It is widely known that after crossing the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus believed he had landed in or near Cathay. What is less familiar to us is the idea that, for hundreds of years after the Columbian voyages, Europeans believed that Asia and America occupied the same continent. In fact, on a regular basis, European cartographers and cosmographers understood the lands that are today the American Southwest and New Mexico to be near, or even overlapping with, China and India. The accounts of early explorers of the American southwest in particular, including those of Coronado and Oñate, repeatedly express the idea that India or China lay within easy reach of the lands of New Mexico, surely just beyond the next valley or mountain ridge. This talk explores a variety of maps, images and historical texts to demonstrate how and why it was logical for early modern Europeans to believe that the part of the world that today we call America, including New Mexico, was Asian. Perhaps most importantly, it considers how ideas about the lands of New Mexico were at the heart of some of the earliest European conceptions of globalization.