00:00Mexico's privileged geographical opposition made it the land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the 16th century,
00:07which allowed peoples from Mesoamerica, Europe, Africa and Asia to mix over the centuries.
00:13This and other implications of the first global culture are detailed in the exhibition
00:18We are Pacific, the world that emerged from the tropics.
00:22Antonio Aranda takes us on a tour of this exhibition on the following report.
00:27The Nao of China is a myth.
00:31What connected Mexico with Asia for almost 300 years was the Acapulco Manila galleon, says this historian.
00:39When we talk about the Nao of China, it is actually a misconception because what arrived here was the galleon.
00:46But what arrived here was precisely the kingdom of Manila, which was the only one that could trade with New Spain.
00:52But from Manila, other products arrived from Canton, from India.
00:58So everything also arrived from China.
01:01And then the misconception arose that if everything from Asia was Chinese, then it arrived from China.
01:06Veronica Herrera, researcher at the San Ildefonso Museum, which hosts the exhibition We are Pacific, explains that the Mexico-Manila route fertilized intercontinental mixed racing.
01:20When the galleon arrived and the first were held, once a year they arrived and transformed the entire city.
01:27The Marques, the Parianes and other types of merchants settled there.
01:30When we talk about the galleon, we think about how good arrived and that's it.
01:34But people come too.
01:35So when we talk about this crew, people arrived, sailors arrived, there are around a thousand of them.
01:39And many arrive here and settle down, they no longer want to return to the Philippines.
01:46The exhibition consists of 300 original pieces from national and international collections that allow us to reconstruct the dimension of political, commercial, social and spiritual relations between Mexico and Asia.
02:01The distance between Acapulco and Manila is more than 14,300 kilometers.
02:06Despite this, over the last 500 years, the Pacific Ocean has served to unite Mexico with Asia, according to the expert.
02:15Maybe we no longer have this galleon first, but we still have products, we still consume Asian culture.
02:28And this culture, how we deal with food, with culture, with products, it is actually telling us about a whole memory of a whole past.
02:35And this exhibition help us understand it.
02:38The Mexico-Manila route is considered by historians to be the first global trade connection because it provided a stable and continuous link between Europe, Asia and America, using Mexican silver as an international currency.
02:54The Acapulco-Manila galleon stopped sailing the Pacific Ocean more than 300 years ago, but its legacy, the cultural and economic ties that unite Mexico with Asia, remain strong and grow every day.
03:07Antonio Aranda Telesur, Ciudad de México.
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