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The Historian's Table
Prologue: The First Asians in the Americas
00:23:24
Diego's research begins with homemade chili oil, a 16th century book, and an empire's identity crisis.
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- [00:01]
Charles Fournier
Welcome to the historians table. This is season one, the first Asians in the Americas prologue. I want you to think about the most recent photograph that you've taken. Look through your phone if you need to. I'll give you a minute. This photo, in its ability to be objective and capture the imperfections and realities of a moment, is influenced by you, the photographer, the angle of the picture, the subject of the picture, what is included, what is not, what filters are applied or left off. That is all a reflection of you. Intentional or not, your proclivities are projected onto this photo, onto your work. So though this photo is an objective representation of a moment, that objectivity is skewed by your eye, your background, and your preferences. With that in mind, let's think about history. The work of a historian is, at its core, deeply personal. Historians seek objectivity or impartiality, but their work, the research itself, cannot be removed from their personal journeys. Consider what impact that can have on our collective views of history when the same constitution of person tells the same stories about the same people and same places. How limiting. Welcome to the first Asians in the Americas. I'm your host, Charles Fournier. Now I have a friend I'd like to introduce you to. This whole podcast concerns him and his work on the history of the first Asians in the Americas. Because, dear listener, in case your snapshots into history like mine only included one hemisphere of the story, you might not know, but there were Asians in the Americas about three centuries before the building of the transcontinental railroad. That means Asians were in the Americas decades before the pilgrims even knew about Plymouth Rock. And we'll get to the history of Asians in the Americas, of a South Asian holy woman, of mutinies and massacres of empire anxieties. But to better understand that history, to get a more honest look at this picture of history and its impact, it would be good for you to know a little bit about the historian whose personal journey influenced this research. So please allow me to introduce Diego Javier Luis.
- [02:42]
Diego Javier Luis
I think if your idea of Asian American history begins in the 19th century, then you have a very particular idea about Asian history in the Americas, when in fact that history extends far further back than that to the 16th century.
- [03:03]
Charles Fournier
This is Diego, assistant professor in the Tufts University History department.
- [03:09]
Diego Javier Luis
You have more history pre railroad than post railroad from the 16th century. The first Asian person that we know of in the Americas, insert name, I can't remember right now.
- [03:23]
Charles Fournier
His name was Juan Nunez from Calicut, India.
- [03:27]
Diego Javier Luis
He's listed in the Bishop of Mexico's will in 1548, and he probably arrived in the late 1520s or early 1530s. This is just a few years after Tenochtitlan falls. This is so early in the history of the Americas. And this is certainly well before any English settlement or any place that we know of in the US ever came into being.
- [03:49]
Charles Fournier
A quick note. Obviously, indigenous people had been settled in the Americas for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the first Asians or first Europeans. And that's a view of history that is absolutely worth taking a look at. But for our purposes, we'll only be focusing on the Asian American experience back to Diego.
- [04:09]
Diego Javier Luis
And I think what that does is it allows us to show that Asians have been here as long and in fact longer than the overwhelming majority of European people in the Americas too.
- [04:28]
Charles Fournier
And Diego has just published a book called the First Asians in the Americas. This book works to recenter how we may view the history of the Americas. And now, before we move on, listener, I want to address the elephant in the room. You may be asking, Charles, why is it that you, a white guy, are hosting a podcast about the first Asians in the Americas? And I'd say to you that I had the same concern. I told Diego that I didn't think I was the right guy to host, but he told me that was BS because I'm helping to amplify his work. So here I am. Now, if we can return to our discussion of photography. If much of American history has been a photo of transatlantic happenings, Diego in his work has taken his photograph from the other side of the world, of the Trans Pacific. This gives us a more informed, holistic view of a world where global empires existed, which might impact how we may view our present and ourselves.
