By Stephen Acabado, University of California, Los Angeles
Bottles of tequila now command premium prices in trendy bars. On Instagram, celebrity-backed brands of the agave-based Mexican spirit jostle for attention. And debates over cultural appropriation and agave sustainability swirl alongside booming tourism in Jalisco, the western Mexican state that serves as the world’s tequila distillation hub.
But behind the spirit’s flash of marketing and growing popularity lies a rarely asked question: Where did the knowledge to distill agave come from in the first place?
In recent years, scholars studying how Indigenous communities responded to colonialism and global trade networks have begun to look more closely at the Pacific world. One key focus is the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route, which linked Asia and the Americas for 250 years, from 1565 to 1815.
After Spain colonized the Philippines in 1565, Spanish galleons—towering, multidecked sailing ships—carried Chinese silk and Mexican silver across the ocean. But far more than goods travelled aboard those ships. They moved people, ideas, and technologies.
Among them was the craft of distillation.
This overlooked connection may help explain how distilled agave spirits such as tequila came into being. While tequila is unmistakably a Mexican creation, the techniques used to produce it may owe something to Filipino sailors, who brought with them deep knowledge of transforming coconut sap into a potent spirit known as lambanog.
Three competing theories
For centuries, the rise of tequila has been credited to the Spanish. After the conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, colonizers introduced alembic stills, which are based on Moorish and Arabic technology. Unlike simple boiling, distillation requires managing heat and capturing purified vapour. These stills represented a major technological leap, allowing people to transform fermented drinks into distilled spirits.
Agave, long used to make the fermented drink pulque, soon became the base for something new: tequila and mezcal.
Colonial records, including the “Relaciones Geográficas”, a massive data-gathering project initiated by the Spanish Crown in the late 16th century, describe local Mesoamerican communities learning distillation from Spanish settlers. This version is well documented. But it assumes that technology moved in only one direction, from Europe to the Americas.
A second idea suggests that Mesoamerican communities already had some understanding of vapour condensation. Archaeologists have found ceramic vessels in western Mexico that may have been used to capture steam. While distillation requires additional steps, this prior knowledge may have primed Indigenous groups to more readily adopt new techniques.
As Mexican ethnobotanists Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín and Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal have argued, “The adoption of distillation was likely not simply imposed, but creatively adapted to local knowledge systems.”
A third perspective, which other researchers and I are exploring, traces a potential Filipino influence. The galleon trade brought thousands of Filipino sailors and laborers to Mexico, particularly along the Pacific coast. In places such as Guerrero, Colima and Jalisco, Filipino migrants introduced methods for fermenting and distilling coconut sap into lambanog, the coconut-based spirit.
The stills they used, sometimes called Mongolian stills, were built with clay and bamboo and included a condensation bowl. Historian Pablo Guzman-Rivas has noted that these stills more closely resemble the earliest Mexican agave distillation setups than European alembics. He has also documented oral traditions in some coastal Mexican communities to link local distillation practices to their Filipino ancestors.
Beyond the bottle
Filipino influence extends beyond the distilling pot.
In Colima and other Pacific port towns, traces of the Manila galleon trade ripple through daily life—in kitchens, cantinas and even in architecture. The word “palapa”, used in Mexico and Central America today to describe rustic thatched roofs, is exactly the same as the term for coconut fronds that’s primarily used in the Bicol Region of the Philippines.
Filipino migrants in Mexico also shared knowledge of boatbuilding, fermentation and food preservation. Coconut vinegar, fish sauce and palm sugar-based condiments became part of Mexican cuisine. One of the most enduring legacies is tuba, the fermented coconut sap still popular in coastal areas of the Mexican state of Guerrero, where Filipino sailors once settled. Known locally by the same name, tuba is sold in markets and along roadsides, often enjoyed as a refreshing drink or as a cooking ingredient.
Exchange moved both ways. Filipino vessels carried corn, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and cacao back across the Pacific, reshaping food in the Philippines. These exchanges took place under the shadow of colonialism and forced labour, but their legacies endure in language, in taste, and even in the roofs over people’s heads.
Technical knowledge rarely travels through official channels alone. It moves with cooks in ship galleys, with carpenters below deck, with labourers who desert ships to settle in unfamiliar ports. Sometimes it was a way to build a roof or preserve a flavour. Other times, it was a method for turning a fermented plant into a spirit that could keep for long voyages. And by the early 1600s, new types of distilled agave spirits were being made in Mexico.
Tequila is unmistakably a product of Mexico. But it is also a product of movement. Whether Filipino migrants directly introduced distillation methods or whether they emerged from a mix of Indigenous experimentation and European tools, every time you sip tequila, you’re tasting an echo of those long ocean crossings from many centuries ago.
Stephen Acabado is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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