I am a historian of Latin America specializing in the connections between Mexico and the Philippines during the Manila galleon period (1571-1815). My research unfurls the global scope of the early modern Spanish empire by tracing the movement of people and ideas across the Pacific Ocean and how that movement transformed societies across the early modern Pacific World.

I am the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024), which is the first monograph to examine the full scope of free and enslaved Asian mobility to and through the Americas via the Manila galleons. It is the recipient of the 2024 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, the 2025 Howard F. Cline Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the 2025 Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions Book Prize. I am also the co-creator of The Historian's Table podcast, the first season of which features my motivation for writing the book.

I am currently working on three other book-length projects. The first, "Manila and Acapulco: A Tale of Two Cities in the Early Modern Black Pacific," follows the colonial projection of Blackness onto Pacific Ocean spaces and peoples. These diverse Black populations were foundational to the infrastructure of transpacific trade, achieved freedom for themselves and their descendants on both sides of the Pacific, and challenged and redefined colonial categories of Blackness as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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

The third project is a published edition of my grandmother's memoir manuscript that traces the history of our family from enslavement in Cuba during the nineteenth century, to its intersection with the Chinese diaspora in Cuba, and finally to migration to the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1980s.

I am also a published and exhibiting photographer, as well as a game designer. My board game, Obraje, was a Zenobia Award finalist and will be published by the Scholarship and Lore: Games for Learning Series of Central Michigan University Press. It simulates the perils of social mobility as a colonial subject in seventeenth-century Mexico.

I welcome applications from prospective graduate students interested in studying colonial Latin America, global Iberian empire, race-making, and early modern enslavement.

Articles and Book Chapters:

"The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila," in The Spanish Pacific 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, vol. 2, Christina H. Lee and Ricard Padrón, eds., (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

"Galleon Anxiety: How Afro-Mexican Women Shaped Colonial Spirituality in Acapulco," The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 78:3 (2021).

"Diasporic Convergences: Tracing Knowledge Production and Transmission among Enslaved Chinos in New Spain, Ethnohistory 68:2 (2021).

"Rethinking the Battle of Otumba: Entangled Narrations and the Digitization of Colonial Violence," Rethinking History 23:3 (2019).

"The Armed Chino: Licensing Fear in New Spain," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 20:1 (2019).

Essays:

"Latin America's Colonial Period Was Far Less Catholic Than It Might Seem – Despite the Inquisition's Attempts to Police Religion," The Conversation, 2024.

"A Forgotten Asian History of Oregon in No-No Boy's '1603,'" Smithsonian Folklife, 2024.

"From South Asia to Mexico, from Slave to Spiritual Icon, This Woman's Life is a Snapshot of Spain's Colonization – and the Pacific​ Slave Trade History Books Often Leave Out," The Conversation, 2024.

"Asians in Early America," Aeon, 2023.

"Racing Games: Choice and History in Videogames," Perspectives on History, 2022.

"Anti-Asian Violence and Sexual Deviance, from Manila 1603 to Atlanta 2021: An Historical Overview," A-id: Agenda for International Development, 2021.

"A Retrospective on 500 Years Since the Fall of Tenochtitlan," Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, 2021.