- [05:25]
Diego Javier Luis
It matters, period, because that's the history and that's what happened. But it also matters because the way that Asian people are racialized in the US and even in the Americas, even if you look at Latin American countries too, as not belonging to the societies that they live in, as being conceptualized as perpetually foreign, as unable to assimilate, as being outside their sort of social environment, or just confined to a Chinatowns or whatever it may be, and oftentimes that conception engenders violence, creates violence. And that's been happening for a very, very long time. That's nothing new. It's intensified through the COVID era, but there's a long history of that. So I think that knowing about this origin, that Asians have been in the Americas since the early 16th century really shows how skewed and how distorted the idea or the myth of Asian people or Asian Americans. How distorted the idea, the mainstream idea of those people is so history. I think it's easy to look at history as a kind of safe way of going through that process of discovery. But I think what I've come to terms with as I've gone along in becoming a historian and doing historical work is that you can't really, you can't disentangle who you are from the work that you do. It's fundamental. And how can I explain the project that I've been working on without talking about my own family history? It is part of that process of discovering discovery.
- [07:14]
Charles Fournier
So this is exactly what we'll be doing over the course of this podcast in order to better understand Diego's research. As we talk about it, we will be getting to know about Diego and his family history. Let's start with how he got into his research. Diego went to Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode island, to pursue his PhD. But Diego was unmoored. He didn't know which direction his research would take, so he sought advice from history professor Evelyn Hudehart.
- [07:47]
Diego Javier Luis
I remember meeting Evelyn and being like, I don't have an advisor. I don't know what I'm studying. Please help me. And she was very generous. She invited me over to her home, cooked a wonderful Chinese dinner. Her signature stuff, her homemade chili oil, just really remarkable, made me feel right at home. And she said, you have to go to the John Carter Brown Library and you have to read this text. It's a Spanish perspective of China in the late 16th century. And it was a best seller in its time. It was called. The English translation is like History of the Rituals and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China.
- [08:31]
Charles Fournier
This book, whose full title is History of the Most Important Things, Rituals and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China, created a moment of worlds colliding for Diego and a pulling back of the veil. Because like most of us who learned only a little about Spain during our education, when Diego thought about the Spanish empire, it was always tied to America with the likes of Cortes. But this book, a 1585 account that praises China written by the Spaniard Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza, did something to Diego specifically. And I quote, it, like, totally explodes your perception of what kind of global connection was possible in the world.
- [09:12]
Diego Javier Luis
It's like, holy shit, there's Spaniards in China. Right before grad school, I lived a year in China, and being part Chinese, I cared a lot about Chinese and still care a lot about Chinese culture and customs. And when I read this text and the Spanish observations of a lot of these customs, I was like, oh, that actually resonates with a lot of things that I experienced.
- [09:34]
Charles Fournier
Diego recognized an identity crisis within this book, an empire's identity crisis, because this 16th century Spaniard's reflection on China forced a not so small reckoning with Spain's limitations.
- [09:47]
Diego Javier Luis
Coming to terms with the grandeur of China in Spanish eyes was something that I hadn't seen before, seeing another a non European civilization that had a very sophisticated form of governance, a very sophisticated and powerful military that Spaniards eventually recognized was more powerful than their own. The printing, the literary culture, gunpowder. There were all these social institutions designed to help poor people, to help people with various disabilities. And Spaniards, they prized charity, like Catholic charity. So a civilization that's able to effectively do that was something that they admired. And the only fault that this guy pointed out was they don't have Catholicism.
- [10:39]
Charles Fournier
So after a meal with homemade chili oil, Diego had a book, an advisor, and a sense of academic purpose. This spark will lead Diego to chronicle the first wave of Asian mobility across the Pacific to the early Americas, to highlight the brutality of the trans Pacific crossing on the Manila galleons, and to explore the daily lives of these Asian people in the early Americas as they navigate their roles under the new name of Chino. This was a very important dinner. A book about Spain and China excited our intrepid historian because he feels personally connected to these spaces. And we're going to get into that over the course of the podcast. But getting to know Diego is no easy matter. I've thought about a variety of ways to talk about Diego. If I were to take the simple approach of setting up a recorder and asking, Diego, my friend, tell me about you, he might say something like, well, it's complicated.
- [11:36]
Diego Javier Luis
It's complicated. The reality is really quite complicated. So much more complicated than that. It's kind of long and complicated history.
- [11:44]
Charles Fournier
So we are going to start slow, and to get to know Diego, we are going to make use of a foil. Yeah.
- [11:52]
Julian Saporin
I'm sitting here with Diego Javier Luis, a historian, scholar, professor at Tufts University, originally from Nashville, Tennessee.
