Asian Latin Americans or Latinasians are Latin Americans of Asian descent. Asian immigrants to Latin America have largely been from East Asia or West Asia. Historically, Asians in Latin America have a centuries-long history in the region, starting with Filipinos in the 16th century. The peak of Asian immigration occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. There are currently more than four million Asian Latin Americans, nearly 1% of Latin America's population. Chinese, Japanese and the Lebanese are the largest Asian ancestries; other major ethnic groups include Syrians, Indians, Koreans and Filipinos. Brazil is home to the largest population of East Asian descent, estimated at 2.08 million. The country is also home is a large percentage of West Asian descendants. With as much as 5% of their population having some degree of Chinese ancestry, Peru has the highest ratio of any country for East Asian descent. Though the most recent official census, which relied on self-identification, gave a much lower percentage. There has been notable emigration from these communities in recent decades, so that there are now hundreds of thousands of people of Asian Latin American origin in both Japan and the United States. History The first Asian Latin Americans were Filipinos who made their way to Latin America (primarily to Cuba and Mexico and secondarily to Colombia, Panama and Peru) in the 16th century, as slaves, crew members, and prisoners during the Spanish colonial rule of the Philippines through the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with its capital in Mexico City. For two and a half centuries (between 1565 and 1815) many Filipinos and Chinese sailed on the Manila-Acapulco Galleons, assisting in the Spanish Empire's monopoly in trade. Some of these sailors never returned to the Philippines and many of their descendants can be found in small communities around Baja California, Sonora, Mexico City, Peru and others, thus making Filipinos the oldest Asian ethnic group in Latin America. While South Asians had been present in various forms in Latin America for centuries by the 1800s, it was in this century that the flow into the region spiked dramatically. This rapid influx of hundreds of thousands of mainly male South Asians was due to the need for indentured servants. This is largely tied to the abolition of black slavery in the Caribbean colonies in 1834. Without the promise of free labor and a hostile working class on their hands, the Dutch