Forging Spaces in the City of Kings: Asian and Asian-Descended Residents in 16th- and 17th-Century Lima

Taking as points of comparison the Indigenous migrant population and the African and Afro-Andean experiences in Lima, this paper explores how Asian and Asian-descended people found or created ways to live in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima. In particular, it examines in what ways they participated in the local arrangement of labor, how they participated in local markets and interacted with guilds, and what roles they played in confraternities and other parish church activities such as baptisms, marriages, and burials. Of importance is how they navigated life at the household level, sometimes creating their own households and sometimes forging unions with members of other groups. The families and individuals of this diaspora and descended from it lived in a society shaped by freedom and enslavement, and the various ways they dealt with these constraints and the degrees of control and coercion that all lived under form a part of this history. Accumulating their own property in homes, market stands, and even other enslaved people is equally important to establishing the nature and extent of Asian and Asian-descended residents’ survivance and local success. Ultimately, the paper seeks to contribute another piece to an opening chapter on Asian Andean history by establishing some points of comparison with other Spanish American cities known for larger Asian and Asian-descended populations like Mexico City and Acapulco and with the larger groups and a wider plebeian class simultaneously forging spaces to live in Lima. Along with the other papers on this panel, this study pays attention to the sources and methods of ethnohistory, social history, and micro-economic history in reconstructing the lives and actions of people hard to distinguish in the historical record.