Diego Javier Luis, PhD

Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studies the colonial histories of Latin America and the Pacific World, race-making, and Afro-Asian diasporic convergences.

 

His first book, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, is out with Harvard University Press. 

 

The First Asians in the Americas is "the definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas" (from the Harvard site).

Luis is also working on three other book-length projects. The first, Manila and Acapulco: A Tale of Two Cities in the Early Modern Black Pacific, traces the development of colonial categories of Blackness in the Pacific as broad referents to Africans and Afro-descendants, South Asians, and Pacific Islanders. In particular, it locates the two nodes of transpacific galleon trade, Manila and Acapulco, as sites with large, socially mobile Black populations deeply integrated with Indigenous communities in their respective locales.

 

The second is a history of early modern Spanish fencing called "la verdadera destreza" (the true skill). His research explores how ideas about fencing, which was then considered a science, informed colonial ethnography across the global Spanish empire and became an important form of social mobility and colonial contestation for non-Spanish subjects. As a practitioner of early modern fencing, this project blends experiential methodologies and self-writing with archival research.

 

The third book-length project is a published edition of his grandmother's memoir manuscript that traces the history of his family from enslavement in Cuba during the nineteenth century to migration to the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1980s.

​

Luis conducts archival research in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, and the U.S.