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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Description: Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system.Dr. Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americ...