Not Quite Asian, Not Quite Pacific Islander—Simply Filipino
Every May, during Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, a quiet but persistent question surfaces: where do Filipinos truly belong?
Often, Filipinos are defaulted as “Asian.” At times, they are categorized as “Pacific Islander.” Yet, truthfully, neither label carries the full weight of their identity. Both feel incomplete—borrowed, imposed, or imprecise. Increasingly, a quiet assertion rises with growing clarity: Filipino is neither. Filipino is its own.
This is not a rejection of solidarity or kinship with other Asian or Pacific Islander communities. It is, rather, a call for clarity—a reclamation of an identity shaped not just by geography, but by empire, migration, revolution, and survival. The Filipino is not a convenient racial subtype. The Filipino is a category in itself.
While the Philippines sits in Southeast Asia geographically, its history diverges sharply from many of its neighbors. Where other Asian nations trace continuous dynastic lineages or ancient monarchies, the Philippines endured over three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, followed by half a century of American occupation. This legacy shaped a nation that feels, in many ways, closer to the Iberian tropics than to Confucian East Asia or the oceanic rhythms of Polynesia.
The Filipino carries the imprints of this history: Catholic festivals layered over Indigenous rituals; animist tribes adopting Spanish surnames; Muslims side by side with Christians; Indigenous folks intermingling with the Lowlanders; Mestizos fraternizing with the locals; American slang threading through local dialects. Lowlanders and Indigenous peoples forged shared customs under the pressure of colonial demands. There is no singular language, no monolithic ethnicity, no uninterrupted tradition. Instead, there is mestizaje—a constant mixing, an endless becoming.
Given these experiences, it is no exaggeration to say that the Filipino is an Iberotropical being. A hybrid soul forged in the tropical crucible of conquest and resistance. As Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos described in La Raza Cósmica, the destiny of humanity may lie in the fusion of races—not as erasure, but as synthesis. In many ways, the Filipino is one of the earliest incarnations of that cosmic race. The roots may be brown, but the branches stretch across continents—bearing the burdens of empire, but also the beauty of transformation.
This colonial legacy lives on—in language, faith, architecture, dress, music, and governance. It created a cultural reality that feels at once native and foreign, familiar and dissonant within broader Asian frameworks. In fact, Filipino identity often aligns more deeply with colonized nations in Latin America than with East or even Southeast Asian nations that maintained longer stretches of indigenous governance. These comparisons are not romantic—they are rooted in the shared traumas of conquest, conversion, and mestizaje.
And yet, Filipinos have long been misrecognized. If one may ask: how, truly, are Filipinos seen? Some call them “the Latinos of Asia.” Others, more crudely, have used racial slurs like the “Asian n-word”—a reflection of the discrimination they’ve faced as darker-skinned, working-class migrants, often relegated to invisible service roles. Even within diaspora communities, Filipinos are sometimes deemed “too Americanized,” “too Western,” or “not Asian enough.”
Such designations—flippant, racialized, or outright derogatory—reveal the failure of existing categories to account for the Filipino experience. Filipino identity does not fit neatly into mainstream definitions of “Asian” or “Pacific Islander.” Over time, it has become both—and neither.
So the question is no longer about fitting in, but about owning that mestizaje—this convergence of brown skin, brilliant mind, and unbreakable spirit—and directing it toward sovereignty. Not just political sovereignty, but cultural and psychological sovereignty: the power to define oneself. To speak from the center, not from the margins of someone else’s framework.
Even within the AAPI umbrella, Filipino narratives remain peripheral. AAPI representation too often leans East Asian—focusing on tech leaders, academic excellence, or tidy immigration success stories. Pacific Islander narratives tend toward land-centered indigeneity, often rooted in anti-colonial resistance. Filipino stories float somewhere between—too Western to be native, too native to be Western—often sidelined, rarely centered.
But Filipinos have built nations. They’ve fought wars, scrubbed floors, raised children across continents, and led revolutions back home. They speak over 150 languages. They carry a shared memory of occupation and a deeply ingrained instinct for endurance. Still, in global media and academic discourse, they remain underrepresented. In the Western imagination, they are often reduced to domestic workers, dancers, nurses—rarely thinkers, artists, architects of their own destiny.
This omission is not accidental—it is structural. The marginalization of Filipinos stems from a long history of colonial erasure. The United States colonized the Philippines before Filipinos ever immigrated en masse. They were U.S. nationals before they were immigrants. They served in the U.S. Navy, labored in California’s fields, and raised generations of American children. And yet, the American racial imagination struggled—and still struggles—to place them. Too brown to be Asian. Too Westernized to be Indigenous. Too colonized to be sovereign.
To be Filipino today is to embody contradiction with grace. To live at the intersection of reverence and resistance. To curse in Spanish, pray in English, and move to the rhythms of precolonial gongs. It is to carry the heartbreak of diaspora and the burning hope of homeland. It is to look in the mirror and see not confusion, but plurality—a living testament to everything survived, and everything still possible.
The world may try to define the Filipino in halves: half Asian, half colonial, half Catholic, half native. But the deeper truth is this—the Filipino is whole. Whole in complexity. Whole in contradiction. Whole in becoming.
And that wholeness needs no apology. It demands recognition—not as an asterisk to Asian identity or a footnote in Pacific politics.
Both and Neither as Asian and Pacific Islander
Just Filipino.
And that is enough.