I’ve lived in London my whole life. All through school, all through my life, I’ve been surrounded by a host of people from different countries with different cultures. I know that I’ve been very fortunate in growing up in one of the world’s greatest cities where there is such cultural diversity.

 

I knew that Filipinos did things a certain way. We ate every meal with a spoon and fork. Every adult we knew was ‘Auntie’ or ‘Uncle’. Our homes, no matter whose home it was you went to, had a picture of the Last Supper in the dining room. Spam was the first thing any of us learnt how to cook. Don’t get me started on Filipino time.

 

It wasn’t however, until I went home to the Philippines I realised how similar the lives we lived 13,000 miles away were to the lives there. Naturally there were differences. When you compare the capital of one of modern History’s greatest empires to a third world country there are bound to be. Moreover though, a lot of what we did, who we were, was exactly the same as it was there.

 

When I was doing my A-level in Sociology at college I chose to look at the Filipino youth subculture in London. I was interested in finding out how we, the youth of the time, were able to maintain our Filipino identity even though the majority of us had been born and bred in London.

 

I’ve always felt that Filipino culture has been overlooked by historians and scholars alike. The School of Oriental and African Studies here in London looks at practically every other country in Asia, except the Philippines. We are a complex people still trying to forge our identity after “300yrs in the convent and 50yrs in Hollywood” as the saying goes.

 

This series will be a continuation of the ideas I developed when I first tackled this subject. Time has moved on and now the second generation gives birth to the third. The third generation whose parents are no longer the ones who came here from the Philippines to try and give them a better life, but are instead the grandchildren of those that left the Philippines.

 

The issues faced in our youth though haven’t changed. If anything they’ve increased. Now, as we raise our children in a place thousands of miles from where their ancestors started, in a culture we were passed down, it’s interesting to see how much of that Filipino identity we keep. Just how Filipino do our natures remain when we are British by law?

Posted on 6 March 2009 by Gemma in Culture

Tagged british, filipino, heritage