This chronological delineation coincides with several fundamental developments: the opening of the Pacific, the inauguration of the Manila galleons, increasingly hostile discourses targeting moriscos and conversos on the Peninsula, and the peak of the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico. From the biographical proclivities of inquisitors who put Afro-descendants on trial to the deployment of Reconquista vocabulary in the Philippines to the creation of “chinos” in Mexico, New Spain’s rapidly changing demographic and social profiles thrust it to the forefront of burgeoning discourses of early modern difference-making. The adaptations of colonial administrators, bureaucrats, missionaries, and subjects to these new developments and demographic trajectories constituted a definitive consolidation of the articulation of human difference in the colonies.

Simultaneously, our presentations reveal that the colonial process of interpreting and construing difference intersected with numerous, parallel processes that were historically contingent, legally informed, and co-constructed across numerous social groupings. In a study of letters exchanged between the Crown and colonial officials regarding enslavement in the Philippines (c. 1565-c. 1585), Erica Feild-Marchello considers the rhetorical function of labels developed to distinguish between Muslims, recent converts to Islam, and non-Muslims in the archipelago. She also considers how the terminologies that officials selected reflected engagement with racializing terms and concepts of religious difference developed in Spain. In tracing the emergence of the “chino/a” label in Acapulco, Mexico, Diego Javier Luis argues that colonial officials invented a new people precisely as thousands of free and enslaved Asians began disembarking in Mexico at the onset of the seventeenth century. Mayer Juni explores the development of unique trial procedures for the prosecution of enslaved negros and mulatos accused of blasphemy in colonial Mexico ca. 1600. His paper demonstrates how heresy trials and the formation of the Mexican inquisitorial archive itself formed a site for race-making through the articulation of presumed biographical and congenital differences between Europeans and Africans. Through these interventions, we argue that New Spain emerges as a unique site of colonial racialization born of bureaucratic and administrative adaptations to the novelties of a transatlantic and transpacific empire.