a decades long project.
- [15:28]
Julian
I started the no no Boy project, which was, I think if you're a more high minded, critical person, you'd say like a reclamation of self or something grandiose like that. But it was in a way and it was through finding a crew, I guess, like other musicians who looked like me and writing songs about them. And when I had them, then my character of myself, when autobiography would come into play, which is not that much for no no Boy, but it happens, was finally just me looked like me.
- [16:00]
Charles Fournier
Navigating identity on its own is difficult, but it's made more difficult with outside pressures like the desire to fit in or the expectations others have of us based on looks or name or any other stereotypical or monolithic expectations.
- [16:15]
Julian
Something that I realized especially when I was a grad student and since I do this project where I sing songs about Asian people and Asian American, white people in particular are disinterested in me being white. They want diversity wallpaper, right? They want to decorate their house and their record collection and their bookshelf with Vietnamese singer songwriter, not Italian Tennessee singer songwriter.
- [16:38]
Charles Fournier
And these outside expectations have an impact on what gets valued.
- [16:42]
Julian
What I think is more interesting is how much you play up your identity and then how much that actually shifts your mindset of who you are because there's a monetary advantage or cultural cachet you gain. Like, how much more Cuban Chinese are you now? And how much more Vietnamese am I now as professionals in this field than as if we were in a field where it mattered not, or like we were talking about earlier when we were younger, if it mattered more that we could get into white society, right, and play because we used to play down those parts. So these are so malleable.
- [17:25]
Charles Fournier
This is a part of the reflection that is necessary for honest history to occur. If we can't have an honest reckoning in our present, how can we take an honest look at history? We have to wade into the murkiness of some complicated intersections of ourselves and of history. For Diego, this was addressing whiteness as.
- [17:44]
Diego
A young mixed person growing up in the south and suppressing the of color side of the identity. And then perhaps later, maybe when you're at Brown, amplifying that other side at the expense of the white side. But I think that, you know, going back to doing honest history and looking at things fully, that at a certain point I realized that I needed to explore that with the same kind of intentionality that I had previously explored the Chinese and the Cuban sides.
- [18:16]
Charles Fournier
So Diego went to Vermont, where his mom's side of the family's from, to walk the Long trail. It's a 272 mile trek along the Green Mountains from Williamston, Massachusetts to the Canadian border.
- [18:28]
Diego
I wanted to explore this state that was part of the white side of my heritage. And it was a kind of reclaiming that I think was very similar to what I'd done with the other sides, too. And I remember when I got to jp, it felt just so amazing to be back there. And I felt really comfortable and at home too, in a way that felt right. So I think that's also been part of the journey is learning to embrace that white side too. That has been such a complicated piece growing up and going through grad school.
- [19:02]
Julian
If you don't embrace it, you're not going to have an honest reckoning of yourself. Of course, it's the exact same thing as your history.
- [19:07]
Diego
Yeah. It's like you're at war with yourself.
- [19:10]
Charles Fournier
So what does this in depth exploration of self and history allow for Julian and Diego? It allows for an honest reflection of where they belong and where they consider home, which means accepting the complexity of both who they are and the space in which they grew up.
- [19:33]
Julian
I have a question for you. Because we're both men in our 30s and grew up in the exact same place, going to the exact same schools, both having bouts at certain times of not feeling like we belonged. And we're talking about origin stories and sort of the fallacy of that, especially for people as disconnected as we are. Right. Cause we can both plot our family histories and our DNA in just a wild mirror of empires. But I'm curious, like, is. Is it more about, like, becoming okay with your actual origin story? That is. You're from Nashville.
- [20:12]
Diego
From Nashville. Yeah, Absolutely.
- [20:13]
Julian
That's how I felt.
- [20:14]
Diego
Absolutely. It's part of that process.
- [20:16]
Julian
Yeah.
- [20:16]
Diego
And I think it's. Yeah. Becoming okay with, like, this is who you are.
