Filipino Culture: The Filipino Spaniard

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The Filipino Spaniard
The Philippines was conquered once by the Spaniards, and gained independency from Spain on June 12, 1898. “So even though we might be a South East Asia community, we are so different from any other Asians or people in the region, is like we belong somewhere else. We are mutts, they look at us like we are mutts”, the person I interviewed said. My mother in law was the interviewed person, she is the president of the FAAP of El Paso, which is a Filipino organization here in El Paso, who holds strong cultural values and traditions from the Philippines, and put it to practice, even though they are not in the Philippines.
With the interview I learned so much about symbols that represent the Filipinos cultural identity. Some …show more content…

We both agreed on patriarchy, being a really cultural grounded characteristic of the Filipinos and Latinos as well. I went ahead and ask the interviewee the accepted roles for men and women, as a patriarchal society. She described how, “Men provide for the home, and women are expected to be stay home moms, but nowadays women are single moms and work, but you know traditionally is supposed to be men-work, women-house”. Which is no different from my culture, and is amazes me more and more how not so different we are from each other. She commented how even though people in her community wanted to change that so bad, as many other communities, trying to empower more the women, it “always comes back to the way things are supposed to be”, and that unconsciously we tend to look at the means authority, even for the smallest things. Our talk was pretty critical and intense, as she mentioned to me things that I have always think but never heard somebody say, or at least think in the same way. From endless cuisine lessons, to how to clean a house and how to act like a lady, to how to find a good husband, which dad had to approve first and once approved, just “like a purchase in the store”, next was to make a beautiful and happy family where roles in the family were about to repeat itself again. And this is how from a 30 minute interview, it passed to be an hour and a half interview, because of the endless …show more content…

As surprising it is, she could of think and she seemed to think that I asked the question because maybe I went through something similar, but to her surprised I have never been part of an act of discrimination, when then she answers me that sadly, during her first years here in the United States she suffered from discrimination. She married a U.S. Marine, and came to the U.S.A., yet she still had to learn fully English and try to assimilate to the American culture, which she mentions “until this point in time I have not still fully assimilated, I believed I am like half-half”. She feels like something is missing from her, and it is not hard to guess that she feels alienated. One anecdote that I found highly interesting is that she tells how her husband was working in Indiana, and for Christmas she went down to visit him; his friends met her and started talking to him about her, making inappropriate comments of her getting her U.S. citizenship. She tells how scared she felt of keep being stared at everywhere she would go, and until she came to El Paso, where she found a community where the majority are Latinos and for her luck, where there are a lot of Filipinos as well, she felt identified and more

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