MANILA, Philippines - I mentioned earlier that about l00,000 Asian slaves - from India, Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines - were captured by Spanish and Portuguese traders and brought to Mexico on the Manila galleons which sailed from Manila to Acapulco from l575 to l8l5.
One Filipino slave, well-known to Mexicans, was a Kapampangan by the name of Nicolas Tolentino, who lived and died in Chihuahua in northern Mexico. He left behind a body of literature written in Spanish and Kapampangan which are preserved in a museum in Chihuahua.
Another Filipino slave who left a legacy in Mexico was Catarina de San Juan. She was a religious mystic and a chef who invented the famous dish mole, a mixture of chocolate and chili favored by Mexicans as ingredient for cooking chicken or turkey.
Catarina, who lived in the l600s, is the prototype of a long line of magic chefs in Mexican folk stories, such as the tale in the film Like Water for Chocolate.
Catarina arrived in Mexico from the Philippines as a slave but converted to Christianity and became a nun in Puebla. She designed Mexico's distinctive national dress called La China Poblana.
The Spanish also brought about half a million African blacks to Mexico from the l6th century onward. Following the conquest, the Mexican Indians were decimated by diseases brought by the Europeans, their population dwindling from 20 million to less than five million in a century.
Slaves had to be imported from Asia and Africa to work the great silver mines, the cloth mills, and the farmlands.
