Cultural Assimilation In The Philippines

These colonizers changed our minds radically. Imagine, from a gender equal society, the Spaniards turned us into women-discriminating one. The Americans changed us from the datu system, into a “republic” system. We all know what these colonizers did to our country. We all know that they only used our Philippines to meet their own needs. They only use our country to get natural resources for the benefit of their country.
Though we have a lot to say about the horrible things that the colonizers did to us, we also have many good things to say. One of the things that we learned from these colonizers is the concept of cultural assimilation. Indeed, we are influenced by different countries’ cultures except we don’t absorb them all. Yes, we resemble

We traded peacefully with neighbouring countries before and we also experienced and saw the cultures of each. Our ancestors adopted some of their traditions like the using of umbrella in Chinese, use of slippers, and many Filipino traditions have foreign origins but are owned by us Filipinos.
Our political system was founded by the Americans but we consider it as ours. Our traditions like pagmamano, pasalubong, and Christmas are in a way came from other countries but still we consider it as ours. There are many traditions that we adopted from different countries that now claim as ours. It is these different cultures that has influenced us that makes us different. For we can sift the certain traditions and make them ours by “Filipinizing” the action being done by others. It is how our country become multi-cultural. It is good in a way that we are establishing our identity from others. It looks like we are saying “It may seem familiar, but it is surely not the identical. They are others and we are Filipinos”. We are establishing a fine and concrete line between the other nationalities and Filipinos. Indeed, we are influenced but we are not wholly changed by their culture, we only adopted those who are applicable and helpful to our

Speaking in English is not terrible, it is actually fine. It makes us competent. However, seeing English-speaking people superior to Filipino-speaking one is absolutely wrong. Given one situation in a classroom, a teacher asks a question. One answered in fluent English not because she is boasting but because it is the way their parents raised her, and another answered in pure Filipino. The common notion is that the one who spoke English is the one who is more intellectual even though everything she says is nonsense. Filipinos nowadays see speaking Filipino as an inferiority whereas it is their mother tongue. We must stop seeing other countries as something greater than us that we would “worship” it and follow its path. It should not be like that. We should make our own way of living, our own culture, and our own way of dealing with life. Given the multi-intellectual thinking of Filipinos, we are capable of doing so. We just need to help others to realize not to discriminate or be ashamed of their own culture but be proud of it and enrich it in any way they could. We need to see that our culture is a very fascinating one because it is overlapping with different cultures of different countries across the