Hyphenated

THERE IS no hyphen in “Filipino American.” It’s not solely a matter of punctuation but also of ideology. The majority-sanctioned assumption in the United States (US) is that everyone regardless of origin who’s permanently resident in or a citizen of that country is an American.

While no one can ignore one’s racial roots, these do not define “American-ness”, which historically has been identified with the norms of the white majority—e.g., with the capacity to speak English, familiarity with Anglo-Saxon culture,  a belief in the US as “God’s own country” and therefore its right to global supremacy, the superiority of “American civilization” and the evangelical commitment to recreate it across the planet, etc., etc. Like Filipino Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans, among others, are supposedly not defined by the languages they speak (or used to speak), or by their traditions and cultural roots, but by the mandates of “Whiteness,” which incidentally has become a special field of  multi-disciplinary study in the US.

In contrast to “Filipino American,” “Filipino-Japanese” is hyphenated, as is “Filipino-Chinese,” “Filipino-Italian,” etc., which again is not a mere matter of punctuation, for behind it lurks the assumption, usually unspoken, that despite one’s mixed parentage, which is often the basis for the hyphenation, or one’s parents’ change in citizenship, one is still both Filipino as well as Japanese or Chinese or Italian. The hyphenated Filipino is thus the bearer of the cultures, traditions and history of the countries from which his parents sprang. He or she is almost literally everywhere, as a result of the emigration driven since the early 1900s (Filipino plantation workers left for Hawaii in 1906) by the search for jobs and a better future, or, in not a few instances, for the order and stability the Philippines so sorely lacks.

Among the hyphenated,  however, the meaning of  “Filipino-ness”  has varied widely, from the merely gustatory and external—for example, a preference for adobo in one’s menu and wearing a barong or terno; to the anthropological—the  search for meaning through one’s roots;  to the political—involvement in political causes in the mother country of one or both of one’s parents.

Inevitable that some of the progeny of the Filipinos who have been leaving the country in droves  since the export of Filipino labor became unofficial policy in the 1970s and Filipinos became the fastest growing Asian community in a number of countries including the US should end up, though only temporarily, back in the country of origin of, if not both their parents, of at least one of their parents. Among these “returnees” in recent times have been rock stars, mixed martial arts fighters, basketball players, and college students. Some of the members of the Philippine National Football Team, popularly known as the Azkals (from “Calle Azul,” or Blue Street, but locally assumed to be from  “Askal,” or Street Dog, which itself acknowledges the multi- or bi-racial sources of some of its members)  are among  the most visible of these Filipino returnees.

If their return and together with it, their high visibility, has been inevitable,  so is some of these Azkals’ obviously bi-racial origins’ eventually provoking  responses redolent with racial overtones.

Usually reserved for colored and non-white folk (for example the Chinese, Indians, African Americans) Filipino racism is among the odd offspring of the colonial experience. Besides voting Republican, many Filipinos in the US, for example, stereotype blacks, in what social psychologists say is an effort to compensate for feelings of racial inferiority towards whites, to whom they must prove their “whiteness” by separating themselves from other colored folk.   The stereotypes are even more pronounced in the Philippines itself, where students from Africa, for example, complain about being subjected to racial slurs, usually by ordinary folk including their fellow students in the schools they attend.

The other side of this racist coin is the affirmation that being Filipino puts one in a superior category, in one more demonstration of over-compensation for the deep-seated but usually publicly unacknowledged suspicion that there must be something wrong with us, given our failure to join the developed countries of Southeast Asia, and the country’s continuing slide into poverty.

GMA-7 TV’s Arnold Clavio defined being Filipino in his recent on-the-air rant against the Azkals in terms of being “kayumanggi,” or brown-skinned,  with Clavio implicitly contending that for the fairness of their skins, the bi-racial members of the team, two of whom have been accused of sexual harassment, were only pretending to be Filipino.

And yet being Filipino is hardly so determined, millions of them whether at home or abroad being multi-hued as well as multi-cultural. Among those known as Filipino Americans in the US, for example, are Filipinos of Chinese, Japanese,  (Asian) Indian, and Spanish origins, among others.

The reality is that centuries of interaction with other countries have changed the definition of “Filipino-ness” from that of “being brown,” which served during less cosmopolitan and more parochial times, to something far more complex. Brownness is in the first place hardly uniquely Filipino, that attribute being shared across the planet among many races.

Though its bases are historical and unalterable, “Filipino-ness” is a continuing process, a work in progress shaped by, among other factors, the Filipino interface with the many cultures and nations all over the planet.

It’s a truth the Philippine media must recognize and understand, but usually don’t, despite their lip service to the “global Filipino,” and even as they celebrate the triumphs of hyphenated Filipinos in beauty contests, or in theater, academia, music, film, business, medicine and the sciences in their countries of residence or citizenship abroad.

The meaning of “Filipino-ness” lies elsewhere, not in skin color. Perhaps it lies in the  commitment to the people of this country some of the hyphenated and non-hyphenated have expressed, or in the determination to contribute to it one’s capacities and talents in whatever field. Certainly part of that commitment is playing for the national football team of the country where a parent or both parents were born, or where they claim their origins.