What is Filipino?

 

 

A friend I met during the Pinoy Fiesta & Trade Show at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre last June 28 shared with me an interesting story about this Canadian whom he invited to the same event last year. After watching with quite subdued interest the song-and-dance routines of young Filipino talents on stage, and of course, the highlight of the event, the Santacruzan, a parade of beauty queens from across the ages (from Miss Little Philippines to Miss Philippines to Mrs. Philippines), his Canadian friend asked him: So, what is Filipino here?

 

Naturally my friend was surprised for he didn’t have an appropriate response to his friend’s question. This Canadian interloper, if we can call him that for being a stranger to our so-called traditional festivals, thought he would have a front-seat lesson in understanding our culture. To his amazement, he was clueless and didn’t have a faint idea of what he was watching. True enough, it had the atmosphere of an extravaganza, but emptied of the variety of cultures and ethnicities of similar festivals he had watched and participated in before, either here in Toronto or during his travels abroad.

Pinoy Fiesta & Trade Show, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, 2014.

Even the food didn’t appeal to him as very inviting. He even heard people complaining about how expensive the food was. He thought of the Mexican migas he ate while visiting the town of Tepito in Mexico. Migas was a simple dish of garlic soup thickened with sliced day-old bolillos, left-over bread baked in a stone oven, and flavoured with pork shanks, ham bones, epazote (an herb native to southern Mexico), oregano and different types of chilies. A raw egg is usually added to each plate when served. It has become a very popular dish in fondas around downtown Mexico City. As simple as the migas is, it reminded him of Mexican culture, of the succulent food and other dishes Mexicans like to eat, which he was looking to sample during the Pinoy Fiesta.

 

My friend thought of the pondahan that we have back home, but the food there would not be as great compared to what his Canadian friend had experienced in Mexico. All he could offer his friend was a taste of Max’s Chicken, but even this fried bird was not an authentic Filipino dish.

 

If this was the best the organizers of the Pinoy Fiesta & Trade Show could offer as some glimpse into Philippine culture but enough to leave a lasting imprint of our DNA, then the Philippine Canadian Charitable Foundation (PCCF) is on the wrong side of history. The PCCF, led by the first Filipino senator in the Canadian parliament and his self-promoting and public attention-starved wife, is indeed a sad example of a community organization that will never help Filipinos in Canada break the glass barrier. Not even as a vehicle for promoting Filipino unity as their own festival was conceived to rival the original Mabuhay Festival, yet another example of a poorly-conceived effort to promote Filipino culture in the diaspora.

 

Year after year, the PCCF and other like Filipino community organizations stage their annual festivals right after the celebration of Philippine Independence Day. One would think such festivals would enrich and promote Filipino culture, customs and traditions so that non-Filipinos here in Canada would appreciate our rich heritage. But every year their template for celebration of our culture has not changed. It is the same, old, and worn out variety shows which most of us have grown accustomed to from the old days of vaudeville or “bodabil” entertainment in the Philippines since the coming of the Americans.

 

The formula for these so-called community leaders is simple: invite a few entertainment personalities from back home, introduce some up-and-coming young local talents, and hold a beauty pageant show. Then gather some local businesses to exhibit their products and services in booths that will generate revenues for the organizers. Finally, invite some friendly federal members of parliament and local elected officials to drop by and endorse the celebration and don’t forget to ask them to exhort the dependable and hospitable character of Filipinos, which will guarantee them some votes during elections.

 

Somewhat lost in the din of the Pinoy Fiesta last Saturday was an exhibit of T’boli arts and crafts, like bead-based jewellery, handcrafted ladies’ bags and purses, and indigenous musical instruments such as the wood two-stringed lute called hegelung. A local arts collective in Toronto invited some members of the T’boli indigenous tribe from Lake Sebu, South Cotabato, to showcase their handiwork, the reason why they were participating in the fiesta. We were told that they also performed their native musical instruments during one of their engagements which we missed. The aesthetic beauty of the T’boli people reflected well in their arts, crafts and music. At least to us, the rowdier and more popular Santacruzan parade that went by the T’boli booth failed to quiet it down.  

T'boli arts and crafts. Click link http://vimeo.com/5784881 to view "Preserving
culture, the T'boli people."

