For centuries, the Chinese have been intermarrying with inhabitants of the Philippines, resulting in a creolized community of Chinese mestizos under the Spanish colonial regime. In contemporary Philippine society, the “Chinese” are seen as a racialized “Other” while descendants from early Chinese-Filipino intermarriages as “Filipino.” Previous scholarship attributes this development to the identification of Chinese mestizos with the equally “Hispanicized” and “Catholic” indios. Building on works in Chinese transnationalism and cultural anthropology, this book examines the everyday practices of Chinese merchant families in Manila from the 1860s to the 1930s. The result is a fascinating study of how families and individuals creatively negotiate their identities in ways that challenge our understanding of the genesis of ethnic identities in the Philippines. “...[This book] helps contribute to the revision of the existing literature on the Chinese and Chinese mestizos with a new perspective that highlights the emerging field of transnational studies.” - Prof. Augusto Espiritu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “...the author does an outstanding job and we recommend that citizens of the Philippine ‘nation,’ whether they see themselves as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Filipino’ would do well to read this work and understand the origins of the racial stereotypes that influence the way they look at particular members of Philippine society, particularly in Manila.” - Prof. Ellen Palanca and Prof. Clark Alejandrino, Ateneo de Manila University "...an ambitious study of the Chinese and first-generation Chinese mestizos of Manila...[the author] has added valuable research materials from Philippine and American archival collections and...a wide range of published primary sources...The book is meticulously annotated and rich in descriptive detail..." - Michael Cullinane, University of Wisconsin-Madison

A ground-breaking analysis of how the Malayan Communist Party helped forge a Malayan national identity, while promoting Chinese nationalism.

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core. This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals. Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalization and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

Examines the contested process of colonial education in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

The Hybrid Tsinoys is a study of hybridity and homogeneity as sociocultural constructs in the development of current ethnic identity/ies of Chinese Filipinos. This study employs a descriptive ethnographic research method to discover how they see or define themselves in terms of ethnicity (Chinese, Filipino, or both) and how their perspectives affect other aspects of their lives (language, marriage, and family). The research proposes that there are different kinds of Chinese Filipinos as evidenced in the six classifications in chapter 4. Further, most of them have constructed a hybrid culture exclusively and uniquely their own. On the one hand, they are still attached to their cultural roots; on the other hand, they cannot evade the fact that they are influenced by their host country and the present global and migratory age we live in. Second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Filipinos demonstrate their hybridity in language and mindset. This dissertation also lays out some challenges in relation to doing mission among them.

Navigating the Spanish Lake examines Spain’s long presence in the Pacific Ocean (1521–1898) in the context of its global empire. Building on a growing body of literature on the Atlantic world and indigenous peoples in the Pacific, this pioneering book investigates the historiographical “Spanish Lake” as an artifact that unites the Pacific Rim (the Americas and Asia) and Basin (Oceania) with the Iberian Atlantic. Incorporating an impressive array of unpublished archival materials on Spain’s two most important island possessions (Guam and the Philippines) and foreign policy in the South Sea, the book brings the Pacific into the prevailing Atlanticentric scholarship, challenging many standard interpretations. By examining Castile’s cultural heritage in the Pacific through the lens of archipelagic Hispanization, the authors bring a new comparative methodology to an important field of research. The book opens with a macrohistorical perspective of the conceptual and literal Spanish Lake. The chapters that follow explore both the Iberian vision of the Pacific and indigenous counternarratives; chart the history of a Chinese mestizo regiment that emerged after Britain’s occupation of Manila in 1762-1764; and examine how Chamorros responded to waves of newcomers making their way to Guam from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. An epilogue analyzes the decline of Spanish influence against a backdrop of European and American imperial ambitions and reflects on the legacies of archipelagic Hispanization into the twenty-first century. Specialists and students of Pacific studies, world history, the Spanish colonial era, maritime history, early modern Europe, and Asian studies will welcome Navigating the Spanish Lake as a persuasive reorientation of the Pacific in both Iberian and world history.

The rising strength of mainland China has spurred a revival of "Chineseness" in the Philippines. Perceived during the Cold War era as economically dominant, political disloyal, and culturally different, the "Chinese" presented themselves as an integral part of the Filipino imagined community. Today, as Filipinos seek associations with China, many of them see the local Chinese community as key players in East Asian regional economic development. With the revaluing of Chineseness has come a repositioning of "Chinese" racial and cultural identity. Philippine mestizos (people of mixed ancestry) form an important sub-group of the Filipino elite, but their Chineseness was occluded as they disappeared into the emergent Filipino nation. In the twentieth century, mestizos defined themselves and based claims to privilege on "white" ancestry, but mestizos are now actively reclaiming their "Chinese" heritage. At the same time, so-called "pure Chinese" are parlaying their connections into cultural, social, symbolic, or economic capital, and leaders of mainland Chinese state companies have entered into politico-business alliances with the Filipino national elite. As the meanings of "Chinese" and "Filipino" evolve, intractable contradictions are appearing in the concepts of citizenship and national belonging. Through an examination of cinematic and literary works, The Chinese Question shows how race, class, ideology, nationality, territory, sovereignty, and mobility are shaping the discourses of national integration, regional identification, and global cosmopolitanism.

An exploration of the deportation of Mexican military recruits and vagrants to the Philippines between 1765 and 1811.

Advances the theoretical understanding of the behaviour of entrepreneurial minorities and draws a vivid picture of how various imperial powers came to rely on local entreprenuerial minorities to establish their hegemony in Asia.