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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