Filipinos are not perfect — far from it. But is there any race or group of people anywhere in the world who could claim to be? No race is without blemish. All people, from every nation, carry negative tendencies alongside their virtues — some, perhaps, worse than those of Filipinos. There is no shame in admitting that one’s race is imperfect, and no reason to deny or hide the shortcomings of a nation and its people.

When something goes wrong, it isn’t accurate to say “only in the Philippines,” because far worse happens elsewhere in the world.

Filipinos, almost by habit, tend to stress their own shortcomings and find fault in their behavior. Some even compare themselves unfavorably to Westerners, judging themselves by Western standards [7]. Perhaps, somewhere in their subconscious, they have not fully shaken off the legacy of having once been dominated by fair-skinned colonizers.

These Southeast Asian people are well aware of the negative traits they carry. They do not sweep their imperfections under the rug. Some of these traits are minor, even petty, but others are serious enough to be considered harmful to national development — and may help explain why the country continues to lag in socio-economic performance.

What people unfamiliar with Filipino history often fail to understand is that many, if not most, of these negative traits developed as a direct result of the painful experiences endured during the colonial period.

Self-deprecation, fatalism, regionalism, colonial mentality — on the surface, these look like four unrelated tendencies. They are not. Each is a different face of the same wound: centuries of being told, in ways both subtle and violent, that another people’s judgment mattered more than one’s own. Trace any of them far enough back, and they lead to the same place.

A fair skeptic might object here: are these truly colonial wounds, or simply the ordinary texture of agrarian, deeply religious societies anywhere in Southeast Asia — traits one might find in Thailand or Vietnam, nations Spain and America never touched? The objection deserves an answer, not a dismissal. Some of what looks colonial may well be regional or agrarian in origin rather than colonial at all. But regionalism of this particular kind — this specific, engineered mistrust between Filipinos of different provinces — has a documented cause with a name and a date, not a vague cultural explanation. Colonial mentality, too, cannot exist without a colonizer to measure oneself against by definition. Where a trait has a specific colonial mechanism behind it, as with these two, the case is strong. Where it does not, honesty requires admitting that colonization may be only one thread among several, not the whole of the explanation.

Filipinos are fatalistic. They believe that whatever happens, happens because of fate — that events unfold inevitably, set in motion from the beginning of time, following a course from which there is no deviation.

Having been Christianized by the Spaniards, Filipinos developed a strong faith in God — a positive trait in itself. But they also absorbed, almost uncritically, the doctrine of predestination: the belief that God exercises total control over the world and has freely and unchangeably ordained everything that comes to pass [8]. For many Filipinos, whatever happens is simply God’s will. If a person is destined to succeed, they believe, the stars will align and he will become exactly what the Supreme Being intended.

This belief sometimes leads Filipinos to work only half-heartedly, reasoning that no amount of effort will matter unless success is already written in the stars — what they call “guhit ng palad,” or destiny. When something good happens, they credit luck (“swerte”); when misfortune strikes, they blame bad luck (“malas”), shrug, and accept it as fate. It is God’s will, they say, that allows both good and bad to happen.

Their experiences under colonization deepened this fatalism. During the Spanish and American periods, Filipinos learned that no matter how hard they worked, they could go only as far as their colonizers allowed, and could keep only what their conquerors permitted — and more often than not, the fruits of their labor were simply taken from them. Out of this grew the attitude of “bahala na” — come what may. They learned to plunge into uncertain endeavors, fingers crossed, trusting that “God will see them through” (“May awa ang Diyos”).

And why is regionalism so strong among Filipinos? Why this fierce loyalty to one’s home region? Why, even abroad, do they gravitate toward others who speak their language and eat their food? Why the lingering distrust between people from different parts of the country?

Two commonly cited reasons are the Philippines’ fragmented geography — a nation of scattered islands — and its many distinct languages. Both may be true, but there is a more compelling explanation for why regionalism became embedded in the Filipino character.

Both the Spaniards and the Americans needed policies that would guarantee the longevity of their rule. The colonizers had to find ways to contain the colonized, keep them at bay, and prevent them from uniting to drive out their rulers.

Because the Philippines is a fragmented archipelago of thousands of islands, the Spaniards used this geography to their advantage, tightening their grip on the natives. It made their “divide and rule” tactics far easier to execute. They restricted movement between provinces and regions specifically to prevent unity from taking root.

