Vicente L. Rafael

Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Tagalog and the “Filipinization” of Filipino-Americans

When Prof. Mabanglo asked me to address this conference with a few remarks on the

place of Tagalog or Filipino in the United States, it made me think of the complex linguistic

conditions inhabited by Filipino Americans spread across the generations. At the risk of

appearing immodest, I decided to start with my own linguistic history thinking that it may have

some relevance to the topic of this conference. While I have been living continuously in the US

for 33 year, I was born and raised in Manila. I was 23 years old when I left to go to graduate

school in 1979. Through a series of accidents, I ended up getting a job and staying on without

really meaning to. Growing up in Manila, I went to grade school and high school in La Salle

Green Hills and spent two years of college just across the street from this hotel between the

1960s and early 70s before graduating from the Ateneo. In all cases English was of course the

medium of instruction. However, I was raised in a multi-lingual household. My parents were

what you might describe as provincial “petit-bourgeois”—my mother’s father was a judge in

Apalit, Pampanga, and my father’s family came from a lower middle class background from

Bacolod, in Negros. Like many of their class and their generation—she was born in 1925, he two

years later—they attended the colonial public school system. My mother graduated high school

from Arellano, my father from Negros Occidental High School. After the war, they met in

Manila while going to school—she was at UP studying to be a nurse, and he at FEU majoring in

English and Accounting.

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During one my annual visits to the Philippines, I found a cache of love letters my father

had written to my mother. They were all in English. This made perfect sense since he was from

Negros and spoke Visayan, while my mom spoke Kapampangan, though having gone to school

in Manila she had become fluent in Tagalog. The only language they had in common when they

started to date in 1955 was English. I was born in 1956, exactly ten years after the United States

formally granted independence to the Philippines. Yet, in many ways as we all know the country

remained very much a neo-colony of the US. The wide spread use of English in schools,

businesses, and pubic life testified to the on-going hegemony of the US. But there was something

else that contributed to the dominance of English. When I think back to my youth, I realized that

English was one among many languages that was spoken among my family, both immediate and

extended. Mixed with vernacular languages, English served as a lingua franca for the middle

classes. Among the katulong, however, my father spoke Ilongo since they were all from Negros.

My mother eventually learned enough Ilongo to give orders to the maids. But she also picked it

up to communicate with my father’s mother who knew no other language when she came to visit

with us along with other Bacolod relatives. With my maternal grandfather after whom I was

named, I would talk in Tagalog and English, though he was fluent in Spanish by virtue of the fact

that Spanish was still the dominant language of the courts as it was of the Philippine legislature

till 1941. And with our yayas, I spoke Tagalog while they spoke to me in Ilongo. I remember

reading the Ilongo language magazine, Hiligaynon which both the maids and my grandmother

brought along before I could even read Tagalog. We also had Chinese neighbors who we played

with, and we spoke to them in a mix of Tagalog and English (they went to Xavier School) while

they would intersperse their conversation with Hokkien cuss words which all the neighborhood

kids quickly learned. Hollywood movies were predominant in the 1950s and 60s, but the first

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film I remember seeing was in Tagalog, “Captain Barbel” which starred Dolphy with my Ilongo-

speaking grandmother in downtown Manila. And while American productions dominated the

early days of television in the Philippines, everyone watched variety shows like Student Canteen,

Kuwarto o Kahon, Dance Time with Chito, and so forth, all of which trafficked in Taglish of

some sort or the other. As anyone familiar with the culture of private schools in Manila, rampant

code-switching among the vernaculars, English and at times Spanish ran beneath and through the

American English that was meant to be the standard medium of instruction, at least until the

introduction of bi-lingual curriculum in the mid -1970s. Conyo speak, collegiala talk, Arneo

accents, characterized the chatter that came out of these schools. Adding to this inter- and intra-

linguistic Babel was the Catholic Church. Attending mass before the days of Vatican II meant

hearing it in Latin, and as an altar boy I remember memorizing the liturgy in Latin while waiting

for the school bus to pick me up. I understood only fragments of what I was saying, but was

fascinated by the sonorous syllables and grave tones of a language whose power, like the pig

Latin of the anting-anting, came directly from its otherworldly opaqueness. Then in my second

year of high school, I discovered Marxist politics by way of my economics teacher who was then

a member of the Kabataang Makabayan. He introduced me to world of left-wing activism which

had its own set of languages. On the one hand, I encountered a kind of stern, polemical English

that always felt like an earnest translation of the Chinese or Russian Marxist-Lenninist-Maoist

literature, full of new jargon like imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, while words

like puppets and running dogs became weapons of condemnation rather than terms of

endearment. On the other hand, activist life also brought with it a whole new way of hearing and

speaking Tagalog: coming from the streets, it was lively, inventive, trenchant and full of humor.

