Filipino Mestizos

In the Philippines, Filipino Mestizo (Spanish: mestizo (masculine) / mestiza (feminine); Filipino/Tagalog: Mestiso (masculine) / Mestisa (feminine)), or colloquially Tisoy, is a name used to refer to people of mixed native Filipino and any foreign ancestry. The word mestizo itself is of Spanish origin; it was first used in the Americas to describe people of mixed Amerindian and European ancestry. Currently and historically, the Chinese mestizos were and are still ordinarily the most populous subgroup among mestizos; they have historically been very influential in the creation of Filipino nationalism. The Spanish mestizos also historically and currently exist as a smaller population, but remain a significant minority among mestizos which historically enjoyed prestigious status in Philippine society during Spanish colonial times.
A Spanish expedition led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565 started a period of Spanish colonization of the Philippines which lasted for 333 years. The Roman Catholic Church played an important role in the Spanish colonization of the Philippines beyond the preaching of the Catholic faith. Spanish missionaries contributed to education, healthcare, scientific research and even public works. The Spanish government and religious missionaries studied the native Filipino languages and published the first grammars and dictionaries of Tagalog, the Bisayan languages and others. In the earlier period, Roman Catholic rituals were adapted to native beliefs and values. As a result, a folk Roman Catholicism developed in the Philippines. European settlers from Spain and Mexico immigrated to the islands and their offspring (of either pure Spanish, or mixed Spanish and Native descent) adopted the culture of their parents and grandparents. Most Filipinos of Spanish descent in the Philippines are of Basque ancestry Some families still privately use Spanish in the households. In addition, Chavacano (a creole language based largely on the Spanish) is widely spoken in Zamboanga and neighboring regions, as well as Cavite and Ternate. Spanish era periodicals record that as much as one-third of the inhabitants of the island of Luzon possessed varying degrees of Spanish admixture. In addition to Manila, select cities such as Bacolod, Cebu, Iloilo or Zamboanga which had important military fortifications and commercial ports during the Spanish era also had sizable Mestizo communities.
Even before the Spanish arrived in the Philippines, the Chinese had traded with the natives of the Philippines. During the colonial period, there was an increase in the number of Chinese immigrants in the Philippines. The Spaniards restricted the activities of the Chinese and confined them to the Parián which was located near Intramuros, which later they could only live outside it if they became Christian, baptized under the Spanish friars. Most of the Chinese residents earned their livelihood as merchant traders.
Initially, many of the Chinese who arrived during the Spanish period were Hokkien initially from "Chiõ Chiu" (Zhangzhou) and some from "Chin Chiu" (Quanzhou), then later Amoy (Xiamen) and many from "Chinchew" (Quanzhou) who were usually merchants and rarely Macanese Cantonese or Taishanese from Macau and "Cantón" (Guangzhou or Guangdong province in general), who usually worked as cooks or laborers ("cargadores" coolie) or artisan craftsmen. By the American period, more "Fukien" still came and entered and continued the retail trade and currently make up most of the Chinese Filipino population with a few Cantonese also coming to build the Kennon Road / Benguet Road to Baguio. The Chinese residents of the islands were encouraged and sometimes incentivized to intermarry with other native or Spanish Filipinos and convert to Roman Catholicism. Both native Filipinos and Chinese who lacked surnames were encouraged to adopt one from the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, an alphabetical list of Spanish family names, introduced by the government in the mid-19th century.
During the United States colonial period, the Chinese Exclusion Act of the United States was also applied to the Philippines once it was under US administration. Despite this, many were still able to find ways to migrate into the Philippines during the era via legal exceptions or loopholes or illegal means. There was a legal exception for "merchant's sons" with a Landing Certificate of Residence and loophole through family adoption through it. Some also came illegally by stowing away in ships and illegally sneaking past port authority or their own boats landing where there was no coast guard coverage before during that era. Some later also used these as a stepping stone to move to mainland United States.
After the Second World War and the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War, many refugees who fled from Mainland China settled in the Philippines. These groups in the 20th century formed the bulk of the current population of Chinese Filipinos. After the Philippines achieved full sovereignty on July 4, 1946, Chinese immigrants became naturalized Filipino citizens, while the children of these new citizens who were born in the country acquired Filipino citizenship from birth.
Chinese Filipinos are one of the largest overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Mestizos de Sangley—Filipinos with at least some Chinese ancestry descended from the Spanish colonial era—comprise 18–27% of the Philippine population. There used to be a record of roughly 1.5 million Filipinos with pure Chinese ancestry, or about 1.6% of the population back then. There are no consistent ethnic-based census in the Philippine census currently.
Except for the many Chinese migration waves, the history of racial mixture in the Philippines occurred on a smaller scale than other Spanish territories in Americas after and during the Spanish colonial period from the 16th to the 19th century. This ethno-religious social stratification schema was similar to the casta system used in Hispanic America, with some major differences.
The system was used for taxation purposes, with indios and negritos who lived within the colony paying a base tax, mestizos de sangley paying double the base tax, sangleys paying quadruple; blancos, however, paid no tax. The tax system was abolished after the Philippine Declaration of Independence from Spain in 1898, and the term "Filipino" was used to include the entire population of the Philippines regardless of ancestry, as per the Philippine nationality law.
The Spanish deliberately implemented incentives to entangle the various races together to stop rebellion:
Persons classified as blancos (whites) and those with Spanish ancestry were subdivided into the peninsulares (persons of pure Spanish descent born in Spain); insulares (persons of pure Spanish descent born in the Philippines i.e. criollos); mestizos de español (persons of mixed Austronesian and Spanish ancestry), and tornatrás (persons of mixed Austronesian, Chinese, and Spanish ancestry).
