#filipinx vs filipino

joshualunacreations:

(Please don’t repost or edit my work. Reblogs are always appreciated)

Being artistic paid off in art school, but it didn’t help me do well in high school, where I usually doodled and dissociated—especially in Spanish class. I joke that the spirit of Lapu-Lapu was protecting me from being recolonized.

In class—which was taught in English—I was given a Spanish first name (Josué) to replace my Biblical birth name, which conveniently matched my Spanish surname “given” to my ancestors. So, I was taught the language of one colonizer (Spain) via the language of another (USA).

Even though I was living the legacy of colonization every day, I wasn’t taught much about this Filipino history until I was an adult, outside of the US school system. So maybe me—and others—aren’t bad students after all, we’re just in the wrong environment.

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The debate about Filipinx vs Filipino seems to be a product of colonized mindsets. We didn’t choose to be named after King Philip II and have a gendered language invade our Indigenous ones, but Spanish colonization is a historical fact and no amount of arguing will change that.

I use Filipino to refer to myself and Filipinx in general because it’s more inclusive than words derived from the Spanish o/a language designation for male/female. If you don’t want to use Filipinx that’s fine, but it’s ridiculous to pretend Filipino is a gender-neutral word.

A lot of the discomfort around the word Filipinx seems to come from two sources: 1) a refusal to acknowledge how deeply Spanish colonization has fundamentally altered Filipinx culture and 2) a hatred of Fil-Ams having a say in how Filipinx identity is defined and understood.

I’m not here for either. Let’s acknowledge our past and present fully—including how colonization altered how we look, how we talk, how we worship and even how we think—so we can make decisions about our identity and culture that aren’t beholden to a dead colonizer from Europe.