- [12:01]
Charles Fournier
A foil is a character that aids in the understanding and development of another character. Julian, with his Pacifico of truth, is our guide in breaking down the complexity of Diego.
- [12:13]
Diego Javier Luis
And I'm sitting here with Julian Sapariti, singer, songwriter, academic, musician, also from Nashville, Tennessee, recently graduated from Brown university with a PhD in American Studies.
- [12:28]
Julian Saporin
So you are a young professor just starting here At Tufts, you're from Nashville, Tennessee, originally. You are of Chinese, Cuban, and European Jewish descent. Is that fair to say?
- [12:42]
Diego Javier Luis
That's fair to say.
- [12:49]
Charles Fournier
Diego and Julian met in the spring of 2016 at Brown University University in Providence, Rhode island, during their first year of grad school.
- [12:57]
Diego Javier Luis
I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life yet. I didn't know what I wanted to study. I actually thought I was going to start. I was going to study early Modern Europe. That was my original plan. And, yeah, that didn't pan out. So, like anyone in my position, I decided to take a Holocaust history class.
- [13:15]
Julian Saporin
So I had only taken classes in music and American studies and public humanities, so I hadn't been to that part of campus yet. And when you take a class outside of your discipline, it's a little bit like first day of school vibes. Like, new kid in high school. And so I remember all of these basically history bros. But, yeah, so I remember talking to someone one day. Maybe it was the communist with thinning hair, and saying. We were just exchanging pleasantries, like, where are you from? I said, oh, I'm from Nashville.
- [13:46]
Diego Javier Luis
And I remember hearing someone say that they're from Nashville. And I thought, oh, wow, that's great. And New England and Rhode island especially. Almost never. I almost never met anyone who was from the south, not at Brown.
- [14:01]
Julian Saporin
And then this kid walks up. He can't be more than 23 or 24 at the time, and is like, oh, you're from Nashville. I'm from Nashville, too.
- [14:11]
Diego Javier Luis
Okay. I'm sure it wasn't in that tone of voice.
- [14:15]
Julian Saporin
No, it wasn't. And then it turned out he asked, where'd you go to high school? I said, hume Fogg. He said, no way. I went to Hume Fog, too.
- [14:23]
Diego Javier Luis
Probably was in that tone of voice.
- [14:25]
Julian Saporin
And then either him or I asked, where'd you go to middle school? I said, harding Academy. And we were both like, whoa, that's crazy.
- [14:32]
Diego Javier Luis
That combination never happens. Harding Academy, a private middle school in the southern suburbs of Nashville. To Hume Fogg, this former fallout shelter on Broadway in downtown Nashville public magnet school. There were only, like, one or two people that I knew who had done both that middle school and that high school.
- [14:56]
Julian Saporin
It was just wild. It was almost like kismet, right? Because not only did we go to Harding, Hume Fogg, we're both getting PhDs at Brown University. There will never be another pair of people to do that.
- [15:07]
Diego Javier Luis
And, yeah, it was just this coincidence to meet someone at Brown in a Holocaust history class who had shared all of that.
- [15:18]
Charles Fournier
So Diego and Julian went to the same middle school and the same high school, but they only crossed paths at Brown.
- [15:25]
Julian Saporin
So it turns out Diego was basically just like my seven year younger doppelganger, like little brother. Because not only did we go to these shared, have these shared intellectual and cultural experiences, but we're both very similar in our racial makeups. On a general level, he's Cuban, Afro, Chinese mixed with white Jew, I'm Vietnamese mixed with Italian, Scandinavian, Northern European extract. So in actuality, being Chinese and Vietnamese, we're mortal enemies. But generally speaking, we both have a very similar experience of being mixed race, going to the exact same schools. So it's almost like something that some sick social scientists would want to study or something, I would think. And I think we've both found it very informative because in that Holocaust history class, I think we became buddies.
- [16:14]
Charles Fournier
And as buddies, Julian and Diego have been able to see each other grow as academics and as human beings. While Diego found his calling in a Spaniard's book about China, Julian intended to study ethnomusicology and street musicians.
