Filipino, Fil-Am, Filipinx? Reflections on a National Identity Crisis

If you’re a part of the Filipino (Filipinx?) community and have been on Twitter recently, as I unfortunately have, you’ve probably seen a debate flaring up between folks from the Philippines and folks in the Filipino American diaspora around the contentious term “Filipinx.” To many folks in the diaspora, “Filipinx” is a gender-neutral alternative to “Filipino” that also potentially signals progressivism and a series of political commitments to cross-diasporic solidarity; to many folks in the homeland, “Filipinx” is a colonial imposition, a grammatically dubious and phonetically unsound attempt to revise a label that is already unproblematic and ungendered, “Filipino.” As a Chinese-Filipino international student who grew up in Quezon City for the first 18 years of his life, and spent the next 4 studying in the United States, I feel like I’m uniquely positioned to talk a bit about the historical, political, and colonial tensions that underlie this seemingly straightforward argument about the “proper” way to identify. Plus, my undergraduate thesis in anthropology happens to be about how Filipino American activists in the Bay Area understand and practice Filipino nationalism, so my research serendipitously touches on many of the claims being made! So I hope you’ll indulge me as we dive a little bit into the Discourse…

Filipino or Filipinx?

A common critique levied by Filipinos in the homeland against diasporic Filipino Americans who employ or advocate for the use of Filipinx is that they are colonizers, trying to push an imperialist agenda from their privileged place in the West onto the rest of the Filipino people. There’s a lot to be sympathetic about when it comes to this point of view — the Philippines is, for all intents and purposes, a neocolony, which apart from a history of centuries of colonialism is still a political linchpin between great power interests in Southeast Asia, most recently the subject of duels between America and China for oceanic sovereignty. But there are a lot of assumptions here we need to unpack before we go ahead and RT:

This tweet assumes that “Filipino” itself is a straightforward, non-colonial term. That, however, is patently not the case. For the majority of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, “Filipino” didn’t actually refer to native inhabitants of the Philippine islands — instead, it referred to people of Spanish descent who were born in the Philippines, as contrasted with the “peninsulares”, Spaniards born in Spain who later migrated to the colonies. Native inhabitants would instead be referred to as “indio” or “infieles”, depending on their ethnic, cultural, and religious affiliations (“indio” usually referred to the more Christianized indigenous populations of Manila and central Luzon, while “infieles” usually referred to native inhabitants in the northern and southern frontiers of the islands who practiced animism or Islam). The term “Filipino” starts to resemble its contemporary usage only towards the later half of the 19th century, when it was consciously appropriated by the ilustrados, a group of mestizo (mixed-race) and indio scholars who were educated in Spain and began developing a sense of national identity distinct from simple affiliation with colonial rule. The leaders of the Propaganda Movement, folks like Graciano Lopez Jaena and Jose Rizal, began self-consciously calling themselves “Filipino” to deliberately subvert Spanish racial categories which marked “indios” as indolent and uneducated, while also crafting a new sense of loyalty and patriotism to an emergent national collective of “Filipinos.” By the time the Katipunan began their armed uprising in 1896, this novel usage of “Filipino” had gained enough currency that Andres Bonifacio would employ it in his speeches to gesture towards the independent national community he was hoping to build. There’s a bit of irony to the fact that in the Twittersphere, Filipinos in the homeland employ “Filipino” as if it were a straightforward identification unmarked by coloniality in contrast to “Filipinx,” when less than two centuries ago “Filipino” would have referred to the descendants of our Spanish conquerors, not our indigenous ancestors.

But then, one might argue in good faith, isn’t the contemporary usage of “Filipino” anticolonial, since we are drawing from its employment by our pantheon of nationalist heroes — the Propagandists and Katipuneros? And subsequently, isn’t “Filipinx” a superfluous attempt to replicate the already anti-imperialist connotations of the original term? Now, if only it were so simple — but this line of argument implies that the Propagandists and Katipuneros were themselves pure anti-imperialists, as opposed to complicated historical agents with varying relationships of resistance and complicity to colonial structures of power. The Propagandists, for example, employed “Filipino” in a way that emphasized the belonging of Christianized lowlanders while excluding indigenous animists and Muslim populations (see Paul Kramer’s “The Blood of Empire” for more on this). This meant that, even as they were crafting an alternative to Spanish imperial chauvinism, the Propagandists were redrawing colonial frontiers within the emergent Philippine nation. The Katipuneros, too, while arguably the most successful “Filipino” mass movement against the Spanish, still remained caught in regional hierarchies that sometimes transcended the ostensibly cross-regional nationalist cause. Perhaps most famously, Andres Bonifacio met his death at the hands of Emilio Aguinaldo in large part because he was coasting on his Manileño fame in the heart of Cavite, where regional leaders owed their loyalty less to an abstract notion of Philippine nationhood and more to the specific military prowess of their Caviteño general, Aguinaldo.