A giddy sense of defiance connected youthful participants in demonstrations as they felt

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themselves traversed by chants like “makibaka, huwag matakot!” while measuring the rhythm of

their marches with “Amado/Guerrero, Bernabe/Buscayno”, and climaxing in the deep feelings of

solidarity evoked by the singing of the anthem of the global left, the International in Tagalog.

This then is a hasty inventory of my linguistic history: American English at school and at

home folded into a variety of urban Tagalogs, Ilongo, Capampangan, bits and pieces of

Hokkien, Spanish and Latin, and vernacularized Englishes—my father’s Visayan-accented but

grammatically precise speech, those from American popular culture full of black, bohemian and

hippie slang, and Marxist –Maoist literature full of jargon, which were themselves translations

from the German, Russian and Chinese—and finally all sorts of Taglish, from the television and

radio to the schoolyard and demos on the street. Hence, when asked what my native language is,

I always hesitate to respond. It is tempting to say that I have no mother tongue, or rather that I

have many mother tongues, as if to acknowledge that whatever I happen to be speaking at the

moment is always comingled and contaminated with a whole train of other languages I grew up

speaking and hearing in the past. To inhabit multiple mother tongues meant that speaking any

one language entailed translating not only across different languages but within the same

language insofar as they were spoken in different ways in different contexts. Inter- and intra-

lingual translation defined the condition of having a native language in the Philippines.

I suspect that my case is typical of many other Filipinos of my generation, and perhaps

earlier and later ones, too, though of course with many variations. Perhaps it is not too far-

fetched to think that this condition of linguistic pluralism follows even and especially those

Filipinos who immigrate abroad to places like the US and Canada. However, it is also the case

that once abroad in countries where there is a dominant national language like American English,

Filipinos find themselves constrained to repress this linguistic pluralism. They tend to keep it at

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home and take care from letting it spill into the public sphere. Their sons and daughters grow up

amid this split between a “home” language and “public” one. Rather than acknowledge linguistic

pluralism, they are compelled to devalue it just as they are confronted with daily pressures to set

aside their origins and assimilate into an American mainstream. The repression of linguistic

pluralism in favor of a standardized monolingualism becomes the route to “Americanization”

which assumes that to be like everyone else means to speak like everyone else. In this linguistic

context, what possible effects could the teaching of Filipino have on Americanized Filipinos,

especially those from the second or third generation struggling to understand their difference

amid the pressures to conform and be the same?

Let me try to explore these questions by first looking at a recent textbook, Tagalog for

Beginners: An Introduction to Filipino, the National Language of the Philippines,1 by University

of California language instructor Joi Barrios. I was immediately struck by the title and subtitle of

this text. It seemed to me to highlight an enduring peculiarity: that the language of the Filipino

nation is not one but at least two. There is the constitutionally mandated language of “Filipino”

that, along with English, is one of the official languages of the state. Then there is the vernacular

Tagalog, the basis for Filipino. Since the first half of the twentieth century, the Philippines has

been characterized by a fissure between an emergent and evolving national language and a

plurality of vernacular languages of which Tagalog is among the most widely spoken. This split

between the national and the vernaculars is a direct legacy of colonial rule. In an early attempt at

counterinsurgency, the United States military sought to “pacify” Filipinos during the Filipino-

American war (1899-1902) by establishing a network of public schools. The military governor,

Gen. Arthur McArthur conceived of the schools as “adjuncts to military operations,” needed to

“expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the archipelago.”2 American soldiers were

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initially assigned to serve as teachers, followed by an army of American civilian teachers known

as the “Thomasites” (named after the USS Thomas, the army transport that brought them to the

country) in 1901. By the 1920s, most American teachers had been replaced by Filipinos as part

of a larger effort to Filipinize the colonial government en route to preparing the people for self-

government.3

The key feature of the colonial public school system was the adoption of English as the

sole medium of instruction. Given the considerable linguistic diversity of the archipelago where

more than eighty mutually unintelligible languages continued to be spoken combined with the

unevenness of knowledge in Spanish, whereby only about 5% of the population claimed to be

fluent despite three and fifty years of Spanish rule, American policy makers deemed it necessary

to use English as the dominant language of rule and education. Within weeks of the occupation

of Manila on August 13, 1898, the U.S. military reopened several schools in the city, assigning

from among its ranks a teacher of English to each of them. By January of 1901, the colonial

civilian government passed a law known as Act 74 establishing the Bureau of Education. Among

its provisions was the mandatory use of English as the “basis of instruction.”4 From the start, the

decision to use English was fraught with contradiction. On the one hand, English was meant to

speed up pacification, drawing natives closer to American interests and thereby putting an end to

their resistance. On the other hand, English was deemed the best way of “uplifting” Filipinos,

preparing them for self-rule. But doing so also meant maintaining them as colonial subjects with

limited rights, while designating the archipelago as an “unincorporated” territory distinct from

the U.S. In a similar vein, mass literacy in English was meant to mitigate social inequalities and

pave the way for a more democratic society. Yet, the chronic shortage of funds, the failure to

extend universal access to schooling, and the difficulty of retaining most of the students beyond

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the primary grades meant that education in English was bound to create the conditions for

intensifying those inequalities. It eventually created new divisions between an elite minority who

achieved fluency and with it greater economic wealth and social influence5, and a majority, some

with limited years of education who may have understood English but could barely speak and

write in it, and many others without any schooling who could not speak it at all. Barely literate in

English, the majority lived in largely vernacular worlds where English circulated intermittently,

emanating as the language of those above. In other words, the colonial legacy of English

included the creation of a linguistic hierarchy that roughly corresponded to a social hierarchy.

Beginning with the Commonwealth government of 1935 through the post-authoritarian

regimes of the twenty-first century, Filipino-led governments have sought with varying degrees

of success to replace, or at least complement, English with Tagalog-based Filipino. As one of the

official languages of the state, Filipino has also been designated as national language. In this

way, the history of Filipino continues that of English. As with English, Filipino has been

invested with the power to suture the gap between the vernacular and the national. Designated as

the language of the state and the nation, it is meant to serve the nationalist project of producing a

“people” capable of governing themselves. But as with English, Filipino also perpetuates a

linguistic hierarchy, subsuming other vernaculars under the hegemony of Tagalog. As the

nationalization of Tagalog, Filipino has had the effect of marginalizing the rest of the

vernaculars. While it does not seek to abolish these languages, Filipino, like Bahasa Indonesian

or American English or Castilian Spanish seeks to harness all other vernaculars into the

communicative needs of the nation-state.

There is, however, an important difference between the historical role of English and that

of Filipino. Unlike the American colonial imposition of English, Filipino is described by the

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constitution as an “evolving” language. It is, like Tagalog, promiscuously hospitable to foreign

borrowings. Far from being standardized by anything like a Real Academia, its usage is lightly

policed and so allows for all sorts of expressive variations, cultural appropriations and regional

inflections. It cannot, as English continues to do or Spanish before it, secure the top of the

linguistic hierarchy. Rather than nationalize Tagalog, it is fair to say that Filipino is continuously

being vernacularized, localized, even de-nationalized. Still, it continues to be widespread,

understood, though not universally spoken, in nearly all parts of the archipelago, thanks in large

part to such mass media as film, radio and television. It is as if the power of Filipino lies in its

powerlessness in relation to English and the vernacular. What seems like a paradoxical situation

—that language seems most powerful when it is powerless to resist wildly different forms of

appropriations and usages—becomes understandable (though no less paradoxical) when seen in

historical context. In particular, the oddness of Filipino as Tagalog, of a national language that

remains tied to both the vernacular and the colonial, cannot be understood apart from the legacy

of English and before it Spanish in the formation of the Philippine nation. As a prelude to

examining this history, I want first to return to Barrios’s textbook on teaching Tagalog/Filipino

in the United States. Addressed especially to second and third generation Filipino-Americans, the

teaching of Tagalog becomes part of a project, at once national and colonial, of Filipinizing

them.

