Mexicans in the Philippines (fictional)

Mexicans in the Philippines, historically Americanos and colloquially known as Mehinoy (a portmanteau of the words Mehikano and Pinoy, "Mehikano" meaning Mexican) are a multilingual Filipino ethnic group composed of Philippine citizens with Mexican ancestry. The immigration of Mexicans to the Philippines dates back to the Spanish period. The Philippines is home to the most Mexicans living in Asia.

The resident embassy of Mexico reported 41,295 Mexican citizens in the Philippines in 2010, but estimates approximately 1,000 Mexican citizens crossing into the neighboring country for educational, business, commercial, industrial and tourist activities. The Mexican community has been primarily established in the capital city Manila.

Many people from Mexico state, Chihuahua, Yucatan and Jalisco share ties of familiarity with Filipinos following the Philippine Revolution that drove Mexicans to migrate to the island to assist the Spaniards.

History
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.

Around the 1600s, Stephanie Mawson in her book entitled ‘Between Loyalty and Disobedience: The Limits of Spanish Domination in the Seventeenth Century Pacific’ showed that there were thousands of Latin-American settlers sent to the Philippines by the Spaniards per year and around that time-frame 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, Latin American and Hispanic descent quickly spread across the territory.

As a result, German Ethnographer Fedor Jagor using Spanish censuses, estimated that one-third of the island of Luzon, which holds half of the Philippine population, had varying degrees of Spanish and Latin American ancestry. 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.

The Philippines and Mexico were part of the Spanish Empire, an experience that left a deep imprint on both societies. Once Spain began its long period of decline in the nineteenth century, the Philippines and Mexico came under the sphere of influence of the emerging power of the north, the United States. According to an opinion piece in La Opinión, it describes Mexico being a subordinate and fearful neighbor of American interventions and the Philippines a Spanish territory subject to the designs of Washington, D.C.

During the Spanish period, the islands formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, coupled 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 made trade routes from Mexico to the Philippines, the main ports of Mexico today to start their starting points were Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta with their final destination to Manila, the current capital of the Philippines. The Spanish ships on these routes were known as the Manila galleons.

After the arrival of Mexican immigrants to the Philippines, they belonged to different ethnic groups such as indigenous and mestizos and Creoles who mainly mixed with the local population, which also 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, have influenced some local languages of the Philippines.

Currently, the entrance of the Philippines in the APEC has strengthened ties with Spanish-speaking countries, including as Mexico, where the islands share a common history and other Spanish-speaking countries such as Peru and Chile.