ABSTRACT In 1610, a Tagalog printer named Tomás Pinpin published a Spanish grammar in Tagalog that was intended to help natives avoid errors and misunderstandings in their interactions with Spanish colonizers. This article attempts to clarify the book's genesis and to contextualize it within the global expansion of Spanish. Pinpin exemplifies a pattern whereby Spanish was taught by colonial subjects on their own initiative and following their own criteria. At the same time, his grammar is associated with a missionary translation project in which the printers, among them Pinpin himself, were non‐Spanish. This text thus offers an opportunity to broaden understandings of early modern colonial translation and linguistic description by stressing the creations of native collaborators.