The Mexicans hold cockfights in cockpits they call palenque during special occasions in the same way that Filipinos do. The fighting cocks are armed with sharp metal knives attached to their legs with intent to kill the opponent. Which is not the way cockfighting is done in India and Thailand.
When a Spanish scientific expedition visited Acapulco in 1789, one of the scenes recorded by the expedition for posterity was of Filipino sailors holding a cockfight on the beach.
It is not true, as some claim, that cockfighting was introduced from the New World to the Philippines. It was the other way around and cockfighting was only one of the customs left behind by the Filipinos in this country.
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The interchange of social and cultural practices between Mexico and the Philippines during the Galleon era (1570-1815) was the subject of a long discussion I had the other day with a noted Mexican historian specializing on the Philippines.
Maria Cristina Barron is one of many Mexican scholars specializing on the Philippines and its long relations with Mexico. Mrs. Barron took her master’s degree in Philippine history at the University of the Philippines in the early 80s. She lived in Manila for four years during which she researched for her thesis the migration of Filipinos to Mexico and the process of their Christianization by Spain.
Early in our conversation, Mrs. Barron impressed me with her observation that Filipinos as a people are closer in temperament, outlook, and manners to the Mexicans that to other peoples in Asia.
Their being Christians is responsible for their close affinity with the Mexican people.
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The Spanish employed the same method of Christianizing the Filipinos that they used in Mexico, Mrs. Barron explained. The priests taught the Catholic faith, not in the Spanish language but in the dialect of the natives. But Mexico did not become a Spanishspeaking country until the 18th and 19th century.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Mexicans did not speak Spanish but were speaking in 52 dialects, the most dominant being Nahuatl, a language that traveled to the Philippines. Spanish was only a minor language.
Today there are 10 million Mexicans, out of a population of 100 million, who don’t speak Spanish; they communicate in their dialects.
Were it not for the arrival of the Americans at the turn of the century, according to Mrs. Barron, the Philippines would have become a Spanish-speaking country like Mexico. But Spanish comprises 25 percent of most Philippine languages.
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The making of tuba from the coconut tree was another art taught by the Filipinos to the Mexicans. The first to do so were more than 70 sailors on the galleon Encarbacion who jumped ship at Acapulco in 1611.
Drinking of tuba is a custom observed on the Pacific coast of Mexico over a thousand miles long, from Colima in the north to Oaxaca in the south. The Mexicans also imported from the Philippines people who could teach them how to make copra from coconuts.
***
Another legacy left by the Filipinos in Mexico was the cult of the Santo Niño of Cebu, whose image was brought to this country by Filipino sailors. The presence of a strange image, small and brown in color with pagan undertones, aroused the curiosity of the religious community.
Their curiosity snowballed into a major investigation by the inquisition, but after a lengthy inquiry they found that the Santo Niño had come from the Philippines and was a genuine and harmless image Santo Niño de Cebu has a following in Mexico until today.