Persons of pure or mostly Spanish descent living in the Philippines who were born in Hispanic America were classified as Americanos. Mestizos and mulattoes born in Hispanic America living in the Philippines kept their legal classification as such. Mulattos usually came as indentured servants to the Americanos. Philippine-born children of mestizos and mulattoes from Hispanic America were classified based on patrilineal descent.
The indigenous peoples of the Philippines were referred to as Indios (for those of pure Austronesian descent) and negritos. Indio was a general term applied to native Austronesians as a legal classification; it was only applied to Christianised natives who lived in proximity to the Spanish colonies. Persons who lived outside of Manila, Cebu, and areas with a large Spanish concentration were classified as such: naturales were baptised Austronesians of the lowland and coastal towns. Unbaptised Austronesians and Aetas who lived in the towns were classified as salvajes (savages) or infieles (infidels). Remontados ("those who went to the mountains") and tulisanes (bandits) were Austronesians and Aetas who refused to live in towns and moved upland. They were considered to live outside the social order as Catholicism was a driving force in everyday life as well as determinant of social class.
The Spanish legally classified the Aetas as ''negritos'', based on their appearance. The word term would be misinterpreted and used by future European scholars as an ethnoracial term in and of itself. Both Christianised Aetas who lived in the colony and unbaptised Aetas who lived in tribes outside of the colony were classified negrito. Christianised Aetas who lived in Manila were not allowed to enter Intramuros and lived in areas designated for indios. Persons of Aeta descent were also viewed as being outside the social order as they usually lived in tribes beyond settlements and resisted conversion to Christianity.
The fluid nature of racial integration in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period was recorded by many travelers and public figures at the time, who were favorably impressed by the lack of racial discrimination, as compared to the situation in other European colonies.
Among them was Sir John Bowring, Governor General of British Hong Kong and a well-seasoned traveler who had written several books about the different cultures in Asia. He described the situation as "admirable" during a visit to the Philippines in the 1870s:
Another foreign witness was English engineer, Frederic H. Sawyer, who had spent most of his life in different parts of Asia and lived in Luzon for fourteen years. His impression was that as far as racial integration and harmony was concerned, the situation in the Philippines was not equaled by any other colonial power:
Though the Philippines upholds the principle of racial equality and does not actively gather information on specific races, statistics from historical immigration records, census results, and ship passenger logs, can be used to ascertain the populations of specific types of Filipino mestizos.
Stephanie J. Mawson, by rummaging through records in the archives of Mexico discovered that the Spaniards were not the only immigrant group to the Philippines; Peru and Mexico too sent soldiers to the islands, and in fact outnumbered the Spaniards who immigrated to the Philippines.
The book, "Intercolonial Intimacies Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898–1964 By Paula C. Park" citing "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.
In the late 1700s to early 1800s, Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga, an Agustinian Friar, in his Two Volume Book: "Estadismo de las islas Filipinas" compiled a census of the Spanish-Philippines based on the tribute counts (Which represented an average family of seven to ten children and two parents, per tribute) and came upon the following statistics:
The Spanish Mestizo population as a proportion of the provinces widely varied; with as high as 19% of the population of Tondo province (The most populous province and former name of Manila), to Pampanga 13.7%, Cavite at 13%, Laguna 2.28%, Batangas 3%, Bulacan 10.79%, Bataan 16.72%, Ilocos 1.38%, Pangasinan 3.49%, Albay 1.16%, Cebu 2.17%, Samar 3.27%, Iloilo 1%, Capiz 1%, Bicol 20%, and Zamboanga 40%. According to the data, in the Archdiocese of Manila which administers much of Luzon under it, about 10% of the population was Spanish-Filipino. Spanish-Filipinos maintaining a minimum median of 5% of the total Philippine population, once summing up all provinces.
Meanwhile, in 2013, according to older records held by the Senate of the Philippines, there were approximately 1.35 million ethnic (or pure) Chinese within the Philippine population, while Filipinos with any Chinese descent comprised 22.8 million of the population.
In modern times, many of the descendants of the above Filipino mestizos may technically be classified as Tornatrás, but due to the term's obsolescence in mainstream usage, most Filipino mestizo descendants would usually identify as just mestizo or even just "Filipino". In modern times, the descendants of the Filipino mestizos are still very active in the politics of the Philippines, especially controlling the bulk of the country's political families and compose a considerable part of the Philippine population especially its bourgeoisie, whereas the modern Chinese Filipino community and the few remaining Spanish Filipino families both contribute major shares in the Philippine economy, of which a majority of the Philippines' richest billionaires are either of Chinese Filipino background, such as the Sy family (SM Group, BDO, etc.), Gokongwei family (JG Summit, Robinsons, etc.), Lucio Tan & family (LT Group, Philippine Airlines (PAL), etc.), Tony Tan Caktiong & family (Jollibee Corp.), Ramon Ang & family (San Miguel Corp. (SMC)), and many more, or (less commonly) of Spanish Filipino background, such as Zobel de Ayala family (Ayala Corp.), Razon family (International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI, Solaire, etc.), Aboitiz family (Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Aboitiz Power, etc.), Araneta family (Smart Araneta Coliseum), Lhuillier family (Cebuana Lhuillier), Ortigas family (Ortigas Center), etc.
Today, the word mestizo is shortened as tisoy just as is the word Pinoy for Filipino. It is used for all Filipinos with foreign ancestry, particularly those born in the diaspora or as children of recent immigrants.