The T’boli booth was Pinoy Fiesta’s saving grace, that in the hubbub of the festivities and despite being relegated to a very inconspicuous spot in the Metro Toronto Convention hall, it stood out as an interesting facet of the Philippines’ ancestral roots which are currently being destroyed by the market economy and foreign mining companies. They do not represent today’s image and culture of lowland Filipinos but their continuing struggle to live by their ancestral lands and indigenous culture only shows how much our native traditions have survived the inroads of time and progress.

 

This is not to suggest that we should only showcase our past. But there is something in our connection to the past that makes the present more interesting. Our historical links to our ancestral traditions make our culture more alluring not just because they are exotic to the eyes, but more so because they bring our distant past to the present, that we have our native traditions and customs even before we were colonized by the West.

This is why the celebration of our home country’s Independence Day and other so-called fiestas lacks any meaningful substance or content which our children who were born and raised abroad and non-Filipinos can understand and appreciate. Filipinos here in Toronto or most probably elsewhere in the diaspora, lack a sense of history. There is so much in our past that we should celebrate and share with the rest of the world, yet we insist on exhibiting the shallowness of our progress as a people, in rehashing the tricks of a former colonizer to keep its conquered masses in complete obeisance. Yes, still quick to gawp in the pomp and circumstance of parading beauty queens and their ladies-in-waiting. That we could only find delight in what we have become—skin-deep and no deeper—this to us seems to be the final destination in our collective journey.

 

As a people, we tend to give less importance to our past and a minor role for history in our lives as a community. Every race, or nation for that matter, is a work in progress. We would not be where we are now if not for our cultural past.

 

We have many remarkable achievements, but only individually. Our fashion designers and models are on demand, just as our song-and dance-talents, musicians and artists have been competing with the best in the business. The same goes with our athletes, our boxing champions of the world. Our children can also compete with the best students in foreign schools of higher learning.

 

Yet, as a society, we continue to lag behind. The leaders we select to run our government are some of the most inept and corrupt in the world. There is little empowerment that our chosen leaders allow the common masses, that the people in general are not harnessed in the shaping and making of public policies and programs. It is the elite that continue to determine the progress of our society, and in all probability, only what is good for them becomes the full yardstick of public and private intentions.

 

We carry this kind of mentality when we live overseas. The people we entrust to lead our communities are the mirror image of leaders at home. What is good for this few people is good for everybody, so it seems.

 

If the objective of the Pinoy Fiesta & Trade Show and other like Filipino festivals is to ensure the self-promotion of their leaders and in providing them a venue to grab the mike and hug the stage in order to satisfy their insatiable desire for attention, then probably the fault is also in our community for allowing them the opportunity. It’s also just a waste of time and newspaper space that one Filipino so-called journalist in the community devotes so much of his energy in mudslinging and destroying the personalities behind these festivals, rather than criticizing their celebrations for lack of content and historical and cultural relevance to our collective identity as Filipinos.

 

The next time your Canadian friends ask you what or where is the Filipino in our fiestas and other celebrations, tell them that the Filipino has been lost on the way here. Filipinos abroad are a lost soul, wandering in their new surroundings without a sense of history and oblivious of their origins.

Culture of progress

 

 

The writer Nick Joaquin, more popularly known as Quijano de Manila, once wrote that Filipinos as a people have a heritage of smallness. To nitpick on small things is so prevalent in our tendency to spotlight shenanigans in government, the perceived or obvious inadequacies of our leaders and their plans and policies, or even to the short fuse of a Supreme Court justice in reacting to an innocent demotion of his pay-grade, or the sad state of physical disrepair of our beloved alma mater’s buildings and facilities.

 

Not that all these things are not the least important in themselves. But lamenting on them incrementally instead of focusing on the sum total of our displeasures and frustrations also limits our ability to frame a more rational and complete redemption from these little things.  



The Philippine Flag. Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noft4od-Wcg
to listen to Filipino poet Jess Santiago sing about the social and political realities
in the Philippines.



