FilAms Don't Need to Go Home

“When I get old, I want to go back and be surrounded by my family.” - said practically every 2nd Gen immigrant’s parents.

Many first-generation Filipinos dream of the pursuit of happiness abroad. In fact, it is a national policy (see Republic Act 11641). That isn’t the complete dream though. The other half of that dream is to return to the Philippines triumphantly and cruise into their later years. The same can’t necessarily be said about Filipino-Americans who are born and raised in the US. Their dream isn’t to go “home” to the Philippines because not only is it foreign in so many ways, but it really isn’t home. Yet, at the same time, thanks to the model minority myth and the impulse to integrate and not be noticed, a FilAm culture has just barely formed its own identity that it badly needs and deserves.

Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence in Filipino cultural interest among FilAms and when I first moved to Los Angeles I was sort of amused by the obsession with Ube (purple yam), Jollibee and Lumpia (fried Filipino spring rolls). I didn’t give it much thought because unlike other FilAms, I wasn’t born in the US and spent most of my formative years in countries other than my parents. Wherever we moved to, there would be a Filipino community made up of people who had never stepped foot in the United States. Regardless of which country we moved to, my mother made sure that our culture was fully embedded into our lives.

In retrospect, I enjoyed a kind of privilege. The pressure to assimilate (to survive let along succeed) wasn’t part of my formative years the way it was for many FilAms whose parents felt they had to hide their culture believing that they were protecting their children’s future. My father worked for the Swiss government, and yet we were free to be Filipino in ways that many first-generation FilAms in the US couldn't be.

So, I didn’t get the obsession with all the trappings of our culture that my generation of FilAms was stricken by, but then I realized that they are starved for their own culture. I recognized it pretty quickly because I too have cherry-picked from my cultures to put together a mosaic of belonging. When you are multi-racial or multi-cultural, one size cannot fit all. Not every cultural inheritance or historical trauma will hit the same way as those who are inherently mono-cultural.

I believe we are in the fragile space where FilAm culture is testing out what does and doesn’t fit. It’s critical that we keep promoting our root culture but in the process it’s even more important that we look ahead at establishing a new one that doesn’t come with the things that haunt our parents. I’m talking about the inheritances colonialism and white supremacy left with the generations before ours: imposed religious rigidity, toxic masculinity, outdated gender roles, and the systemic patterns of cronyism and nepotism. The list is long but so are the possibilities of what we choose to build. I think this is especially urgent for those of us who tell stories through our creative practices.

I speak with many FilAm filmmakers, and inevitably one of them will say that they want to go back to the islands and tell a story about the Philippines. For a long time, I was always afraid to ask - WHY? Lav Diaz, Kidlat Tahimik, Rafael Manuel, and many more, are already telling their stories in their own languages, from their own vantage points. Our obligation as storytellers isn’t to tell their story. Our. obligation is to tell the story of our relationship to the Philippines and Filipino culture. That’s our conflict. That’s our trauma. That is the dramatic narrative that will build our own subculture.

To be clear, I am not making the argument against filming in the Philippines, making political commentary or even telling a historical story. Everyone is free to tell the story they need to tell. I am suggesting, we approach it with the tension and conflict that informs our perspective on the relationship we have with the country or culture. Otherwise, borrowing from Audre Lorde, we’re just backseat driving from inside the colonial master’s house

FilAms don’t need to go home, but we do need to keep building the one we’re building here.