Filipinization

Filipinization is a Filipino nationalist process whereby Filipino culture is made to dominate, assimilate or influence other cultures, or manifestations of those cultures, within Philippine society. The idea evolved through periods in Philippine history.

In the Spanish colonial era, however, an evolution of ventures toward Filipinization revealed motives by factions in Philippine society that have been deemed by some historians and other researchers as not inclusive of other sectors of that society, therefore limiting the idea of what could already have been a broader concept of a Filipino nation. Later occurrences of the drive towards Filipinization among individuals and groups would come at various points in their personal and collective lives.

In a lecture by Filipino academic Soledad Reyes, for instance, the writer-critic stated that a Filipinization (or period of awakening) occurred in her own work during the Philippines' martial law period under then President Ferdinand Marcos when her Maryknoll College education, shaped by Western ideas in English texts, came face to face with the everyday Philippine realities that were now strongly being shouted, with anti-Marcos and anti-United States sentiments, by the Filipino student activists of the 1960s–1970s. She said that the tumult of the period led her to see her schooling's alienation from other sources of learning, such as the Tagalog novels of Macario Pineda, which she then started to pay attention to. On the other hand, the Ateneo de Manila student newspaper The Guidon wrote that the nationalist "Filipinization!" battle cry of 1960s student activism at the school was actually one of those that influenced Marcos to declare martial law in 1972. It wrote that the battle cry was born from the activists' perception during that decade that their institution was being subservient to colonial interests (or, since the school's inception in 1859, to Western worldviews) and from the belief that the school was being made to exist to serve the country's "oppressive power elite". This perception led to the writing of the students' "Down from the Hill" manifesto, written by five undergraduates that included the later-revolutionary Emmanuel Lacaba and the poet-activist Alfredo Navarro Salanga. "We find the Ateneo developing in the line of a university attuned to the standards and conditions of Western society," the manifesto wrote, "when the revolutionary situation demands service for national development, in terms of Philippine standards and conditions." The Down from the Hill movement instigated by the manifesto followed.