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An intro to Colonial Mentality and its effects on the Filipino-/American community, in recognition and celebration of Filipino American History Month. We acknowledge that there are many terms to describe the community: Filipinx/a/o, and have chosen to use “Filipino” in this resource.
On her flight back home from visiting my auntie in Canada, my mom looked up from her plane ticket to find that she was sitting next to a man who she had an inkling was also Filipino. She was eager to talk to him. After a bit of small talk, my mom was able to casually sneak in the question: “Pilipino ka ba?” (Are you Filipino?). To her delight, she found out that he was actually from Ilocos, her and my dad’s home province in the Philippines. Naturally, she started speaking to him in Ilokano. What was odd was that even though he clearly understood what she was saying, he continued responding back to her in English. Thinking he would be more comfortable speaking in Filipino (the national language of the Philippines), she changed dialects. He continued to respond in English. Confused, my mom asked him how long he had been in the States. She wondered, “Maybe he’s been away for so long that he’d just forgotten how to speak the language?” To her surprise, he responded “6 years.” My mom, who had moved to the States when she was 16, had been living in the US for nearly 35 years. She admitted that she had lost some of the vocabularies, but that there was no way the man on the plane could have forgotten how to speak both languages. As she was retelling this story to me, I could see the recounted look of annoyance and disappointment on her face. She asked, “Did he think he was better than me because he was speaking in English?”
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