1252 © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Sebestian Kroupa Reading beneath the Skin Indigenous Tattooing in the Early Spanish Philippines, ca. 1520–1720 During their attempt to establish a Spanish foothold in the Philippines in 1565, the expedition led by Miguel de Legazpi learned the surprising news that a Christian named Juanes had been living with the locals for more than twenty years. Juanes turned out to be a native of Mexico who had been brought to the Philippines as a cabin boy in 1543 on the voyage of Ruy López de Villalobos. Juanes had been captured by the locals and joined their community, later marrying a daughter of the local chief Subuco. The strongest testimony to Juanes’s transformation came from his own body, now proudly adorned with innumerable tattoos. Spanish expeditioners’ pleas for him to rejoin them left Juanes cold. His skin markings meant that he had sworn allegiance to a new leader—they tied him to his adopted community and separated him from his former countrymen. After long negotiations with the Spanish, Subuco reluctantly accepted the pile of valuables that the Spanish ofered as ransom for his son-in-law. The power wielded by Subuco over Juanes’s fate was inscribed in the chief’s full-body tattoos, which placed him above his subjects in the social hierarchy. 1 Upon arriving in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, the Spanish entered a world of marked skin. 2 Filipino communities had long been engaged in a diversity of skin-marking practices, from tattooing and cauterization to various kinds of body piercing, including ear adornments and penis pins. The practice of tattooing was 1 “Relacion mui circunstanciada de lo ocurrido en el real y campo de la Isla de Zubu de las Islas Philipinas desde 1 Junio de 1565 … hasta el mes de Julio de 1567,” in Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de ultramar, ed. Real Academia de la Historia, pt. 1 (Madrid, 1865), 3:91–225, here 171–78. 2 For Spanish colonization of the Philippines, see William L. Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York, 1959); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (London, 1988); Linda A. Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines (Honolulu, 2009); and Stephanie J. Mawson, “Convicts or Conquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacifc,” Past and Present 232, no. 1 (2016): 87–125. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/127/3/1252/6850914 by University of Cambridge user on 09 March 2023