The Manila Galleon and the Asian ancestry of Mexico

The Manila Galleon and the Asian ancestry of Mexico
Jorge Mojarro June 14, 2022 https://www.manilatimes.net/2022/06/14/opinion/columns/the-manila-galleo...

"THE impact of the Manila Galleon in the Philippines is overrated. What influence could a yearly boat [could possibly have] in the Philippines?" a Filipino friend told me a few years ago. The Manila Galleon traded all kinds of products; many of which are common in Filipino life until today. Tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, mani (peanuts), avocado or papayas arrived in the Philippines via the Manila Galleon, changing the gastronomic landscape of the archipelago. One of those products was chili: basically, there was no spicy food in Asia, not even the kimchi in Korea — or not, at least, in the way it is commonly eaten today — until the arrival of chili from Mexico. All the Asian species of chili are modern adaptations of the original Mexican chili. Curiously, chili was not well accepted in the Philippines as in other Asian territories with the notable exception of Bicol, where many dishes have a slightly hot taste. Chicken tinola (ginger stew), in its Ilocano version, also carries some chili.

People commonly tend to identify the Galleon Trade with silver, which was the most valuable product. But it also carried many other products such as ivory, pearls, textiles, etc. One of those products was slaves. The issue has been very well studied by professor Tatiana Seijas in his book Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Now, a genetical research study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society just two months ago shows that Mexicans from the state of Guerrero, where the Acapulco port is, carry a comparatively high percentage of genes from Asia although it can be found also in other neighboring states of Mexico. The title of the article is "The genetic legacy of the Manila Galleon Trade in Mexico," and it was carried out by seven researchers working in Mexican and US universities.

This finding is aligned with the fact proved by several historians: the Galleon Trade did bring thousands of slaves, mainly from Sumatra and Mindanao. The overwhelming majority of them were Muslims caught in a "just war," as it was said then. Those slaves were commonly called "chinos" despite the fact that they were not Chinese.

Their research concluded finding some Filipino ancestry together with ancestry related to Sumatra in modern Indonesia, then under Muslim Malay rule. Although the Spanish Pacific trade occurred between Manila and Acapulco, this heterogeneity of Asian ancestry in Acapulco can be explained by the multi-ethnicity of Manila as there was an active slave trade across colonial Southeast Asia involving the Portuguese colony of Malacca, the Spanish, and even the Filipino elites that targeted the Muslim-ruled southern islands via the colonial-era concept of 'just war'. [...] During the Spanish–Moro conflict, sources suggest that soldiers enslaved more than 4,000 Muslims between 1599 and 1604 alone. These Muslim Filipinos, named Moros by the Spanish, inhabited the southern Philippines. The genetic affinity of one individual from Guerrero with Mindanao (the southernmost major island in the Philippines) suggests an ancestry perhaps originating in this context. Most of these captives were sold in the Manila slave market."

As much as the Japanese Catholic population escaping from persecution who settled in Paco, mingled with the local population and eventually vanished as a community, the Southeast Asian slaves followed a similar fate, despite the high number of arrivals in Acapulco.

The cultural imprint of the Philippines in Mexico can also be seen in the tuba (coco wine), which has been documented to have been made in Colima since 1610. Coco liquor, or lambanog, is also produced in the western coast of Mexico, although it is simply called "aguardiente" (meaning distilled drink with a high gradation of alcohol). Today tuba is more popular in Colima than it is today in Bohol or Aklan, as Mexican historian Paulina Machuca has documented. This might be because drinking tuba is seen today as typical for low- status people in the Philippines. In Colima, as an example of its popularity, a football team is even called "Los Tuberos."

Another Philippine influence is in the vocabulary: "palais," a term used in the state of Guerrero, comes from Tagalog "palay." "Parian," the district where the sangleyes used to live — today's Binondo — in some areas of Mexico today simply means market, as palengke is in today's Tagalog.

As we have seen in all those examples, the cultural and economic exchange delivered by the Manila Galleon between Asia and America was enormous, affecting many things that we take for granted today, and this even affects art, literature, and even religious devotions, but that will be a topic for another article.

See also:
Rodríguez-Rodríguez JE,Ioannidis AG, Medina-Muñoz SG, Barberena-Jonas C, Blanco-Portillo J, Quinto-Cortés CD,Moreno-Estrada A. 2022 The genetic legacy of the Manila galleon trade in Mexico.Phil.Trans. R. Soc. B377: 20200419.https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0419 (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rstb.2020.0419)