In truth, Spanish presence was minimal outside of a handful of urban settlements. Spain's outlandish claim to the entirety of the Pacific was actualized almost solely through the passage of a couple of ships sailing in either direction each year. Strictly speaking, the Spanish presence in the Pacific during most of the colonial period existed within a narrow navigational corridor, a transpacific space "as shallow as the amount of seawater displaced by the weight of Iberian sailing vessels." In the words of [Christina H. Lee] and [Ricardo Padrón], "Spanish Pacific studies begins by recognizing that Spain's presence in the Pacific was always slim, tenuous, and contested."
Despite the extremely limited scope of the Spanish encounter with the Pacific, it sufficed to facilitate "an unprecedented global mestizaje [intermingling and intermixture]" in the movement of thousands of free and enslaved Asians to the Americas for the first time. During their 250 years of operation, the Manila galleons confronted the most challenging seafaring conditions of their era to ferry merchandise and people between Cavite in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico. The survivors of this arduous journey were forever marked by it.
The people disembarking in Mexico's torrid Pacific port had come from Gujarat to the southwest, Nagasaki to the northeast, and everywhere in between. Most sailors and free migrants were born on Luzon in the Philippines, while captives had often been ensnared throughout the Philippines or ... by Portuguese enslaving operations in the Indian Ocean World. Smaller concentrations came from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Japan, or China.
Excerpt from The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (2024) by Diego Javier Luis
