Dentro y fuera de los muros:

Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography

Dana Leibsohn, Smith College

Abstract. In 1671 the Dominican friar Ignacio Muñoz created a map of Manila that
has since become one of the most frequently published images of the city. His pen-­
and-­ink image describes key places in the island city—some that would have been
characteristic of urban spaces across Spanish America and some that were highly
distinctive. This cartographic representation also enlists visual and textual language
that was, by the late seventeenth century, familiar across the Indies. In what ways,
then, does the Muñoz map speak to local histories as well as those that were more
global? This essay addresses this query and its implications by examining the ways
the Muñoz map documents and implicitly imagines the spatial and civic experiences
of Chinese, indigenous, and Spanish residents of Manila. In pursuing this theme,
this essay also considers relationships between colonial cartography and histories
of ethnic diversity.

How might one read a map or any document describing distinctive, local
practices as constitutive of the broad colonial world? With this question as
guide this essay turns to a map of Manila, a city deeply enmeshed in Asian
networks of exchange in the seventeenth century yet also subject to Spanish
rule.1 The document that interests me is a map from the 1670s (fig. 1), one
that opens onto conversations about close reading and the writing of colo-
nial history. At issue is also the intersection of cartography and ethnicity in
the early modern Hispanic world and how a suite of documents might open
that space to interpretation. Manila was of course a port city, and there is an
argument to be made for exploring its ethnic diversity through this lens. Yet
as Alejandro de la Fuente has suggested in his study of Havana, “Relation-
ships with the wider world are key to understanding port cities, but their
inhabitants also have a history of their own.”2 Ultimately, then, this essay

Ethnohistory 61:2 (Spring 2014) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2414154

Copyright 2014 by American Society for Ethnohistory
230 Dana Leibsohn

Figure 1. Ignacio Muñóz, “Descripción geométrica de la ciudad y circunvalación

de Manila . . . ,” 1671. Watercolor on paper. Archivo General de Indias, Seville,
Mapas y Planos, Filipinas, 10

seeks to understand the particularities of a specific civic setting and one of

its maps. At the same time, it asks how an early modern map might broaden
our perspectives onto the colonial history of the Hispanic world.
One of the most frequently published views of Manila, the map in
figure 1 has been considered by some the “first scientific representation” of
the city; it has also been called the “Centennial Map,” since its date of pro-
duction, 1671, falls one hundred years after the settling of Manila by Span-
iards.3 As will become clear in the pages that follow, however, the occasion
of the map’s production had nothing to do with an anniversary. Rather, the
map describes urban space, but also charts urban loss—specifically the loss
of a hospital where some of the poorest residents of Manila received the
gift of Christian charity. This map thus documents both Manila’s physical
layout and its civic responsibilities. Ignacio Muñoz, who crafted the map,
was a Dominican friar born in Spain and a well-­respected engineer and stu-
dent of nautical sciences.4 His intended readership seems to have resided in
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 231

Spain, and while it is not known if Muñoz found his mapmaking project
onerous or pleasurable, he took care with its execution. This suggests that
his desires for the map’s reception were more than incidental.
Turning first to material and form, the Muñoz map extends across a
sheet of European paper and has been framed with a thin border of yellow
and black.5 In the upper left corner, in a multicolored cartouche, are the
date and title, “Descripción Geometrica de la Ciudad, y Circunvalacion de
Manila, y de sus Arrabales al Real Consejo de las Indias.”6 Muñoz is named
as the map’s creator, and his association with the Dominicans and title of
maestro, or “master,” are duly noted. The compass, the letters and numbers
that correspond to an alphabetic key (on a separate page), the main water-
ways, and the shoreline have been highlighted in color. The currents of the
Rio Passig, the sandy shores, and a few tree-­lined waterways create a sense
of local landscapes. Without doubt, the Muñoz map gives pride of place to
civic space, as did many of the maps created in Spain’s dominions in the
seventeenth century.7 His map also strives to “get the city right,” a point
underscored by the compass and scale and by the fact that so many places
have been carefully labeled.
Manila takes form through a combination of representational imagery
and abstracted geometric shapes. Mimetic images of houses and churches
appear, but darkened rectangles define the blocks and buildings of the
city’s center. For Spaniards of the time who had experience in reading
maps, this would have been neither surprising nor exceptional. Compari-
son with related images crafted by Spanish hands in the seventeenth cen-
tury, especially maps that highlight urban forms ringed by defensive walls,
often reveals similar features.8 For instance, a map of Santo Domingo, from
earlier in the seventeenth century, relies upon a similar visual vocabulary
(fig. 2). Created as part of a proposal to extend the city’s defensive enclo-
sures, the Santo Domingo map clearly delineates scale and direction. It
also relies upon multiple perspectives and geometric rather than mimetic
forms to indicate city blocks. In contrast to the Muñoz map, individual
buildings have been articulated by tiny arches and squares (representing
doorways), and alphabetic labeling has been used instead of an alphanu-
meric key. The color palette and style of painting are also quite different.
The Santo Domingo map features pink and green at the map’s perimeter,
with pale orange pigment describing city blocks and defensive walls, and
in general the image displays painterly qualities absent in the Muñoz map.
The Muñoz document, in contrast, seems more restrained and muted, pre-
ferring sharper lines and, in terms of color, blue for waterways, yellow for
Manila’s sandy shores, and gray-­brown for its urban structures. This diver-
gence in hue may seem incidental to colonial history, but it reminds us
232 Dana Leibsohn

Figure 2. “Plano de la ciudad de Santo Domingo,” 1608. Color on paper, 67.5 x

64.4 cm. Archivo General de Indias, Mapas y Planos, Santo Domingo, 22

that maps are not solely conventional documents, nor were all mapmakers
trained in the same ways: both choice and local circumstance shaped carto-
graphic forms. Nevertheless, comparison of the two paintings points to an
overall effect in which similarities outweigh differences. From this we sense
that the Muñoz map fits fairly, if not seamlessly, into the broader ambit of
Spain’s investment in urban cartography. Manila may have been far away
from both Spain and Spanish America (physically and conceptually), but
cartography seems to have been one mode of representation that aligned the
Philippine city with others in the extended Hispanic world.
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 233

Figure 3. Key for Ignacio Muñóz, “Descripción geométrica de la ciudad y circun-

valación de Manila . . . ,” 1671. Watercolor on paper. Archivo General de Indias,
Seville, Mapas y Planos, Filipinas, 10

