The genetic legacy of the Acapulco-Manila early trans-Pacific system in Mexico — Exposing the long time invisible Asian contribution to the Mexican fabric, by Ricardo Pinzón
March 27, 2026, 17:00 Central European Time. Online via MS Teams
Thousands of Indios Chinos arrived to the Pacific coastal towns in nowadays Mexico from the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade system. Since 1565 and until the early nineteenth century, Filipinos, Malays, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Polynesians, Arabs and Indochinese have settled in Mexico and formed families adding their wisdom and genes to the melting pot along with the local mestizos helping to build the emerging great new nation of Mexico. Despite the great contribution of Asians to the formerly New Spain, their impact has been largely kept marginalized. The politics of a binary admixture between natives and European colonizers and the pardization (I coin the term Pardizacion), the configuration of these thousands of Indios Chinos into the local African descendant community invisibilized their presence and national impact. It has also been noticed a generalized fact that, even though native, European and African descendants are easily spotted or identified by their physical and facial features, the phenotype of the Indios Chinos is for many hardly recognizable. While it is debatable that Filipinos and other Asian descendants are easily or not identifiable, it has been necessary to rely on genetic tools to confirm the Asian ascendancy of Mexicans. For the past ten years individual DNA tests have been applied to specific people as samples of population to determine the percentages of Asian ancestry in Mexico City and its provinces including the Pacific coastal towns. The large Mexican genetic laboratories recent results have also been considered and preliminary results are available to share with the scientific and academic communities.
Ricardo Pinzón de la Cruz grew up in Acapulco, the epicenter of the Manila-Acapulco Galleons for 250 years. Since he was a teenager he has been passionate about social sciences. He enjoys working on research involving transdisciplinarity under the social sciences umbrella which include pedagogy, political science, sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology and geography. Ricardo Pinzón has a bachelor’s degree in Engineering in Telecommunications with a minor in Behavioral Psychology. He completed a aster’s degree in Education at the University of the People in California. He is currently a doctoral student at Rosario Castellanos National University in Mexico City pursuing a degree in Social Research from Complexity. His dissertation relies on biological anthropology and microhistory to highlight the existing descendants of the thousands of Asians who settled in Mexico during the early trans-Pacific global commerce. His first academic essay has recently been included in the book THE FILIPINO WORLDVIEW THROUGH ART, IMAGES, AND OBJECTS — From indigenous culture to the 19th century (2025). The book is a joint collaboration between the University of the Philippines and the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain. The article is titled “The Zarangola, the kite-fighting legacy of the Filipinos in the coast of Guerrero, during the period of the Manila-Acapulco galleons”.
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