Chinese Mestizos Reclaimed
In his description of Chinese mestizo identity choices before 1750, Wickberg writes:
This situation also existed for the Chinese mestizos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, it must have been easier for Chinese mestizos to “move into the Chinese community” because of the increasing number of Chinese immigrants arriving in the Philippines during this time. Additionally, efforts of the Qing dynasty to attract “overseas Chinese” (huaqiao) support for the modernization of China led many wealthy diasporic Chinese to send their Chinese mestizo children to study and live in China for a few years.In the end, the deciding factors of assimilation may well have been the relative level of hispanization and the relative availability of direct contact with Chinese culture as an alternative. Those who were heavily hispanized stopped in the mestizo gremios and stayed there. Those who were moderately hispanized might pause in the mestizo community and classification and then move on to total assimilation as indios. Those in Manila who were lightly hispanized and in contact with the Chinese cultural alternative might pause for a generation and then move into the Chinese community.[23]
In looking at the quotidian and the everyday lives of families and individuals, one can argue that the identities of Chinese mestizos during the Spanish colonial period are better understood as lying within a shifting and problematic continuum. Chinese mestizos were able to “segue from one discourse to another, experiment with alternative forms of identification, shrug in and out of identities, or evade imposed forms of identifications.”[24] Their identities were more ambiguous and fluid because Spanish policy legitimated “racial mixing” and created a separate classification for “half-breeds.”
In terms of “mixed-blood” groups of people, the Spanish colonial regime classified them as either Spanish mestizos or Chinese mestizos, although the latter numbered more than the former. The creation of such a classification, according to Wickberg, was not so much a policy of divide-and-rule but a “Spanish application of the Roman traditional concept of recognition of cultural differences within the empire.”[25][26] Hence, at least until before the nineteenth century, it was important for the Spanish regime to classify people according to “assumed cultural differences.”[27] Although Spanish legal classifications gradually moved in the direction of classifying colonial subjects on the basis of residency and ability to pay taxes during the nineteenth century, these changes did not completely remove the category of a “third ethnic status” (i.e., the Chinese mestizo) that people could identify with.[28] As in Malacca and Indonesia, there continued to exist a “discrete and stable community alongside of, but clearly distinguishable from, Chinese as well as indigenous society” in the Philippines, a community of “an indigenous-based creole.”[29] Wickberg writes:
(m)obility between groups was possible for individuals and families, by legal actions,…or more commonly, by intermarriage. The basis for intermarriage was that both parties be Catholic. It is the presence of Catholicism, and Spain’s emphasis upon propagating it, that distinguish Spanish Philippine social policy from that of other colonial countries of Southeast Asia. Spanish social policy was one of social division mitigated by cultural indoctrination, centering upon Catholicism, which was available to all elements in society. The result was that the various fragments of Philippine society could not only meet in the marketplace; they could also meet in the church.[30]
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[22] Focusing on the lives of Chinese mestizas can also lead to rescuing the history of the Chinese mestizos from the nation. Writing about the experiences of the Chinese in the United States, Gary Okihiro (1994, Chapter 3) points out that the inclusion of women in the study of Chinese immigration history broadens or interrogates the territorial reach of any nation-state, since many of the Chinese men who came to the United States were not simply bachelors. They had wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, aunts, and other female relatives back in China. Hence, to truly understand the history of the Chinese in the United States, one has to adopt a transnational approach in order to include the families that Chinese immigrants left behind. Applying this to the case of the Chinese mestizos in the Philippines, it has been known that many Chinese mestizo women, whether as wives, concubines, or daughters, were brought to China to live there for a considerable number of years. Hence, this author encourages efforts to include the lives of Chinese mestizo women in the study of the Chinese mestizos of the Philippines.
[23] Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 35.
[24] Aihwa Ong and Donald Macon Nonini, eds.,Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 26.
[25] Wickberg,The Chinese in Philippine Life, 7.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] The Maura Reform of 1893 attempted to eliminate the Gremio de Mestizos and Gremio de Naturales, and, responding to Chinese mestizo demand to abolish the “tribute . . . based on ethnic considerations,” the Spanish colonial government replaced the tribute with an industrial tax that was “in turn . . . replaced by the cedula, made uniformly applicable in 1894” and “broke down the legal distinction between the (i)ndios and Chinese mestizos as the latter were now classified as (i)ndios” (Tan 1985, 58).
[29] G. William Skinner, "Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia," Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, eds. Anthony Reid, Kristine Alilunas-Rodgers, and Jennifer Wayne Cushman, Southeast Asia Publications Series no. 28 (1996): 51-52
[30] Wickberg, “The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History,” 66.