This article explores how enslaved and free people of the African Diaspora created, revised, and transformed their identities within the physical demands and legal erasure of New World slavery. Locating Diasporic collectivities from the multicultural region of Senegambia, I argue that captives from Guinea-Bissau formed a coherent Diasporic community in coastal Peru not based on a singular ethnicity, but on their multiple and dynamic means of adaptation. By following those called bran from Guinea-Bissau to colonial Peru, I re-configure “transnational” borders separating Latin America and African historiography, as well as complicate ethnicity as a stable marker of early modern identity. As a contribution to African Diaspora history, I disrupt a monolithic construction of an “authentic” black identity by describing the elements of Guinea-Bissau collectivities in the Americas. Therefore, I show how enslaved men acted not always in resistance to slavery, but in conflict with each other and other subalterns in particular applications of Guinea-Bissaun practices. This transnational “way of seeing” requires that I see double, or listen to simultaneous narratives of West African and colonial Andean histories to interpret the specific actions of the enslaved from Guinea-Bissau in Peru.

This thesis maintains that the ongoing conflicts between Spanish and indigenous peoples in the frontier region of the Kingdom of New Mexico in the eighteenth century demonstrated Spaniards' inability to achieve conquest. Spanish colonizers conceptualized a successful conquest in the Americas to include access to land and control over its resources. Nevertheless, analyzing this material mode of conquest on its own reveals an incomplete process. The Spanish state did not fully realize its ambition to occupy New Mexico with Spanish colonizers since the Apache, Comanche, and Pueblo refused to internalize Spanish values in the eighteenth century. Spanish colonizers resorted to discursive forms of conquest as a means to create a legal-religious discourse that justified their presence in the region. The Spanish labeled indigenous peoples such as the Pueblo variously as sodomite, heretic, and adulterer in order to remain in New Mexico. This thesis employs forms of textual analysis, qualitative content analysis, and discourse analysis of the primary sources from New Mexico including, letters, diaries, travelogues, and Inquisition testimonies written by Spanish colonizers in order to illustrate the ongoing contestations between the Spanish and indigenous peoples for control over a network of exchange in the frontier region of the Kingdom of New Mexico.

In early colonial Philippines, the Spanish crown believed the Catholic missionizing project was of primary importance. Colonizers and clergy, preliminarily, intended to convert all the Filipino indigenous peoples in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. However, the tumultuous seventeenth century impeded this mission. In this paper I analyze the ways in which colonizers interpreted the transformation of Filipino gender norms. By examining published correspondence among crown authorities, lay officials, and clergy, I assert that Spanish colonizers measured the success of their mission according to the Filipino's gendered performance of Spanish Catholic gender norms. As full conversion of the Filipinos and Filipinas seemed more improbable, colonizers shifted their focus from what the colonizers believed to be superficial expressions of faith, to the chronicles of exceptional Filipinos. Although colonizers interpreted the success of their mission in different ways over time, they persistently conceptualized their mission through the transformation of indigenous gender norms.

This dissertation investigates how merchants in colonial Mexico transformed regional markets through their participation in transpacific trade. A heterogeneous category of actors including capital investors to local entrepreneurs, Mexican merchants circulated Asian imports to make profit and integrate local markets into global commerce. The influence of the Manila Galleon trade extended well beyond the port of entry at Acapulco and extended into numerous cities and towns (Yuste López 2007, Giráldez 2015). Combined with domestic, South American and European manufactures (Kicza 1983, Hoberman 1991, Hassig 1993), merchants created complex trade networks to circulate a diverse selection of merchandise for their customers. Through their actions to facilitate and expand market access to global goods widely, I argue, these merchants created a cosmopolitanism in New Spain. Their business strategies transformed the colony by opening local market access to distant locations across the oceans (like China, India and Japan), thus enriching globalized Mexican consumer choices in the seventeenth century.

Each chapter focuses on a specific type of merchant actor in a select location. Beginning in Acapulco, I examine the mediating role of the encomenderos who regulated and promoted galleon trade between Mexican investors, Philippine agents in Manila, and regional merchants. Turning to Mexico City, I examine how merchant members of the Consulado (the powerful merchants’ guild) negotiated with powerful colonial authorities to ensure the viability of transpacific trade. In Puebla, I shift my focus to those merchants who, by serving on the city council, created favorable situations for the trade and distribution of valuable merchandise. Lastly, I end my study in Toluca to investigate how small-scale merchants and local entrepreneurs engaged in transactions to put global goods into the hands of their clientele. Taken as a whole, the chapters reveal how different merchants contributed to and participated in a complex commercial network that extended well beyond the ports. Cosmopolitanism in Mexico matters because colonial spaces participated in the construction of global connections and integration in the early modern period. In the case of New Spain, its merchants linked consumers to distant locations around the world. These merchants drove cosmopolitanism by integrating global goods into economic and commercial transactions across colonial Mexico.

In the Philippines from 1640 to 1750, Spanish authorities feared that they would lose control of the Pacific colony to its multiracial resident populations. Essential to imperial fear was a fundamental misunderstanding of racial and gender dynamics within colonial labor spaces. Imperial officials discursively constructed laboring populations as “lazy indios” and Chinese “infidels”; such men were potential enemies of empire who outnumbered Spanish residents and incited disorder. This dissertation examines imperial correspondence, labor laws, and colonial reports to highlight the processes, discursive and material, through which Spanish imperial authorities conceptualized race and masculinity in the markets, the lumberyards, the mines, and the haciendas of the colonial Philippines. I argue that in the century prior to the Bourbon Reforms, colonial authorities – confronted with the challenge of making the local Philippine economy more efficient– consistently recalibrated their assumptions on racial formations to ultimately convince themselves that some races, and some men, could be redeemed from the category of “enemies of the empire.” Moving from racial formations situated within the binaries of Spanish and non-Spanish, imperial officials progressively reimagined race and masculinity through the lenses of religion, scientific intellect, and economic practicality. As they toiled in colonial labor regimes, indigenous and Chinese men mirrored racialized and gendered assimilation for their Spanish superiors while simultaneously building their own networks of economic and sociopolitical power.