2026-06-27 –, Room 302 (Seats 48)
This paper uses the late sixteenth-century Boxer Codex to rethink what it means for a world to be “connected” outside modern frameworks of globalization. Produced in Manila at the end of the sixteenth century, the codex crystallizes a dense web of exchanges linking Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, China, and many communities in East and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the opening Spanish-Chamorro maritime encounter and the narrative “Relación de las yslas de los Ladrones” [An Account of the Ladrones Islands] (modern-day Mariana Islands), I argue that the manuscript emerges from uneven, multiethnic collaboration: a Spanish author, a likely Chinese artist, translators, and indigenous and local informants from the Philippine archipelago.
By tracing how knowledge moves orally, visually, and textually, the paper shows how the Boxer Codex makes visible historical precedents of interconnection that are partial, asymmetrical, and often excluded: encounters at sea without landfall, anonymous sources, and representational gaps between text and image. Rather than anticipating a unified global system, the codex records a patchwork of routes, mediations, and silences. Reading it as an archive of relationality, I propose that early modern colonial manuscripts can help us rethink dominant historiographical narratives of “globalization” and recover other grammars of connectedness.
- Boxer Codex
- Transoceanic Connectedness
- Early Modern Knowledge Networks
- Spanish-Chamorro Encounter
Brayan Serratos García is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kalamazoo College. He holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Vanderbilt University, with graduate certificates in Latin American Studies and Asian Studies. His research explores the intellectual, visual, textual, and cartographic networks that connected Spanish America and Spanish Asia, centering the role of Indigenous and local knowledge producers across the Pacific world. Brayan’s work has appeared in journals such as Hispanic Review, with additional articles forthcoming in Hispanófila and the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos