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Decolonization of the Filipino American Mind

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Decolonization of the Filipino American Mind
The last Census revealed that Filipinos have grown to 1,850,314, the country’s second-largest Asian ethnic group behind the Chinese (2,341,537). The Filipino populous has become an “invisible majority”, with 49.72% of Filipinos residing in California. These figures beg the question, how can a group so large continue to be considered an underrepresented minority in our colleges and universities when in total, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are attending institutions of higher education more now than ever?
Though faced with the same obstacles as other American families, Filipinos possess a unique set of cultural, social, historical, and financial factors that negatively influence their ability to attain a higher education. In addition, the myth of Asian Americans as being the “model minority” has also served to limit the ability of Filipinos to access institutions of higher education. Through the research findings presented here, I hope to propose some remedies to assure Filipinos rise up from the ranks of an underrepresented minority and contribute more to the diversity of the student population in California’s colleges and universities.

THE PEOPLE
Textbooks provide a wealth of information of distorted truths on the history of the Philippines, yet little is known about the Filipino people. The diversity found amongst the Filipino people themselves is due to their origins in an archipelago of 7,100 islands and over eighty dialects. As Maria P.P Root states on page xiii in her book, Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity:
…People of Filipino heritage have experiences very different from those of other
Asian American groups who are part of the fabric of this country. Not dominated by Confucian philosophy… coming from societies that have matriarchal structures… intersected and invaded by seafarers, traders, military, missionaries, and colonizers, Filipinos of America are seldom accurately situated in history or culture and are therefore


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