Filipinos’ love and hate relationship with Spaniards

During my elementary- and high-school days, I could vividly recall how my history teachers described our colonizers, the Spaniards, as elites who were always ready to subterfuge and oppress their brownskinned subordinates.

Every time my Sibika teachers told the story of Jose Rizal, the martyr who died for his country but wanted it to be a province of Spain, I would always get teary-eyed because of the ignominious way he was killed through firing squad.

When I was in fifth grade, our teacher asked us to watch a movie about Rizal who was played by Cesar Montano. I was heart-wrenched as the good-looking actor cried while holding his dead baby, and as he walked toward his death. Deep down, I was expecting a different ending, a different turn of events. I hated the Spaniards for killing him and oppressing our forefathers.

But several years later, I realized that Filipinos up to this day are still in love with their former colonizers. Our obsession with whitening soap, whitening lotion, and whitening pills is clear proof that most of us are willing to trade our brown complexion to porcelain, white skin.

Even television producers and talent managers tend to choose a Mestiza with light brown hair and porcelain-like complexion over a brown-skinned actress even if the role is a peasant or daughter of a poor farmer. In the Philippines, there is no such thing as a miscast.

A friend of mine told me that one famous soap opera annoyed her so much because the leading actress, who happens to be a Mestiza, played the role of a poor farmer and yet she wore make-up while tilting a palayan and she looked like she just stepped out from an expensive parlor.

My grandma can attest to our obsession with the culture and even looks of our former colonizers. She said that my

great-grandmother was married to a philandering, rich Spaniard with whom she had two beautiful daughters. Fed up with the way she was treated, she left the man and eloped with a poor farmer in Palawan and bore him three daughters, one of them is my lola.

My grandma said her half-sisters, because of their beautiful Spanish features and fair skin, were courted by dozens of men during their younger days. While she and her “native sisters” (that’s how she describes themselves) would only manage to enthrall just a few.

I would not deny that I am also fascinated with Spanish culture although I sometimes question myself if this is more of an obsession. In fact, two years ago, I enrolled in Spanish class because I thought cursing in a different language would make me sound classy.

But just after two months, I stopped going to my class because one of my professors (who is an Argentinean-born Spanish) told me that my Spanish sounded more like a Chavacano than the real thing. He was polite and warm to his students, so I believe that he was just being honest.

At first I was adamant that I could be fluent in Spanish and even occasionally visited online chat rooms and talked with native speakers. While some were helpful, I became even more confused because they would speak to me in Spanglish.

At the time, quitting was the only option—despite my stubborn belief that I could learn and do anything— since the only phrases I could recall were curses, and the words that I could only remember were indecent ones. Perhaps, I was suffering from selective amnesia back then.

But my short stint in the Spanish language school made me realize that the Spaniards are not as rude and oppressive as how they were described in some history books. They are, in fact, polite, warm, all-smiling, and friendly—no wonder that many of our ancestors fell in love with them. They really know how to charm their way to anyone’s heart.

Perhaps, we should see our former colonizers as our past who made us more resilient, exciting, and creative, rather than someone who made us resentful, confused, hapless, and bitter. And besides, even before they came, we had always been beautiful in our own color and race.