This heritage of smallness is almost akin to our inability to see the forest preferring to pay attention to individual trees. We could easily highlight, for instance, the problem of poor people squatting on private lands but fail to empathize with the bigger problem of unemployment or homelessness. We bring to light scandals like “sex-for-flight” offers by certain consular officials to female overseas foreign workers supposedly to get them out of harm’s way, but then resort to a knee-jerk solution of exterminating by unusual means those responsible for this wrongdoing. We understand the anger and condemnation, but what has happened to due process or is this how we dispense justice nowadays?

 

If we react to everything we find not in accord with our expectations, who can daresay when this is going to end? How do we manage our anger and our furies from events that seem to violate our sense of ground rules?

 

This is not to say that we shouldn’t react. That when it starts raining, we should be thankful for the cold spell instead of fretting about flooding. How we react to frustration is significantly determined by what we think of as normal. For example, we may be frustrated that it is raining but our familiarity with showers means we are unlikely to respond with anger. Our frustrations are essentially tempered by what we understand we can expect, by our existential experience of what it is normal to hope for.

 

We’re not merely into small things but as a people, Filipinos seem to gripe a lot. There’s nothing happening around us that ever escapes our loathing. We can see evil in almost everything, a positive trait if only it is used for a correct social investigation of the many problems that bedevil our nation as a whole.

 

Is this heritage of smallness and our infinite capacity to gripe a cultural barrier to our progress and development as a society?

 

Contrast that with the voluntary self-restraint by the Japanese when Fukushima was hit by a double disaster of earthquake and tsunami. In the wake of adverse circumstances beyond their control, the Japanese showed their natural predisposition to calmness and forbearance, which is called “gaman” in Japanese culture. The Japanese seldom complain about anything which ordinary people like most of us gripe about.

 

For the Japanese, the ability to “gaman” is a sign of maturity. They learn from childhood that it’s better to suffer in silence, to be able to bear discomfort. To most of us, on the other hand, that would be a great disincentive. If we simply keep quiet, nobody will notice our predicament. We make noise hoping someone will pay attention and do something about it.

 

Perhaps we will stop complaining and becoming incensed about everything that’s happening in our society—the rains and the flooding, the traffic congestion, the “sex-for-flights scheme,” public squatting, family political dynasties, the President and his men’s obsession with favourable opinion polls, or who the President is dating, etcetera—when we cease to be so hopeful. But this is not going to happen. Being cynical and optimistic at the same time goes hand in hand. It’s our yin and yang.

 

It is like the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s goddess Fortune inscribed on the back of many Roman coins. Fortune holds a cornucopia in one hand and the rudder in the other. The cornucopia symbolizes Fortune’s power to bestow favours, and the rudder, a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies. Whether Fortune brings us luck or tribulation, Seneca in his Praemeditatio implores us to “reckon on everything, expect everything.”

 

Fatalistic as it sounds, it more or less describes who we are as a people. We tend to rely too much on the vagaries of fate. “Bahala na” as we would say in our vernacular. Or “Happen what may,” an attitude that tests the fates, that no matter how often we are besieged by natural calamities or political scandals and upheavals, as a people we will always survive and prevail.

 

Thus, whatever flaws there are in our culture, there are also countervailing forces that enable us to move on. Sometimes we belittle ourselves to the extent that we lose our faith in our natural capacities. We might not have gaman as the Japanese have, but we have the natural flexibility of the bamboo as frail as it is in enduring the winds and torrents of change.

 

The tendency to blame our culture as the drawback to our social progress is nothing new. Some economists even write off the relevance of culture at all. Others like Lawrence E. Harrison, author of Underdevelopment is a State of Mind, Who Prospers?, and co-editor, with Samuel Huntington, of Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, believes that culture is helpful in understanding economic development. In his survey of factors that identify the essential elements of cultures that promote high incomes and growth, Lawrence divides cultures into “progress-prone” and the “progress-resistant.” He explains this classification this way: “In progress-prone societies, for example, people assert ‘I can influence my destiny’. In progress-resistant societies ‘fatalism’ rules. Progress-prone societies have better economic performance.”

 

But is there really such a thing called “Universal Culture of Progress” as Lawrence would like to call it?

