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How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (Last of 4 parts)
The last quarter of the 19th century was perhaps the most significant stage in the development of the Philippines as a nation — the moment nationalism began to flourish. It took centuries for the natives to finally unite against their colonizers. Like the sun rising in the east, spreading its golden light to signal a new day, this emerging solidarity became a portent of greater things to come — things that, in the end, never came.
The essential ingredient for national development was finally taking shape among Filipinos. The seeds of nationalism began to sprout, nourished by the influx of liberal ideas from Europe, the rise of the middle class, and the martyrdom of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora (GomBurZa) — events widely credited with fanning the flames of national unity.
It was a long and difficult road to national solidarity, made harder by a combination of factors: a geographically fragmented island nation, a people divided by dialect, and the Spaniards’ relentless use of “divide and conquer” tactics.
The Spaniards employed that tactic so effectively that they reigned for more than three hundred years. But once Filipinos began to forge a cohesive spirit that bridged their geographic divides, once they tore down the language barriers with a unified cry for freedom, the days of Spanish rule became numbered. The colonizers suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the very people they had held by the neck for so long, and were forced to retreat behind the walls of Intramuros.
But the next chapter of the Philippine story did not unfold according to the script the Filipinos had written. It unfolded the way Hollywood might have written it instead. And just as the Filipinos were ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of Spanish tyranny, the Americans called, “Cut.”
There is little doubt the revolution begun in 1896 would have finally ended Spanish rule — the Filipinos were ready to storm Intramuros, the last Spanish stronghold, needing only to march together as one. But the Americans, whom they wrongly mistook for allies in their fight for freedom, stopped them just short of the finish line.
To cut the story short: the Americans occupied the Philippines once the Spaniards withdrew, and the Filipinos were forced to fight a war against a military far more powerful and far better armed than their former colonizers had ever been.
The natives lost, and the seeds of nationalism sown by earlier generations of Filipinos were never allowed to bloom. They were forcibly uprooted and trampled by an occupying power determined not to let them take root again.
Filipino nationalism was nipped in the bud. Historians call this period the “Era of Suppressed Nationalism.” While the natives were still nursing the wounds inflicted by their former Spanish masters, the Americans began inflicting new ones.
As is well known, the justification the new colonizers offered was that the Filipinos were not yet ready for self-governance, and that leaving them to their own devices would have led to chaos.
They may have been right. Or they may have been wrong. No one will ever know for certain. But what any critical-thinking Filipino today understands is that the Americans had no right to deny the Filipinos the opportunity to determine their own fate. The natives should have been allowed to face the consequences of standing on their own feet — to raise their arms in victory against Spain, however that victory might have unfolded. It would have meant so much for the colonizer to surrender to the colonized. That would have been a profound moral victory for a people who had been enslaved and deprived of their basic rights and freedoms for so long — a genuine boost to Filipino morale. Instead, American intervention wounded Filipino pride and stunted the growth of a stronger national character.
The Americans might have looked to their own history to understand how the Filipinos felt. The American colonists themselves fought for independence from Britain in the 1700s because they believed in the inalienable rights of the individual, and that taxation by Parliament without representation violated those rights [12]. They believed that a government’s power must rest on the consent of the governed. The Filipinos, too, wanted no part of another foreign power ruling over them — they had already had enough of the Spaniards. And the Americans never had the Filipinos’ consent to remain and govern.
But there was nothing the Filipinos could do; no country stood ready to come to their aid. The Americans had France’s support in their fight for independence from Britain, and perhaps the Filipinos hoped America might do the same for them. It was wishful thinking.
The Filipinos stood alone, in a world that, at the time, functioned like a jungle — where colonial powers were the predators and weaker nations the helpless prey.
The Filipinos could not even invoke any law to challenge the legality of the American occupation. Imperialism operates by its own laws, backed by brute force; armed power allows imperial law to override international law, since the legality of imperial activity rests largely on the imperial state’s judicial system and legal experts [13]. Yet wasn’t America supposed to champion liberalism — the belief that natural rights exist independent of any culture, custom, or government, and are therefore universal and inalienable [14]?
Two faces of the same Filipino emerged from those centuries of subjugation, and both carry the fingerprints of the colonizer.
On one face: a people famous for their warmth, resilience, and instinct to hold family and neighbor close through every storm. The hospitality that welcomed strangers ashore, the bayanihan spirit that still carries a neighbor’s house on bamboo poles, the family ties that never loosened even when everything else was taken — none of this vanished under three centuries of foreign rule. If anything, colonization tempered these traits the way fire tempers steel. A people stripped of land, labor, and self-governance had little left to hold onto but each other, and so they held on tighter.
