Spanish Casta: Philippines

Spanish Casta of the Philippines

The Spanish claim to the Philippine Islands began in March 1521 when Ferdinand Magellan arrived from across the Pacific. After Magellan’s death in battle one month later his 2nd in command Juan Sebastián Elcano sailed west to complete the first circumnavigation in September 1522. Simultaneously in 1521 Hernán Cortés completed the siege of Tenochtitlán and conquered the Aztec Empire. By 1533 the Spanish had established ports such as Acapulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico as staging points for exploration of the Pacific. In November 1542 Ruy López de Villalobos left the port of Barra de Navidad with over 350 men sailing west. In February 1543 they arrived in the Philippines. A few months later they attempted to return to Mexico but the winds were unfavorable and the Spanish were confronted and imprisoned by the Portuguese.

In November 1564 the Spanish explorer Miguel López de Legazpi set out from the port of Barra de Navidad in Mexico for the Philippines. After 93 days he landed in the Mariana Islands. In February 1563 he landed on Cebu and established a colony there. The Spanish then fanned out across the islands, exploring, making alliances with the natives and fighting the petty sultans as well as Chinese and Japanese pirates. Then in May 1570 the Spanish fought their way onto the future site of Manila. On June 24th 1571 López de Legazpi arrived from the south to establish Manila as the center of the Spanish East Indies.

By 1591 roughly 200 Spanish soldiers were garrisoned in Manila, ruling over roughly 30,640 Filipinos within and outside the city. Also resident in or around Manila were about 4,000 Japanese and Chinese traders.
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Casta
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Los Peninsulares: full Spanish born in Europe
Los Criollos: full Spanish born in the Americas
Los Indios: natives of the Americas
Los Mestizos: half Spanish, half native
Los Castizos: mostly Spanish, quarter native
Los Américanos: all peoples born in the Americas
Los Insulares: full Spanish born in the Philippines
Los Moros: African slaves sold by the Chinese and Arabs to the Spanish
Los Negritos: natives of the Philippines [link]
Los Indios: natives of the Philippines
Sangley: Chinese settlers living in the Philippines
Mestizo de Sangley: half Chinese, half Filipino
Mestizo de Español: half Spanish, half Filipino
Tornatrás: part Spanish, part Filipino, part Chinese

The suggestion for this deviation was given to me by

sources [link] [link] [link]

Edit: July 25, 2011
Excerpts from Henry Kamen's Empire: How Spain Became a World Power 1492 – 1763

"The Spanish authorities were logically alarmed by the flood of immigrants, and in 1582 created a special quarter of the city, known as the Parian (from the local Chinese word for 'marketplace'), to which the Chinese were in theory restricted. It was impossible, however, to avoid the reality that the immigrants from the mainland monopolized retail trades and dominated the crafts and agriculture. 'The truth is', Antonio de Marga admitted in the 1590s, 'that without these Sangleys it would be impossible to maintain the town, for they operate all the trades.' The fact is seldom reflected in the references made by Spanish historians to their Asian empire. At the same period a Jesuit reported that 'from China come those who supply every sort of service, all dexterous, prompt and cheap, from physicians and barbers to carriers and porters. They are the tailors and the shoemakers, metalworkers, silversmiths, sculptors, locksmiths, painters, masons, weavers and every kind of service.' The growth of Manila was at every stage made possible only by the Chinese merchants, artisans, farmers and general laborers who contributed by their work, investment and imports to the development of one of the most thriving 'European' cities of Asia." p207 to 208

"Though the Spanish presence in the Philippines was a small one, it was maintained thanks to a certain common interest among the races. All the residents united resolutely to defend themselves against attack from outside. In 1597 when Muslim pirates from the islands of Mindanao and Jolo attacked Luzon, the population drove them off successfully. In October 1603 the Spanish mounted an expedition within Luzon against the Sangleys; a common anti-Chinese sentiment united the two hundred Spaniards, three hundred Japanese and fifteen hundred Tagalogs who took part. But tensions between the Manila communities also erupted occasionally into bloody violence. There were massacres of the Chinese by Spainiards, chiefly in 1603, 1639 and 1662, with the active help of the Filipinos, who were always willing to get rid of the Chinese. The brutal treatment of the fundamentally peaceful Chinese population was always counter-productive. After an estimated twenty-three thousand of them had perished in the massacres of 1603, Morga reported that 'the city found itself in distress, for since there were no Sangleys there was nothing to eat and no shoes to wear'. The majority of remaining Sangleys emigrated to the mainland, leaving a community of about five hundred. By 1621, however, their population had again risen, to twenty thousand." p208

"The Spanish population, by contrast, failed to grow. As late as 1637 Manila counted only a hundred and fifty Spanish households within its walls, an incredibly small number after some eighty years of colonization. The lack of European women forced the settlers to marry Asians, and a population of mixed blood rapidly came into existence." p209

"The demand for labour led to an important new element in the demography of the Philippines. To make up for the general shortfall in manpower, and also to recruit household help, all Spaniards during the sixteenth century imported African slaves, who were traded to East Asia by the Arabs and the Chinese. 'The country is flooded with black slaves', according to an observer at the end of the century. As in the New World, blacks did not long remain slaves, and soon made themselves into a vital component of the labour force. In 1638 the number of free blacks serving in manila as soldiers, laborers and sailors was estimated at around five hundred. In the end, the city became a thriving commercial centre in which the Spaniards formed only a small part of the population. 'The diversity of the peoples who are seen in manila and its environs', reported a friar in 1662, 'is the greatest in the world, for these include men from all kingdoms and nations - Spain, France, England, Italy, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Muscovy; people from all the Indies, both east and west; and Turks, Greeks, Persians, Tatars, Chinese, Japanese, Africans and other Asians.' p209

"Spaniards liked to think of Manila as an outpost of the universal Spanish empire. In reality, it existed only because of the tolerance of the Chinese and Japanese. In the 1580s there were just a few hundred Spaniards in the city; by contrast, there were over ten thousand Chinese in the 1580s and possibly thirty thousand in the 1630s. Morga estimated the number of Japanese around the year 1600 at one thousand five hundred. The indigenous population, obviously, outnumbered both." p220

Spanish Casta Series
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Mexico [link]
Philippines [link]