 

Lawrence's study suggests the existence of a universal culture of progress, the idea that there are the same economic behavior values, whatever their root, which create prosperity in widely different geographic/climate, political, institutional, and indeed cultural settings. He is so optimistic that he finds “no compelling reason why the “universal progress values” should be beyond the reach of any human society.

 

There are economists who are critical of Lawrence’s argument that culture influences the behaviors that in turn influence political, social, and economic performance. One of his detractors is James A. Robinson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, who argues on the contrary that it’s not culture that determines society’s development.

 

Responding to Lawrence with regard to why some ethnic or religious minorities do much better than majority populations in some multicultural countries, Robinson pointed out that Ghana’s Nkruma, for example, allowed ethnic minorities to prosper to counterbalance the threat of a wealthy class of Ghanian businessmen who might oppose his own political power. Nkrumah had no love of foreign capitalists but he preferred to encourage them rather than local entrepreneurs whom he wished to restrict. Thus, the Lebanese businessmen prospered and became successful not because Ghana had a “progress-prone culture, but because they received favours from politicians. Robinson also argued that this also true of Indian businessmen in Kenya under the presidency of Daniel Arap Moi and Chinese businessmen in Indonesia during the regime of President Suharto.

 

We could as well add to the list our very own successful Taipan business class. Chinese Filipino businessmen have done better than the majority of the Filipino population not simply because they are a skillful indigenous entrepreneurial class but because they have been cuddled by Filipino politicians. In turn, this Chinese mercantile class has always thrown its support to whoever controls political power.   

A Filipino community turns trash into cash. Photo by IPS Inter Press Service.

The extent of Chinese control of the Philippine local economy became the undercurrent that forced former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to abandon the NBN-ZTE project with Mainland China. It was not the reported widespread corruption that scuttled the proposed bilateral project but the opposition of the Makati Business Club, a powerful interest group in the Philippines, to the threat of growing investments from Mainland China. It was a severe lesson that reminded the Arroyo administration to go slow in opening up the economy to China’s foreign investment.

 

Whether it was a progress-prone culture that inspired the rise and prominence of the local Chinese business class or the same type of culture that hampered the influx of China’s foreign investments is not very clear. According to Lawrence, cultural factors may not provide the whole explanation, but surely they are relevant.

 

Alvin Rabushka in The New China argues that there is no adequate evidence to explain that culture plays a leading role in economic development. He writes that economic differences between countries cannot be explained by cultural differences but different economic institutions and public policies, such as whether these countries respect property rights, limit the scope for regulation, and practice free trade. According to Rabushka, “Economic freedom—not the cultural traditions of a people, or the geographic advantages of a country—leads to economic growth and development.”

 

The difficulty in Rabushka’s economic prescription is that it ignores inherent economic inequities that separate the haves from the have-nots and merely focuses on efficiency of economic institutions. A perfect regime of property rights, for instance, is only possible if ownership is universal and not based on who has access to ownership. Granting that poverty, too, is both a political and economic problem, its alleviation should be an open process and not to be trusted solely to the whims of the market and efficiency of economic institutions.

 

It depends on our economic planners to fully understand where cultural values and factors intersect with the objectives of progress, and not simply override long-established traditions for the sake of achieving development. Full employment, equalization of economic opportunities, and elimination of poverty are goals that cannot be achieved alone through the market mechanism or a purely private- or profit-oriented process.

Disconnect between old and young

Celebrating Philippine Independence Day in Toronto, or perhaps elsewhere in today’s Filipino diaspora, brings about an obvious disconnect between two main groups in our immigrant Filipino community: the older and traditional groups, led and composed by and large of the older and more established folks, on one hand, and the more engaged and activist-oriented youth, on the other. The focus and way of celebrating Philippine independence by these two groups are quite asymmetrical, although not necessarily opposed to each other. They’re not opposed in the sense that neither one aims to spoil or junk the other.

Diwa ng Kasarinlan (Spirit of Independence) 2012, an alternative celebration
by Anakbayan Toronto on July 7, 2012 at the Ryerson University Students
Union. To see more about the event, click  link to Anakbayan Toronto FB page, https://www.facebook.com/Anakbayan.Toronto



At the forefront of this group of elders is the Philippine Independence Day Celebration (PIDC), an umbrella of Filipino community organizations dedicated to the commemoration of Philippine Independence Day every year. PIDC is also holding the Mabuhay Festival and Trade Show at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on July 28. Hosting the annual Pistahan sa Toronto which is the focal point of the celebration of Independence Day is the Filipino Centre Toronto (FCT), another organization led by community elders and successful Filipino professionals.