On the other face: a people who, more often than history should allow, still doubt themselves before a foreigner even speaks — who shrug at misfortune and call it destiny, who eye a neighbor from the next province with more suspicion than they ever directed at the men who colonized them both. Fatalism, regionalism, colonial mentality — these were not accidents. They were cultivated by rulers who profited from a people too divided to unite, too resigned to resist, too eager to please to ever ask why. That same regionalism, inherited rather than chosen, still makes it difficult to think and act as one nation; it resurfaces today less as province against province than as camp against camp, with loyalty to a politician often commanding more devotion than loyalty to a shared and rightful cause.
Here, then, is the uncomfortable truth this series has been circling: colonialism did not simply wound the Filipino, nor did it simply fail to break him. It did both, to the very same people, across the very same three hundred years — and the strength and the wound came from the identical source. That is the paradox at the center of Filipino character: a resilience the world admires, built atop a self-doubt the Filipino rarely admits to himself.
The history itself, painful as it is, is water under the bridge now — the Spaniards and the Americans are both long gone. What remains, and what every Filipino still carries, is the paradox laid bare above. Revisiting the hallowed pages of that history is not about relitigating old wrongs; it is about understanding what they made of us, and why we still think and act the way we do.
Filipinos need to do some rewiring. They must remove the faulty code their colonizers left behind in their system — the lines that cause them to malfunction — replace it with something better, and reboot.
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How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (3rd of 4 parts)
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)
How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (2nd of 4 parts)
Filipinos often ask, “What would the Philippines be like today had Spain never colonized the island nation? Would the Filipino character have developed the way it has now had the Spaniards not succeeded in keeping the natives in chains for more than three centuries?”
What if the Americans had honored the principle that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” [4], and decided in 1898 not to stay, allowing the Filipinos to govern themselves instead? The Americans should have known better. That very principle drove their own declaration of independence in 1776, and it is held up as the model for the right to self-determination — the same right they denied the Filipinos when they colonized the Philippines. The Americans justified their occupation by claiming the Filipinos were not ready for self-governance. But how could they have been so certain? Even so, the Filipinos would certainly have preferred to chart their own destiny as a nation, whatever the consequences. The world will never know what might have become of the Philippines had the Americans handed over the reins of government. It is not certain the Filipinos would have succeeded — but one thing is clear: the Philippines did not become a better nation because the Americans occupied it either.
It would have been a tremendous boost to Filipino pride had they been allowed to continue their war with Spain — a war they were winning — before Spanish and American strategists staged what later became known as the “Mock Battle of Manila Bay,” a battle the Americans claimed to have won. The plan was concocted to keep Manila, the nation’s capital, from falling into the hands of Filipino revolutionaries. Imagine how differently the Filipino psyche might have evolved had that victory been real and theirs. The nation’s character would have taken a very different shape. But it was not meant to be.
As it happened, the Philippines was colonized by both Spain and America, and the evolution of the Filipino psyche did not unfold as it should have had that colonization never occurred. So how did that colonization shape the Filipino character? How did Spanish cruelty and American treachery impact the evolution of Filipino values and traits?
A nation’s character is expressed through the values and traits of its people. These develop over time, shaped by the events of a nation’s life and by the environment in which its people live.
Filipinos carry both positive and negative values and traits. Among the positive are hospitality and resilience.
Filipinos are famous for their hospitality. They treat visitors, especially foreigners, with remarkable generosity, offering them the best of what they have. As hosts, Filipinos go out of their way to make guests comfortable, providing the finest amenities available. The Spaniards experienced this hospitality firsthand upon arriving on the islands and took full advantage of it. Though there were places where the natives met them with hostility, they were, on the whole, welcomed warmly.
This hospitality is sometimes mistaken for subservience. Some argue that centuries of colonization left Filipinos with a sense of inferiority, making them overly gracious toward foreigners — that they were conditioned by their former colonial masters to obey, serve, and never question. This stereotype has been reinforced by the number of Filipinos working abroad as domestic helpers.
Those who look at Filipino hospitality this way are mistaken. Warmth toward strangers and generosity toward guests were already woven into pre-colonial Filipino custom, embedded in values these people held long before any foreign flag was planted on their shores. A trait rooted in something that old cannot be reduced to a symptom of something that came centuries later. Those who insist otherwise choose to view the trait through a negative lens, mistaking a virtue that predates colonization for a wound it supposedly caused.
