Round Trip to Filipino Pride

Three generations of Filipino women tell how they got back to their roots after moving to the U.S.

For Filipino American History month in October, Sampan, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s Filipino Cultural Club, Hoy! Pinoy!, hosted a live panel of three Filipino American immigrants.

The panel’s speakers, Lexie Fadrigalan, Hanah Fadrigalan, and Lewanda Lim, represent three different generations: young adult, a thirty-something adult, and an elder. They sat down before a classroom at UMass-Boston to discuss their journey to America as Filipino immigrants and reflected on their unique experiences living life as Filipinos in the U.S. Here are their stories:

Lexie Fadrigalan: ‘Tan’ and Proud

Lexie Fadrigalan is a 21-year-old biology student at UMass-Boston, who currently serves as Hoy! Pinoy!’s secretary. She came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2019, following her father, who was working overseas for five years.

Fadrigalan described life back home as more condensed. Neighborhoods were close, not just in proximity, but in personal relations. Neighbors would help each other and operate communally.

“In the Philippines, everything is more condensed, whereas here everything is more spread out,” she said. “Everything is right next to each other, commuting isn’t too bad. Commuting (on foot) is much more common than having cars.”

Fadrigalan, who now lives in Taunton, talked about how she moved overseas for better opportunities in education, with the belief that America could offer something the Philippines could not.

“I feel like Filipinos really romanticize the American dream,” Fadrigalan said.

But after arriving in America and returning to school in the middle of 8th grade, the Western educational world was not as welcoming to Fadrigalan as she expected it to be. Fadrigalan enrolled in a school that didn’t have faces like hers; in fact, she would arrive every day as the only Filipino in the entire building.

Transitioning from a close and communal environment to an American school was tough and isolating, she said.

“I had no one to share my sense of culture with except my family.”

A particular experience stuck with her from this time: During her freshman year at Taunton High School, a white student made a racist comment to her about eating cats. She was unaware of the stereotype that some people have of Asians eating cats, so the comment left her confused. Then, with time, her struggle to assimilate at school hurt other areas of her social life. Fadrigalan started using Kojic soap to whiten her skin in an attempt to look more like her peers.

“I thought I would be more beautiful if my skin was lighter,” she said.

HERE AND NOW: Panel at UMass-Boston discusses Filipino immigration. Courtesy photo by Sarah Pena, Hoy! Pinoy!’s historian.

But eventually things changed, and school became a place where she could celebrate her identity. As a high school senior, Fadrigalan gathered some friends and founded the Asian American club, a space that served as somewhere Fadrigalan could embrace who she was as a Filipino American and celebrate and share her culture. It was around this time that Fadrigalan also gave up the Kojic soap and began to “feel comfortable in her skin.”

“Now I embrace my skin color. I love that I’m tan.”

Now, she says, the very thing that drove her to connect more with her Filipino identity was, ironically, moving to the U.S. She pointed out that the Philippines tended to idolize Western culture and trends, a phenomenon rooted in the nation’s colonial history. But for Fadrigalan, her experiences in the U.S. almost worked the other way, causing her to want to connect with the Filipino heritage and culture that she originally felt like she needed to distance herself from.

“Now that I’m here, it’s like, ‘No, I want to be with my culture and represent my culture more,” Fadrigalan said.

She continues to try to shed what she calls an internalized colonial mindset. Instead, she is maintaining her home language, Tagalog, by speaking to her family in it exclusively.

“That’s just my personal way of truly connecting with the culture.”

Although Fadrigalan said she wishes she were able to connect with and celebrate her Filipino identity earlier on after the move, her journey of self-acceptance has brought her immense joy, as today she holds no shame in who she is and isn’t afraid to show that.

Hanah Fadrigalan: Part of the ‘Club’

Hanah Fadrigalan, Lexie Fadrigalan’s aunt, is a 37-year-old who immigrated to the U.S. in 2002, 17 years before her niece did.

Similar to her niece, Hanah Fadrigalan also remembers her life in the Philippines as a simple one in an accessible community where people scratch each other's backs. Hanah Fadrigalan’s father was also an overseas worker.

