Jmd Ortega
Nov 8 · 2 min read

Totally agree with your article. Its a myth that the Spaniards didn’t teach Filipinos the language. Truth is the Spanish Royal Courts mandated that Spanish be taught to all natives to the colonized nations but the thing is there were only very few Hispanics who came to the Philippines and which is why the language never got widespread although some say 60% of Filipinos (aka Indios) at the early American era spoke Spanish with varying degrees of fluency. As for ancestry, according to NatGeo findings, the combined Southern European percentage of the many Filipino samples they gather is only 5% which means far more Filipinos have less than that. I’ve seen many Filipinos announcing their DNA test results in Youtube and blogs and almost every single time, they got zero or noise level European DNA and the one with the highest European DNA is only at 3%.

One thing that I observe is that it seems prevalent among Asians in general to want to belong to other ethnicity. I read some Asian Muslims especially Pakistanis and Indian Muslims fantasize being Arabs or Middle Easterners, some Indians especially from the North emphasize more their foreign side while in the Philippines, its a norm for every Filipino to be told about having a presumed Spanish ancestor. Its a thing being passed on from one generation to another. However the reality speaks otherwise. With the popularity of DNA testing nowadays, many Filipinos are starting to wake up from this myth.

Because of years of European colonialism, colorism is very much alive everywhere from Asia to Middle East to Africa to Latin America.

    Jmd Ortega

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