1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (54 page)

More than a hundred sets of
casta
paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves.

Looking at these images today, it is hard to imagine what their creators were thinking at the time. They must have known that Europeans were fascinated and repulsed by New Spain’s exotic inhabitants. The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the
castizos,
mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily business, tall and robustly healthy each and every one. Looking at the smooth, smiling faces now, one would never know that on the streets of the cities where they were painted these people were scorned for their very diversity. One would also never know that the
casta
paintings were not diverse
enough
—not a single one portrayed New Spain’s Asian population, by far the biggest outside Asia.

SHOOK-UP CITY

In January 1688 crowds of the faithful forced their way into the chapel of Holy Innocents in the Jesuit church of the Holy Spirit, in Puebla de los Ángeles. Resting inside was the body of Catarina de San Juan, a renowned local holy woman who had died in her eighties. Officers at the city cathedral and the local religious orders had taken turns carrying her elaborately carved coffin into the chapel, where it rested on a bier bedecked with art and manuscript poetry. In an ecstasy of faith, worshippers tore at the shroud covering the body, trying to cut off fingers, ears, or other gobbets of flesh as relics. To protect Catarina’s corpse from her fans, ecclesiastical authorities emplaced a team of armed soldiers.

Leading members of the city council and Puebla’s religious establishment attended the interment, then walked to the cathedral for a memorial mass. The sermon was given by the Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera, who recounted Catarina’s life in elaborate, fanciful detail. Although Catarina spent most of her day praying, Aguilera told the assembled dignitaries, she was in fact voyaging spiritually across the planet. Indeed, she was responsible for Christian victories over Muslim armadas in the Mediterranean. Later supporters would learn that she had joined the Virgin Mary to save the Spanish treasure fleet from a demonic hurricane; helped Spanish ships beat back English and French pirates; flown over Japan and China to spread Christianity; and personally witnessed the martyrdom of Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico.

These feats were unusual in number but not in type for people who went on to become saints in that period. Not unusual, too, were the hagiographic biographies written after her death by churchmen who knew Catarina, though it was remarkable for three to appear, one of them almost a thousand pages long. What was peculiar was Aguilera’s claim about her birth: Catarina de San Juan, an obscure visionary in the mountains of Mexico, was the granddaughter of an Asian emperor. More peculiar still, this claim was probably accurate, or mostly so.

Named Mirra at birth, she was born around 1605 into an aristocratic family in a city in the Mughal empire, probably Lahore, in modern Pakistan, or Agra, later famous for the Taj Mahal. The Mughal empire was a Muslim dynasty, and Mirra’s family, which seems to have been distantly related to the imperial family, was Muslim as well. Mirra/Catarina’s biographers claim that she lived in a palace beside a river with the rest of the emperor’s extended family and that her family had Christian sympathies. The latter claim is not preposterous. Akbar, emperor at the time, was celebrated for tolerance; Jesuits, welcomed at his court, converted some high-ranking courtiers to Christ. Images of Christian saints were common in courtly gardens, statuary, and tombs—they were taken as symbols of Akbar’s divinely guided reign.

Everything changed when Mirra was seven. Portuguese pirates seized a ship of Mughal pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Interpreting the attack as a deliberate religious insult, Akbar booted out the Jesuits and turned to persecuting Christians. Mirra’s parents were implicated in the crackdown and moved to the coast—possibly Surat, on the Arabian Sea, which had a big European community. Surat also had, alas, a big piracy problem. As recounted by one of Mirra’s biographers, who claimed to have heard the story from her own lips, pirates disguised as Portuguese merchants abducted her on the beach and transported her to Kochi (Cochin), near the southern tip of India. Jesuits there baptized her. Christians were not supposed to be enslaved by other Christians, but the pirates took the young girl back from the Jesuits. On the seas she was repeatedly degraded before being deposited in Manila, where she was acquired by a ship captain from Puebla.