If Manila is the subject of the Muñoz map, then one of its primary con-
cerns—as registered in both the map key and a letter written by Muñoz—
was the Hospital de los Naturales, a building that once stood just outside
the walled part of the city. In a letter to the Crown, Muñoz says he made this
map in part to identify the hospital site, where a sturdy building had suffered
great damage in recent years. Now, however, nothing but a humble, tempo-
rary structure, in need of refinancing and rebuilding, occupied this ground.
One theme of this map, then, was the loss—if not actual absence—of a hos-
pital where ethnic difference was publicly marked and, moreover, where
the physical and symbolic power of charity and healing figured prominently
in the civic project of Manila. The importance of this site is made clear in
the map’s key, which explicitly singles out the hospital: it is the only entry
on the legend identified in red ink.9 Even so, the graphic language of the
map mutes the implications of the hospital’s misfortune, identifying the site
through an unexceptional alphabetic cue, a lowercase f (fig. 3). This gesture
highlights the map’s second theme, the persuasive description of Manila’s
physical qualities. Muñoz articulates this interest in his letter, explaining
that he wishes the Crown to understand the full disposition of the city of
234 Dana Leibsohn

Manila and its surroundings, knowledge he graciously facilitates by draw-

ing this map and writing a prose account of its main features.10 While this
map is hardly unique in its concatenation of multiple desires, it is the con-
stellation of ambitions at work here that makes the document worth pur-
suing. It is my contention that this map does not merely describe Manila;
it also raises an interpretive dilemma. Specifically, this map asks us to con-
sider whether, and how, a painted document can register the lived realities
of a colonial city and, at the same time, comment upon the place of that city
in the world—metaphorically, if not also literally.
To begin to answer this query, I turn first to the map’s evocation of
ethnic history, which involves the tone of Muñoz’s endeavor, not only its
iconography. As we might expect of a man devoted to nautical science,
Muñoz clearly describes major paths for navigation and movement through
Manila: waterways and bridges. He also carefully depicts city walls, nam-
ing each gate, bastion, and curtain wall in his key. This interest in the walls
of Manila is stressed in the map’s title, for the Spanish term circunvalación
references “encircling.”11 In the accompanying prose document, Muñoz
establishes a sequence for reading the map. He first situates the reader via
the longitude and latitude of the island of Luzon and then of Manila. Only
then does his description of the city turn to Intramuros. He notes the beauty
of bridges and the security of the walls before identifying different types of
urban structures: twelve main religious structures, two religious schools,
two hospitals, and six tribunals. He then turns to the regions outside the
walls—which, he states explicitly, is the largest part of the city.12 Intramuros
(within the walls) and extramuros (outside the walls) are terms that surface
repeatedly in seventeenth-­century documents, and what happened inside,
as opposed to outside the city walls, mattered a great deal in Manila. This
distinction was also relevant, and powerfully charged, in other colonial port
cities in Spanish America, including Havana, Lima, and Cartagena. Yet the
actual role of the city walls—as well as the physical spaces they defined and
their connotative meanings—varied in each of these settings.13
In Manila, Intramuros formed the symbolic center of the city. This
would have been in keeping with the Spanish tradition of imposing a traza
(urban plan), with space for the preeminent institutions of government,
commerce, and religious practice (usually for Spaniards and their descen-
dants) at the heart of a city. Muñoz does not name the main roads of Intra-
muros, but their grid-­like formation recalls the maps of other cities in Span-
ish America.14 At the lower left edge of Intramuros sits Fort San Diego,
the city’s major military foothold. Further inland, Muñoz has depicted
the royal storehouses and royal chapel and, facing onto an open plaza, the
cathedral. The other labeled blocks include the monastic compounds of the
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 235

Jesuits, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Franciscans. The houses of wealthy

Spaniards, schools, and other administrative buildings make up the rest
of the inner city. Inmaculada Alva Rodríguez, a historian of Manila, has
suggested that earlier in the seventeenth century, before an earthquake,
Chinese uprisings, and threats from outsiders had taken their toll, Intra-
muros had a greater number of stone structures and impressive buildings.15
This may well have been the case, but an early modern voyager and writer,
William Dampier, described Manila of the 1690s as a city “environed with a
high strong wall and very well fortified; the houses are large, strongly built,
the streets are large, and pretty regular . . . there are a great many fair build-
ings besides Churches and other religious houses; of which there are not a
few,” a vision that aligns reasonably enough with the Muñoz description.16
On the Muñoz map, Extramuros appears as less densely settled, even
though the majority of Manila’s residents lived here. The neighborhoods
depicted include Dilao, which was primarily inhabited by Japanese and
Japanese-­indigenous residents; Bagumbaya an indigenous community; and
the Parian, the largest concentration of Chinese residents. On the other side
of the river, are Estacada, Binondo, and Quiapo (these last two communi-
ties were also settled by people of Chinese descent, largely those who had
converted to Christianity). It was not unusual in major port cities of Span-
ish America (or elsewhere) to find neighborhoods or barrios dominated by
particular ethnic groups. Although the spaces defined by defensive walls in
these cities did not necessarily align in simple ways with patterns of ethnic
settlement, the Muñoz map portrays Manila as a city quite neatly divided,
with a “Spanish” interior and a “multiethnic” periphery.17
In graphic terms, the selective use of geometry and mimetic imagery—
and the contrasting relationships they signaled—reinforced the division
between Intramuros and Extramuros. Muñoz depicted Intramuros via geo-
metric shapes, plotted at regular intervals, while outside the walls he used
representational images. The distinction is not hard and fast, but depictions
of architectural structures are most prominent in those parts of the city that
were, in many ways, the least Spanish. If the houses of Japanese residents
differed from those of indigenous people, the map does not say, yet it does
register variation in the size of these neighborhoods. The Parian, which
appears near the top of the Muñoz map (marked as letter I; see fig. 1), was
the region where most Chinese residents of Manila lived, at times housing
upward of fifteen thousand people.18 In the late 1660s, it was a space laid
out with perpendicular streets, and on the map it is depicted with buildings
packed closely together; in Dilao, a far smaller community, the structures
are loosely scattered. The scale bar in the upper right-­hand corner further
suggests how measurement gave rise to the map. Here, too, geometry con-
236 Dana Leibsohn

