Saturday, January 9, 2010: 9:20 AM
Elizabeth Ballroom C (Hyatt)
James B. Tueller
Associate Professor of History
Brigham Young University - Hawai‘i
BYUH #1970
55-220 Kulanui St
Laie, HI 96762
tuellerj@byuh.edu
American Historical Association
Annual Meeting, January 7-10, 2010
San Diego, California
Scales of Spain’s Empire in the Pacific: From Small Islands to Global Sea Routes
In the first twenty seven years of the Eighteenth Century, the Jesuit school of San Juan de Letrán in Agaña, Guam, the largest of the Marianas Islands, listed fifty boys attending. The school was founded in 1669 by Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores, the leader of the first Jesuit mission to the archipelago. Although the islanders had interacted with European explorers since Spanish sailors with Magellan’s ships had landed there in 1521, the young men in early Eighteenth-Century Guam were among the first to face the full scale transformations of the Spanish Empire. The school boys were mostly native Chamorros. Three were of mixed parentage, mestizos españoles. The young men lived the transition into direct imperial control, learning the new ways of praying, reading, farming and dressing. The deep contrasts of a small island, leagues away from any center of power, elicits a scale of judgment. Three hundred years later, the lives of the school boys help us analyze multiple issues of agency and values, hanging in the balance. The daily lives of Chamorros and newcomers on Guam instruct us about the order and control that the Imperial administrators expected and separated from the reality that emerged. The Marianas stop-over for the Manila Galleon was both crucially important and insignificantly small during the 250 years of the Acapulco trade. This paper will analyze the continuities maintained by the indigenous inhabitants along with the changes they faced as newcomers arrived from Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Associate Professor of History
Brigham Young University - Hawai‘i
BYUH #1970
55-220 Kulanui St
Laie, HI 96762
tuellerj@byuh.edu
American Historical Association
Annual Meeting, January 7-10, 2010
San Diego, California
Scales of Spain’s Empire in the Pacific: From Small Islands to Global Sea Routes
In the first twenty seven years of the Eighteenth Century, the Jesuit school of San Juan de Letrán in Agaña, Guam, the largest of the Marianas Islands, listed fifty boys attending. The school was founded in 1669 by Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores, the leader of the first Jesuit mission to the archipelago. Although the islanders had interacted with European explorers since Spanish sailors with Magellan’s ships had landed there in 1521, the young men in early Eighteenth-Century Guam were among the first to face the full scale transformations of the Spanish Empire. The school boys were mostly native Chamorros. Three were of mixed parentage, mestizos españoles. The young men lived the transition into direct imperial control, learning the new ways of praying, reading, farming and dressing. The deep contrasts of a small island, leagues away from any center of power, elicits a scale of judgment. Three hundred years later, the lives of the school boys help us analyze multiple issues of agency and values, hanging in the balance. The daily lives of Chamorros and newcomers on Guam instruct us about the order and control that the Imperial administrators expected and separated from the reality that emerged. The Marianas stop-over for the Manila Galleon was both crucially important and insignificantly small during the 250 years of the Acapulco trade. This paper will analyze the continuities maintained by the indigenous inhabitants along with the changes they faced as newcomers arrived from Europe, the Americas and Asia.