Filipinos are naturally caring, friendly, polite, and respectful. Their hospitality reflects genuine humanity, not subservience. They are highly relational people who form connections easily, adapt quickly to different cultures, and embrace foreigners without judgment. If the world were tested for what Howard Gardner calls “interpersonal intelligence,” Filipinos would likely rank among the highest.
This trait did not disappear with the arrival of the Spaniards — it was reinforced. The Spaniards introduced Christianity, and embracing that faith gave Filipinos still more reason to love and care for others.
Genuine concern for others comes naturally to Filipinos. Beyond domestic work, many serve abroad as doctors, nurses, caregivers, nannies, and teachers. Filipinos are not driven by ego; they can take on menial work, believing that “any necessary work that pays an honest wage carries its own honor and dignity” [5]. This is why many accept such jobs overseas. At the same time, skilled Filipino workers and professionals are sought after in many countries, and Filipino artists can be found working around the world — proof of Filipino intelligence and talent.
Filipinos are also resilient, almost unwilling to give up. Both the natural calamities that have plagued the nation since time immemorial and the painful experience of colonization have hardened them. They rise again after serious setbacks, their ingenuity and resourcefulness helping them find a way out of difficult situations, their trademark humor allowing them to laugh even through the hardest of times.
Another trait that survived colonization is close family ties. Perhaps the harsh rule of Spain and America drew Filipino families closer — in times of sorrow and desperation, during those long years of subjugation, they had nothing to rely on but each other. This trait runs deep: Filipinos maintain close bonds with relatives to nearly the fourth degree of consanguinity, and parents often allow their children to remain in the family home even after marriage.
Strong among Filipinos, too, is the spirit of “Bayanihan” — communal unity, something akin to volunteerism. It shows up in many forms, most famously in the old tradition of neighbors helping a family relocate their home — long bamboo poles slid beneath a traditional house and carried by volunteers to its new location [6]. The tradition persists even now that homes are built of wood and concrete; the spirit of Bayanihan lives on in other forms, especially during natural calamities, when Filipinos readily offer help and resources to neighbors in need. This, too, is part of the innate humanity that Christianity helped strengthen.
This same resilience and devotion to family now sustains the nation in a form the pre-colonial Filipino could never have imagined. Millions work abroad, apart from spouses and children for years at a stretch, so that money sent home might build a house, put a sibling through school, or cover a parent’s medical bills. The remittance economy that keeps much of the Philippines afloat today is not a modern invention so much as a very old loyalty finding a new outlet in a globalized world — proof that the traits colonization tested centuries ago are still doing the very same work today.
But Filipinos have negative traits as well.
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[6] http://groups.csail.mit.edu
How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (3rd of 4 Parts)
How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (1st of 4 parts)
To better appreciate who and what the Filipino is, one has to decipher the Filipino psyche and identify the factors that contributed to its formation. An in-depth analysis of the character of this people would require a thorough examination of their history and racial origins. Filipinos cannot be figured out by leaning on stereotypes or by viewing them through a supremacist lens.
Those who claim to know Filipinos simply by piecing together information from the internet are gravely mistaken. Those who form assumptions after reading a news item or two — without even checking the credibility of the source — should hold their horses.
The pre-colonial Filipino belonged to a race whose culture and gene pool were already a mix of Negrito, Indones, Malay, Arab, Hindu, and Chinese influences, a spirit shaped, for better or worse, by the geography of the islands and their climate. A genetic and cultural identity was already flourishing in this part of Southeast Asia before the Portuguese explorer Magellan and his Spanish expedition landed in Mactan in 1521. A national identity was still evolving when the Spaniards, led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, returned in 1565 to establish a stronghold in what the Europeans would later call “Las Islas Filipinas.”
Long before any galleon touched these shores, the islands were already organized into barangays — communities governed by a datu, bound by custom rather than written code, where land and harvest were often held and worked in common. Women held real standing in that world: many served as babaylan, ruling as spiritual and healing authorities in their own right, in a system where leadership did not automatically bypass them the way it would under the friars and the patriarchy they imported. Mutual aid between neighbors — the impulse that would later be called Bayanihan — was already a fact of daily life, not a virtue invented by hardship. The Filipino, in other words, arrived at the colonial encounter already possessing values worth protecting, not empty of them.