“I feel like a lot of Filipinos and Filipino Americans can relate to this because usually, you have one or two parents working overseas,” she said.

Hanah Fadrigalan moved to the U.S. when she was 13 years old, leaving her close-knit community behind for one where she’d have to take a 30- to 45-minute car ride to see kin.

Leaving on such short notice was the most challenging part of her move to the U.S., she said.

“All of a sudden, you have to uproot yourself, uproot your culture and the world you know to come to a new place.”

Hanah Fadrigalan found herself in classrooms with little Filipino representation, which she specifically noticed during her time at Boston Latin Academy. The isolation led her to try to overcompensate to fit her vision of the West, doing things like bleaching her hair blonde.

But the hunger to connect with her identity as a Filipino American would prevail. When she was attending UMass Boston in 2008, she and her friend Mark Lujares established what Boston Latin Academy couldn’t offer her at the time, a space where Filipinos could embrace themselves: the Filipino Club. Today, the club has been rebranded to “Hoy! Pinoy!” The term “pinoy” was first used by Filipino Americans in the 1920s; it has since been used to express cultural pride.

Similar to her niece, Hanah Fadrigalan’s time away from the Philippines and in the U.S., as well as her family’s community involvement, allowed her to feel more connected to her Filipino identity.

Hanah Fadrigalan now works as the director of marketing and special events for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of New England, an organization that provides support services for families with children receiving medical treatment at hospitals.

Also having previously worked with news stations, Hanah Fadrigalan has always had a passion for human stories. The move to the U.S. has allowed her to collect stories both at work with kids and in her personal life with a family of immigrants, as well as the opportunity to present them.

“I’ve always stayed close to my personal mission, vision, purpose…you’re not connected to your brand, you’re connected to yourself,” she said. “I love stories, and it felt like, because I see it all the time, it’s something that I’m really passionate about, I feel like the path opens up.”

She urged younger generations of Filipino immigrants to claim their power and stay true to themselves, encouraging them to dig deeper into their roots, as deep as pre-colonial Philippine history, when Filipinos were warriors and seafarers.

Philippine history is often taught with colonization as a starting point, specifically with Lapu-Lapu defeating Ferdinand Magellan, but she emphasizes that there’s so much more to unpack about her people.

“Filipinos have existed way before Magellan.”

Hanah Fadrigalan encourages young people to “decolonialize” their minds by joining community groups, incorporating Filipino food into their lives as both a way to gather Filipinos together and savor the tastes of the region, and, perhaps most importantly, to ask their family questions.

“Your parents and family members will be your biggest resource in finding that spark of connection. Ask questions and be curious.”

Lewanda Lim: Learning About Pre-Colonial Past

Lewanda Lim is an 81-year-old artist who left the Philippines in the mid-1970s during the age of Ferdinand Marcos' Martial Law.

In the Philippines, Lim was working as an art history professor at the University of the Philippines. At the time, President Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law with the intent of prolonging his stay in power. This divided the country and created major unrest among its citizens, with many rallying against Marcos and his martial law declaration.

Lim described the movement opposing Marcos as an anti-imperialist movement that strived for Philippine sovereignty. Despite the Philippines no longer being a colony of the U.S., the nation’s presence very much remained. With the Vietnam War wrapping up, the U.S. had bases all over the Philippines, which added to the unrest that came with Marcos and his martial law.

For Lim, her family and many Filipinos, this was a very frightening time that limited expression, which was especially difficult as an artist.

“Nobody could just go out and express yourself. Otherwise, you’d be put in jail,” Lim said.

Lim, her husband, who was working as an electrical engineer for GE Philippines, and her children fled the Philippines for Canada, where they lived in Hamilton. By the time they got there, it was winter, where they were met with cold and snowy weather that they were not accustomed to, forcing them to adapt and bundle up.

“You can just imagine the bodily shock we encountered moving from a tropical country,” Lim said.

But with the difficult changes came the pleasant ones. Lim told a story about the first time she walked into a large grocery store in Canada, overwhelmed by the abundance of food all available in one place.

“I felt so shocked that such abundance and variety would exist in a different country,” Lim said.