- [20:22]
Diego Javier Luis
Right.
- [20:22]
Diego
Exactly.
- [20:23]
Julian
Like you like your. All your historical subjects that you study, right?
- [20:26]
Diego
Yeah. I think you're articulating something that I had trouble articulating.
- [20:29]
Julian
That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here, buddy.
- [20:31]
Diego
Thanks.
- [20:31]
Julian
Got you.
- [20:32]
Diego
Yeah. But I think it's. It's realizing that when you go off, like, my case to China or to Cuba and realizing that you don't really fit in there either, I think makes you more comfortable with, like, where you are. Like, where I was born, you know, where you're from. Where I'm from. I'm from Nashville.
- [20:54]
Julian
Yeah. Say it.
- [20:56]
Diego
Say I'm from Nashville.
- [20:57]
Julian
It's okay. Let it out. He's been doing a fake accent this whole time.
- [21:01]
Diego
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, that's what you answer when someone asks you where you're from. It's from Nashville, Tennessee. It's not, oh, I'm from Guangdong. I'm from Guangdong province. That's just not true. Yeah, yeah. My grandfather is from Guangdong province. Yeah.
- [21:18]
Julian
They're not asking about him.
- [21:19]
Diego
They're not asking about it.
- [21:20]
Julian
That's where he was from.
- [21:21]
Diego
Yes, but I'm from Nashville, Tennessee, and that's okay. It wasn't okay before because I was ashamed of being from Nashville before because of all the racism and discrimination and. Yeah. I mean, just always feeling like an outsider there for X, Y and Z reasons and being just so confused about my identity at that time, too. I mean, it's part of being a mixed kid as well. Like, don't really know which way to turn. When you meet people, you're traveling, you meet people, you have to tell them about where you're from. You know, you ask them where they're from, and they tell you about that, and they ask you about where you're from, and you talk about it. It's not just like you're from the United States or I am from, like, an Afro, Cuban, Chinese, white US Background. But, yeah, I talk about Nashville, and everyone's always like, oh, yeah, Nashville. I've heard of that country music and Jack Daniels. And I'm like, yeah. I mean, I don't really like country music, and Jack Daniels is fine, but, yeah, I'm from Nashville.
- [22:29]
Charles Fournier
If you listen closely to how Diego describes being from Nashville, he uses several expressions of acceptance. It's okay. It's fine. He isn't ecstatic or disappointed. But there is a level of comfort in accepting that no matter what he looks like or where his family came from, Diego is from Nashville. He has the sound of someone who has gained the kind of comfort that comes from knowing the truth, whether it's good or bad. He also realizes that his background was essential for his ability to do the research that he does.
- [23:03]
Diego
I don't think I could have written this history if I hadn't grown up as a mixed kid in Tennessee. That's so left out of the Asian American narrative or even left out of the Latino narrative, too. I think that kind of gave me a perspective of seeing things from the outside that guided me to think, you know, I'm the kind of person, when I see a whole lot of people going in this direction, I go in the other direction. And that's what I did to try to find these stories of these chinos. And I think that maybe we should do that a little more when we're looking to enhance our understanding of history and its uses.
- [23:40]
Charles Fournier
To echo a point from the prologue, there is value in having a wide range of people study the past, because when our history comes from the same kind of perspective, we just hear the same stories about the same people and the same places. An honest look into the past requires various perspectives. Only then will we gain a more truthful view of history. And it's likely that this new history won't be fully good or fully bad, but it will just be honest, and we should take comfort in that. Now it seems more than ever, we need to find comfort in the truth, no matter what it looks like. For Diego, his effort to seek the truth about the first Asians in the Americas required him to excavate information about a group of people in the Americas that were not often deemed important enough to be included in records. That fact, the reality of what isn't said or recorded, speaks to what is or isn't valued by the people in power at the time. So in this case, that's the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire would only keep records of people that they believed were notable.
