What do Filipinos and Mexicans have in common?

What do the Filipinos and Mexicans have in common? Both are afflicted with AIDS or Acute Income Deficiency Syndrome.

There are so many similarities between the Mexican people and our kababayans in the Philippines. Like their Philippine counterparts, the Mexican government officials just condone the thousands of people (some carrying babies) to peddle most anything from religious statues to food, rugs and blankets just to make a buck.

Despite their poverty, however, the Mexicans are a happy and deeply spiritual people. Like their Filipino cousins, they can smile even when they have almost nothing. Life’s simplicity is God’s gift, I suppose.

As many Mexicans consider children as additional farm laborers and eventually the source of their security in old age, many families produce twice or thrice as many babies than American or Canadian families. Because of their high birth rates, the Mexican population in California accounts for over a third of the total population – and it’s growing every year. Our business associates in Mexico jestingly predicted that it is one sure strategy for Mexicans to get California back from the US! A sobering thought but politically speaking, it could happen within another generation’s time – about 20 to 40 years from today.

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Mexicans and Filipinos are in the same impoverished boat. Any academician, politician or journalist can analyze and debate for another 400 years, the countless reasons why both nations are poor. Everybody has heard of the foremost excuse we use to explain our two countries’ poverty – because we were both colonized by the same arrogant Spaniards since Magellan "discovered" the Philippines on March 16, l521. On a lighter note, while in Mexico, my friend Holmes Stoner, the incumbent president of our Pan Pacific Chamber of Commerce (who was married to an Ilocana RN for over 20 years before they got divorced) told this joke: "Why is it that the number of Filipinos decrease when they become a little bit richer? They become Spaniards!"

Although Filipino-Americans now rank number one among all Asians in recent immigration statistics, the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese beat us in terms of socio-economic political clout in mainstream America. Even the most recent immigrant groups, the Vietnamese-Americans, are now apparently ahead of us. For instance, in Orange County, California, where about 250,000 Vietnamese-Americans who are concentrated in the Asian enclaves of Westminster and Garden Grove, there is now a robust, vibrant and interesting commercial district called Little Saigon, which the State of California has officially designated as another tourist attraction. Orange County has a total population of over three million, 45,000 of which are Filipinos. There are about one million Filipinos in the entire state of California, according to the a 2000 census. But unlike the other Asian groups like the Chinese, Japanese or Koreans, there is still no Filipino town in the entire state of California. Politically speaking, the other Asian groups have more elected government officials that Filipino Americans.

Last year, I toured STAR publisher Max Soliven and wife Preciosa Soliven all over Little Saigon before we visited the world-famous Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. Over lunch in a French Vietnamese restaurant in Little Saigon, Mr. Soliven commented that "The Vietnamese work like ants while Filipinos just buzz like bees and fly like butterflies."

A very sad but true observation about how Filipinos act and behave even in this so-called land of opportunity.

I also drove Mr. Soliven and his secretary Tess Santos around the Alvarado-Temple area in Los Angeles downtown where Filipinos are still hoping to build a Filipino Town. Without any commercial base where economic activities sustaining the place, it will never happen in the next hundred years. To add insult to injury, the bust of Philippine national hero Dr. Jose Rizal was installed without ceremony and shamelessly displayed in the parking lot of two Seafood City grocery parking lots – one in National City and one in Carson, California. These are cheap and crazy tokens, consuelo de bobo, to all the Filipinos who made this grocery giant very successful.

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My impressions of Mexico brought me back to my fond hopes for the Philippines. Our economic woes will never experience a dramatic change until we ourselves do. Sadly, we have been conditioned to have good grades in school and that knowledge is power. Most people believe this fallacy until they die. Fortunately, I discovered out of school in the real world that this maxim is a lot of nonsense.

It is the application of good and appropriate knowledge, coupled with hard work, determination, integrity and harmonious working relationship with all kinds of people that really makes people successful.

There are probably more intellectual derelicts in the Philippines right now than the endangered species of tilapia, gurami or dalag in our rivers due to dynamite fishing! But where is the Philippines ranked with respect to other nations of the world? I always commiserate with Teddy Benigno whenever he cries and laments about the "damaged culture," the apparent flaws of Philippine society. Like him, I also feel the pulse and the longing of the Filipinos to be really free because I am still a Filipino although I have been here in the USA for more than a quarter of a century. (Teddy, whenever you come to San Diego again, our friend, publisher Simeon Silverio Jr., you, and a few others can just sit down for dinner or lunch indulging in some mentally stimulating conversations at the Seaport Village where your favorite, unassuming neat bookstore UpStart Crow is. We can have a leisurely drive along the vast Baja California coast. I admire you for your fine finished products up to this day! Incredible passion for cerebral journalism. But you also deserve to relax a little bit and take it easy during your golden years. You alone cannot change Philippine society unless the people want to change themselves. Lamentably, the leader that the Philippines truly needs is probably not even born yet!)

When all is said and done it is us, the living – regardless who our colonizers were – who can change our political and socio-economic plight. It starts with a spartan attitude, not a wishy-washy bahala na mentality or urong-sulong leadership style.

Dr. Thomas Parham, a nationally known psychologist in the United States who is the vice chancellor of Counseling at UC-Irvine, describes it best when he admonished black Americans about their sad socio economic plight in America. He said, "The biggest problem facing our African-American community isn’t drugs, violence, racism, or white supremacy, but rather the need for mental liberation. Removing the physical shackles of slavery didn’t remove the mental shackles."

I believe this also applies to the mental state of Filipinos even after almost 500 years since our Spanish occupation in the 16th century. We must seek to help the young as well as the adults to understand the way we are mentally incarcerated and how to break the cycle of the "victim mentality."

I like the metaphor that Dr. Parham uses to deliver his message: "Shop less for gifts and more for your truer self. If you look for it, you can find still hope in the face of despair, strength in the face of weakness, courage in the face of fear, compassion in the face of insensitivity. And be sure to pass it on!"

Kababayans, do you see or feel what I feel? For your sake, stop listening to many political charlatans and bimbos (they are not your role models, they are just images of the citizenry of the land!) and stop watching Sa Pagkat Kami ay Tao Lamang movies. For once, start listening to your own feeble voice inside of you and do what it tells you to do religiously, like the ants building their colony! In one generation, when the babies of today become adults, Filipinos will become what they truly deserve.

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