The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.

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.

"This book is a brilliant exercise of global microhistory and essential reading for anyone hoping to get a full picture of colonial Spanish America, Asian diaspora studies, or protoglobalization. The author never ceases to show empathy toward the people whose history he is carefully reconstructing from widely scattered fragments of evidence. Luis successfully conveys an emotional underpinning to the experience of the first Asians in the Americas in a way that any historian can appreciate and that, importantly, undergraduate and graduate history students should constantly be exposed to." - Hispanic American Historical Review

"A broadly thought-provoking book. …Although the modern Western use of ‘Asian’ is perhaps better (and arguably more benign) than the colonial use of ‘chino’ as an identifier, it suffers from much the same problem of ‘collapsing’ various ‘diverse ethnolinguistic groups’ to the benefit of some, perhaps, but the detriment of others. Luis’s book is a salutary reminder that all this started long ago." - Asian Review of Books

"Fascinating…While expertly summarizing and engaging existing historical studies, the author also indicates new avenues of research…[This] book thus stands as a bellwether for shifting trajectories of analysis that invite micro-historical follow-up." - H-Net Reviews