The Latin Americans of Asia

Colonization was normally a bad thing. However, some good things came on its wake.

We Latin Americans lost touch with the Pilipino people after Spain withdrew from the islands (the Philipines, Cuba and Puerto Rico), in 1898. Until then and even more so before the independence of the rest of the American sister colonies of the Philipines (Felipinas should have been their name), in the early XIX century, it was common that trade, movement of people and other exchanges should take place between us. Manila´s scarves, lacquered fans, wood screens, etc., were common place in the Spanish colonies of the Western Hemisphere. Then, the Anglo-Saxons intruded and on the horse of progress, English replaced Spanish, the USA suplanted Spain and its colonies as source of goods.

However, Pilipinos and Spanish Latin Americans also shared our resistance to colonial rule by Madrid -- the imposition of a closed empire within which and nowhere else we could move, our resources heading towards the Metropolis. But we also got a common language, living side by side with our many dialects but acting as a lingua franca, Roman Catholicism as a common religion, strong family values associated with the Judeo-Christian structures but implanted in a tropical context, and the like.

All that, as applied for 400 years, produced special habits, ways of behaving and of laughing, of enjoying and getting sad. Nowadays, both Pilipinos and Latin Americans are travelling a lot, both in search of work which we do not find at home and for tourism.

We go to today´s Meccas. So we find each other in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Madrid, London, and other such large cities. Alongside we also find Indonesians, Thais, Indians. Nevertheless, all the rest, however interesting people they may be and indeed are, some strong cultural divide makes it difficult to really get to know each other. You, the Pilipinos, are just like us. With our good and bad things, you are family. All these values put on us by our then loathed Spanish colonization came back from the isolation of the last century and here we are....We are very similar. We relate. We marry each other. We experience the immigrant adventure in similar ways and we adapt more easily to this cultures into which we venture. This is because those Spanish Western values (although in their more traditional face), are already ours much as they are not the Indians´, Indonesians´, etc. That is why you are the Latin Americans of Asia and we are the Pilipinos of the Western Hemisphere.

I like stamps and collect them. For all of the above, of the whole of Asia, those of the Felipinas of Maguellan are the ones on which I am most interested. I may not get them but, who cares? We still are the same.