Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Conclusion

Despite the anti-Chinese sentiment of the American colonial rulers and the racial prejudice the Chinese developed against the Filipinos, nothing could totally prevent the continuation of interracial unions and the creation of “mixed” children. The introduction of racial categories and ideologies from the American colonial period created hardened boundaries between “Filipinos” and “non-Filipinos.” These laws combined with an emerging sense of Chinese nationalism that promoted Chinese racial superiority, resulting in both a reduced number of “Chinese mestizo” offspring and a shift in the meanings of “mestizo.” To the Filipinos, “mestizo” thus became associated with those of Caucasian/white and Filipino descent. The colloquial terms “tisoy” or “tisay” (for male mestizos and female mestizos, respectively) carry a certain social cache for those identified as such, as fair skin and Caucasian “blood” were established standards of beauty since Spanish colonial times.

Within the Chinese community, a term was coined for mixed-raced children, particularly those whose mothers were of Filipino descent. The word in Hokkien is chhut-si-á (出世子), literally meaning “someone born outside” (i.e., outside of China and in the Philippines). This term refers to the offspring of Chinese men, and of Chinese mestizo or indio women during the Spanish colonial period. The modern use of the term carries with it negative connotations that evoke earlier images of racial impurity and inferiority, especially due to the “mixing” of the Filipino blood in one’s veins. For many Chinese families, it is still taboo to marry a Filipino or a non-Chinese.

To conclude, I quote from a work I published recently:

The Chinese mestizo of the Philippines is an important figure for those interested in the study of the country’s history of colonialism and nationalism. Its appearance as an ethnic categorization under the Spanish colonial period, subsequent disappearance under the Americans, and reappearance (albeit in different guises) in contemporary Philippine society point us to ways dominant powers attempt to spread their hegemonic control over others." [44]

However, as shown through the lives of individuals like Mariano Limjap and Bonifacio Limtuaco, Chinese mestizos were and are not passive receptors or victims of such attempts to localize them into neat, uncomplicated, and unambiguous categories. By adapting flexible strategies, they also participated in, colluded with, evaded, or challenged the racial ideologies that not only categorize races in oppositional binaries but also arrange them in a hierarchical order.
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[44] Richard T. Chu, “Chinese Mestizo,” in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, eds. Joshua Barker, Erick Harms, and Johan Lindquist (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014): 25. 

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