In 1629 don Luis Castilla offered several parcels of land for sale to the Colegio de Santo Tomas in Manila. According to the protocol of the time, public calls for any opposition to the transaction were made in a major church and outside the main government building in Manila. Due to some opposition, the land was not sold until 1634.

The present article is a selection of contracts that form a dossier on the lands of Luis Castilla, whose file itself is one of many others bound in a thick volume documenting lands eventually acquired by the Colegio of Santo Tomas for its maintenance. Two land contracts in Castilla's dossier are written in baybayin, the pre-Hispanic script of the Tagalogs of Manila. Two other contracts are written in romanized Tagalog. The dossier presents hardly known and surprising glimpses of how Manila's citizens were encountering and responding to the interactions of indigenous and Hispanic norms and culture. Apart from its unique cultural aspects, Castilla's dossier was chosen for this reader because it seems rather poetic that the name of the vendor was Luis Castilla, a native, who sold land to the Castilians; hence the title of this article.