- [24:44]
Diego
I think that this lack of documentation or lack of accessibility of that information or knowledge of how to access it has led to this kind of process of dehumanization or just erasure, like not knowing that they're there.
- [25:00]
Charles Fournier
To combat this erasure, research about the marginalized communities in the Spanish Empire must be done.
- [25:08]
Diego
Suppose you're a young researcher, you're interested in history, but you don't really know where to start. And you see in books, people say, like, they went to certain archives, right? That's where historians do their research. There are places that gather old documents, and that's where you go and read them. But if you go to an archive, and let's say you're going to Spain, which holds a lot of the documents for old Spanish Empire, and you do a search in one of the databases for chinos or Asians, you're going to find very, very little. In reality, almost nothing, in fact.
- [25:45]
Charles Fournier
So the way research into history is usually done was not necessarily going to work for Diego. But that's okay, because this scrappy young historian can adapt.
- [25:55]
Diego
You're never going to find a document like that. You're never going to find any kind of summary of Asian movement across the Pacific. There were no Spanish officials that were like, well, over the last 10 years, we had 2,000 Asians enter into Mexico. This percentage was from this group. This percentage was from that group. You're never going to find any kind of document like that. So what's that do? It forces you to get really creative with how you search for this shit. So you look in property records, wills, enslaved people were property. When property was exchanged, like in a will, enslaved people are probably going to show up in it. But just as little notations, and most of the time is just a little notation like that that tells us, okay, there was a person here, let's say, in Guadalajara, Mexico, who was 20, whatever years old, male, let's say, and was inherited during this year from this family. This family was involved in X, Y and Z things. And you can kind of piece together a little bit of a context for that person. Let's say that the person who died was a merchant who ran a store. And you can assume, okay, this enslaved person was probably working in that store. And you can have an idea of what that could have meant. So there's a lot of detective work that goes into this.
- [27:24]
Charles Fournier
But Diego was able to make use of documents tied to things the Spanish Empire cared about. Things like the Inquisition, which was the institution meant to police the boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable under Catholic dogma.
- [27:43]
Diego
But the interesting thing about the Inquisition is it creates a mini biography for that person. They ask them about their lives, about their parents, their grandparents, how they ended up in Mexico, and then eventually about the quote, unquote, crime. And they interview, let's say, like, 10 people who that person knows. So you can kind of piece together a mini biography with the Inquisition so we have more information like that.
- [28:06]
Charles Fournier
And this leads Diego to Catarina de San Juan.
- [28:19]
Diego
Catarina de San Juan was a woman who died in Puebla, Mexico. She was born probably somewhere in southern India, was enslaved as a young girl by the Portuguese, experienced all manner of sexual abuse in captivity, and was eventually traded to the Spaniards in Manila, then traded across the Pacific, like many of these people that we were just talking about. And she ends up in Puebla, Mexico, where eventually she's freed and then lives a life largely in isolation. But it's that life and isolation and her commitment more than anything to the Catholic faith that transform her into this kind of local hero or local icon of Catholicism.
- [29:05]
Charles Fournier
And when catarina dies in 1688, thousands.
- [29:08]
Diego
Of people attend her funeral and in fact, take her body and the things that she owned to be holy relics to the extent that when she's being buried, the crowd rushes in and takes the flowers of her veil and steals her shoes and rips up her clothing and tries to take pieces of her flesh like they would any other holy Catholic figure to pray and worship those physical pieces of a holy person's Life.
- [29:39]
Charles Fournier
The documentation on Catarina is extensive. She's not only the best documented China of this time, she's the best documented person of this time, Spaniards included. This complicates things, because the Spanish documented what they valued, but they consistently devalued chinos and China's. Still, hers is the name that has lasted.
- [30:06]
Diego
How could it be that someone of that social position could be memorialized in the way that she was? The longest publication ever to come out of colonial Mexico was about her life. That's just remarkable. And I think that for a lot of people at the time, she represented the power of the Catholic faith. That someone so distant, so different, so depraved in her social standing could become like them in her faith and be so devoted so as to become a symbol for Spaniards even to follow.