In Mexico the girl now known as Catarina became ever more fervent and ascetic in her beliefs, retreating to a cell, drinking little and eating less, twisting straps with sharp metal studs around her limbs, and rejecting any hint of sexual contact—she once told the naked Christ, whom she saw in a vision, to put his clothes on. Shuttered in a bare, tiny room, she battled the assault of devils on a nightly basis, arming herself with holy water, reliquaries, and the cross. Visions possessed her, according to her most determined chronicler, Alonso Ramos, a Jesuit whom Catarina had selected as her confessor. She saw the communion host transfigured into a star that shot magical rays into her mouth, Ramos said. She saw the soul of the Queen of Heaven rise in a splash of brilliance and fire, twelve lights upon her head like a diadem. She saw the vaults of the church explode and the roof crack open to reveal a floating, magical table covered with flowers and sparkling gold and a great feast attended by the Savior himself. She saw a staircase made of “delicate and shimmering clouds” with souls climbing it to heaven and her own prayers turning into angels and flowers raining down on everything and everyone.

Ramos narrated these events in three jumbo-sized volumes released in 1689, 1690, and 1692—the longest work ever published in New Spain. Four years later the Inquisition condemned all three as “useless, improbable, full of contradictions and … rash doctrines.” Ramos was removed from his position as rector of the Puebla Jesuit college and confined to a cell. Already an alcoholic, he seems to have gone mad in captivity. He escaped, tried to murder his successor as rector, and died a forgotten man.

Catarina de San Juan, too, was almost forgotten. Forgotten as well were the Asians who preceded and followed her to the Americas—fifty to a hundred thousand of them, according to Edward R. Slack, a historian at Eastern Washington University. They came via the galleon trade: sailors, servants, and slaves disembarking in Acapulco and scattering across New Spain. By the early seventeenth century, Asians—Filipinos, Fujianese, and Filipino-Fujianese—were building Spanish ships in Manila Bay. When Spaniards proved reluctant to make the long and arduous trip across the ocean, Asians took their place. Some may have shipped to Mexico as early as 1565, when Urdaneta made the first successful crossing of the Pacific from west to east. (On that voyage, Legazpi sent Asian slaves to his hacienda in Coyuca, northwest of Acapulco.) Slack estimates that 60 to 80 percent of the crew on the great ships and their accompanying vessels were Asian. Many never went back to Manila. One example is the seventy-five Asian sailors known to have landed in Acapulco in 1618 on the galleon
Espiritu Sancto.
Only five were aboard for the return trip. Over the decades thousands of sailors jumped ship in the Americas, taking jobs in the city’s shipyards or building forts and other public works.
⁶

Sometimes Asian sailors worked side by side with Asian slaves like Catarina de San Juan, who trickled in despite the disapproval of the colonial government. They came from India, Malaysia, Burma, and Sri Lanka to Manila, transported by Portuguese slavers; Chinese junks brought others from Vietnam and Borneo. From Manila they were shipped in the great galleons with the silk and porcelain. In 1672 Manila banned Asian slavery. The ban was rarely effective. Almost a century later, the municipal council of Veracruz forced a company of Jesuits from Manila to get rid of the twenty Asian servants whom they were taking to Madrid. They were too much like slaves.

Known collectively as
chinos,
Asian migrants spread slowly along the silver highway from Acapulco to Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Indeed, the road was patrolled by them—Japanese samurai perhaps in particular. Katana-swinging Japanese had helped suppress Chinese rebellions in Manila in 1603 and 1609. When Japan closed its borders to foreigners in the 1630s, Japanese expatriates were stranded wherever they were. Scores, perhaps hundreds, migrated to Mexico. Initially the viceroy had forbidden mestizos, mullatos, negros,
zambaigos,
and
chinos
to carry weapons. The Spaniards made an exception for samurai, allowing them to wield their katanas and tantos to protect the silver shipments against the escaped-slaves-turned-highwaymen in the hills. The results were so encouraging that the authorities reversed course and drafted mixed-race people into the militias. By the eighteenth century Afro-Indo-Asian paramilitary units on Mexico’s Pacific coast were protecting mail deliveries, patrolling for bandits, and repelling attacks by British ships. Acapulco, terminus of the silver trade, was guarded by a force of
morenos, pardos,
Spaniards, and
chinos,
the latter mostly Filipinos and Fujianese. When the British admiral/pirate George Anson invaded western Mexico in 1741, the multicultural force played a major role in his defeat.

