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Stephanie Mawson, Mark Dizon. Reciprocal Mobilities: Indigeneity and Imperialism in an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Borderland., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 4, December 2024, Pages 1780–1781, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae379
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The Philippines has increasingly been recognized as a borderland region of the Spanish Empire, where colonization was partial and incomplete. In Reciprocal Mobilities: Indigeneity and Imperialism in an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Borderland, Mark Dizon introduces us to a wealth of new insights on the progress of colonization in the frontier zone of “Ituy and Paniqui” in Northern Luzon. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Dizon’s work brings the Philippines into recent historiographies that emphasize colonial borderlands as sites of negotiation, confrontation, and exchange.
The major theme of the book is neatly encapsulated by the book’s title, Reciprocal Mobilities. Movement in Philippines history is usually associated with silk and silver, with galleons and cosmopolitan encounters. By contrast, Dizon emphasizes “nondescript everyday mobilities like visits, raids, trading, and flight” (5). Four major vectors of mobility are explored within each of the chapters, neatly summarized as missions, forts, roads, and disease. The first chapter, on mutual visits, highlights that the history of this borderland was defined by the reciprocal movement of both sides. Where missionaries moved into the mountains to establish evangelizing missions, Indigenous communities sent delegations to Manila to negotiate alliances and peace treaties. Missionaries were able to make use of the relationships of trust that they built through these mutual visits alongside their knowledge of local kinship to facilitate the establishment of missions and the conversion of communities.
