The ins and outs of Filipino families

In 1964, the late Mayor Antonio “Yeba” Villegas emptied the post-war ghettoes of Intramuros, the walled city of Manila. About 3,000 families who were squatting within its six-meter thick walls were relocated to Sapang Palay, Bulacan.

Three major dailies: The Manila Times, Manila Bulletin and The Manila Chronicle, raised funds to help these economic refugees from the countryside. Operation Brotherhood International (OBI), our mother organization, which was then looking after six refugee villages in Vietnam and Laos since 1956, decided to help. Its founder, the late architect and civic leader Oscar Arellano, put together an OBI local team to assist 300 families. This team of volunteer doctors, nurses, social workers, food technologists and agronomists actually lived with the people, unlike the other government and non-government workers who reported to Sapang Palay only during the day. Oscar used the medical team to attract the cooperation of the settlers. He hired me to organize a kindergarten school for the children. He was convinced that helping the offspring would provide a stronger and more lasting source of inspiration for them.

The Filipino family system

Drawing a stick figure of a child on a broad sheet in the OBI Sta. Ana office, Oscar enthusiastically explained, “Precious, this child is the agent of change in Philippine society. If you can condition him to love work, to be orderly and independent in the Montessori way, you will also inspire two sets of families – his father’s and his mother’s.”

What is the Filipino family? When a Filipino marries and produces a child, that birth – as much as the marriage itself – unites the families of both the father and mother. They will have several children. This “nuclear family” will be the core of their life.  Beyond that, their relatives on both sides will constitute the “extended family,” even to the third and fourth cousins in far-away provinces.

Theodore Friend, in his book Between Two Empires, refers to this so-called “bilateral family system” of the Filipino. He said, “It contrasts with both the Japanese and the American. In Japan, relatives were reckoned ‘unilaterally,’ through the male line only. Thus the Japanese sense of family narrowed into loyalty to clan.” On the other hand, the Americans’ self-reliance was stilled in their pioneering days as depicted in sagas like How the West Was Won. To this Friend added, “the American family system may also be bilateral, but greatly affected by industrialization, urbanization, geographical mobility, and a high standard of living. Corporate demands and community activities washed out the extended American family; the same pressures, plus self-reliant individualism, weakened even the nuclear American family.”

During their separate periods of dominion, both Americans and Japanese overlords criticized the “conservative localism of the Filipino and his corresponding lack of a sense of nation.” His sense of family spread out and stopped with kin; it did not reach up to a symbolic national father (Uncle Sam) or a divine emperor. His sense of community tended to be coterminous with his sense of family; it did not reach out to an organization, which afforded him a living or to a state, which supplied him protection. 

For most Filipinos, the family itself was his fraternity, sorority and social security; it was his Rotary Club, and his Old Folks’ Home. It was sometimes a close-shop union, frequently a business, and always in part a government. Land was a family trust, wealth was family shared, and religion, family-centered. The family provided for all members the most intimate satisfactions and the ultimate protections.

Multiplying the kin

Filipinos had also developed ritual and affinitive means of expanding the family to include friends, partners, employers and those with whom one engaged or might someday engage in vital business.

An institution that assisted this expansion was the Catholic practice of godparenthood. At the great ritual occasions of youth-baptism and confirmation, the parents were canonically required to select an adult sponsor of the same sex as the child. Marriage had also been made as another occasion for choosing sponsors.  Furthermore, at each of these momentous events, they chose not one or two but several functionaries, submerging the religious purpose in the family purpose to expand one’s kin.

Thus the ninongs or ninangs (godparents) were chosen not because of their exemplary moral lives – an essential factor to assure the spiritual welfare of the child – but for what they can bring to the family. Political prominence or economic prosperity became the customary guide, very much like that of the Italian mafia, since the ultimate goal has been power and influence.

The family structure of Philippine emotions caused the Filipino to feel (and the feeling was reciprocal) a tie not only with sponsors he selected as his compadres and comadres, but also with their brothers, sisters and spouses, as well as his own brothers’ and sisters’ spouses. The possibilities of multiplying his kin were extraordinary.  If he had five children and on each of the three ritual occasions he chose four sponsors, each of whom was one of a separate family of four, and each married, he had theoretically added to his kin by ritual bond a total of 480 people of his own generation. However, such a giant proliferation was unlikely for several reasons: choosing sponsors among existing blood kin, repetition of selections, overlapping of relatives and so forth. But it is, in any event, clear that the extended Filipino family was by the compadre system further extended.

The family also grew in less formal ways. Friendship among Filipinos was tentative and uncertain. If it were not ritualized in church, then it was by secular familiarities. Pet nicknames, references to a common town of origin, to a school mutually attended, or to an important event shared were all part of daily reintroductions to acquaintances. The same might be true in the West, but without the special urgency felt by the Filipino to establish a quasi-kin bond. By blood, by rite, by ritualized affinity, the Filipinos knew his kin; they made up his “we”; and those outside of it were “they” – enemies, neutrals and persons of no significance.

Impaired Filipinos, an impaired Philippines

Within the depth of the human psyche is the need to assert oneself. Individual power builds up as the child learns to walk and express himself during infancy. Eventually, he learns to work and be responsible in school, until he graduates and becomes economically self-sufficient. Unfortunately, his childhood achievement turns into failure between high school and college. In his step-by-step quest for manhood, the Filipino family repeatedly blocks the growing child at home, in school, or at work. The elders always make the decisions and assume the responsibilities thereof. There is no gradated turnover of the decision-making process to the child or the sincere encouragement toward responsible independence.

Oscar illustrated the good and powerful influence of a child in the “extended family” within Philippine society. In our present history, however, we see the reverse influence of political families over their children and heirs. Did the fate of our country move forward or backward with the families of Quezon, Osmeña (John, Lito, Serge), Roxas (Gerry, Dinggoy, Mar), Laurel (Jose, Doy, Teroy, etc.), Quirino, Magsaysay (Jun, Vic, JB), Garcia, Macapagal (Cielo, Gloria), Marcos (Imelda, Irene, Bongbong), Cojuangco (Cory, Danding, P-Noy) and Aquino (Butz, Tessie, Lupita)?

Can our nation be a powerhouse?

The country gained independence from the United States and was recognized by the family of nations in July 4, 1946, yet Filipinos never attained psychological independence. Instead, their parents and political leaders assumed a sort of oligarchy and autocratic dominion over their development thereby stunting their growth as a people and as a nation.

Yes, the Filipino can be likened to a powerhouse in Asia, but the turbines are locked, and human energy has not evolved at all. A social revolution is imperative.

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