LITFILI 1: Filipino Culture

I saw a cigarette vendor walking down the road. "This Filipino is a hardworking man," I said to myself, "walking under the sun all day just to earn cents per cigarette that he sells..." It was like using a plunger in the ocean -- futile and idealistic. "Filipinos must be really hardworking," I thought.

After that I saw this guy in church and I thought, "this Filipino is a religious man, kneeling down inside the church introduced to him by a nation who enslaved his people for more than 300 years. He must be really faithful, truly a believer."

What is our true identity? Who are we as a collective?



It's a lot like seeing a white ball while wearing red sunglasses. The ball is seemingly red. If you look around, everything is suddenly a shade of red. And so what is our true color? How could we ever see? Our identity is being dictated to us by different means of influence. We see ourselves as red only because we are no longer conscious of the red glasses we are wearing.

Filipinos have a vast variety of beliefs, values, and customs. A person from Manila would generally have a different set of values and beliefs as compared to a person from, let's say, Cebu or Davao or Palawan or whatever. Just like in one of the texts we read, the father of Leon and Baldo were testing Maria. Maria is a Filipino too just like Leon and Baldo, only the difference is a few hundred miles of location. This shows how different we are from each other.

As a collective, are there really values or beliefs that could unify our diverse people who are islands apart? Hospitable? Hardworking? Religious?

In my opinion, there is no inherent collective identity. The way we are all grouped is not a matter of values or beliefs. How we have come to be is entirely political. All I am saying is that there is no absolute Filipino. To say that there is one is like saying that Tagalog is the official language. It's discriminatory. It's different in Mindanao, it's different in Ilocos, it's different in Manila, etc. We are all different. And ideally, according to some sections of our Bill of Rights, this is what makes us Filipinos -- our right to be different.