Today at 3:30pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum hosts Diego Javier Luis, Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. In his talk, Luis will discuss how these diverse Asian subjects confronted colonial race-making and became “chinos” in the Americas.
From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons sailed between the Philippines and Mexico. They connected Spain’s Asian colonies to the rest of its colonial world and opened a new and unprecedented chapter of global trade across the Pacific Ocean. Through these vessels, the first populations of free and enslaved Asian peoples arrived in the Americas. They originated from South Asia, Japan, and everywhere between. Luis’s talk and book of the same name unearth that history and, in particular, how these diverse Asian subjects confronted colonial race-making and became “chinos” in the Americas.
Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studies the colonial histories of Latin America and the Pacific World, race-making, and Afro-Asian diasporic convergences.
His first book, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, is out with Harvard University Press. He is also the co-creator of The Historian’s Table podcast.
