 Their colonial mixed descendants, known as the Mestizos de Sangley, would eventually form the bulk of the middle-class elite in Spanish colonial Philippines.The emergence of the Mestizo class would later rise to the noble Principalia class, which later carried over and fueled the elite ruling classes of the American era and later sovereign Philippines.Since the 1860s, most Chinese immigrants of the contemporary Chinese Filipinos have come from Fujian and thus form the bulk of the contemporary mixed and unmixed Chinese Filipinos and Filipinos of partial Chinese ancestry.