The Chinese

Mestizos
Important Elements in the
Development of Philippine Society
The Evolution of Chinese Mestizo
• They played a significant role to Philippine historical development
• From the time that Chinese mestizos became numerous enough to be
classified separately, the population in the Philippines that were controlled by
Spain was formally divided into four categories:
1. Spaniards and Spanish mestizos
2. Indios
3. Chinese
4. Chinese mestizo
• The last three were considered tribute-paying classes but the amount of their
tribute payments and the services demanded of them varied
• The tribute-paying classes remained until late in the nineteenth century.
• In terms of tax obligations, indios, Chinese mestizos, and
Chinese remained as three separate groups.
• But insofar as rights were concerned-such as rights to move
about the islands, own property, or participate in town
government, the division tended to be two-fold, rather than
three-fold
• In terms of legal status, it was provided for by Spanish
legislation
• Purely, in terms of his ancestry, Rizal might be considered a
fifth generation Chinese mestizo
Ancestry
Ancestry
• The grandson, having achieved wealth and status in his locality, was able
to have his family transferred from the mestizo padron, or tax-census
register, to that of the Indios. Thus Rizal’s father, and rizal himself, were
considered Indio.
• In the late eighteent century, the individual dispensation was possible in
a given certain procedures they called dispensa de ley or gracias al sacar.
• By the nineteenth century, the Chinese mestizos had become so
numerous and their influence so great that the term “mestizo”, as
popularly used in the Philippines, meant “Chinese mestizo”.
• The development of Chinese mestizo group in the Philippines can be
understood only by first considering briefly certain features of the history
of the Chinese in the Philippines.
The Chinese Important Economic Position
• Chinese merchants carried on a rich trade between Manila and the China
coast and distributed the imports from China into the area of Central Luzon,
to the immediate north of Manila.
• Chinese established themselves at or near Spanish settlements, serving them
in various ways: providers of food, as retail traders, and as artisans
• Conversion of Chinese to Catholicism and Hispanism
• Evacuation to Parian
The Parian was Spanish settlement of Cebu established in 1565 when
conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi arrived on the island. This area, then called the
Ciudad, was located in the port area, and was exclusively for the Spaniards. Legaspi
also created a policy of ethnic segregation, which divided the port area into two, the
other half being the Poblacion de Naturales, which is present day San Nicolas. Pari-an
rose on the north side of the Spanish settlement around 1590, when Chinese traders
and artisans occupied the area and considered it their home, market, and trading
center.
• The Chinese traders came regularly to Cebu way before the Spaniards
came. But it was only in the 1590’s when Cebu briefly took part in the
galleon trade that they decided to settle down in the city. Chinese goods
and wares for trade were dropped off in the main port area in
the intramuros and transported via small boats called cascos, and entered
through Tinago, a wide waterway. They would unload their products in what
we now call as Pari-an, a name that traces its roots to a Mexican word for
marketplace.

• By the end of the 16th century, the Spaniards began to define the Ciudad
as “intramuros” or walled city. However, historians discovered that instead
of walls built around this area, pantanos or swamps defined its borders.
This distinguished the “intramuros” from the “extramuros”, the spaces
outside the ciudad where Pari-an District belonged.
The Parian in Manila
THE RISE OF PARIAN IN CEBU 1700-1850 onwards
Parian in Cebu
Binondo
• Binondo as Chinese settlement
• Spanish Dominican missionary soon made of Binondo a kind of
acculturation laboratory
• Once Binondo has been assigned them as a parish, the Dominican
quickly made of it a community of married Catholic Chinese.
• Clearly, Binondo, by the seventeenth century was intended to be a
settlememt for Catholic Chinese and their mestizo descendants.
• Although mestizo total represented only about five percent of the
Philippine population as a whole, there were areas of mestizo
concentration in which they formed a much larger percentage of the
regional population specific in three Central Luzon provinces of Tondo,
Bulacan, and Pampanga.
• Landholding and wholesale trading (Inquilinos and kasamahan system)
• The Binan hacienda is mostly in the power of the rich, who work it by
means of the kasamahan system
• To the immediate north of Manila, the rich people of the towns of Tondo,
Tambobong (Malabon), Polo, Ovando, Meycauayan and Bocaue --
principally mestizos--were inquilinos
• Pacto de retro- pattern of mestizo money-lending and acquisition of
Indio lands in Bulacan ( contract of retrocession)