The 1989 discovery of the Laguna Copperplate proved — or affirmed what historians had long suspected — that a well-organized form of government based on customary law existed in the Philippines long before the Spaniards arrived [1]. The pre-colonial Filipino was no lost soul waiting to be rescued from the Dark Ages. If anything, it may have been the other way around: the arrival of the Europeans could just as easily have disrupted a culture already on its own path of development, for better or worse. A people was already becoming something, and that becoming veered off course the moment Western colonizers succeeded in subduing them.
For 333 years, the Filipinos lived at the mercy of the Spanish conquistadors. Scattered revolts broke out across the country to overthrow the invaders from the Iberian Peninsula, but each was crushed in turn. The most significant of these was the uprising led by Francisco Dagohoy in Bohol, which lasted more than 80 years (1744–1829). These early attempts to overthrow Spanish rule failed for three reasons: they lacked a unifying national character, were confined to limited geographic areas, and were driven by narrow, localized grievances rather than a shared national cause [2]. It was not until the 1896 revolution that Filipino resistance finally succeeded, leading to the declaration of Philippine independence in 1898.
That mercy, it must be said, was never absolute. Spain’s writ never fully reached the Muslim sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu, nor the highland peoples of the Cordillera — both of whom resisted colonization throughout, and in the case of the Moro sultanates, arguably never fully surrendered at all. What follows in this series, then, is largely the story of the lowland, Christianized Filipino — the majority experience, but not the whole of it. The character traced here is real, but it is not universal, and any honest reckoning with what colonization did to “the Filipino” should say so plainly.
But independence was short-lived.
The Americans, whom the Filipinos believed had come to help them build a republic, had other plans. They persuaded Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the revolt against Spain, that America had no interest in claiming a colony — that they had come only to free the natives from Spanish rule. In reality, the Treaty of Paris of 1898 saw Spain cede the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, worth well over half a billion dollars today — one of the terms the two powers negotiated and concluded without so much as consulting the Filipino people. The Filipinos watched, powerless, as Spain — too proud to surrender to the very “Indios” it had enslaved for centuries — surrendered instead to the Americans.
Would the Americans really have paid the Spanish that enormous sum and walked away with nothing in return? Hell no — that’s what any geopolitical expert would tell you. America, an emerging world power at the time, needed a foothold in the Pacific, and the Philippines was the ideal prize. So, contrary to the promise Aguinaldo later admitted he had naively believed, the Americans declared the Philippines a territory ceded to them by Spain.
This betrayal was a bitter blow to the Filipinos. After centuries of resisting Spanish domination, they had finally hoped to chart their own destiny as a nation — only to find themselves facing a new colonial master. The search for freedom was far from over.
When the Spaniards withdrew, the Filipinos took up arms against a far more powerful American force. It was David against Goliath — and in this telling, Goliath won. But it did not end for lack of trying: the Filipinos stood their ground and fought as fiercely as they could, gallantly resisting for three long years before losing the Philippine-American War (1899–1902).
And so the Philippines changed hands once more — from the Spanish yoke to the American.
Once in control, the Americans moved quickly to make sure no second uprising would follow the first. Laws like the Sedition Law of 1901 — which imposed death or long imprisonment on anyone who so much as advocated independence, even by peaceful means — and the Flag Law of 1907, which banned the display of the Philippine flag anywhere in the country, extinguished what little remained of the nationalist fire the revolution had lit [9].
As the Philippines transitioned from Spanish to American rule, elements of both cultures became woven into Filipino society, leaving a deep imprint on the nation’s values, traditions, and even its gene pool. The policies each colonizer enforced in turn undeniably shaped the evolution of the Filipino character.
The 20th century saw the rise of a distinct post-colonial Filipino identity — a fusion of Asian and European influences, shaped by a history of colonization and hardened by resilience in the face of frequent natural disasters. This character continues to evolve even now, blending the past with contemporary influences.
The parts that follow will trace exactly that transformation — the hospitality, resilience, and close family ties that colonization tempered rather than created; the fatalism, regionalism, and colonial mentality it left behind as open wounds; and, in the end, the paradox of a people whose greatest strength and deepest self-doubt trace back to the very same three centuries.
How did these centuries of colonization shape the Filipino character? How did Spanish cruelty and American betrayal mold the values and traits of the Filipino people? These questions remain central to understanding what it means to be Filipino today.
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[1] philippinestudies.net
[2] asianjournalusa.com
[3] http://www.thefilipinomind.com
Notes: Images used were taken from the following sites:
lifestyle.inquirer.net
angelsinasphere.wordpress.com
http://www.boundless.com
How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character (2nd of 4 Parts)
M.A.D. LIGAYA
M.A.D. L I G A Y A 