In 1615, a Dutch fleet under the command of Joris van Spilbergen attacked the Mexican port of Acapulco. The port was the eastern terminus of the Manila galleons, the ships that linked Asia and the Americas during the early modern period. In the face of foreign incursion, Spanish officials in Mexico proposed to secure transpacific trade by constructing the Fort of San Diego to protect Acapulco. To build and later repair the fort, they mobilized thousands of Indigenous men through the repartimiento (rotational forced labour system) from what is now the Mexican state of Guerrero. Using the port’s accounting records, this article argues that the novelty of transpacific empire profoundly affected the social and economic lives of Mexico’s coastal and hinterland Indigenous peoples. However, the global histories of the Manila galleons and of early modern Asia–Latin American connections have overlooked the relationship between Spanish Pacific expansion and Indigenous labour in the Americas. Placing the fort’s Indigenous builders at the centre reveals not only the violent outcomes of imperial anxiety, but also how Indigenous people adapted to the advent of transpacific empire.
