camote

The camote was a staple crop of the Aztec markets long before Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519. The Nahuatl word camotli referred to Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato, which Aztec farmers cultivated in the lake-bed gardens called chinampas around Tenochtitlan. Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar who compiled the Florentine Codex in the 1570s, documented many varieties of camotli, each with its own name and market price. The plant itself had arrived from South America centuries earlier; the Aztecs inherited both the crop and the habit of naming it carefully.

Spanish soldiers and missionaries absorbed the Nahuatl word because they had no Castilian alternative. Batata, borrowed from the Taíno language of the Caribbean, existed in Spanish, but in New Spain the Nahuatl term dominated local trade. By the 1550s, colonial documents in Mexico City used camote in household accounts alongside chili and cacao, two other Nahuatl words on the same outward path. The word was about to travel further than its makers imagined.

The Manila Galleon trade route, opened in 1565 between Acapulco and Manila, connected New Spain to the Philippines in a crossing that lasted months and ran until 1815. Ships carried silver west and returned with Chinese silk and porcelain, but seeds and vocabulary made the trip as well. The camote reached the Philippines sometime in the late sixteenth century, and Filipino farmers adopted it quickly. The Tagalog spelling shifted to kamote, following Filipino phonology, and the word settled permanently into the language.

Today camote and kamote mark a dividing line on any map of Spanish or Filipino influence. In Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru, camote is the standard term for sweet potato. In the Philippines, kamote has acquired slang meanings: kamote driver is street slang for a reckless motorist, and anak ng kamote is a mild oath. The plant traveled further than its name; the name has outlasted every empire that carried it.