veys cultural, not strictly physical, meaning. For the map implies that track-
ing distances between buildings and landmarks in Intramuros was more
feasible (and perhaps more useful and necessary) than in communities out-
side the Spanish core.19
In spite of the impenetrable look of the city walls on the map, the
boundary between Intramuros and Extramuros was porous in lived real-
ity—a theme emphasized by Juan Gil’s recent and detailed analysis of the
economic, religious, and labor arrangements that entangled Chinese, Span-
ish, and Japanese residents of the city.20 Manila was hardly unique in this
regard. For instance, Guadalupe García has shown that in Havana of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the conceptual and lived realities
of Intramuros and Extramuros were so complicated by class and ethnicity
that they ultimately inverted.21 In seventeenth-­century Manila, wealthy
residents had country estates, with gardens and orchards, outside the walls,
along the banks of the Passig River and the bay. Slaves—some of African
descent and some who traced their origins to Asia or South Asia—were
also present in many parts of the city.22 And every day, Chinese, indigenous,
and Japanese people came to Intramuros to ply their wares and perform the
labor that kept Spanish Manila alive. In the case of Chinese residents, who
were supposed to be locked out of Intramuros at night, exceptions were
often made, and some lived within the walled compounds of their Span-
ish employers.23 While the risk of riots was ever present, across much of
the seventeenth century, Spaniards found that danger less threatening than
having no one around to rise early to bake the day’s bread. Manila was
in fact one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Spanish America. The
Spanish population of Manila was always small; indigenous people were
the most numerous. Next were the Chinese and then people of mixed ances-
try. The city was also home to people from Japan, Southeast Asia, Macao,
Africa, and western Europe; in some neighborhoods and barrios, the ethnic
composition could be largely homogenous, and in others, quite the con-
trary. For instance, people living and working in the Parian came from a
range of communities, although the vast majority would have been of Chi-
nese descent. In Santa Cruz, in contrast, Chinese Christians, mestizos, free
blacks, and Tagalogs lived along with Jesuit priests.24
Whether Manila was more ethnically diverse than Mexico City
remains an open question, but its reputation certainly rivaled the capital
of New Spain in this regard, and the cultural diversity of the city was often
noted in the seventeenth century. One of the most explicit descriptions
claims that “all the kingdoms and nations” could be seen in Manila: Spain,
France, Italy, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Moscow, the
East and West Indies, the Turks and Persians, Moors and Greeks, Chinese,
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 237

Figure 4. Chest. Ca. late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. 63.5 x 143 x
68 cm. Pigment on wood. Museo José Bello y González, Puebla

Africans, and Japanese.25 Yet the Muñoz map cues little of this, which sug-
gests how complicated a colonial map’s relationship to the ethnic complex-
ion of lived realities might be. When it comes to Dilao and the Parian, for
example, the map records differences in size, density, and location, but its
cartographic language offers no insight into the distinct ethnic composi-
tion of these Extramuros communities. Even Intramuros is composed of
largely abstracted and generic geometries. Muñoz does not identify Span-
ish houses, nor does the map enlist imagery to identify religious residences
as opposed to government buildings. It would not be incorrect, then, to see
the map as presenting an image of Manila that obscures the city’s composite
and mixed population. This point is worth stressing because not all maps of
Manila portray the city through such a dispassionate lens.
A painting of the city that extends across the lid of a chest underscores
this point (fig. 4). The image has been dated broadly, from circa late seven-
teenth century into the eighteenth century. Neither the painter’s name nor
the original context of production is known, but the scene gives pride of
place to Manila’s defensive walls and their gates and to Intramuros.26 In con-
trast to the Muñoz map, buildings rather than streets take the more promi-
nent role. Because architectural elements compress near the city walls, it is
difficult to imagine walking through this city. Through mimetic shorthand,
however, the painting clearly registers certain of Manila’s ethnic divisions.
The Rio Passig occupies the top of the scene, and the Parian, within its own
walled enclosure, appears in the lower right corner; across the river, stand
Binondo and Quiapo. On the other side of the city, toward the left side of the
238 Dana Leibsohn

Figure 5. Chest, detail showing the Parian. Ca. late seventeenth to early eighteenth
centuries. 63.5 x 143 x 68 cm. Pigment on wood. Museo José Bello y González,
Puebla

image, are Dilao and Bagumbaya each with at least one person “dressed” in
ethnically evocative clothing. In the Parian, for instance, “Chinese people”
wear robes and topknots, and some carry parasols (fig. 5); in Intramuros,
Spanish men—one with a sword, another upon a horse—appear with a
scattering of friars. Africans or other dark-­skinned people remain largely
invisible.27 As with the Muñoz map, this image imagines the ethnic geogra-
phy of Manila along lines that both parallel lived experience and convey its
idealized boundaries. On the chest, though, the urban imaginary owes far
more to demographic description than to geometric convention.
This intensely mimetic vein of representation can be traced in a third
map of Manila, the “Topographia de la ciudad de Manila,” which dates
from 1717.28 Here figural and descriptive imagery all but overwhelms the
scene (fig. 6). Parallels with Muñoz’s 1671 map exist, although in the “Topo-
graphia de la ciudad de Manila” the city has been tilted toward the viewer,
exposing both interiors and facades of Intramuros compounds. Also visible
are cannons at the ramparts, orchards enclosed within walled monastic
grounds, houses with tile roofs and huts of wood, and the pleasure houses
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 239

Figure 6. “Topographia de la ciudad de Manila, capital de las Yslas Philipinas,

fundada en la de Luzón Nuevo Reyno de Castilla. . . . ,” 1717, British Library
Board, London, Maps.K.Top.116.40

of the wealthy. Tiny human figures dot the streets of Intramuros: some are
women, and others are certainly men (including soldiers arrayed in forma-
tion in the plaza fronting the Capilla Real); servants fall into step, shad-
ing their masters with parasols. Outside the city walls, the Parian sprawls
across the eastern section of the map; here the “Topographia de la ciudad
de Manila” shows people entering the Parian, but it also depicts rice fields
and burial grounds; and along the banks of the bay, near Puerta Santa Lucia,
rearing steeds, carriages, and a variety of figures animate the landscape.
Densely populated neighborhoods of Extramuros “fill in” regions to the
north and south of Intramuros; in addition to compact housing, horses
graze lush fields and boats with rowers ply the city’s waterways. Most of
the people who walk the streets of Manila are no more than small, dark fig-
ures, and as a result it is difficult to assess their ethnicity. Some of the boats
in this scene are Chinese in style, but as a city view this image devotes far
less attention to the signs of ethnicity than to the sweep of landscapes and
living arrangements that constitute Manila. These vignettes may be largely
240 Dana Leibsohn

