Filipino American Culture

The United States is a cultural melting pot. People come together from all walks of life and co-exist together in one place. Though our country has a diverse population, especially here in California, it’s easy to feel out of place when you are the odd one out in a group of otherwise alike people. Attending events as a nonmember of a culture might seem like a scary, daunting, unwelcoming prospect. However, I found it to be a valuable, insightful learning experience. When visiting the Filipino-American event the “Maboohay” Talent Showcase as a non-Filipino American, I discovered four valuable topics of discussion: how the Filipino-American showcase differed in comparison to a generic talent showcase; what type of cultural atmosphere this particular

In a performance by Jazlynn Pastor, a spoken word poet, she spoke in English but would use words in Tagalog here and there. Of all the performances, many of them felt like performative art- dance for the sake of dancing, singing for the sake of singing. With her poems, however, I felt like there was a serious message in it, of strength, of rebellion, of revolution. She talked about the difficulties our generation faces in her poem, “Find Resilience.” She started off her poem with a hard-hitting line of how our generation is “too loud, too radical, too sensitive, too selfish, too bastos.” The last word had a powerful impact on the audience, earning her both claps and the traditional poetic snaps all across the room. I did not know the meaning of that specific word but later on in her poems, she used other words like kapamilya, which I knew meant “family.” Understanding the Tagalog words added a lot more depth to her performances, but even when I didn’t understand that first word, I could still appreciate the emotion and the theme behind it. Still, I loved her performance so much that I knew I had to watch it all over again to fully appreciate it. I found her performance uploaded on YouTube and I asked a Filipino friend of mine to watch it with me and help me decipher the content. I discovered that the word bastos meant rude. My friend Jocqy said it was very “smooth” of her to say it in Tagalog because it went with the flow of the poem and it made it more powerful by referencing her Filipino heritage (Aleza). If she had simply said “rude” in English along with the rest of her line, it wouldn’t have been as impactful as if she had said bastos, in Tagalog. The word was so powerful not just because of its intrinsic meaning but because it was a nod to her own traditional language, Tagalog, and therefore to