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| Tequila's roots are from the Philippines. |
It would not be inappropriate to down a tequila shot this month to acknowledge and celebrate the historical connection between Mexico and the Philippines.
Hispanic Heritage Month runs from Sept. 15, to Oct. 15. Filipino Heritage Month starts Oct. 1 through the rest of the month. It's fitting that the two months overlap because there is a long history of interchange between the Philippines and Mexico, thanks to Manila Galleon trade of the 16th-17th centuries.
In the history of Mexico and the Philippines, the role of Spain was often glorified while the part of history made by ordinary people were underplayed or not mentioned at all. This historical erasure is changing.
According to some fairly recent anthropologic and linguistic research, tequila, the alcoholic beverage most associated with Mexico, may have its roots in the Philippines.
If you've been to the Pacific coast of Mexico, visiting Acapulco, Mazatlan, Zihuataneo, Puerto Vallarta or any of the coastal cities and taken a tequila tour, your guide might mention this little known bit of knowledge.
Up the coast from Acapulco, in the state of Colima, wandering the streets of Manzanillo or Cuyutlan or even the inland capitol of Colima, you might run across street vendors selling a alcoholic drink similar to the wine produced in the Philippine provinces. Filipino academic Gideon Lasco was surprised to discover that the Mexican vendors call their concoction "tuba," the name of a wine distilled from coconuts.
Even today, in the making of tequila from agave, there is a stage in the distilling process before it is refined to the clear liquid so dear to North Americans, that the milky product is called "tuba."
Aside from mangoes and coconuts, Filipino sailors brought with them “coconut brandy,” a distilled coconut wine (tuba) also known to Filipinos as "lambanog." They also brought the portable stills used to distill the spirit. Using Filipino technology Mexicans started to distill their own spirits, but since there was a limited supply of coconut in Mexico and the Spaniards suppressed production of coconut brandy so as not to threaten production of Spanish brandy, Mexicans used agave, which was abundant in their land.
Legend has it -- and Mexican and Filipino scholars are beginning to document this -- Filipino sailors jumped the galleons when the ships reached the Mexican ports. Estimates vary but documents from Spain and Mexico that 50,000 to 500,000 of these freedom-seeking Filipino seafarers, essentially slave labor, fled their harsh Spanish captains in this manner during the course of the galleon trade, which ran from 1565 to 1815.
According to Spanish documents, Captain Sebastian de Piñeda of the galleon Espiritu Santo complained to the King of Spain in 1619 that of the 75 Filipino crewmen aboard his ship that crossed the Pacific from Manila, only five remained for the return voyage.
The galleon trade ended in 1821 when Mexico won its independence from Spain. Spanish ship.
Acapulco was the biggest Mexican port for the galleons where the cargo of gold, spices, and other goods were off-loaded then transported to the Caribbean ports for the final leg of their journey to Spain. Along the way, local government officials took their share of the wealth.
So it is not surprising that DNA samples of Mexican residents from Mexico's western coast can trace their bloodline to the Philippines.
Geneticists have recently discovered that about one-third of the people sampled in Guerrero, a Pacific coastal state, had up to 10% Asian ancestry, significantly more than most Mexicans. And when researchers compared their genomes to those of people in Asia today, he found that they were most closely related to populations from the Philippines and Indonesia.
In the Philippines, local people were called Luzon indios, but when they deserted their ships in Mexico, they could not be called indios, a description already reserved for the indigenous people of Mexico. The Filipinos became known as "chinos," or Chinese. To this date, Mexicans who have Asian features, often gain the nickname of "Chino," as a term of endearment.
Conversely, Spanish commanders used Mexican soldiers in their conquest of the Philippines. Many of the soldiers wed Filipino women and established families and raised their fortunes in the Philippines. The majority of Filipinos with Hispanicized surnames could find their origins in these soldiers.
Many of these military men along with the commanders from Spain, used their connections with the Spanish rulers and Catholic church to acquire land for vast banana, coconut and sugar cane plantations establishing a wealthy elite class that still retains wealth, power and status in the Philippines.
Several of the Philippine Commonwealth's governors were actually Mexican mestizos lending their names to Philippine history.
As the video accompanying this post by Bronze Nation TV, the Filipino-Mexican connection continued into the 20th century in the formation of the United Farm Workers Association, which combined the Filipino agricultural workers' union led by Larry Itliong and the Mexican union led by Cesar Chavez.
The original Presidential proclamation for Hispanic Heritage Month says: “The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September18, respectively. Also, Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day and also celebrated as Día de la Raza, which is October 12, falls within this 30 day period.”
Recognizing the connection between Mexico and the Philippines cannot be more timely, as both the Philippines and Mexico commemorated 500 years of colonial encounters—and acts of Indigenous resistance to colonization—last year. In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan arrived—and died—in the Philippines. That same year, Spanish forces led by Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec capitol city of Tenochtitlán.
These two events ushered in the establishment of the Spanish Empire—one of the largest the world has ever known—on both sides of the Pacific, writes the historian Gideon Lasco.
The true story of tequila may be a minor subplot within centuries of colonial history, but it’s important because it complicates historical narratives written mainly by Europeans that "share" or forced their languages, traditions, and ways of life on local peoples. As people from the Philippines, Mexico, and many other postcolonial states look back on the past 500 years, new research is telling us that colonized peoples have a history of their own that we're just beginning to discover.
Salud!
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