I love my people and my culture, but the thing that upsets me sometimes is the confusion that Filipinos have about their identity, in that there’s an American way of viewing race. It’s not what other Filipinos usually are upset about, as in the topics of colonial mentality and all that yata yata. It’s a different aspect of it.
For example, many Filipinos often refer to certain celebrities in the Philippines as having mixed “Filipino” and Spanish blood, for example Pilita Corrales or Sarita Perez de Tagle (the Filipina actress to the upper right with green eyes). But that’s incorrect, because there’s no such thing as a Filipino race, it just doesn’t exist. If they say “she has Filipino blood”, they actually mean “she has Malay ancestry”, but just that assumption in itself is a result of American colonialism, the belief that Filipino is a race, because it’s not, it’s a nationality. The “races” that make up the Filipino nationality are Malay, European-Spanish, and Chinese (among others). Usually only Malay Filipinos are viewed as “truly Filipino”, and Filipinos of majority Spanish or Chinese descent are not called Filipino, even though technically, they are as Filipino as those with brown skin. Then comes the miseducation that those Filipinos of mixed descent are “part-Spanish, part-Filipino”because that’s not true, and that comes from the Americanization of the Philippines, because in reality, they are part-Malay, part-Spanish, and the combination is what makes them a Filipino. And that’s the way it should be.
In that sense, mestizos are not “part-Filipino, part-Spanish/European”, because there is no such thing as a Filipino race, mestizos are “part-Malay, part-Spanish/European”, and the combination are what make mestizos Filipino. I wish our people would get this correct and understand it better, because it tends to influence everything, including our people’s own self-pride and their pride in their country.
I did come to realize that it was a result of Americanization because, in the U.S., they often confuse race with nationality. But in the Spanish-speaking world, your actual racial descent has nothing to do with your nationality. A Venezuelan is of mixed Indian, African, and Spanish blood, but he is simply Venezuelan. A Peruvian can be of mixed Indian, Chinese, and Spanish blood, but he is simply Peruvian. A Colombian would not say “I’m Spanish, Indian, and African”, even though that would be his/her racial mixture, he/she would simply say “I’m Colombian”.
In the United States, people are defined by their “race”. In the Spanish-speaking world, people define themselves by their nationality. When the Philippines was less Americanized and still retained more of it’s Hispanicized roots, there was never this confusion, but it has already been Americanized, and so the viewpoints of Filipinos in many things are based on American standards that supplanted our original ideas of nationalized identity based on the original social system that the country was formed in, and that’s the problem, because it adds to the confusion.
This confusion that comes with Filipinos is they think that Filipino is a race, so when it comes to identifying themselves, they do it according to American standards (which are hardly ever correct), and they say “Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese”, when it’s really “Malay, Spanish, and Chinese” and the combination is what makes and what shapes the Filipino. “Filipino” should not only equal to “Malay”, or only refer to those with brown skin of Malay descent, but unfortunately, that’s the way it already is, but that would exclude entire sections of the Filipino population (those of mixed Spanish and Chinese descent) that have done just as much to shape the nation. Filipino should not be referred to as a race, because it’s a nationality.
A Filipino can be of pure Spanish descent, but he identifies as Filipino first, not Spanish, because that’s his nationality. A Filipino can be of pure Malay descent, but he identifies as Filipino first, not Malay, because that’s his nationality. There is no such thing as a Filipino race, unless we’re talking about a cosmic race in which three races blended into one race as is the ideology in Latin America, but I’m thinking of realism in today’s world. Magic surrealism and mysticism is a different art form (which I love).
When Filipinos hear the word mestizo, they think of light skin, pointed nose, European features, and they expect a person to look like this, or like Sarita Perez de Tagle (the Filipina actress at the top of this post):
But real mestizos in the Philippines looked (and look) like this:
Like the majority of the Filipino population. That says a lot about who the real mestizos are in the Philippines: a larger portion of the population that what is generally perceived. Add to that the confusing way in which the American encyclopedias take population censuses, and just because the statistics in an American book say one thing doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re always correct, because you have to apply in different cultural perceptions about different races/social groups that only apply in that country into the information (like the population statistics of Brazil and Latin America and in the different way that “white” is categorized than the United States.)
Let’s think about this, shall we. There’s a lot of miseducation that is still happening among our people that is affecting our national pride. Let’s be proud to be Filipino!
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