Race and society in the Spanish Philippines
Sample of the image Las Castas
By Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, Professor of Global Medieval and Early Modern History
Gonzalo Berenguer will be given his talk, ‘The Colour of an Indio: Race and Agency in the Early Modern Philippines',’ on the 17th November 2022
The historiography dealing with society, race, and difference across the Spanish Monarchy (commonly known as the Spanish Empire) has experienced a surge in the last couple of decades. From María Elena Martínez’s exploration of blood and caste in the context of the Spanish obsession with lineage and limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood) in Genealogical Fictions (2008) to Joanne Rappaport’s study on the mutable identities of those of mixed blood in The Disappearing Mestizo (2014) and Herman L. Bennett’s reconstruction of the lived experiences of Africans and their descendants in Mexico in Colonial Blackness (2009), we now have a much clearer understanding of social interactions between different nations (understood in their early modern ethnic conceptualisation) and how they embraced, resisted, conformed to or manipulated the colonial frameworks in which they lived.
Despite this interest in the social and racial fabric of the Spanish Empire, one territory seems to have been mostly overlooked. The Philippines is a group of more than 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia, composed of dozens of different Indigenous ethnic and linguistic groups, which began to be conquered by Spain (via Mexico) in 1565. Soon afterwards, a colonial government was set up with a seat in Manila (1571), followed by an intense evangelising project that saw several religious orders receive land and the charge to turn pagan Indios (Indigenous peoples) into ‘good Christians’. It is difficult to see why socioracial issues in the Philippines in the Early Modern period have received so little attention, given that it was one of the most global and cosmopolitan places at the time.
Indeed, in 1589, the Dominican Friar Juan de Cobo (later to become the first person fully to translate a Chinese work into a European vernacular), thought that, in Manila, ‘the diversity [...] is immense, such that I could go on forever trying to differentiate lands and peoples’ and he went on to enumerate the different nations, aside from Indios, which took part of Manila’s bustling life: Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Dutch, Greeks, Canary Islanders, and Mexican Indios. There were also African and South Asian enslaved persons, Moors (Muslims from Indonesia and the southern islands of the Philippines), Javanese, and Bengalese. Above all, however, there were thousands of Sangleyes (the name by which the Chinese were known in Manila, a noun derived from a Hokkien term meaning ‘business’). Over a century later, in 1712, this impression had not changed. The anonymous author of the Breve relación de las acclamaciones festivas claimed that ‘in no other part of the orb could all the nations of the world and their riches come together with such ease’ and concluded that ‘if a universal fair of all the nations of the world were ever to be held, it would have to take place in Manila.’
My current research seeks to fill in this gap and to redress the imbalance in Hispanic studies that privileges the Atlantic over the Pacific and, instead, connect these two worlds together, united as they were by the annual commercial ventures of the Manila galleons, but also to the Asian world and to the globe at large. Through an exploration of a wide range of primary material (marriage, baptism, and burial records; notarial documents, colonial archives, granting of encomiendas, etc.) I explore the composition of Manileño and Filipino society and how different races mingled, intermarried, coexisted, competed, and fought and killed each other in the Early Modern period. So far, my research is yielding illuminating results. Contrary to common assumptions, for instance, many Indigenous men attained high places in the colonial structures of power and, far from being a stratified and racially segregated society (that came later, in the nineteenth century), marriage records prove that most families in Manila were to some degree ethnically mixed. Women possessed great influence in family structures, owning businesses and participating in the commercial life of Manila. These aspects of colonial life intersected, of course, with much more negative counterparts in the forms of slavery, oppression, resettlement, etc. If we are to understand the roles of Indigenous peoples and other non-Europeans in a colonial setting, we need to move away from assumptions about their subalternity and otherness and, instead, study their agency in its own terms and specific historical contexts. Only then will we be able to reconstruct the outlook and mechanisms of these societies accurately, avoiding, in the process, the perceptions that we have inherited from a post-Enlightenment world.