“Filipino” was further institutionalized as a term of national identification by President Manuel Quezon, whose famous agenda of “Filipinization” sought to increase native participation in the colonial Commonwealth government while also institutionalizing “Filipino” as a national language. However, Quezon’s “Filipinization” policy ended up drawing from the same elite stratum of landowning and wealthy politicians who had held positions under Spanish colonial rule, meaning that for all his pretensions towards indigenization, he only kept the country within the grip of the same group of power-holding caciques, just with more nationalist branding.

All this is to say that critiques of “Filipinx” as imperialist grandstanding may be missing the larger point, which is that imperialist systems of oppression, racialization, economic inequality, and cultural chauvinism remain with us in the Philippines in forms far more insidious and wide-ranging than the labels we use to refer to ourselves, and whether or not we append an “x” to those labels. “Filipino” remains contested — how relevant is this project of nationalist identification and solidarity for Lumad communities whose schools are being redtagged as communist fronts, whose leaders are being assassinated by state forces and paramilitaries, and whose attempts at cultivating and sustaining indigenous knowledge practices are being systematically repressed? How relevant is it for the Muslim populations of Mindanao, many of whom remained unconquered during the harshest periods of Spanish and American imperialism, yet who faced increasing waves of internal colonization due to Philippine state programs of resettlement which brought non-Muslim migrants from Luzon and Visayas into their territory?

Finally, marking “Filipinx” Americans as innate imperialists risks a particularly insidious form of victim blaming. Let’s take a prototypical example: a Filipino from one of the rural provinces near Metro Manila moves to the city to start a degree in nursing; after completing her training, she takes an opportunity to have a year of nursing practice in the United States on a J-1 visa; with a lack of job opportunities at home, she decides to overstay her visa and keep working as an undocumented nurse in the US; she falls in love with a fellow nurse who is also a migrant from the Philippines, and they have a child who, because of birthright citizenship, is juridically American. This child grows up, joins an activist organization of Filipinos in a community college, and sees that some of them refer to themselves as Filipinx — including folks who are trans and/or gender nonbinary. As someone questioning their gender identification themselves, they decide to adopt they/them pronouns (conveniently, they still go by “siya” in Tagalog) and try out self-labeling as Filipinx — not because Filipino isn’t gender neutral, but because they want to make an explicit political commitment by associating their exploration with an emergent category of identity. Now, this Filipinx child of immigrants hops onto Twitter, only to find that they are being called … an imperialist!

Again, there’s something sympathetic about this — Filipinos understandably recognize that being born in America is a serious form of juridical privilege. However, this view of America from the Philippines can often idealize what is, just like the Philippines, a complicated and grossly unequal society where a gender-questioning child of undocumented immigrants will not have access to the same forms of privilege as a white American man. And, as I mentioned, calling them an imperialist just because they were born in America fails to recognize that imperialism isn’t a product of being born in a particular country, but rather a series of systematic inequalities that are reinforced by a ruling class. If anything, this Filipinx’s family history positions them as a victim of imperialism— US neoliberal policymaking and resource extraction cut down on job opportunities at home for their parents, while the long history of nurse-training institutionalized by US colonial officials (see Catherine Choy’s “Empire of Care”), coupled with the Marcos regime’s labor export policies (see Robyn Rodriguez’s “Migrants for Export”), led to their parents having to leave the Philippines to become undocumented migrants in the United States, where they face xenophobia, racism, and the continuing risk of deportation. Meanwhile, there are Filipinos, born and raised in the Philippines, who are happily serving as the agents of empire — need I go into the billions in ill-gotten wealth that the Marcoses embezzled from the Filipino people while backed by the CIA, opening up the nation to foreign corporate extraction, and dividing up national industries among their cronies and political allies? All, let’s recall, while they were born and raised Filipinos who would never have identified with an x at the end of their names — unless it’s part of some cosmetic ploy to deny their crimes against humanity by rebranding as self-conscious woke folks, which I wouldn’t put beneath them at all. (“It’s Imee Marcosx, not Imee Marcos, tysm.”)

All this is to say that when we talk about imperialism, language is a powerful entryway — but fixating on the argument between two labels, Filipino and Filipinx, is a distraction. To paraphrase one of my mentors, when we fixate on whether or not there’s an x at the end of a label, we mistake language (an institutionalized system of signification propped up by complicated histories of power and conflict) for words (like what does or doesn’t make it onto dictionary.com). If we instead recognize that imperialism is far more concerning and systematic than the self-identification of diasporic Filipinxs with a relatively new political term, then we can start to realize that the true enemies of the people often couldn’t care less whether or not their speech is gender neutral, so long as they can keep the masses pliant and their pockets full.