In her introduction to Tagalog for Beginners, Barrios indicates her intended audience as

Filipino-Americans as well as other non-Filipino English-speakers who may have an academic or

professional interest in acquiring some familiarity with Filipino. 6 Teaching at a California

university with one of the heaviest concentrations of Filipino-Americans, it would not be far-

fetched to imagine that the majority of her students would come from this group. In the US, such

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hyphenated Americans have come to be known as “heritage language learners.” The category

“heritage language” is a recent invention, emerging over the last twenty five years in the context

of the post-civil rights, multicultural, anti-affirmative action era. It seeks to name the various

languages spoken by immigrant communities in the shadow of American English.7 As a heritage

language, Tagalog is at once valorized and marginalized. It is acknowledged as a kind of

inheritance that retains value and requires preservation as it is handed down from one immigrant

generation to the next. But it is also situated firmly as a supplement under English, not as its

replacement as a medium of instruction. The hierarchical relationship between English and the

subaltern languages is highlighted by the fact that the rational for funding the teaching of

heritage languages invariably point to their usefulness for national security. If heritage languages

protect the storehouse of diversity in the U.S., it is because diversity itself is a resource for

projecting America’s strength to the world. All sorts of arguments have been made about the

pedagogical value of treating heritage language learners as a distinct group with a “natural

advantage” in comprehending their home language while remaining largely illiterate in its

grammar and spelling. Still, teaching heritage languages as a federally funded project makes

sense from the perspective of the State only to the extent that it contributes to its security and

stability. Such in turn depends on the unquestioned primacy of English over all other languages.

The notion of heritage languages thus reaffirms the existence of a linguistic hierarchy and

the ideology of monolingualism –that is, the delusional belief that the United States has always

been and will always be an English-speaking country—that keeps that linguistic hierarchy in

place.8 However, the actual learning of a heritage language such as Tagalog can produce

unexpected results, especially among second or third generation Filipino Americans. Learning

Tagalog, such students might develop other interests and take exception to the task of safe-

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guarding national security in the service of American exceptionalism. For example, Barrios in

one of the appendices of her textbook describes what she takes to be the typical heritage

language learner of Tagalog. Drawn from interviews with several of her students, Barrios paints

a composite figure she names “Margie.” A second generation Filipino American, Margie grows

up hearing and speaking bits and pieces of Tagalog among her extended family. Typical of her

generation, she remains largely passive and uninterested in her parents’ language given that it is

neither recognized nor valorized outside of her home. This situation changes once she enters

college. She becomes transformed by joining political groups such human rights organizations

that monitor political violence in the Philippines. She takes a number of trips to the country, first

to visit relatives, then to immerse herself among peasants and workers in tours sponsored and led

by members of the left-leaning political party Bayan. Deeply moved by the relationships she’s

formed in the Philippines, Margie returns to the US. She regularly corresponds with Filipino

friends. In them she finds a new place for addressing the Tagalog she has learned in school.

Margie thus realizes that her inherited language provides her a way to connect not just

with her origins but with a possible future. From being an other tongue, Tagalog begins to feel

like a mother tongue. She thus embarks on what Barrios calls a process of “decolonizaton.”

Growing up in the US, she had thought of herself as American, speaking English while setting

aside the Tagalog of her parents. She might have even regarded Tagalog with a twinge of

embarrassment to the extent that it is associated with the racially devalued history of immigration

audible in the heavily accented English of her parents. Vaguely aware of the history of their

origins and the US role in colonizing the Philippines, she thinks of her life as largely

disconnected from those across the Pacific. But learning Tagalog in college opens a path to

reclaim a legacy that she did not even know she had. It allows her to learn the “truth” of her

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history, one that is imbedded in the past of her parents and others like them both in America and

in the Philippines. Re-possessing her language and re-learning her history, or at least a version

that she can identify with, Margie begins to participate actively in Filipino and Filipino

American politics. She finds a position from where to differentiate herself not from the authority

of her parents (which she has now come to recognize and appreciate) but from that of the US and

Philippine states. This comes with her participation in organized dissent against the violence and

corruption of the two governments. In this way she becomes an “activist” in the style of left-

wing Filipino nationalists from the 1960s. Margie can now fluently chant their slogan,

“Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!” (Fight! Don’t be Afraid!).

