The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 -- with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan -- and 1815 -- the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish America, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific among Europeans, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

In 1813, the Bishop of Cebu, Joaquín Encabo de la Virgen de Sopetrán, issued an edict prohibiting the exhumation of the dead, written primarily in the local language of Cebuano Visayan. This document from the archives of the Roman Catholic parish of Patrocinio de Maria in Boljoon, a town in the Philippine province of Cebu, suggests that inhabitants of the diocese were digging up the bones of the dead in order to hold rituals for a secondary burial along traditional, non-Christian lines. Ino Manalo discusses the edict in light of the emphasis placed by Spanish colonialism on urbanism and literacy, and outlines the ways in which it provides evidence of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices centuries after the introduction of Christianity to the Visayas.

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