- [30:46]
Charles Fournier
Even though Catarina is mythologized in a lot of what is written about her, Diego was able to get some information about what life was like, and this means he gained insight into what life was like for a lot of other Chinos and Chinas at this time.
- [31:00]
Diego
She's one of the really important figures in the work that I do, because when you have, like, a small little piece of information about someone's life, you know, any of the other thousands of people who are enslaved, you can have a kind of stronger idea about what that person's experience was like, because we have so much written about Katarina. And when you read that person's life through that of Katarina, you begin to have a more full picture of what those people's lives were like, who they were interacting with, the kind of brutality they experienced within. Enslavement.
- [31:33]
Charles Fournier
Catarina was an access point for getting a better idea of experiences that were ignored by the Spanish empire in the Americas. This also means Catarina offers insight into an Asian experience in the Americas that we in the present often overlook.
- [31:50]
Diego
A lot of these people were straight up slaves. I mean, that's something that we don't often think about in this country. And when you say slavery or slave, I think there's a particular image in mind, and it's closely linked to African American history, as it should be, because they're, you know, certainly the majority population of enslaved people in the Americas. But nonetheless, it's important to say that Asians were enslaved, too. You know, when Europeans were going around the world, colonizing, settling, trading, enslaving, they were doing that everywhere. And from South Asia to East Asia, that was no exception.
- [32:27]
Charles Fournier
So with insight into Katharina's experience in enslavement in the Americas. Diego gained a better look at the enslavement of Asians in the Americas. Diego also notes that Catarina isn't universally praised. Upon her death, many people venerated Catarina as a saint. She was known to have visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. This veneration included a three volume plea written by Alonso Ramos, which made a case for Catarina's beatification.
- [32:56]
Diego
But at the same time, even as she achieves this larger than life standing upon death, she's still in the eyes of many, you know, just a China. She's just someone who was enslaved. She's described as being ugly, dark skinned. A lot of people thought that she was like a witch in Echisera or like a sorceress, someone who had larger kind of spiritual or supernatural powers to be able to trick people. She was called a trickster. And because of this kind of ambiguity about the nature of her powers, if she's really truly a holy figure or if she's really a trickster, the Inquisition ends up censoring these biographies or hagiographies, these, these, these texts that were written about her, censoring them and burning them so that even though you have this longest text ever published in colonial Mexico and it's about her life, nobody would end up reading it. That's kind of one of the tragedies about her legacy. And by the time you get to modern Mexico, there's such confusion about who she was and her life that her image is conflated with that of this dress.
- [34:17]
Charles Fournier
The dress Diego is describing is called the China poblana.
- [34:21]
Diego
There's a dress in Mexico that sort of represents unbridled femininity and sexual liberation and all of this stuff. And she's thought to be. Catarina is thought to be the inventor of that.
- [34:34]
Charles Fournier
In the end, Catarina is often reduced to a myth or a symbol. But she was a human. And her story, her whole story, is worth considering, especially in the larger context of what life was like for the first Asians in the Americas. This woman was kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery, was shipped across the Pacific Ocean, gained her freedom, became a devout Catholic and died as either a saint or a witch, depending on who you ask. Catarina's story matters because she complicates what we think we know about the Americas, about who belongs in our discussions of the Americas. She's also a warning. If we mine history for what we want to hear, we will be left with myths and not humans. We will gain relics that represent a fragment view of the past. Instead of a whole picture. We have to accept the reality that belonging somewhere can be complicated, whether it be in Puebla, in the United States, or in Nashville. And that's okay. Next time in our epilogue, we consider the value of viewing history.
- [35:54]
Diego
Honestly, I think it helps us see the world as it is, rather than how we want it to be. You can't change what happened in the past. What happened in the past is what happened.
- [36:16]
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. 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.