The Creation of a New People: Becoming “Chino/a” in Colonial Mexico

In early modern Spanish, “chino/a” simply meant “Chinese.” Spaniards writing in as distant locales as the Iberian Peninsula and the Philippines consistently used this word to refer to the people of the Kingdom of China. At the onset of the seventeenth century in Mexico, however, a new trend emerged. As the Manila galleons arrived in Acapulco every year and deposited dozens and hundreds of Asians on American coasts for the first time in world history, “chino/a” morphed and came to encompass all newly disembarked Asian peoples. This terminological transformation–which came to be a defining feature of the Asian experience in colonial Mexico–was itself the product of a racializing process that began on the galleons and differentiated the survivors of the Pacific passage from Asian subjects of the Spanish Philippines.

In this presentation, I unravel the roots of the “chino/a” moniker as it emerged and coalesced during a period of intensifying transpacific trade. In particular, I trace the evolution of the term’s inconsistent use in treasury records from Acapuclo during the 1590s to its eventual dominance of the colonial casta lexicon at port after 1615. In so doing, I argue that the imposition of the “chino/a” label is one of the clearest examples of race making at the turn of the seventeenth century. It was the first time that a single word could refer to all Asian peoples regardless of provenance, ethnicity, language, religion, or culture. Crucially, it also robbed Asian subjects of the protections of “indio/a” subjecthood. Thus, by collapsing an enormous range of colonial signs (ex. whiteness, blackness, freedom, enslavement) into an undifferentiated casta, the word created a new people fully vulnerable to all of the most punishing institutions of colonial society and the target of increasingly hostile laws seeking to control the non-Spanish masses of Mexico.