imagined; even so, we should understand the “Topographia de la ciudad

de Manila” as part genre scene, part map. It is also a document that con-
structs an affective sense of geography that is quite distinct from that of the
Muñoz map.29
To be sure, the intended purposes of each of these views of Manila were
unique; yet one point their juxtaposition makes clear is that the walls of
Manila were virtually iconic in Spanish depictions of the city. Setting these
maps side by side also shows how conventionalized, visual forms could so
differently signal the cultural experiences of “interior,” “exterior,” and their
liminal regions. Of the three examples discussed here, the Muñoz map is the
most reticent to comment on the city’s ethnic complexity. It also relies upon
some of the most persuasive graphic language of the day to suggest that the
ethnic divide between a Spanish city center and other regions of Manila was
the divide of greatest significance. This is hardly a cartographic failing, but
it is a cartographic position. It matters because, as historians of cartography
have long known, maps create—and do not merely record—the ideological
and lived possibilities of civic space. Even if we understand maps as perfor-
mative documents and acknowledge (as I think we must) that fundamental
meanings derive from practices of map reading and display, not only the
imagery and texts that make up the face of a map, then the power of colo-
nial cartography derives, in no small part, from the fact that some images
and not others were set down in ink on paper.30
This position opens onto the silences and subtleties of early modern
maps. Of course, cartography always has its limits, and the ambitions of
mapmakers respond to convention. Nevertheless, when it comes to eth-
nicity, the Muñoz map is far less effusive than some.31 It is impossible to
say with certainty whether studied repression—or simply disinterest—
is at work in the Muñoz map. Archival sources reveal his knowledge of
recent events intimately tied up with transnational anxieties and intereth-
nic violence that had scarred civic memory and physically reshaped Manila.
Indeed, the Muñoz map is not wholly indifferent on this point. Yet it treats
this history subtly. And it is this quality of the Muñoz map that makes it
possible (although not simple) to understand how local histories could
intersect with colonial narratives played out across a wider stage.
We sense the scope of this stage from documents accompanying the
map and, in particular, their reference to the Hospital de los Naturales,
the site marked distinctively in the Muñoz map legend. In his letter to the
Crown, Muñoz explains that, in days past, certain royal monies had funded
and sustained a hospital for indigenous people in Manila. The hospital—
a sturdy structure of stone, but now a building of wood and palm as basic
as the house of any simple indigenous person—occupied the site. A letter
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 241

by the Franciscan Miguel Juan Serret, today bound with the Muñoz docu-
ment, asks explicitly for a return of Crown support for the hospital.32 As
so often is the case, it is the backstory that complicates their request. In this
case, the hospital offers a point of focus for a larger tale.
While Muñoz does not recount the history of the Hospital de los Natu-
rales, it is worth noting that the early hospital was located in Intramuros,
within the symbolic heart of Manila.33 Founded in 1578, under Francis-
can care, the hospital was supported through donations from residents of
Manila but also by lands and herds owned and maintained by the Francis-
cans.34 Before the century’s end, the hospital entered the Patronato Real,
which included an annual donation of rice, fowl, and cloth from Ilocos
(a region in northern Luzon), as well as a set sum of money. As with many
religious institutions established in Intramuros, the hospital depended upon
local generosity, regional agriculture and tribute, and the labor of several
slaves.35 The hospital was also allowed to send a small amount of merchan-
dise to Mexico for sale, exempt from both export and import taxes.36 It
derived sustenance, then, from local economic arrangements along with
practices that stretched across two oceans and implicated a myriad of social
actors.
In the early seventeenth century, after a major fire, the hospital build-
ing was moved to Extramuros, very close to, but outside, the city walls.
This relocation did not weaken the pulse of foreign affairs experienced by
the hospital. In 1632, for instance, the Japanese emperor expelled Christian
lepers. In an act of Christian generosity, Spanish leaders in Manila agreed
to accept the exiles, and after a temporary stay in Dilao (the primary Japa-
nese settlement in Extramuros) the lepers were publicly processed through
Manila and housed in the Hospital de los Naturales.37 Conflict pitted colo-
nial officials against the Franciscans across the seventeenth century, but the
events most central to the Muñoz map transpired in 1662, when Governor
Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara ordered that the hospital, that sturdy
structure of stone, be demolished.38
Muñoz summarizes these events in the letter accompanying his map.
His position mirrors that of many a Spaniard in Manila: the hospital had
been demolished because of Chinese barbarians.39 There is truth in his
claim, but it is a truth that turns upon a historical convolution. In 1661–62,
Koxinga, a Chinese leader, overthrew the Dutch on Taiwan. Emboldened by
his victory, he sent an ambassador to Manila, demanding tribute.40 Should
the Spaniards refuse, he would attack. Koxinga’s demand both incensed the
Spaniards and terrified them. If sailing weather was good, the distance from
Taiwan to Manila Bay could be covered in about a week, close enough to
create believable menace. When the Spanish council in Manila voted not to
242 Dana Leibsohn

pay tribute, the city braced for attack, reinforcing walls and building new
bridges. Indigenous people bore the brunt of this labor, both residents of
Extramuros and people sent to Manila from communities elsewhere on the
island. In Intramuros, Spaniards prayed with fervor, marching relics and
images of saints through the city. Fear of Koxinga’s arrival turned Intra-
muros into a space of public ritual: processions unleashed the apotropaic
force of prayer as residents marched from the cathedral, parading along city
streets and past Manila’s main monastic compounds.41
In Extramuros, the situation became violent. In the spring of 1662,
rumors spread: by some accounts the Chinese of the Parian were planning a
revolt; according to other accounts, the Chinese were simply anxious to flee
and avoid beheading at the hands of anxious Spaniards.42 Tumult ensued.
Some Chinese fled into the hills, others drowned as they tried to swim away,
and some were hunted down and beheaded in skirmishes with Spanish and
indigenous soldiers. The Japanese residents of Manila tended to stand with
the Spaniards and together, with indigenous allies, they dismantled all
major stone structures outside of, but close to, the city walls. By destroy-
ing these buildings, they reasoned, Koxinga and his men would be denied
strongholds from which to attack the city. Churches in Dilao, the Parian,
and Bagumbaya, the country houses of the Spaniards, and the Hospital de
los Naturales (San Lázaro) were all taken down. The city turned on itself,
sacrificing buildings in the liminal spaces from which Intramuros could be
destroyed, quite literally, by what transpired just outside the city walls.
In the end, Koxinga never came to Manila, and the Spanish suffered no
Chinese attack. People were “freed from the affliction,” to quote one docu-
ment, and trade with merchants in China and Mexico resumed.43 To those
living in Manila of the time, this historical misadventure was a major affair,
and its effects wounded the city. Muñoz witnessed Manila’s reaction to
Koxinga’s threat: he worked in the city during those fraught, anticipatory
days, and his map represents part of his response.44 For historians today,
though, how much can—or should—this local drama matter? Is it the stuff
of colonial history?
Manila’s response to Koxinga certainly points to the power of colonial
anxieties: it was the fear of Chinese attack that caused the hospital’s demoli-
tion (along with other buildings). This narrative also highlights how deeply
transnational and interethnic conflicts marked the early modern period. As
a material object and visual image, the Muñoz map registers all of this in
a way that minimizes the hospital’s fate. The map’s key signals the hos-
pital site clearly, and Muñoz calls attention to the site in his letter to the
Crown, but the graphic qualities of the image lead us to believe that the
hospital was not his most central concern. The relative quiet of the map on
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 243

the topic of transregional violence is not to be taken lightly. Even so, I am

reluctant to conclude that Muñoz’s map is immune to the events that swept
into Manila’s orbit and transformed the city.
At the very least, the disjunction between written accounts and the
visual features of the map reminds us of the multiple, and at times con-
flicted, purposes of cartography. The disjunction also underscores the
power of graphic forms even as (or especially because) they can circulate
apart from written text. Few today, or even in the past, have had reason
to revisit the hospital story or consider its relationship to the map. Rather,
the Muñoz map is valued, and consistently so, as a record of the layout
of colonial Manila, as one city among many in the Hispanic world. In no
small way, the story of the Muñoz map is the story of a document prepared
to make one case in the colonial past but which, ultimately, became per-
suasive in another register. And with this, I return to the queries posed at
the opening of this essay, about how a map might speak of civic health and
ambitions and whether such a map can broaden our perspectives onto the
study of colonial histories.
The documents that accompany the Muñoz map make it clear that
the restoration of Manila and the renewal of its strength after success-
fully escaping a foreign invasion were serious concerns. The map’s graphic
language and persuasiveness on these points, however, rely heavily upon
absence and allusion. Muñoz represents Manila as if in good shape, as if
the city suffered hardly at all from the anxieties and demolitions produced
by Koxinga’s threats. A destroyed local hospital may have been the puta-
tive inspiration for the map, but this hospital was just one building in the
recovering urban fabric of Manila. Yet it is recuperation that the Muñoz
map captures most explicitly. In lived experience, parts of Manila awaited
rebuilding—including institutions deeply dependent upon civic good-
will, local charity, and Crown generosity—but the map implies a city now
robust.45 It is of course possible to read the map as duplicitous. In closing,
I suggest that there are more interesting lenses to bring to the document.
This is because the Muñoz map also opens a rather partisan view onto what
today might be called Pacific history.
In a recent suite of essays on the state of research on Spain and Span-
ish America, Gauvin Alexander Bailey has argued that there is still much
to learn about intercultural negotiation, especially by stretching beyond
narratives of Native American and European encounter.46 The stretch he
envisions would set practices from colonial Latin America alongside those
of the Spanish Philippines, French Canada, and Portugal’s colonies in
Goa and Macao. For many who work on the early modern period, such
an expansive geography, and the shift in interpretive work it invites, holds
244 Dana Leibsohn

much appeal. For ethnohistorians who have long honed their skills in micro-
history, however, this invitation brings complications.
While hardly unfamiliar to historians, “scaling up”—so that meaning-
ful comparisons between local events and settings and those with regional,
imperial, or (to invoke the contemporary word of favor) global reaches can
be drawn—remains one of the most intractable of challenges. One way to
make such comparisons, and therefore enable the writing of broad colonial
(or even Spanish imperial) histories, would be to let details fall into shadow.
In some ways, this is a strategy enlisted by Muñoz and his map: the local
events it engages are subsumed by graphic habits and practices that stretch
across wide swathes of territory. It is a map, he seems to want his readers to
know, that belongs within the domain of early modern Hispanic cartogra-
phy. This point becomes ever more clear when the Muñoz map is set along-
side another from Spanish America, a map of Havana of 1691 (fig. 7). Even
though the Havana map follows the Muñoz map by a few years, the pair-
ing hints at a fact that historians of cartography know well: there existed
no uniform graphic language or homogenous sense of “scientific represen-
tation” that unified the territories Spain claimed. And yet there existed a
range of historical conditions that made the coexistence of mapping prac-
tices tolerable (if not actually viable) across these lands. The similarities in
these practices suggest that it makes sense, as it were, to align Havana and
its cartography with that of Manila. This alignment, then, is one mode of
“scaling up.”
In his book on Spanish power in the early modern period, Henry
Kamen notes that “in the imagination of Spaniards, and even more surely
in their maps, the Philippines featured as part of their ‘empire.’ Yet those
who lived in the islands knew better.”47 The comment is telling for more
than one reason: it calls attention to the power of maps, especially in the
forging of an imperial imagination; it also underscores how “empire” may
seem large, but it actually rests upon disparate bits and agendas, upon dis-
tinct lived experiences. If we were to read the Havana and Muñoz maps
closely (although not literally), we would surely put more weight on local
agendas, less on the ligaments that bind things together. While this may
not have been the way Muñoz wished his image to be received, it is only
by taking this tack that we can today understand the complex weighing
of information, the emphases and omissions, that created the Muñoz map
and, consequently, its view onto Manila.
There now exist many interpretive options for balancing the contin-
gency of local practices with global trends—each with distinct political and
cultural implications.48 Ultimately, though, the question of interpretive scale
in the writing of history may itself be an artifact of contemporary thinking.
Taking a cue from the Muñoz map, it would seem that events shaping the
Figure 7. Juan Siscara, “Plano de la ciudad de La Habana con la demarcación de
parroquias, 1691.” Color on paper. 312 x 430. Archivo General de Indias, Mapas
y Planos, Santo Domingo, 97 (top). Ignacio Muñóz, “Descripción geométrica de
la ciudad y circunvalación de Manila. . . . ,” 1671. Watercolor on paper. Archivo
General de Indias, Seville, Mapas y Planos, Filipinas, 10
246 Dana Leibsohn

fate of individual buildings and cities were integral to, not separate from,
the ideas and practices that organized transregional metropoles and their
colonies. In enlisting graphic language that transcends local boundaries,
the Muñoz map makes the case that the accretive detail of individual lived
experiences—the very local relationships that divided and bound commu-
nities together across, and in spite of, ethnic differences—is indeed the stuff
of world (and worldly) histories. At the same time, the Muñoz map begs
a difficult question, in part because it remains so quiet on so many topics.
Can any map depict colonial history in a way that is fair to both those who
have left little trace in the historical record and those whose names and
deeds are known well? Perhaps it is possible, but not alone, and perhaps
not explicitly. This is one way early modern cartography creates its sense of
the world. Nevertheless, it is important to ask about the possibilities, and
not only the limits, of maps. For how else can little-­known geographies—­
especially those with complex ethnic legacies and anxious histories—still
matter to history writing today?

Notes

An early version of this work was presented at the annual meeting of the Ameri-
can Society for Ethnohistory in October 2011, and I thank Alexander Hidalgo and
John F. López for inviting me to participate in their session. I also thank Elvira Parra
de Allende, who offered generous assistance with permissions in Mexico. In addi-
tion to the anonymous readers of Ethnohistory, I am grateful to Daniel Bridgman,
Brigitte Buettner, Barbara Kellum, Barbara E. Mundy, Meha Priyadarshini, Tatiana
Seijas, and Ajay Sinha—all of whom shared ideas and references. Any errors or
lapses in logic are mine.
1 Well before the arrival of Europeans, people living on the island of Luzon estab-
lished commercial and diplomatic exchanges across East and South Asia, includ-
ing communities in India, China, Vietnam, and Japan. Under Spanish rule (from
the late sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries), Manila actively participated
in inter-­Asian networks—some with long-­standing precedents, others newly
forged. Across this same period, connections between Manila and Mexico
City were more direct than between Manila and Madrid. Through the annual
galleon trade the Philippines were in many ways “governed through Mexico.”
D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford,
UK, 2012), 24. Nevertheless, perceptions of Manila and the Philippines vis-­
à-­vis New Spain and the broader Spanish “empire” varied across the colonial
period, as they do in modern scholarship. See the discussion below, but also
Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity
through the Mid-­Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002):
391–427; Irving, Colonial Counterpoint; Javier Morillo-­Alicea, “Uncharted
Land­scapes of ‘Latin America’: The Philippines in the Spanish Imperial Archi-
pelago,” in Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, ed.
Christopher Schmidt-­ Nowara and John Nieto-­ Phillips (Albuquerque, NM,
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 247

2005), 25–53; and Ricardo Padrón, “Allegory and Empire,” in Mapping Latin
America: A Cartographic Reader, ed. Jordana Dym and Karl Offen (Chicago,
2011), 84–87.
2 Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2008), 6. Port cities, as urban spaces, have a long literature. For
instance, Rhoads Murphey characterizes them as a distinctive mode of civic
space and finds ports to be cosmopolitan and hybrid, although not necessarily
sophisticated, spaces. Rhoads Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,”
in Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Cen-
turies, ed. Frank Broeze (Honolulu, 1989), 223–45. On parallels among ports in
Spanish America as well as key distinctions, see the summary offered in Patrick
O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500–1900 (Aldershot, UK, 2008).
3 Javier Galván Guijo, “La fundación de Manila y su trazado urbanístico,” in
España y el Pacífico: Legazpi, ed. Leoncio Cabrero, 2 vols. (Madrid, 2004), 2:
155. The prose document that accompanies the map is also dated 1671, although
it explains events of the 1660s. For the document, see Archivo General de Indias
(hereafter AGI), Seville, Filipinas, 86, n. 30; the map is today housed sepa-
rately in AGI, Mapas y Planos, Filipinas, vol. 10. Others who have discussed
this document include Concha Aguilera and Ignacio González Tascón, whose
work emphasizes the map’s evocation of navigational routes and limited oppor-
tunities for disembarkation in Manila. Concha Aguilera and Ignacio González
Tascón, “Las islas Filipinas,” in Puertos y fortificaciones en América y Filipinas
(Madrid, 1985), 213–24.
4 José Antonio Cervera, “Misioneros en Filipinas y su relación con la ciencia en
China: Fray Juan Cobo y su libro Shi Lu,” Llull 20, no. 39 (1997): 491–506.
Cervera, in summarizing the career of Muñoz (b. 1612, Valladolid; d. 1685,
Madrid), notes that he was a mathematician, a philosopher, an engineer, and
an astronomer; after having traveled along the coasts of several Asian countries,
Muñoz worked in Manila, helping the city arrange protection from attack by
Koxinga (see discussion below). He later held a chair in mathematics at the Real
y Pontificia Universidad de México and spent his last years in Spain.
5 The map measures 35 by 27 centimeters. Pedro Torres Lanzas, Relación descrip-
tiva de los mapas, planos, etc. de Filipinas existentes en el Archivo General de Indias
(Madrid, 1897), 8. In turning first to the physical qualities of the map, I follow
the lead of several recent studies that carefully analyze the graphic forms of
specific maps from the early modern Hispanic world. See, e.g., Elizabeth Hill
Boone, “This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and the Presentation
of Mexico to Europe,” Word and Image 27, no. 1 (2011): 31–46; and the essays
in Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America.
6 Titles and quotations from seventeenth-­century documents, here and through-
out this essay, present original spellings, use of accents, and punctuation. On
the map, the legend continues: “Por el P. Maestro F. Ignacio Muñoz del Ord. de
Pred. Año 1671.” In the accompanying documents, however, the request for the
map, made by Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara, governor of the Philippines,
seems to date from 1662. AGI, Filipinas, 86, 30, im. 7.
7 See, e.g., Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793,
with the collaboration of Fernando Marías (New Haven, CT, 2000).
8 These conventions can be found on a wide range of maps of Cartagena, Havana,
Lima, and Santo Domingo. See Puertos y fortificaciones en América y Filipinas.
248 Dana Leibsohn

On sixteenth-­century precedents, see the general discussion of Spanish maps of

fortified cities created under Felipe II in Alicia Muñoz Cámara, Fortificación y
ciudad en los reinos de Felipe II (Madrid, 1998), 198–207.
9 Since hospitals were important civic works in Spain and Spanish America, it
is not surprising to see them identified on a map of this period. Uncommon,
though, is a map legend that signals a hospital’s importance by using a distinc-
tive color of ink.
10 “Porque nunca podria comprehender el sitio, que tenia esta fabrica, quien no
estuviese enterado en la desposicion de la dicha ciudad, y de su circunvalación:
y asi me parecio conveniente poner aqui su planta, medida y delineada por mi
Geometricamente en mayor figura para su Magested.” AGI, Filipinas, vol. 86,
30, im. 7.
11 In the early eighteenth century, the word also had military connotations. See
Real Academia Española (Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, 1729), buscon.rae.es
/ntlle/SrvltGUIMenuNtlle?cmd=Lema&sec=1.0.0.0.0, 359.
12 Moving from east to west and north to south through the city, he also names
each area and its affiliated monastic order (Franciscan, Dominican, Augus-
tinian, etc.). See AGI, Filipinas, vol. 86, 30.
13 See, e.g., Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic; Rodolfo Segovia Salas, The Fortifi-
cations of Cartagena de Indias: Strategy and History (Bogotá, 1982); and Luis
Enrique Sifuentes de la Cruz, Las muralles de Lima en el proceso histórico del Perú
(Lima, 2004).
14 Even so, Muñoz seems to have some doubts about the map’s legibility in this
regard since he explains that the white spaces represent city streets.
15 Inmaculada Alva Rodríguez, Vida municipal en Manila, siglos XVI–XVII (Cór-
doba, 1997). In Alva Rodríguez’s words, Manila closed out the seventeenth cen-
tury with “una traza urbana desmejorada y un predominio de construcciones
de Madera” (“an eroded urban plan and a predominance of structures built of
wood”) (133).
16 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World: Describing Particularly the
Isthmus of America, Several Coasts and Islands in the West Indies, The Isles of
Cape . . . 2nd ed. (London, 1697), 387.
17 City walls maintained, and thwarted, ethnic separations in many early modern
settings. In Lima, for instance, one indigenous section of town, Santiago del
Cercado, was divided by the construction of city walls such that one part was
enclosed within, one part kept outside. Sifuentes de la Cruz, Las muralles de
Lima, 107. For Havana, see Guadalupe García, “Beyond the Walled City: Urban
Expansion in and around Havana, 1828–1909,” PhD diss., University of North
Carolina, 2006. For exemplary geographies closer to Manila, see Leonard
Blussé, “Batavia, 1619–1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (1981): 159–78; Heather Sutherland,
“Eastern Emporium and Company Town: Trade and Society in Eighteenth-­
Century Makassar,” in Broeze, Brides of the Sea, 96–128.
18 On the Parian, see Juan Gil, Los chinos en Manila: Siglos XVI y XVII (Lisbon,
2011), 142–94; Galván Guijo, “La fundación de Manila y su trazado urbanís-
tico”; and Alberto Santamaria, “The Chinese Parian (El Parian de los Sanglays),”
in The Chinese in the Philippines, ed. Alonso Felix Jr. (Manila, 1966), 1: 67–118.
19 The visual language of the map suggests that the measurement of distance in
Intramuros was not only more viable but also more important to register.
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 249

20 Gil, Los chinos.

21 García, “Beyond the Walled City.” On the urban fabric of Manila during the
seventeenth century, see Alva Rodríguez, Vida municipal; Robert Reed, Colonial
Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berke-
ley, CA, 1978); and Santamaria, “Chinese Parian.” Even Antonio de Morga, in
his early seventeenth-­century description of the city, notes that some Spaniards
lived outside of Intramuros. Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas
(Mexico City, 1609).
22 Tatiana Seijas notes that slaves made up perhaps a third of the Intramuros popu-
lation at certain points in the seventeenth century. Tatiana Seijas, “The Portu-
guese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 21.
23 For example, legislation dating from 1608 forbade citizens of Manila (Intra-
muros) to house Chinese people (Sangleyes) overnight. Recopilación de leyes de
los Reynos de las Indias, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1973), 273v.
24 See, e.g., “State of Jesuit Missions, 1655,” in The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898,
ed. Emma Blair and James Robertson (Manila, 2000), CD-­Rom, vol. 36, 54.
25 The text, written by Bartolomé de Letona and dated to 1622, is cited in Irving,
Colonial Counterpoint, 32. It could be interesting to compare this kind of writ-
ing to census documents, although the elasticity and slippage in definitions and
designations of ethnic identity in early modern censuses means that their “data”
can sometimes beg as many questions as they answer.
26 For the range of dates, I thank Gustavo Curiel (personal communication, June
2012). Very little has been published on the chest and its painting, although see,
e.g., Maria Lourdes Díaz-­Trechuelo, “Evolución urbana de Manila,” in Cuader-
nos del centro cultural (Manila), no. 5 (1978): 83–96.
27 I have not seen the original, so I cannot say with certainty that such figures are
wholly absent. If they are absent, the painting parallels the point made by Pas-
cale Girard, stressing the marginality of Africans in histories and representa-
tions of the early modern Philippines. Pascale Girard, “Les Africains aux Phil-
ippines aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in Negros, mulatos, zambaigos: Derroteros
africanos en los mundos ibéricos, ed. Berta Ares Queija and Alessandro Stella
(Seville, 2000), 67–74.
28 The “Topographia de la ciudad de Manila” was dedicated to Philip V, although
it fell into British hands before the end of the eighteenth century, and today
is held in the British Library in London (Maps.K.Top.116.40). The cartouche
reads: “Topographia de la ciudad de Manila, Capital de las Yslas de las Phi-
lipinas, Fundada en la de Luzon Nuevo Reyno de Castilla. Dedicada al Rey y
Nuestro Señor D. Felipe V (que Dios gu.de). Por el Mariscal de Campo D. Fer-
nando Valdes Tamon su Governador y Capitan Genl. de dhas Yslas, y Presidente
dha R.l Audiencia y Chanc.ria de ellas. Delineada de orden de su Mag.d por
D. Antonio Fernandez de Roxas: y esculpida por Fr. Hipolito Ximenez dl Orden
dla Hspit.l dl Glor.o San Juan al Dios.”
29 Admittedly, the mood of daily life conveyed by the “Topographia de la ciudad
de Manila” is inexplicit. The image nevertheless invites one to imagine a city
enlivened by the noise and scent of animals and the visual experiences of servants
holding parasols—features of the city the Muñoz map completely obscures. For
an interesting study of affective geography that considers mapping through both
literal and broad perspectives, see Yael Navaro-­Yashin, The Make-­Believe Space:
Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC, 2012).
250 Dana Leibsohn

