The Idea of a Spanish Pacific in History and the Historical Imagination

Abstract

This article introduces recent works by Ricardo Padrón, Stephanie Joy Mawson, and Paula Park as part of a larger conversation about the assumptions and certitudes of a “Spanish Pacific”, which follows the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire overseas. Each text, in its own way, blurs the boundaries of these historical markers; by defamiliarising established notions of the Pacific in the geopolitical imaginary, the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines, and succeeding efforts of the Philippines to cultivate a national cultural identity. While revising the history of Spain in the Pacific, these texts also invite us to grapple with the reorientation of “worldings”, ways of imagining the world, which have historically determined the projects of national and hemispheric identities in the Pacific.