Oaxaca

Oaxaca

by Metty Pellicer

I have not met another Filipino on this trip, and I’ve tried to find them. I’ve asked my expat contacts, their cleaning lady, storekeepers, taxi drivers, random people I happen to chat with, waiters. They’ve known Filipinos in other places, but not here In Oaxaca.  Filipino overseas workers (OFW) are important contributors to the Philippine economy, accounting for 13.5% of the country’s GDP. I’ve met them in all of the countries I’ve visited, even as remote as Antarctica and in Easter Island. In Dubai, where I’ve been most recently, they are so ubiquitous I thought for a moment I was in the Philippines. Why are they not in Oaxaca? This piqued my curiosity about Filipino immigration to Mexico and prompted a scholarly research through Wikipedia. I found no direct link to my question, and overall, there was a dearth of information about modern immigration. It can’t be because of the economy and security. There are Filipino enclaves in Pakistan, even Iraq, and Syria. Is it because of proximity to the US and that was the preferred destination? I suppose with all the problems of Mexican illegal immigration to the US, it would be foolish for Filipinos to enter from Mexico. Canada would be the obvious choice. But I got excited when I found a blog by a Filipino tourist about a chance meeting with a clan in Oaxaca who descended from a Filipino who settled in the area during colonial times. Their great, great, grandfather, Lorenzo Paulo was a sailor who jumped ship off the isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico, a fugitive from Manila in 1854. He met their great, great-grandmother in Tijuana (near the U.S. border). As the trans-Pacific railway was being built, Paulo sought and got employment there. He and his wife moved south and finally settled in the coastal town of Salina Cruz, in the state of Oaxaca. In 1859, Benito Juarez, who became Mexico’s first Indian president , who was then governor of Oaxaca, appointed Lorenzo as chief of security of the port of Salina Cruz. He developed a reputation as a tough hombre and was referred to even by his descendants as “patron Lorenzo.” I found another article about a researcher coming across a park named Parque Reyna Maganda in Espinalillo, near Acapulco. Maganda is a Tagalog word for beautiful. He discovered  that the great grandmother of this large clan indeed came from the Philippines. I was excited to find these gems of information but also wondered why there seems so little connection between the Philippines and Mexico in modern times. My father-in-law, who’s father was a Spaniard from the continent, married a Filipina, and had 6 children. Four remained in the Philippines, a sister, returned to Spain, and a brother went to Mexico and started a family there with a Mexican wife. They consider themselves Mexicans and I suspect may not have factored their Filipino ancestry at all in their consciousness. I think they will consider themselves Spanish-Mexicans, if pressed to consider their mixed heritage. Unless I’m not entering the correct search question, there’s very little Filipino immigration to Mexico in modern times. Most occurred during colonial times, and again after the Spanish-American War when the Philippines became a US territory.

 When Mexico started its fight for independence in 1810-1821, colonial governance of the Philippines was transferred to Spain. Prior to that Spain administered its colonies through its Viceroy in New Spain, in Mexico. Filipinos stopped arriving in Mexico when the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade was terminated in 1815. The Manila-Acapulco Galleons did not only carry porcelain, ivory, silk, and spices from Asia to Mexico but it also transported culture and language and flora and fauna and religious practices between the two ports. I was so amazed by the similarity of religious festivals, and to find similar fruits and plants, and familiar words. The mango was brought to Mexico, and mais (corn) was brought to the Philippines. I was in Oaxaca the week before Dia de los Muertos, and the preparations and graveyard festivities bring back childhood memories of similar practices in my mother’s barrio. It was a big deal. We clean the grave site, plant flowers, bring food, and socialize with neighboring grave visitors. Children scare each other with ghost stories. The weekly markets are called tianggui, and palenque, balimbim, calachuche, guayabano, nanay, tatay mean the same. When I joined a Tai Chi class at Parque Jardin Conzatti, the teacher introduced his namesake as tocayo. Our barong looks very similar to the Mexican shirt and many dances and music are done the same way. I didn’t know that La Paloma was Mexican rather than Spanish. That was a required piece in many piano teachers curriculum and one of the earlier challenge in my hard journey on the keyboard. 

With 250 years of shared Spanish colonial history and culture I’m puzzled that there is no visible expression of this relationship in both countries in contemporary society.  And there is more. There is the common experience of conquest by the US. In the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 the US annexed the whole American Southwest from Texas to California. The Philippines became a US territory after the Spanish-American War in 1898, together with Guam, and Puerto Rico, and remained its territory after the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, until July 4,1946. When I speak to the youth in both countries, and also true of youths in the US, there is little familiarity with the common bonds that tied these three countries together in history. When once we were brothers, we had become strangers. Some may even harbor contempt for each other.