Lim and her family began to feel at home once they found themselves involved with local barkadas, or community groups of Filipinos, in Canada. Lim said she and her family were approached by these barkadas and became friends with them, moments she cited as very important to this transitional period in her life.

“It’s very important that you find your own immigrant community if you move to another country,” Lim said.

Later in 1979, Lim’s husband would find a job in Pennsylvania, and they would finally find themselves in the U.S. Lim’s family would live in Pennsylvania for four years, becoming accustomed to Western life. It was here their English skills would grow, and they’d develop new friendships.

But it was here that Lim and her husband made the decision not to teach their children Tagalog so they could better integrate within American society, a decision that she regrets to this day.

“That was one big mistake. We were too eager for them to culturize,” Lim said.

As life in America continued for Lim, she began to more seriously pursue her art career. With the available materials and opportunities, and the freedom to express that wasn’t as accessible in the Philippines under Marcos, Lim enrolled in a graduate program in New York. By the time she completed it, she had a vision for what her art would capture, which was the environment and the narration of Philippine-American history.

Lim showed off some of her paintings during the event, such as “I Need a Tan”, which she based on a Filipino ad she saw for whitening cream, displaying the irony of Filipinos whitening their skin and Americans tanning theirs.

She also showed a painting titled “1904 World Fair,” which depicted the 1904 World Fair in Missouri, where Igorot Filipinos were put in human zoo exhibits and forced to slaughter and eat dogs in an attempt to show that Filipinos were uncivilized and needed to be colonized.

Following that was her painting titled “Migrant Worker,” which depicts a ring of fruits and vegetables around a door that says “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.” This painting is a commentary on early Filipino immigrant farm workers, who were recruited during the Chinese Exclusion Act to work on farms on the West Coast. The ring of fruits and vegetables is a sign of welcoming created by the Filipinos, but the message on the door was one that was all too common at restaurants and other businesses.

This was because many white workers resented Filipinos for stealing work as well as being a threat to white women. Most of the Filipinos who came over to the U.S. were male, so they would look to pursue American women, which upset many white men in the area. This caused such an uproar that not only was interracial marriage between Filipinos and Whites outlawed, but this paranoia that Filipinos were “stealing American women” resulted in riots and even murders of Filipinos.

Lastly, Lim showed her painting titled “Roses for Nanny & Nanay.” This painting displayed a Filipina woman holding a white child, while her mother cares for the woman’s child back in the Philippines. The painting is a commentary on overseas workers, specifically women who work as caretakers in America to provide back home, as there are Balikbayan boxes, boxes used to send goods back to the Philippines, behind her in the painting.

These paintings, two of which can be seen above and are available to look at on Lim’s website mgakwento.org, all capture the effects on the colonial relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Lim said that her time in both the Philippines and the U.S., as well as time spent researching history on the internet, has given her a more objective view of both countries, specifically acknowledging America’s existence as an imperial power and hegemon.

Lim agreed that both maintaining Filipino food and digging deep into Philippine history are ways to connect with the Filipino identity. She expressed gratitude for younger generation’s interest in pre-colonial Philippines, including recovering the written language of Baybayan, a Filipino script used prior to Spanish colonization.

“The Spaniards practically destroyed our culture... I’m really happy to know that people are trying to go back to our roots,” Lim said.

Lim fully understands that breaking out of these internalized mindsets is not easy, as although the Philippines may not be a U.S. colony anymore, Lim mentioned that some may consider it a neo-colony due to the economic, mental, and psychological influence and control the U.S. still has on the country, which only makes her more glad to see the efforts to unlearn from the youth.

Lim closed by referencing a recent book she read called Inheritance by Harvey Whitehouse, where he discusses three human biases found in all cultures: conformity, religiosity, and tribalism. Lim expressed that these biases, specifically tribalism, have hindered our development as a species, and it’s our duty to do our best to overcome these, as we are all earthlings.

“As humans, we have to overcome all these biases that have undergirded our civilization and become more mature and stop and overcome tribalism and consider ourselves not as individual nations but as a human species, a humanity living on a fragile planet that is in danger of being destroyed.”

The full audio (and visual for Lim’s paintings) for the panel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSUjiGcCqeU