Ricardo Padrón
Project
Boxer Codex: Colonial Spanish Empire in South East AsiaFollowing on the heels of my newest book, which explores the form and function of the Pacific Rim in the early modern Spanish geopolitical imagination, The Boxer Codex: Frameworks for Analysis studies cultural contact between Asians and Europeans in early colonial Manila. The Boxer Codex is a lengthy manuscript describing the peoples of East and Southeast Asia prepared in Manila during the 1570s at the behest of the Spanish colonial governor by a team of Europeans, Chinese, and perhaps native Filipinos. It fuses the Hispanic geographical and ethnographic imaginary, as it had been nurtured by contact with the New World with that of Ming China. My project convenes scholars in Latin American studies and East Asian studies to discuss the various epistemologies at work in the text.