Puebla was bigger than Acapulco and had a more tight-knit Asian community. Indeed, Catarina’s owner found another Asian slave there for her to marry. (The marriage did not take. It may have been doomed from the wedding night, when Catarina told her new spouse that St. Peter and St. Paul had appeared at the bedside to deny him from exercising his conjugal rights.) One of the city’s most important industries was ceramics—Puebla clay is of exceptional quality. Working with eye-straining attention to detail, skilled potters created pieces that imitated blue-and-white Ming dynasty porcelain. Guild regulations specified that “the coloring should be in imitation of Chinese ware, very blue, finished in the same style.” Edward Slack, the Eastern Washington historian, points out that the manufacturers would hardly have ignored the skilled Asian craftspeople in their midst. More than likely, Puebla’s fake Chinese pottery was created in part by real Chinese potters. If so, they did a splendid job: talavera ware, as it is known today, is now so highly prized that when I visited Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.

Larger still was the Asian community in Mexico City. The first real Chinatown in the Americas, it was centered around an outdoor Asian marketplace under a tent-like roof in the Plaza Mayor, the city’s grand central square, built atop the city center of old Tenochtitlan. The marketplace was called the Parián, after the Asian ghetto in Manila. In a cacophony of languages, Chinese tailors, cobblers, butchers, embroiderers, musicians, and scribes competed with African, Indian, and Spanish shopkeepers for business. Alarming to colonial authorities, Chinese goldsmiths drove European goldsmiths out of business—“the people of China that have been made Christians and every year come thither, have perfected the Spaniards at that trade,” a Dominican monk lamented in the 1620s.

Carried across the Pacific from Manila by the galleon trade, the Chinese artist Esteban Sampzon became one of Buenos Aires’s leading sculptors at the end of the eighteenth century. The sensitively rendered features of his
Christ of Humility and Patience
(ca. 1790) still adorn the city’s Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Merced. (
Photo credit 8.7
)

Spanish goldsmiths evidently took the loss of business calmly. Spanish barbers did not. In those days a barber was both a hair and beard trimmer and a low-ranking medical provider who performed dental surgery. About two hundred
chino
barbers set up shop in the Plaza Mayor, treating maladies with a combination of Eastern and Western techniques: cauterization and acupuncture, bloodletting and Chinese herbal medicine. Wealthy women flocked to their kiosks. It was not just a New Age fad—Chinese dentistry was then the most sophisticated in the world. In the Tang dynasty the savants of Beijing had realized that periodontal disease could be prevented by scraping away dental plaque. They treated the bleeding with pastes made with roots and herbs that recent research has shown to have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.

In 1635 the city’s Spanish barbers petitioned the municipal council to stop the
chinos
’ “excesses” and “inconveniences.” The complaint was artfully worded, but one detects the real cause of grievance: the Chinese were willing to pay higher rents for space in the center of town, even at the risk of lowering their profits, because that brought them closer to their customers. And they spent long hours on the job, forcing European barbers to work equally hard to compete. To Spaniards, the solution was obvious: expel the Chinese from the city center and restrict hair-cutting hours so that they wouldn’t have to work so hard and accept such low profits. Six months later the viceroy banned Asian barbers from the Plaza Mayor. Twisting the knife, he restricted the number of razors they could possess, thus ensuring that their shops couldn’t grow too large.