Mexican settlement in the Philippines

History

Main article: History of Mexico, History of the Philippines, Viceroyalty of New Spain

Mexican immigration to the Philippines mainly occurred during the Hispanic period. Between 1565-1821, the Philippines were in fact administered from the Viceroyalty of New Spain's capital, Mexico City. During this period trans-Pacific trade brought many Mexicans and Spaniards to the Philippines as sailors, crew, prisoners, slaves, adventurers and soldiers in the Manila-Acapulco Galleons which was the main form of communication between the two Spanish territories. Similarly the route brought various different Filipinos, such as native Filipinos, Spanish Filipinos (Philippine-born Insulares), Chinese Filipinos (See Chinese immigration to Mexico), and other Asian groups to Mexico.

According to Stephanie Mawson in her M.Phil thesis entitled Between Loyalty and Disobedience: The Limits of Spanish Domination in the Seventeenth Century Pacific, in the 1600s there were thousands of Latin American settlers sent per year to the Philippines by the Spaniards and around that time frame the Spaniards had cumulatively sent 15,600 settlers from Peru and Mexico while there were only 600 Spaniards from Spain, that supplemented a Philippine population of only 667,612 people. Due to the initial low population count, people of Latin American and Hispanic descent quickly spread across the territory.{{cite web | access-date = August 18, 2020

The book Intercolonial Intimacies Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898–1964 by Paula C. Park cites "Forzados y reclutas: los criollos novohispanos en Asia (1756-1808)", gave a higher number of later Mexican soldier-immigrants to the Philippines, pegging the number at 35,000 immigrants in the 1700s, in a Philippine population which was only around 1.5 Million, thus forming 2.33% of the population. Corroborating these Spanish era estimates, an anthropological study published in the Journal of Human Biology and researched by Matthew Go, using physical anthropology, concluded that 12.7% of Filipinos can be classified as Hispanic (Latin American mestizos or Malay-Spanish mestizos), 7.3% as Indigenous American, African at 4.5% and European at 2.7%. Thus, as much as 20% of those sampled bodies, which were representative of the Philippines, translating to about 20 million Filipinos, can be physically classified as Latin American in appearance.An inter-university study published in the Journal of Forensic Anthropology concluded that the bodies curated by the University of the Philippines, representing the country, showed the percentage of the population that is phenotypically classified as Hispanic is 12.7%, while that of Indigenous American classification is 7.3%. 20% of the sample representative of the Philippines are therefore Latino in physical appearance.{{cite journal | access-date = September 13, 2020 | doi-access = free

In contrast, a different anthropology study using Morphoscopic ancestry estimates in Filipino crania using multivariate probit regression models by J. T. Hefner, published on year 2020, while analyzing Historic and Modern samples of skeletons in the Philippines, paint a different picture, in that, when the reference group for "Asian" was Thailand (Southeast Asians) rather than Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese; and the reference group for "Hispanic" were Colombians (South Americans) rather than Mexicans, the combined historical and modern sample results for Filipinos, yielded the following ratios: Asian at 48.6%, African at 32.9%, and only a small portion classifying as either European at 12.9%, and finally for Hispanic at 5.7%.

Nevertheless, during the Mexican War of Independence Spain feared that the large Mexican population in the Philippines would incite the Filipinos to rebel, thus Spaniards direct from Spain were imported and the Latin American class in the Philippines were displaced and were forced into a lower rank of the caste system.

During the Spanish period, the islands formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, along with other areas of the Pacific Ocean such as the Marianas and the Caroline Islands and during a short period in northern Taiwan. The Spaniards built trade routes from Mexico to the Philippines, primarily from their starting points of Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, with their final destination being Manila, the current capital of the Philippines. The Spanish ships on these routes were known as the Manila galleons.

