15 - Race, Gender, and Colonial Rule in an Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Manuscript on Mexico and the Philippines (1763)

Summary

Abstract

This is an excerpt from Joaquín Antonio de Basarás's Origen, costumbres y estado presente de mexicanos y filipinos (Origin, customs, and present state of Mexicans and Filipinos, 1763). It casts light on diverging processes of racialization of “Indian” communities in the Philippines and Mexico. Additionally, the introduction and translated passages that follow address the following questions: What voices or stories have been preserved in this text dedicated to the elimination and defamation of such voices and perspectives? In what way does the critique of Filipino and Mexican Indians’ behavior—their lack of decorum in a Spaniard's home, their tendency to eavesdrop, or their strategies for incriminating local priests—potentially allow the reader a glimpse of critical or insurgent consciousness or motives among colonized Indigenous peoples?

Keywords: Mexico, Philippines, colonial literature, race, casta, indigeneity

In 1763, Joaquín Antonio de Basarás wrote the two-volume Origen, costumbres y estado presente de mexicanos y filipinos: Descripción acompañada de 106 estampas en colores (Origin, customs, and present state of Mexicans and Filipinos: Description accompanied by 106 color prints). The first volume contains text, including unsystematic, sensationalist descriptions of the peoples, histories, and economies of the Viceroyalty of New Spain's two distant settlements, Mexico and the Philippines. The second volume comprises colored prints about Mexico and not the Philippines, including images of “typical” Indians, racial miscegenation charts, dance and hunting rituals, city maps, exotic fruits, and colonial soldiers. The work did not circulate until art historian and curator Ilona Katzew transcribed and published Basarás's two volumes in 2006.

Much remains unknown about Basarás and his book, principally why and for whom it was written. Basarás was born in Bilbao in the early eighteenth century (exact date unknown) and as a merchant traveled throughout Mexico and the Philippines. He owned a fabric emporium in Santa Fe, Guanajuato, from 1760 to 1761. His brother, for whose instruction perhaps these volumes were composed, was Domingo Blas de Basarás, a lawyer of the Royal Council in Madrid who held judicial posts in the Manila Audience (unknown dates) and in the Mexican Audience (1766–68). Joaquín also had political aspirations, as suggested by a note he wrote to the king requesting he be appointed to a vacant mayorship of Tabasco, Mexico.