This more traditional group—first-generation immigrants who brought the values and traditions they learned while growing up in the Philippines—focuses their celebration of Independence Day around the idea of festivals and merry-making. These festivals have their root in the native town fiesta, complete with the Santacruzan, singing and dance contests, beauty pageants, and even a parade of lechons (roasted pigs). While they usually start their celebration with the raising of the Philippine flag at the Nathan Phillips Square, this only visual and perhaps relevant connection to Independence Day is fleeting and easily drowned by the festive atmosphere that surrounds the presentation of beauty queens, the song and dance performances, and most importantly, by a gala celebration where the movers and shakers of the community are invited and honoured. By day’s end, everything about the significance of independence is only a distant memory; nothing much remembered and learned, except for a superficial recollection of the gowns and attire worn by the gala celebrants.

Even the Santacruzan, which has a deeply religious and historical meaning to Filipinos back home, is somehow scandalized by the emphasis of the organizers on the beauty queens that make up the parade. Otherwise known as “Flores de Mayo,” (Flowers of May), the Santacruzan celebrates the finding of the Cross and in many Philippine towns, this event is celebrated with praying of the rosary, offering of flowers to the Virgin Mary, sharing of homemade delicacies and treats, and welcoming the rains that will water the new crops. But in cosmopolitan Toronto, the older leaders of the Filipino diaspora have transformed it into something akin to a bacchanalian festivity, minus the drunken revelry.

On the other hand, the other group composed of young people and mostly university students, who came to Canada with their parents when they were very young or those born and bred in Canada, points their celebration of Philippine independence to a continuing struggle for national self-determination. To them, independence has not been fully achieved because the Philippines is not yet fully free from American control and influence. Protest against the traditional celebration of Philippine Independence Day runs deep in these young people’s minds as they offer an alternative form of memorial. ANAKBAYAN Toronto represents this militant group that seeks to achieve true national liberation for their motherland.

This group’s celebration of the spirit of independence, Diwa ng Kasarinlan, coincides with the founding of the Katipunan which led the Philippine revolution against colonial Spain on July 7, 1896, instead of the ceremonial independence day of June 12, 1898. Disenchantment typifies the ambience of their celebration, as they conduct workshops to discuss the history of our heroes’ struggle, particularly about the engagement of Filipino youth revolutionaries during the Spanish colonial period. Their riveting performances of songs, whether hip-hop, rap or jazz, and spoken word all invoke their collective angst toward their adopted community and the Philippine society back home. Their spare but powerful dances portray their pride in their heritage and culture and the drama of the ongoing struggle for liberation of the indigenous peoples in the Philippines. Their music not only utilizes digital technology but also traditional Filipino instruments such as the kulintang.

Set against each other, both groups’ celebrations are equally entertaining but the younger group adds a feature with a more lasting impact: not only is the presentation highly informative, it also raises the participants’ awareness of the significance of the event they are celebrating. Both utilize artistic and talented performers but the younger group features home-grown talents who are also intellectually grounded on the issues their performances harp on, so unlike the washed-up entertainers or stars from the past imported by the older group from the Philippines. Thus, while the older group’s celebration puts the accent on the superficial, the younger group focuses on relevance and substance.

Why the big disconnect?

The youth and students comprising the more activist-oriented group are all descended from immigrant parents who have likewise undergone the immigrant’s experience of displacement and loss sometime in their earlier years in Canada. Somehow the same tensions, ambiguities of desire, contradictions and struggles that typify the immigrant experience would have been expected to be transferred on the young, yet the quest of the young for their genuine identity and cultural affinity with their parents’ land of birth seems so far off. Why they would begin questioning the traditions and values that previously gave order and meaning to their immigrant parents’ lives is rather perplexing than what could be most naturally expected from immigrants’ children, particularly with Filipino children who are normally raised under strict rules of parenting.

