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Indios on the move in the sixteenth-century Iberian world*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

Nancy E. van Deusen
Nancy E. van Deusen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada E-mail: nancy.vandeusen@queensu.ca
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Abstract

Between 1572 and 1575, a man named Diego litigated for his freedom from slavery in several Spanish courts. Identified as an Indio (Indian), he claimed to have been born in the Spanish territory of Liampo (now Ningbo), China, and later carried on a Spanish ship to Mexico, and eventually to Seville. His master, the cleric Juan de Morales, asserted that he had bought Diego in Portuguese Goa and taken him to Mozambique and to Lisbon before finally bringing him to Seville. At issue was whether Diego was a Portuguese or Spanish imperial subject, since Spanish law strictly prohibited the enslavement of Indios in Spanish territories, while Portuguese laws did not. As witnesses (several of them former slaves from disparate locations including Panama, Lima, Goa, Mozambique, and China) tried to determine Diego’s imperial status, not only did they reveal their comparative fantasies about Portuguese or Spanish landscapes, but they also embedded their own diasporic tales of liminality and loss into Diego’s. Here is the ultimate example of the Indio experience in Castile: an attempt to affix imperial boundaries to a construct that was, in itself, a metaphor for how the rapidly changing globe was imagined, experienced, and compartmentalized. The use of the increasingly amorphous cultural label ‘Indio’ in Castile was symptomatic of tensions between imperial regimes’ desire to constitute and reify themselves as bounded entities and the global mobilities of some of the most marginalized subjects who informed those processes.

Keywords

circulationsIberian imperial ruleidentityIndians (Indios)mobilityslavery
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 387 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals: the Departments of Anthropology and History at Western Washington University; the amazing staff at the John Carter Brown Library and its director, Neil Safier, for their expert guidance during my Inter-Americas, Reed Foundation Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library during 2014–15; the anonymous readers at the Journal of Global History and its editors; and finally, my colleagues and friends, Kathryn Burns, Amitava Chowdhury, Alan Gallay, Maureen Garvie, James Loucky, Giuseppe Marcocci, Joanne Rappaport, Preston Schiller, and Tatiana Seijas. I also thank Sarah Bell for designing the map.

References

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24 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 42, ‘Confession of Diego’, 10 November 1572.

25 Ibid.

26 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 18, ‘Certificación del pleito’, 22 October 1572.

27 On chinos (some of them from the Philippines) in Spain, see Gil, ‘Chinos’.

28 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 43, ‘Confession of Diego’, 10 November 1572.

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30 For other examples where this legal language is used, see AGI, Justicia 1022, no. 1, ramo 1, 1553, fol. 1r; AGI, Justicia 1013, no. 2, ramo 4, 1561, fol. 1r.

31 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 170, ‘Statement of the fiscal López de Sarria’, May 1572.

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34 Esteban’s recorded age of eighty-four may be an error: see Gil, ‘Chinos’, pp. 148–9.

35 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 32, ‘Declaration of Esteban Cabrera’, 24 October 1572.

36 Ibid.

37 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 31, ‘Declaration of Esteban Cabrera’, 24 October 1572.

38 Ibid.

39 Variants of the place name Liampo are Limpo, Limpoba, and Lumpoba. See map in C. R. Boxer et al., eds., South China in the sixteenth century, being the narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar Da Cruz, O.P. [and] Fr. Martín De Rada, O.E.S.A. (1550–1575), London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1953, p. xxii, which places Ningpo (Liampo) on the estuary.

40 Between the late 1530s and 1550s, a Portuguese named Galeote Pereira travelled to various places in East Asia, including Liampo: see Boxer et al., South China, pp. xxii–xxiii, l–lvi. See also Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Ho primeiro livro da historia do descobrimento …, 4 vols., Coimbra: J. de Barreyra e J. Alvarez, 1552, vol. 4; Boxer et al., South China, pp. 191–3.

41 Gil, ‘Chinos’, p. 148.

42 Castañeda never formally held the post of governor, but he ran the government of Nicaragua as alcalde mayor following Dávila’s death.

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67 Tristán de la China, identified as an ‘Indio de casta chino’, served in the armada to the Moluccas organized by García de Loaysa: see AGI, Indiferente General 1962, L. 6, fol. 121r–v, ‘Pago a Cristóbal de Haro’, 18 September 1538; AGI Indiferente 1964, L. 11, fol. 106r–v, ‘Licencia a Iñigo Ortíz de Retes para llevar un chino [lengua]’, 28 October 1548. Ortíz was granted royal permission to take the linguist to Mexico as long as he was not ‘de casta de moros’ (of Moorish ancestry). See also Gil, ‘Chinos’.

68 For instance, Gonçález de Mendoça (in Historia de las cosas) linked the great kingdom of China with the territories of New Spain.

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74 Ibid., im. 198.

75 They would have had access to the previous lawsuit before the Casa but we are not privy to their musings and how lawyers on behalf of complainant and plaintiff devised new strategies.

76 Van Deusen, ‘Seeing Indios’; Joanne Rappaport, ‘Así lo paresçe por su aspeto’.

77 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 206, ‘Interrogatory, López de Sarria’, 5 February 1575.

78 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 219, ‘Testimony, Francisco Díaz’, 2 February 1575.

79 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 231, ‘Testimony Isabel García’.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 The reference to ‘the endless globe’ is found in Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo E., Spain’s men of the sea: daily life on the Indies fleet in the sixteenth century, trans. Carla Rahn Phillips, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 1Google Scholar.

83 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 242, ‘Testimony Rodrigo Alonso’, 10 February 1575, Seville.

84 Morales issued this statement through his lawyer: AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 166.

85 AGI, Justicia 1133, no. 3, ramo 2, 1575.

86 On the use of just war rhetoric to enslave resistant Asian peoples during the period of the Spanish–Portuguese Union of the Crowns (1580–1640), see Seijas, Tatiana, ‘The Portuguese slave trade to Spanish Manila, 1580–1640’, Itinerario, 32, 2008, pp. 19–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Thomas, ‘Slavery in medieval Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica, 59, 4, 2004, pp. 463–492Google Scholar.

87 AGI, Justicia 928, no. 8, im. 172, ‘New allegation of Cristóbal Pérez’, 8 June 1575.

88 Ibid., im. 184.

89 Ibid.

90 Seijas, Asian slaves.

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