Voicing sexual and social resistance in seventeenth-century Manila

Historical studies of migration around Asia in the early modern period are scarce, but we know that women as well as men were involved in the movement of peoples around this region at the time. These movements, some of which were forced and others voluntary, occurred as a result of war, slavery, trade and faith. For the sixteenth and seventeenth century, rich life narratives and other detailed historical documentation is rarely available, especially for women who were displaced involuntarily as slaves. Nonetheless, this essay explores the remaining textual presentations and representations of one enslaved woman named Maria, who came from the Indian sub-continent and was living in the Spanish-controlled Philippines in the early seventeenth century. To do so, I assess historical materials in which we must “read against the grain” of the documents’ original purposes within colonial and ecclesiastical communication networks in order to uncover information about an enslaved woman’s displacement across the Asian region.