One has to wonder how to correctly define independence. We are not a political subject of any colonial master. That much is at least true. And yet, it is often asked if we have truly come into the post-colonial age of our history.
It is obvious we have not outgrown our old colonial attachments, our knee-jerk affinities for all things Western and foreign, even a latent insidious distaste for those things which are our own and therefore commonplace. But at the other side of the argument, there is the fact we do have to deal collectively with the problems that plague us.
Problems such as corruption, border problems with our political neighbors, poverty, inequality, etc. For these problems, we do not lean quite as much as before on the patronage of our old colonial masters.
It may still be argued, how active they are in pulling strings behind the scene. But over all, Filipinos know that when push comes to shove we will be on our own. We have no one else we can trust quite as much as ourselves.
We have to be naturally critical, of course, in assessing the present state of our country. Surely, we do face many problems now. All of them clearly only half-solved. But if we thought in terms of developing our own culture; then it might be said, we are not doing too badly. Quite a lot of the appreciation of this relies on how we answer the question: Do we value ourselves much higher now in the cultural sense?
We do.
We are better aware now of what it means to be Filipino. Even generations who have grown up in another country call themselves Filipino or half-Filipino. Miami Heat’s coach, Erik Spoelstra, calls himself Fil-American. So, too, Jessica Sanchez and Apl.de.ap. It helps that Manny Pacquiao is still out there punching away and winning fights. The fact they have become our cultural champions measures to some extent our cultural affinities.
Nevertheless, the fact they are internationally popular icons indicate fundamental limitations to our sense of identity. The appreciation of our own culture is easier seen when we put ourselves against the standards of other cultures. It is less visible when we compare our own culture against itself inside the context of history. How different have the generations become from each other over time?
Do Filipino-Spanish still think of themselves as Spanish? Or are they more Filipino now? What about the Chinese? Do they mix culturally with everyone else? And what about the mestizos? And then there is the divide between the social classes.
Are we one Filipino culture? Or are we still many cultures distributed among many islands with identities as distant from each other as the slums are from high-rise condominiums and the plush gated-subdivisions which dot our cities?
Quite obviously, the measure of how post-colonial we truly are rests much on the issue of how effectively we culturally intermingle. Quite obviously, we still have a long way to go in this respect. But we have also done much. We are better aware of each other now.
This increase of awareness results from exchanges of information between each other. We are still composed of many groupings of people. But while these groupings used to exist in virtual isolation of each other, they now have the better propensity to write down their own stories and show these to the rest of the country and the world, complete with illustrations and photographs.
This propensity will only increase in the years ahead. There will be an increasing sense of the disparities between us. There will be cultural tensions. But over time, we will see an increase in the understanding and a deeper appreciation of who we truly are.
Which tells us why art, literature, music, dance and just generally, culture, have a lot to do with the issue of developing the post-colonial Filipino identity. These are the means we have to produce and exchange culturally peculiar text and mixing all these up into the single grand narrative of the emerging post-colonial Filipino. This is the benchmark against which we should measure how independent we truly have become.