Colonial Latin Asia? The case for incorporating the Philippines and the Spanish Pacific into colonial Latin American studies

hosted a conference last year that brought together a small group of scholars to discuss Iberian Asia; to take stock of recent work and to ponder the future directions of research exploring the Spanish and Portuguese ‘ presence ’ in this world region in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries. What is striking about this meeting is that it centered on the question of whether an Iberian Asia ever existed. The organizers asked, ‘ Can we conceive of an Iberian Asia just as some historians have recently done for the Iberian Atlantic? ’ They shunned the term ‘ colonial ’ and spoke of ‘ Iberian societies ’ rather than Iberian colonies. 1 A reluctance to categorize Asia ’ s littorals zones, islands, seas, and peoples as colonized, or at least colonized by Spain and Portugal, is deeply rooted in a long and vibrant postco-lonial intellectual tradition. The historiography of the Philippines frames the archipelago as a frontier zone that a weak Spain never succeeded in conquering. In the 1970s and 1980s, Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto ’ s (1979) and Vicente Rafael ’ s (1988) respective monographs recovered Indigenous Filipino resistance to Spanish colonialism, from mass armed revolts against governments and the powerful friars, to those rebellions more subtly embedded in and enacted through language and translation. William Henry Scott (1974) and James C. Scott (2009) documented the Spanish conquistadors ’ and their Indigenous allies ’ futile e ff orts to dominate the Philippines ’ mountainous high-altitude zones. Arche-ological studies of the cordillera ’ s rice terraces have turned up more proof that multiethnic cimarrones fl ed the lowlands for the mountains to evade colonial rule, adding layers of evidence to what historians have mined from the empire ’ s paper archives (Acabado et al. 2019). More recently, John D. Blanco (2021) argued that Spain also failed to conquer the Philippines lowlands. Painting a picture of con fl ict rather than control, he emphasized how active missions were zones of protracted war. For Blanco, Spanish authority was weak even in Manila, the capital