- [16:31]
Julian Saporin
And then eventually I got waylaid by my stupid Asian American refugee, immigrant, really sad, traumatic research. And that's like depressed me for the last decade. I had discovered this jazz band in a Wyoming internment camp that formed during World War II called the Georgia Galway Orchestra. And I had been recently researching them since I was a grad student at Wyoming. Felt a lot of kinship because I was also an Asian jazz musician in Wyoming leading a band around the state.
- [17:02]
Charles Fournier
To overly simplify. Not only did Diego and Julian have a similar trajectory to get to Brown, their fields overlap in significant ways. Each of their projects ties into their personal stories. Much of what Diego and Julian are doing in their research is trying to present a more complete and complicated view of history, a more honest history that is much more difficult to glorify or damn, which requires a more honest reflection of their own complicated lives. To get an idea of what this means, here's an example from Julian.
- [17:40]
Julian Saporin
There was a professor at Brown in public humanities when I was first sharing some of my no no Boy songs. And because my, my main academic research was focused on the Japanese internment camps, some of these first songs, like a majority of them, were taking oral histories I had collected and turning those into songs. And I was singing a song for a class in public humanities that I wasn't in. I was just visiting as a guest speaker and I performed a couple of songs. And as you know, I always have archival projections behind me so people can Actually see what life was like in these historical moments that I'm singing about.
- [18:11]
Charles Fournier
Just a quick note. This means that as Julian is playing music, a projector casts images behind him and sometimes onto him.
- [18:26]
Julian Saporin
And so I'm singing a song that is very nuanced, that's based on interviews of children who were in these camps. So I'm kind of portraying this in my music and in these images, because there's photos of people sad by barbed wire, of course, but there's also mostly photos of people smiling, because when someone takes a picture of you, you smile. And there's also photos I was showing of people having. I think it was like a summer festival, eating snow cones in an internment camp. And I love that photo because the complexity, right? That's like the honest history of this thing. It's a horrible situation, but yet find whatever avenue you can to dig into a snow cone. That's instructional, I think. But this guy, a very, very white man with white hair and glasses, said, I think you need to make it sadder.
- [19:21]
Charles Fournier
So this professor wanted history to look a specific way. He didn't want the whole picture, just a piece of the picture. He wanted to fold the edge of the photo to hide a reality, to be less honest. Diego's and Julian's research, in their separate ways, provide stories of humans who did human things, which is inherently complicated and devoid of heroes. And why do this? Why continue to look into the past? Why complicate history? For Diego, it provides insight into today, both globally and personally.
- [20:00]
Diego Javier Luis
I think the bottom line is history matters. This stuff didn't go away. Even though it happened hundreds of years ago. You can still see the pieces of it are still around, and it impacts our lives. It's not just like a little. It's not just like a plaque that you see somewhere, and it's, oh, this thing happened 300 years ago, and blah, blah, blah. But it's something that you can see in your daily life. Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why it's really powerful.
- [20:31]
Charles Fournier
And it's also powerful because something like the global history of Asians being enslaved and racialized in the Americas is often left out of conversations of colonialism and race and slavery. But this information might explain gaps in our understanding of modern problems.
- [20:51]
Diego Javier Luis
There's something empowering, there's something instructive, there's something fundamental about just knowing that people were here for so long, people like us were here for so long, and grappling with many of the same kinds of questions.
- [21:16]
Charles Fournier
So for the next four episodes, in Acts 1 through 4, you will learn about Diego and you will learn about the history of the first Asians in the Americas, how they arrived, where they came from, what they did and why it matters. And I want to emphasize that including including a conversation about Diego's navigation of his own identity in relation to his research has purpose. Because our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications directly correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history. Diego would not have been able to do the research he did without having some self reckonings. Next episode in Act 1, we'll learn about the history of the Spanish galleons while taking some time to hear about Diego's childhood.
- [22:21]
Diego Javier Luis
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 can go through that search and for me especially, because I never felt like I fit in.
- [22:43]
Charles Fournier
I'm Charles Fournier. This episode was written and produced by me. Editing help came from Noah Greenspan. This podcast is based on the book the First Asians in the Americas, written by Diego Javier Luis, who also aided in editing. Original music from this podcast is from Julian Saporin. 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.