Musings on the Filipino Identity

1763 Words8 Pages
Skeptical Musings on the Filipino Identity Michael Anthony “Aoux” C. Santos The “Filipino” as a term referring to an identity that would cross cultural and regional boundaries and history can only be construed from a nominal vantage point. It does not necessarily represent an overwhelming affinity of persons identified by the label through a binding sense of coherent oneness but it is only used to refer to “citizens” of a nation—the Philippines. A national identity, engendering a rooted sense of belonging, cannot be merely legislated and imposed in a manner of artificial ascription of naming and baptizing a child. The catalyst for a “created identity” is the experience of the people themselves as they evolve through history, and a hundred years of being a “sovereign” nation will not foster a collective consciousness that has been colonized for centuries. We are only forging steps in creating our own sense of being as a people of this country, we are not yet what we rhetorically purport to be—“Filipinos” in its fullest sense. This skepticism on the nation’s identity is rooted on the following premises: first, the absence of one language that would historically evolve and entirely represent our history as a “people:” and, secondly, related to the entire skeptical assumption, is the geographic nuance that we are in. In the broad sense, in connection to the latter account, our situation made it possible for us to evolve different cultures and linguistic variations that completely created variations of cultural traditions, and this, in turn, formed hardened ethnolinguistic identities that created “group identities” that are linked together by their own history and linguistic representation. In the narrower sense, a “group identity” primarily comes first in the facet of identity creation and affirmation before a citizen formally assumes the
Open Document