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Tens of thousands of enslaved and free Africans lived in Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries, outnumbering Europeans, and today almost all Mexicans carry about 4% African ancestry. Other researchers study the legacy of another marginalized group in colonial Mexico: Africans. "We're uncovering these hidden stories of slavery and people who lost their identities when they disembarked in a whole new country." Once they landed in Mexico, they were all recorded as " chinos"-Chinese, says Moreno-Estrada, who will present the work this weekend at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) annual meeting here.
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Although historians knew of this transpacific slave trade, the origins of its victims were lost. They learned from historians who study ship manifests and other trade documents that during the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish galleons sailed between Manila and the port of Acapulco in Guerrero, carrying goods and people, including enslaved Asians. Rodríguez and his adviser, Andrés Moreno-Estrada, a population geneticist at LANGEBIO, turned to the historical record to figure out who these people's ancestors might be. And when he compared their genomes to those of people in Asia today, he found that they were most closely related to populations from the Philippines and Indonesia. border, also had up to 10% Asian ancestry, significantly more than most Mexicans. Rodríguez discovered that about one-third of the people sampled in Guerrero, the Pacific coastal state that lies nearly 2000 kilometers south of the U.S. Some people from northern Mexico did have significant Asian ancestry, but they weren't the only ones. border, Rodríguez knew this history well, and he wanted to see whether he could identify the Chinese immigrants' genetic contribution to the modern Mexican population.īut when he searched a database of 500 Mexican genomes-initially assembled for biomedical studies-and sought genetic variants more common in Asian populations, he found a surprise. Starting in the 19th century, many Chinese immigrants moved to Mexico to construct railroads in the country's northern states.
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Juan Esteban Rodríguez, a graduate student in population genetics at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) in Irapuato, Mexico, initially planned to study a recent thread in the global tapestry that is Mexican ancestry. "It's helping us to recognize the ways that really fine-scale historical experiences and practices have left this deeply significant imprint on our genomes," says Deborah Bolnick, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Texas here. From the immigration of enslaved Filipinos to that of formerly Jewish families forbidden to travel to the colonies, hidden histories are emerging. The results, reported at a meeting here this week and in a preprint, tell stories of Latin America that have been largely forgotten or were never recorded in historical documents. Aided by sophisticated statistics and worldwide genetic databases, they can tease apart ancestry and population mixing with more nuance than ever before. Historical documents describe this cultural mixture, but now international teams of researchers are enriching our view by analyzing the genomes of people today. All these populations met and mingled for the first time in colonial Latin America. Asians, who traveled to Mexico on Spanish galleons, some by choice and some in bondage. Africans, both enslaved and free, some of whom had been among the first conquistadors. Indigenous people from around the Americas, including soldiers who had joined the Spanish cause. Este artículo está disponible en español.ĪUSTIN-If you walked the cobblestone streets and bustling markets of 16th and 17th century Mexico City, you would see people born all over the world: Spanish settlers on their way to mass at the cathedral built atop Aztec ruins.