Portrait of the Azkal as Filipino: Bravos, but are they Indios?

December 19, 2010

Beyond the flag waving, there’s the inevitable backbiting. Usually said as as a barely-audible afterthought, and more in private, when the rah-rahing majority have moved away from the water cooler and someone eventually screws up the “courage” to carp, “ah, yes, but are they really Filipino?” Welcome to our navel-gazing traditions intruding once more, into the new era of the vuvuzela.

Nick Joaquin wrote extensively of the creoles, see his Anatomy of the Anti-Hero and Why was the Rizal Hero a Creole? Contemporary voices continue to engage in the conversation begun by Quijano de Manila two generations ago: see point and counterpoint in The Marocharim Experiment and Out-of-Date Pinoy Tumblr.

In 2004 (in The Filipino Volk) I wrote of the views of a French historian who argued that the Filipino view of identity is based less on territory, unlike say the French or the Anglo-Saxons, and more on blood, like the Germans. At the time, the article was inspired by the attempts to declare Fernando Poe Jr. a foreigner: his mother being American, and his father, Filipino. The futbol stars of today, however, are Filipino because their mothers are Filipina, and citizenship by matrilineal descent having been decreed since the 1973 Constitution as kosher.

Unlike Filipinos who book a flight to ensure their babies are born on foreign soil and thus get a privileged foreign passport as a kind of permanent christening present, the concept of being Filipino solely by inheritance -by umbilical connection, so to speak- points to the ancient and the new coexisting not only peacefully but arguably, serendipitously, the diaspora engaging the past to justify the present. A case of being the Wily Filipino, as we so uneasily, sensitively, always try to sniff out in the way others portray us? Or simply another Coping Mechanism for our globalized times?

What, indeed, We Filipinos are, this permanent question mark even as others say our neighbors are moving on and willfully recreating themselves, and where even our territory is in flux, and where those who want to be movers and shakers are unshaken by questions of purpose and identity, has to make you wonder.

The players are, after all, playing for no other team but our country’s; they have chosen to wear no other jersey but our own; what brought them to our shores besides love of the sport are ties, not precisely of political citizenship but of blood. And their lies the true story: they are part of our evolution, the newest threads in a tapestry being woven…

(But still, no time to go beyond Notes for a prospective article on the emerging politics of a national identity).

11:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z42vXy2D9TG7

(Notes: 28)