The "Spanish Pacific" designates the geographical space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521, the year Ferdinand Magellan reached the East by sailing West, and 1815, the year when the yearly galleon that linked Mexico to the Philippines stopped operating. The Spanish Pacific encompasses the area in Southeast Asia and East Asia that Spanish officials willfully called "The Indies of the West," in order to clarify that they were not "The Indies of the East," and therefore not Portuguese. It includes the Philippines and the Marianas—territories ruled by the Spanish Crown—but also parts of China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that Spanish officials and missionaries imagined as extensions of their American colonies.
This website features six documents transcribed, translated, and introduced by the collaborative efforts between a group of students from Princeton University and a group of students brought together by the History Department at the University of the Philippines. The featured projects were produced in a Princeton University course taught in the Spring semester of 2024 by Professor Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University) and assisted by Professor Nicholas Sy (History, University of the Philippines). Thanks to this international exchange opportunity, Princeton students gained significant insights from Filipino students in discussions about the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines today, especially in the public sphere and in popular culture. Philippine students were exposed to interpretations of primary sources that contextualize the Philippines in the Spanish transpacific and, even more broadly, in the early modern Spanish imperial project.
Whenever possible these documents were approached "against the grain," and with an eye and ear for the detection of the voices of Philippine natives and mestizos. Most of the manuscripts we will examine were produced by European colonizers, missionaries, and their allies, but even in those cases—with the proper methodology in close-reading—we might be able to find the narratives of the subjected and colonized.
"Image #" refers to the page number of the PDF version of the scanned document. For the transcription, we modernize the Spanish in terms of orthography, punctuation, and the use of upper and lowercase letters. For example, the alcalde hordinario and escrivano were transcribed as alcalde ordinario and escribano. Abbreviations were also fully written out with the help of the Diccionario de Abreviaturas Novohispanas. For instance, names like Fran.co and Mrn were already written out as Francisco and Martín. Unreadable words were placed in brackets. For the English translations, we chose the standard modern American English. Government titles and offices were also retained in Spanish as well as the different Latin phrases in the document.