By the late-sixteenth century, the Spanish empire had established regular, transpacific communication between its colonies in Asia and those of the Americas through ships known as the Manila galleons. These ships sailed the route between Manila and Acapulco from 1571 to 1815. This talk focuses on those two nodes of transpacific trade and uncovers that both sites had large and visible free and enslaved Black populations by the early-seventeenth century. Using a wide range of archival records, it is possible to reconstruct the scope, social mobility, and multiethnic convergences of these populations. On both sides of the Pacific, they were foundational to the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure of transpacific empire. In unraveling this story, the talk argues that Blackness was uniquely constructed and configured in the Pacific World in ways both related to and distinct from the Atlantic World.

Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in colonial Latin American and Spanish Pacific histories and is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2024. He is the co-creator of The Historian's Table podcast.