The Chinese mestizos in the Philippines are…

The Chinese mestizos in the Philippines are of equal, if not greater, significance for subsequent political, cultural, and economic developments.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they compose about five percent of the total population of around two and a half million and are concentrated in the most developed provinces of Central Luzon and in Manila and its environs.

A much smaller number lived in the more important towns of the Visayan Islands, such as Cebu and Iloilo, and on Mindanao.

Converts to Catholicism and speakers of Filipino languages or Spanish rather than Chinese dialects, the mestizos enjoy a legal status as subjects of Spain that is denied the Chinese.

In the words of historian Edgar Vickberg, they were considered, unlike the mixed-Chinese of other Southeast Asian countries, not "a special kind of local Chinese" but ''a special kind of Filipino."