#1587

#1587

Ya from Arknights

"The executor of the Feranmut, "Ya." According to the Sui Regulators' ancient scrolls, one of the Feranmuts hunted by the Yan a thousand years ago, with the mystical ability to "cut away the seasons and hold them at Its bosom." Its wounds still refuse to close, and It laps at them in fury and bewilderment… It returns once more to familiar Yan soil."

Diego Javier Luis is assistant professor of history at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (forthcoming, 2024).

Edited by Sam Haselby.

Cape Sebastian in Oregon perches above two forested declivities along a rocky patch of the state’s southern coast. Travel there today, and you are likely to miss a roadside marker that reads:

Spanish navigators were the first to explore the North American Pacific Coast. Beginning fifty years after Columbus discovered the Western continents, Sebastian Vizciano [sic] saw this cape in 1603 and named it after the patron saint of the day of his discovery. Other navigators, Spanish, British, and American, followed a century and a half later.

Standing before this sign, I winced rather predictably as I read ‘discovery’. But simmering beneath my displeasure with this word was a deeper conviction that Sebastián Vizcaíno’s voyage was, indeed, significant, though not in the ways that the sign suggests. Thousands of miles to the east, in Seville, the old centre of the Spanish Empire, I had stumbled upon Vizcaíno’s voyage in the dusty volumes of treasury records for the port of Acapulco, Mexico. Buried in line after line of winding, Baroque script were curious notations – ‘chino’ and ‘japón’ – next to the names of seven sailors that Vizcaíno had recruited for his voyage up the North American coast. To the tune of carriages rumbling through Seville’s cobbled streets and the crinkle of centuries-old pages turning, I read the names again and again:

Antón Tomás Antonio Bengala Francisco Miguel Cristóbal Catoya Agustín Longalo Lucas Cate Agustín Sao

Seven Asian sailors – entombed by an archive and forgotten by human memory – had sailed with Vizcaíno to what is now Oregon. Where in the chronology of Asian American history could these sailors fit? Flip to the beginning of most books on Asian America, and you will find no content earlier than the 19th century. You will be in the world of the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, indenture, and the San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinatowns.

These seven names transport us to a different world, a different timeline, a different Asian America. These sailors’ presence off the coast of Oregon predated not just the entire Asian American canon but also the founding of the United States and even of the Thirteen Colonies. The histories of the first Asians in the Americas do not take place in the nations born from the fires of British colonialism but, rather, they guide us to a region rarely considered relevant to Asian American history: Latin America.