A Chinese professor at the University of Massachusetts may have the explanation on how the monicker "intsik," a name referring to a Chinese person in the Philippines, came to be.
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| PH Chinatown: Filipino-Chinese community celebrates the Chinese New Year in downtown Manila. |
Richard Chu, a Filipino scholar who lives in the United States and an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts wrote in his book “Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity and Culture, 1860s-1930s,” about the origin of the word, "INTSIK."
Intsik is a Tagalog word, which sounds like the Hokkien word “in-chek” (his uncle), that was used to introduce a Chinese newcomer, he said.
Chu wrote that he found the earliest references to Intsik in the 19th century “Manual del Cabeza de Barangay (Manual of Village Leaders in Manila),” written by Rafael Moreno y Diez in 1874.
The same manual, however, also used “Sangley” (merchant travelers), the Spanish reference to the Chinese.
When the Spaniards first came to Manila in 1570, Chu wrote, they encountered a Chinese settlement composed of 150 men, women and children.
Most of the Chinese families in the Philippines, including Filipinos of Chinese descent, trace their roots to Fujian province, he said.
The Chinese, Chu wrote, traded with the precolonial Filipinos, yet Chinese sea merchants found a profitable niche when the Spanish colonial government opened the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade in 1571.
But Spain soon restricted Chinese migration to the Philippines when their numbers grew, although Spain eventually relaxed its immigration laws due to the colonial government’s extensive requirements for cheap labor, which the period’s Chinese supplied.
Chu said the Spanish government’s prejudice against the Chinese appeared to have been ignited by various issues, beginning with the Chinese “heathen ways” that offended the colonizer whose chief mandate was to convert the natives to Christianity.
Spain’s response was to classify the Chinese apart from the “Indio” (natives), and Sangley became a derogatory term.
Since then, minus the word "Sangley," early Filipinos began to call the Chinese as "intsik."
A number of Filipinos have Chinese ancestors including the late President Corazon Aquino who was a member of the influential Chinese-Filipino Cojuangco clan, the late Cardinal Jaime Sin and business tycoons Lucio Tan, John Gokongwei and Henry Sy.--Excerpt from Inquirer News