Mexican (or rather, New Spaniard) immigrants to the Philippines belonged to different ethnic groups such as indigenous people, mestizos and Creoles who mainly mixed with the local population, which increased the number of descendants with Spanish surnames. The construction of the military fort of Zamboanga used the help of these Mexican immigrants who had already settled in the islands. The Mexican legacy in the Philippines, consisting of marriage between the Spanish and the indigenous culture of origin (Maya and Nahuatl), has been marked in these islands. Many words that originated from Nahuatl, a language spoken by the descendants of the indigenous Mexican Aztecs and Tlaxcalans, have influenced some local languages of the Philippines.

References

References

1. "Mexicanos residentes en FILIPINAS 2020".
2. "Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765-1811".
3. "In 1637 the military force maintained in the islands consisted of one thousand seven hundred and two Spaniards and one hundred and forty Indians." ~''Memorial de D. Juan Grau y Monfalcon, Procurador General de las Islas Filipinas, Docs. Inéditos del Archivo de Indias, vi, p. 425.'' "In 1787 ''the garrison at Manila consisted of one regiment of Mexicans comprising one thousand three hundred men, two artillery companies of eighty men each, three cavalry companies of fifty men each.''" ''La Pérouse, ii, p. 368.''
4. Stephanie Mawson, ‘Between Loyalty and Disobedience: The Limits of Spanish Domination in the Seventeenth Century Pacific’ (Univ. of Sydney M.Phil. thesis, 2014), appendix 3.
5. [http://www.uco.es/aaf/garcia-abasolo/files/63df3.pdf Spanish Settlers in the Philippines (1571–1599) By Antonio Garcia-Abasalo]
6. ''The Unlucky Country: The Republic of the Philippines in the 21st Century'' By Duncan Alexander McKenzie (page xii)
7. "When Tlaxcalan Natives Went to War in the Philippines".
8. [https://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/431623 "Orden de enviar hombres a Filipinas desde México" (Consejo de Indias España)](English Translation from Spanish original: "Royal Decree to the Count of Coruña, Viceroy of New Spain, informing him that, according to information from Captain Gabriel de Rivera who came from the Philippines, on a journey made by Governor Gonzalo Ronquillo to the Cagayan River some Spaniards were lost, and that to make up for this lack and populate these islands it was necessary to take up to two hundred men to them. The viceroy is ordered to attend to this request and send them from New Spain, in addition to another two hundred that were entrusted to him from Lisbon."
9. [https://academic.oup.com/past/article/232/1/87/1752419 Convicts or Conquistadores? Spanish Soldiers in the Seventeenth-Century Pacific By Stephanie J. Mawson] AGI, México, leg. 25, núm. 62; AGI, Filipinas, leg. 8, ramo 3, núm. 50; leg. 10, ramo 1, núm. 6; leg. 22, ramo 1, núm. 1, fos. 408 r –428 v; núm. 21; leg. 32, núm. 30; leg. 285, núm. 1, fos. 30 r –41 v .
10. ''Intercolonial Intimacies Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898–1964'' by Paula C. Park page 100
11. [https://books.google.com/books?id=67xO2hUwzasC&dq=Friar+Manuel+Buzeta+1,502,574&pg=PR12 "The Unlucky Country The Republic of the Philippines in the 21st Century" By Duncan Alexander McKenzie (2012)(page xii)]
12. Garcia, María Fernanda. (1998). "Forzados y reclutas: los criollos novohispanos en Asia (1756-1808)". Bolotin Archivo General de la Nación.
13. Jagor, Fëdor, et al. (1870). [http://www.authorama.com/former-philippines-b-8.html ''The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes'']
14. Go, Matthew C.. (14 January 2020). "Morphoscopic ancestry estimates in Filipino crania using multivariate probit regression models". [[American Journal of Biological Anthropology]].
15. Legarda, Benito J.. (7 December 2024). "The economic background of Rizal's time". The Philippine Review of Economics.
16. Schurz, William Lytle. The Manila Galleon, 1939. P 193.
17. [http://www.philippinestudies.net/ojs/index.php/ps/article/view/257/259 Hispanic Words of Indoamerican Origin in the Philippines] Page 136-137