Domingo Siazon, former Foreign Secretary and current Philippine ambassador to Japan, welcomed me to Tokyo with a hearty ?Bienvenido!? Caught by surprise, I replied in English. He repeated the greeting and I responded in Filipino, prompting him to say, ?I did my research and know you had 12 units of Spanish in college. My generation had 24 units!?
The ambassador was practicing for an academic exchange commemorating the 400th anniversary of the rescue of the crew and passengers of the galleon San Francisco that originated in the Philippines and was shipwrecked in Onjuku, a town 120 kilometers east of Tokyo. Of its 373 passengers and crew, 317 were saved by Japanese fishermen, including Don Rodrigo de Vivero who was returning to Acapulco after completing his term in Manila as Spanish governor-general of the Philippines. This event is taken as the beginning of the relations between Japan and Mexico.
Siazon had arranged for the participation of two Filipino historians in a Tokyo seminar celebrating the ?Onjuku 400? anniversary. My inadequate 12 units of college Spanish came in handy because our textbook was built around the travels of an American named Ana West. With 24 units, I would have completed all the lessons in the book, but we only had 12 covering a third of the textbook and never arrived in Spain. Thus, I learned about: Mexico, the Parque de Chapultepec, the Zocalo, and Avenida de la Reforma.
Too bad our teachers did not point out words of Mexican origin in our everyday language that we all thought were Spanish. For example, the Spanish ?caballo? spelled and pronounced by Filipinos as ?kabayo? actually comes from the Mexican ?cabaio.? The wonderful weed cannabis, also from the Spanish ?caballo,? and is presumed to be a Spanish word when it is Mexican. When two Filipinos have the same name, they address each other as tocayo or tocaya not realizing the term came from the Aztec ?tocaitl.?
There are other words in our language borrowed from Mexico: palengke, tiangge, cassava, zacate, tamales, chili and even mariguana. Perhaps a Mexican lexicographer can tell us of Philippine words in their language because there is an old family in Oaxaca whose surname is ?Maganda.? Mexico exports mangoes to the United States known as ?mangas de Manila.?
We celebrated our own Ano de Amistad Filipino-Mexicano in November 1964 to mark the 400th anniversary of the expedicion maritima Mexico-Filipinas headed by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, founder of Spanish Cebu and Manila, and the Augustinian friar Andres de Urdaneta, the pilot of the expedition who made possible the tornaviaje or return route used during the galleon trade between Mexico and Filipinas that lasted 250 years. From 1565 to 1815, trade between Manila and Acapulco left an imprint in the cultural life of the Philippines that was so deeply ingrained that 21st-century Filipinos do not realize what is Mexican in their midst especially in our language.
On Oct. 8, 2009, the Philippines will celebrate the first ?Dia del Galeon? established through the efforts of Sen. Edgardo J. Angara, who introduced legislation establishing the annual commemoration of Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day. This year, Angara expanded Philippine-Spanish friendship to include the other Spanish-speaking countries with diplomatic missions in Manila. Naturally, the first partner in this endeavor is the Embassy of Mexico and it is providential that the new ambassador and his deputy are historians. Dia del Galeon will hopefully focus our attention on the long relationship with Mexico and provide context for the Manila visit of the president of Mexico scheduled this November. The last visit of a Mexican president to the Philippines was by Adolfo Lopez Mateos in 1962, during the term of President Diosdado Macapagal.
From 1962 to 1964, a series of cultural exchanges between Mexico and the Philippines was implemented to celebrate Ano de Amistad Filipinas-Mexico resulting in three Mexican landmarks in Manila: Avenida Mexico, the monument to the Mexican hero of liberation Padre Miguel Hidalgo on Bonifacio Drive fronting the Port Area, and the monument commemorating the Legazpi-Urdaneta expedition by the Pasig near the Bureau of Immigration.
Unfortunately, not much has been done since in terms of historical research. As a matter of fact, microfilm copies of historical documents on the Philippines from the National Archives of Mexico where presented as a gift to the then Records Management and Archive Office, but these were not fully utilized and deteriorated in storage.
On the bright side was the people-to-people exchange resulting from the Philippines-Mexico Joint Commission on Culture 2005-2008, specifically the visit of a group of Mexican historians to Manila and a reciprocal visit of Filipino historians to Mexico. While most of the participants were familiar old faces, like Cristina Barron and Benito Legarda, the involvement of younger scholars was expected to revive interest in our shared past.
History becomes relevant to our time when we realize that globalization is not new. We had it in the Galleon Trade between Mexico and the Philippines four centuries ago.
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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu
