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THE inhabitants of Asia have had a long and controversial connection to the Iberian-conquered Americas. Even the name indios (Indians) bestowed upon native peoples belied European hopes and expectations of reaching the wealthy, exotic kingdoms of the East sought by Christopher Columbus. Ever since 1498 there has been much speculation on the origin of Native Americans and of Asian pre-Columbian contact with cultures of Central and South America. Speaking in terms of the past five thousand years (and arguably longer), there is no reliable archaeological or humanly chronicled evidence of Asians ever having sailed to the Americas prior to Miguel López de Legazpi's expedition from New Spain to the Philippines in 1564-1565, which ushered in a new era of regular maritime commerce across the Pacific Ocean. The Manila galleons, or naos de China (China ships), transported Asian products and individuals to Acapulco and other Mexican ports for approximately 250 years. During this "first wave" of transpacific Asian migration, travelers from Cathay, Cipango (Japan), the Philippines, various kingdoms in Southeast Asia, and India were known collectively in New Spain as chinos (Chinese) or indios chinos (Chinese Indians), as the word chino/china became synonymous with Asia.
Although the galleon trade has been thoroughly studied by scholars such as William Schurz and Carmen Yuste López,1 chino immigration and its impact on New Spain has been sorely neglected in the extant historiography of colonial Mexico. There has also been a curious lack of interest displayed by world historians in the return voyage from Manila. They apparently have been "blinded by silver," resulting in research that is at once economically deterministic and unidirectionally fixated on the route from Acapulco to Manila, then to various ports in China. Monographs and articles penned by Pierre Chaunu, Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, Katharine Bjork, and Andre Gunder Frank typify these trends.2 The cumulative effect of the aforementioned literature in both fields has been to obscure the multifaceted cultural influence of Asians in New Spain and their unheralded role in the process of racial blending known as "mestizaje."
The main purpose of this article is to answer some fundamental questions concerning the chinos and their roles in New Spain, such as who they were ethnically, how and where they lived, how they integrated into...