30 The literature on the contingency of maps and performative reading has grown
in recent years. In a particularly strong articulation, Leila Harris and Helen
Hazen argue that maps are processual (never truly formed things) and should be
understood as practices not products. Leila Harris and Helen Hazen, “Rethink-
ing Maps from a More-­than-­Human Perspective: Nature-­Society, Mapping,
and Conservation Territories,” in Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Carto-
graphic Theory, ed. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (London,
2009), 50–67.
31 This point brings to mind the (now) large body of scholarship on the culturally
and politically evocative power of silence and exclusion in the historical record.
While J. B. Harley is often cited on cartography, two works I have found per-
sistently compelling on silences in colonial history are Greg Dening, Islands and
Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land; Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu, 1980);
and Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of His-
tory (Boston, 1995).
32 AGI, Filipinas, vol. 86, 30. Serret’s letter is also transcribed in Cayetano Sánchez
Fuertes, OFM, “El hospital Franciscano de los naturales de Filipinas, XVI–
XVII,” Archivum franciscanum historicum 104, nos. 1–2 (2011): 138.
33 My discussion of the hospital and its history draws largely from Francisco
Guerra, El hospital en Hispanoamérica y Filipinas, 1492–1898 (Madrid, 1994);
Linda A. Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines
(Honolulu, 2009); Sánchez Fuertes, “El hospital Franciscano”; and documents
in Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, vol. 11.
34 In contrast, the Dominicans ministered to Chinese residents of the Parian at the
Hospital de San Pedro Mártir (which was eventually moved to Binondo). On
the other hospitals in Manila, see esp. Guerra, El hospital en Hispanoamérica y
Filipinas.
35 Sánchez Fuertes, “El hospital Franciscano,” 131.
36 On galleons making the transpacific crossing, the amount of legal merchandise
(measured in toneladas [tons]) was specified, although “overpacking,” smug-
gling, and other circumventions that would increase profits by boosting sales in
Mexico were rampant. Records indicate that the hospital was allowed four tone-
ladas; given the cargo space available on ships in the late seventeenth century,
this represents a relatively small allotment. On galleon size and cargo space, a
useful source remains William Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York, 1959).
37 In keeping with many institutions dedicated to the care of lepers, the hospi-
tal was renamed Hospital de San Lázaro after the Japanese patients took up
residence.
38 The hospital was one of several structures taken down at this time; others
included the hospital for Chinese residents of the city and the convento and
church of Dilao. See discussion below.
39 Serret wrote in June 1670: “La causa fue que el bárbaro chino pretendió extin-
guir la christiandad de estas Islas Philipinas” (“This was because the Chinese
barbarian [Koxinga] sought to extinguish Christianity in these Philippine
Islands”). AGI, Filipinas, vol. 86, 30.
40 The basic events involving Manila are well published. See, e.g., Manel Ollé,
“Comunidades mercantiles en conflicito en los estrechos de Taiwan (1624–
1684),” Revista de historia económica 23, no. S23 (2005): S275–S297. For a recent
account of the events in Taiwan, see Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two
African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World
Manila, Ethnicity, and Colonial Cartography 251

History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91. My summary relies especially on “Events in

Manila, 1662–1663,” in Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, vol. 36, 218–60;
and Gil, Los chinos, 514–27. Gil’s account draws more heavily on Dominican
documents.
41 One such route began at the cathedral, passed by the Recogimiento de la Mise-
ricordia, the convento of San Agustín, and the Colegio de la Compañía de Jesús,
then turned toward the conventos of San Francisco and Santo Domingo, and
walked in a procession past the Colegio de Santo Tomás before returning to the
cathedral. Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, vol. 36, 246–47.
42 See ibid., vol. 36, 218–26; and Gil, Los chinos, 518–27.
43 Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, vol. 36, 249.
44 He also drew up designs for defensive structures for Manila. See, e.g., AGI, Fili-
pinas, vol. 86, 30; and Gil, Los chinos, 522n293.
45 It is tempting here to invoke Marcia Kupfer’s phrase “topography of heal-
ing.” Marcia Kupfer, “Symbolic Cartography in the Medieval Parish: From
Spatialized Body to Painted Church at Saint-­Aignan-­sur-­Cher,” Speculum 75,
no. 3 (2000): 615–67. Kupfer focuses on a medieval, western European parish,
but her interests in the connotations of hospitals, their siting, and the Chris-
tian charity they both required and evinced open useful perspectives onto civic
health and its evocation through visual imagery. To follow her thinking, one
might say that the Muñoz map seeks to evince a topography healed, rather than
one still healing.
46 See, e.g., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Carla Rahn Phillips, and Lisa Voigt, “Spain
and Spanish America in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Current Trends in
Scholarship,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2009): 1–60.
47 Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New
York, 2003), 204. He continues by noting that Manila “developed into a show-
case of the best and the worst that Western colonialism could offer to other
peoples” (214). This point, which situates Manila within a larger discourse on
colonialism, offers a partial answer to the question of whether Manila “belongs”
within a discussion of early modern colonial practices in Spanish America.
48 This topic is broad (and growing), and so I single out just a few examples,
marked by their distinctions. Tonio Andrade (“Chinese Farmer,” 574) has advo-
cated adopting “microhistorical and biographical approaches to help us popu-
late our models and theories with real people, to write what one might call global
microhistory.” An increasingly important model is that of the Atlantic world;
its key interpretive possibilities have been delineated by David Armitage and
Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke,
UK, 2002). For a sense of this model’s possibilities that is more closely tied to
Spanish America, see, e.g., Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expedi-
tions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, 2012). Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe offers perhaps one of the most often-­
cited models for granting power to detailed, subaltern histories that took form
within, if not also because of, broad narrative arcs; Jean-­Frédéric Schaub, how-
ever, makes a case for asymmetries in the writing of history. See Dipesh Chakra-
barty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ, 2000); and Jean-­Frédéric Schaub, “Notes on Some Discontents
in the Historical Narrative,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for
the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Maxine Berg (London, 2013), 48–65.