美洲的第一批亚洲人：一部跨太平洋史

The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History

Diego Javier Luis

Harvard University Press, 2024

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system.

Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.

The First Asians in the Americas speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.

从1565年到1815年，所谓的马尼拉帆船几乎垄断了西班牙在亚洲和美洲殖民地之间的跨太平洋贸易。这些西班牙商船往返于菲律宾和墨西哥之间，促成了最早期亚洲人迁移到美洲。来自古吉拉特、长崎和许多其他地方的自由和奴役的亚洲人登上帆船，每年踏上艰险的跨太平洋旅程。一旦到达墨西哥，他们在新西班牙种姓制度中被称为“契诺人”。

迭戈·哈维尔·路易斯记录了这股最初持续的亚洲人迁移到早期美洲的浪潮。他通过揭示亚洲人如何以及为何跨越太平洋，为那些在阿卡普尔科下船之人的日常生活提供了新的见解。在那里，“契诺”一词正式将不同的民族语言群体归为一个种姓，使其处于新西班牙殖民控制政策的掌控之下。然而，亚洲人反抗这些限制，往往通过在不同族裔群体之间建立新的联系。路易斯认为，从16世纪的殖民入侵到19世纪墨西哥独立的最初呼声，社会适应和文化趋同定义了亚洲人在西班牙美洲的经历。

《美洲的第一批亚洲人》讲述了种族构建的一个重要时期，生动地展现了在早期现代西班牙帝国中“契诺”意味着什么。通过这样做，它展现了殖民时期的拉丁美洲对亚洲侨民历史的重要性，并揭示了跨太平洋联系对美洲殖民社会发展的根本作用。