When all is said and done, what is a Filipino? How do you identify him in a lineup that
includes an Indonesian cabinet minister, a Hongkong taxi driver, an Indian guru, a Neopolitan monsignor, a banderillo from Seville, and a
Puerto-Rican bus boy from New York Hilton?
Can one do so simply from Bertillon measurements, skin coloring, shape
of nose, and the presence (or absence) of the Mongolian eyefold? Or does one have to resort to more intangible
indications, “mindset”, “spiritual profile,” or whatever is the currently
fashionable term for speculations not subject to measurement and hence more
enticing to the essayist, as being more difficult to dispute?
Allow this essayist to attempt the latter option – the line
of least resistance for one who, after four years in the hard-driving,
task-oriented West, has returned to the shade of his native mango tree to
recover in a supine position his Filipino identity.
This particular mango tree happens to be within sight and
sound of the sea; and so the first thought that comes to one is that Filipinos
were in the beginning a sea-faring people.
They had to be, for how else could they have populated an archipelago? There are, of course, those earlier
Filipinos who came dry-shod (or
barefoot) over the land-bridges of some forgotten ice age. But even they, who claimed for themselves the
proud title of Lords of the Land, will admit upon reflection that the Filipino
identity begins with the sea-faring Malay, the adventurer who named his
settlement on sheltered beach or river-mouth, as a matter of course, after his
sailing vessel, his barangay.
Barangay: the name today of a community of peasants – of
landlubbers. Which is a puzzlement. Where on earth (or sea) did the seamen
go? Before the Spaniards came, they were
still there; very much so. We have fleeting
glimpses of them trading from Batangas to Sabah to Malacca; a triangular trade,
as economists are at pains to inform us, except that these venturesome spirits
did not hesitate to protract one or the other side of the triangle. Coasting, it would seem, up to the Malay peninsula
and down the Indian subcontinent, they ran before the wind to Madagascar, where
as a result, people still speak a sort of Tagalog called Malgache.
Even after the Spaniards came the seamen survived – after a
fashion. If the Filipino Muslims of the
south were able to successfully to resist Spanish domination, it was in part
because their light swift caracaos
were more than a match for the lumbering Venetian galleys of the colonial
government’s interisland fleets. And the
historian Delgado goes on record that if the Spaniards officered the fabulous
Manila galleons, those who built them, and sailed them, and manned their guns,
and sent Dutch raiders yelping back to Batavia with their tails between their
legs, were Filipinos.
