A Mexican Pacific port once welcomed samurai and ships laden with Chinese silk
For centuries Acapulco, in the rugged Mexican state of Guerrero, was where Asia met the Americas. The Manila galleon arrived yearly with silks from China and India, and in 1614 a delegation of Japanese Christians and samurai stepped ashore on a mission to Catholic Europe. Some never left, marrying into local families.
Guerrero sits in southwest Mexico, a mountainous land with few flat areas beyond small mesas and the Pacific shore. Humans sheltered in its caves about 20,000 years ago, and around 8,000 years ago people settled in the moister highlands, living on teocintle, the ancestor of maize. Cave paintings at Juxtlahuaca show Olmec influence, though some recent evidence hints that Guerrero cultures may have helped shape the Olmecs themselves. The Mezcala culture of the Balsas region later produced strikingly simple sculpture.
No large cities dominated the area; instead dozens of peoples, from Purépecha and Mixtecs to Tlapanecs and Amuzgos, ran small dominions and were known for cotton clothing. The Aztecs pushed in from 1414, but the Yopis of the Costa Chica resisted for decades, and the region eventually formed seven Aztec tributary provinces. Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, came from Ixcateopan. After 1521 the Spanish prized the coast, opening their first Pacific port at Zihuatanejo, and the silver mines of Taxco. Disease and exploitation devastated the native population, leading to the import of enslaved Africans on the Costa Chica, whose descendants remain there today.
Acapulco became New Spain's gateway to Asia. Besides luxury goods, the galleons carried thousands of enslaved Asians, who with voluntary migrants form what Mexicans call the fourth root of the nation. When Hasekura Tsunenaga's party landed on January 25, 1614, a scuffle in which a samurai stabbed a Spanish soldier was recorded by the chronicler Chimalpahin, himself of Aztec noble descent.
Independence gave the region its identity. José María Morelos convened the Congress of Anáhuac at Chilpancingo, which issued its founding manifesto on 6 November 1813, and the Mexican flag was first sewn in Iguala after the 1821 agreement that ended the war. The state was carved out in 1849 and named after Vicente Guerrero, the independence leader and second president, making it the only Mexican state named for a president. Today it has about 3.5 million people and leans heavily on tourism.
Source: Guerrero