It is quite plausible to understand that when immigrants leave one place for another, they find themselves dislocated not only in terms of space but also in terms of meaning, time, and values. Early on, they may find their past not so easily accessible and their future uncertain. Inevitably, tensions between the old world and the new build up. As immigrant parents continue to struggle in their newly adopted home, they gradually reconnect with their past by bringing in some facets of their culture that could soothe their feelings of nostalgia. But for the most part, they have become selective, allowing them to be pulled backward toward the values of the past that they deem practical, safe or convenient, such as beauty pageants or music festivals that are largely entertaining, ascribing to these festive activities a simulacra of the culture they left behind.

But the children are pulled differently, much forward into the dynamic vortex of the larger society they have become a part of. Most of the time, they abstain from participating in their parents’ celebrations of culture. After all, culture is more than the way immigrants do things, dress or eat. It is also more than art, ritual or language. It encompasses beliefs and systems of meaning that create community, dignify individual lives and make them significant. These children are looking for more than what their parents’ notion of culture can give, something more than Filipino dishes or festivals can offer. This search for identity beyond their parents’ traditional culture has created a schism between them, a search for answers that cannot be found at home.

So these children embrace an activist orientation which, to their parents, unfortunately, denotes something negative and destructive. This orientation provides them with a way of organizing their world perspective and realizing their full dignity, thanks to the freedom they have, but which now stirs them to question why people in their homeland have no access to the same type of freedom. Although militant and confrontational, these young people take the burning issues of the day seriously as distinguished from the hands-off attitude of their elders.

They would question and oppose American intervention in the affairs of their native land, or why the Philippine government continues to allow the U.S. military to conduct military exercises on Philippine soil and waters when these are obviously not to defend Filipino interests. They would demand that the U.S. stop making the terrorist wars in Mindanao as a laboratory in preparing their troops for military offensives in the Middle East and everywhere the U.S. government sends  its troops in the guise of waging a war against terror and restoring democracy. They would expose the mining practices of Canadian companies in the Philippines that harm the lives of the folks living in the mining grounds: the adverse health effects of mining operations on their environment, particularly on the water they drink, and the human rights abuses committed by paramilitary groups employed by these mining companies when people protest to seek redress for their grievances.

Cultural groups in the Philippines performed a series of street plays to commemorate
the founding of the Katipunan which led the Philippine revolution of 1896. Photo
courtesy of bulatlat.com

Not many of their elders would agree to the demands of these young people and the manner by which they show their discontent. Most of the parents reject their children’s activism and militancy, and that contradiction permeates the gaping divide between the old and the young in the Filipino diaspora in Toronto.

Perhaps, this is the easiest way to understand the schisms between immigrant parents and their children, the gaps that divide generations. However, the divide between these aforementioned older and younger groups is not simply a generational or a cultural gap. These immigrant parents left the Philippines to find a better place for their children to grow and fulfill their dreams, and some were also fed up with the socio-political and economic system they left behind. It is the great tidal pull of a better homeland that motivated these parents and, for the sake of their children, further boosted their belief that immigration was the best decision they made. But their immigrant struggles have also dulled any residue of anger and hopes they nursed before, making them seek simpler and safer entertainment forms from their culture at home, a balm for their longings and despair. Rather than venting their rage against the inequalities and discrimination they have experienced in the workplace in their adopted country, the older generation has chosen to silently seek refuge in the trappings that a materialist society can offer: abundant feasts, the garish display of clothes, possessions, and entertainment.

We should not fault the immigrant parents for their decision to come to Canada. In the same vein, however, we should also not blame their children for taking up an activist stance in trying to shape their true identity as Filipinos, as opposed to what their parents have traditionally accepted. A happy medium could be struck by reconciling our youth’s struggle for identity and their continuing aspiration for a genuinely free and independent homeland with their immigrant parents’ hopeless resignation to the old ways of the past. And the recent Diwa ng Kasarinlan 2012 has shown the way: there is room for optimism that this ideal balance is achievable.

This reconciliation can be realized faster if only Filipino immigrant parents would fully embrace the causes of their children, for the future rightfully belongs to them. And it is only in pushing and driving our children to actively engage in the larger political arena, whether here or at home, can we be assured that the future is within their reach.