The story of Margie is typical, Barrios suggests, of nationalist enlightenment among

Filipinized second or third generation Filipino-Americans. She first comes to know that she

doesn’t know about herself and her past. In reclaiming her linguistic inheritance, she takes on a

debt to the nation from which it came. In doing so, she approaches the truth of her becoming.

She progresses from darkness to light, mula sa dilim hangang sa liwanag, and develops an

affinity with the struggles of “her people” on both sides of the Pacific. The route to her roots is of

course paved by Tagalog. Combining language learning with immersion trips, Margie is able to

give Tagalog a place alongside, rather than subordinate to, English. It is no longer a source of

shame for being a marker of racial difference, but a language for conjuring a new set of affective

ties and articulating ethical and political commitments.

While the story of Margie is not the only one that can be told about second generation

Filipino Americans, it is significant for the way it calls into question the conservatism underlying

the category “heritage language.” Learning Tagalog need not have anything to do with American

interests. Instead, it leads Margie to a sort of diasporic nationalism that disrupts her identification

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with the American nation-state. It loosens the hyphen that links “Filipino” with “American.”

Learning Tagalog then becomes part of a Filipino rather than American nationalist project.

Barrios writes, “The Filipino-American activists’ journey (beginning with learning Tagalog) is a

story rooted in history, colonialism and the struggle for sovereignty.”9

The story of Margie and others like her thus encapsulates one aspect of the strange

linguistic history I’ve been trying to trace. US colonial rule like Spanish before it, established a

linguistic hierarchy with English on top of the vernacular languages that reflected and

reproduced Philippine social hierarchy. But the spread of English through the colonial and later

post-colonial educational system allows for those blocked from advancing in this country to

immigrate abroad. Knowing English allows Filipinos to settle in the US, albeit as marginalized

minorities stigmatized by their skin color and their Filipino accents. Such stigma exercises a

considerable pressure on them to keep their culture of linguistic pluralism apart from the public

sphere. However, the second generation who constitute so-called “heritage language” learners re-

discover Tagalog as a kind of lost mother tongue. But in fact, what they come to reclaim is the

legacy of linguistic pluralism that requires the skills of translating between and within languages.

Margie’s diasporic nationalism, while drawing from the tradition of linguistic nationalism from

the 1960s, is thus entirely different. It does not require giving up English for Filipino or Tagalog,

but of de-centering English from its privileged position. The result is a new kind of outlook that

seeks to align the search for transnational and domestic social justice with the democratization of

the relationship between American English and Filipino Tagalog.

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1Notes

Joi Barrios, Tagalog for Beginners: An Introduction to Filipino, the National Language of the Philippines, Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2011.

2 Cited in Camilo Osias, “Education and Religion,” in Zoilo M. Galang, ed., Encyclopedia of the Philippines, 20 volumes, Manila: E. Floro, 1950-58, v.9, 126. For a somewhat critical look at the first thirteen years of colonial education, see Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980, 77-126.

3 See Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

4 Osias, “Education,” 136; May, “Social Engineering,” 81-83. 5 Census; other sources for number of Filipinos fluent in English

6 Barrios, vii.

7 For an overview of the history and pedagogy underlying “heritage languages”, see Agnes Weiyun He, “The Heart of Heritage: Sociocultural Dimensions of Heritage Language Leraning,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, (2010), 30, 66-82; Shuhan C. Wang and Mara Garcia, “Heritage Language Learners,” Washington, D.C., National Council of State Supervisors for Foreign Languages, 2002, http://www.ncssfl.org/papers/NCSSFLHLLs0902.pdf; Joy Kreeft Peyton, ed., “Frequently Asked Questions About Heritage Languages in the United States,” Center For Applied Linguistics, http://www.cal.org/heritage/research/heritage_faqs_vol1.pdf

8For a more detailed discussion, see Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American Englis and the National Insecurities of Empire,” Social Text, 101, v.27, no.4, Winter, 2009, 1-23.

9Barrios, 365.