This control was not exercised through a single travel-ban law, but through an interlocking system anchored in the cédula personal [9] — a residence tax certificate that every native had to carry and that functioned as a de facto internal passport; without it, a person could be flagged as indocumentado and penalized. This was reinforced by the earlier reducción policy, which resettled scattered communities into centralized pueblos clustered around a church, a condition known as living bajo la campana, or “under the bell,” making the population easier to monitor. On-the-ground enforcement fell to local intermediaries such as the cabeza de barangay and the principalía, who tracked residents for tribute and forced labor under the polo y servicio system. Together, these mechanisms formed the true instrument of movement control — less a single law than a web of taxation, resettlement, and local surveillance designed to keep the population fragmented.

This explains much of the animosity and mistrust that still lingers between Filipinos from different regions. By preventing natives from moving freely and forming strong ties across regions, while simultaneously turning them against one another, the Spaniards ensured that any threat to their rule would collapse from within.

When uprisings broke out in one province or region, Spanish authorities often enlisted soldiers from other regions to help crush the rebellion — effectively making natives fight one another while the colonizers watched safely from a distance, like Romans enjoying the spectacle of gladiators cutting each other down.

This engineered fragmentation outlived Spanish rule. Where the colonizer once directed native loyalty toward local proxies rather than a shared identity, that same instinct — attaching loyalty to a person rather than a nation — still shapes how many Filipinos relate to their leaders today. Support for a politician often hardens into identity rather than policy preference, with rival camps treated less as fellow citizens who disagree and more as enemies to be defeated. The lines have moved from region against region to camp against camp, but the underlying pattern remains the same: identity built through opposition, and loyalty measured by hostility toward those who follow someone else.

Politicians have learned to work within this inherited pattern rather than against it. Just as the Spaniards found a divided population easier to govern than a unified one, political leaders often find it more effective to cultivate personal loyalty than to build coalitions around shared principles. The result is a citizenry no longer separated by seas and mountains, but by invisible borders of allegiance — serving the same old purpose of

Having been colonized by both Spain and America, it was almost inevitable that Filipinos would develop what the historian Renato Constantino famously called a “colonial mentality” — the tendency of a colonized people to see themselves, their culture, and their capabilities through the eyes of their colonizer, and to come away finding themselves lacking by comparison [10]. They resisted, staging uprisings again and again, but eventually succumbed to the superior force of the Westerners. With no real choice, they accepted their colonizers and absorbed their cultures — grudgingly following everything imposed on them, from ideas to manners to food. In trying either to impress their colonial masters or avoid their wrath, the Filipino began to copy their ways, think their thoughts, eat their food, and wear their clothes. This is how the enduring Filipino colonial mentality took root. Over the years, natives came to prefer what the colonizers produced over their own — a pattern still visible today.

That preference shows up in ways both plain and painful. It is there on the shelves of skin-whitening products marketed to a people already brown by nature and by sun. It is there in the quiet assumption that a foreign brand, a foreign degree, or a foreign accent must be better than a local one, simply for being foreign. It is there, too, in the shame some Filipinos feel toward their own regional accent or provincial roots when standing before someone speaking polished English. None of this happened by accident. It was cultivated, generation after generation, until the natives began to police themselves — no longer needing a colonizer standing over them to feel smaller than they were.

Yet those years under Spanish and American rule produced two extremes: fondness for the colonizers on one hand, and deep-seated resentment on the other.

The primary objective of colonization is the subjugation of both a people and their land — achieved either through the colonizers’ physical force (raids, seizure of labor and resources, imprisonment, targeted killing) or through the dismantling of the native population’s cultural patterns [11]. The colonizers of the Philippines did exactly this to its people and its land.

Are these reasons enough to explain why many Filipinos resent their former colonizers? Those who truly know their history carry no trace of colonial mentality. They understand that the Filipino people deserved the right to determine their own fate as a nation and to chart their own destiny.

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[7] http://www.crvp.org/book/series03/iii-7/chapter_v.htm

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_(Calvinism)

[9] Constantino, R., & Constantino, L. R. (1998). The Philippines: A past revisited. Renato Constantino.

[10] Renato Constantino, “The Miseducation of the Filipino” (1966)

[11] http://theanarchistlibrary.org

How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (last of 4 parts)