Filipino American folklore and folktales draw from the rich culture of the Philippine archipelago and adapt it to address the unique circumstances of Filipino Americans. These circumstances are defined by the migrations between the islands and North America initiated by American interventions in the Philippines. Difficult questions of legal status and cultural identity shadowed these population movements. Such questions thus form a crucial backdrop for discussing how and why Filipino Americans invoke the traditional myths of the Philippines. Viewed against this backdrop, it is helpful to think of Filipino American folklore and folktales as efforts on the part of Filipino Americans to negotiate the lived realities of a historically ambivalent relationship between their host country (the United States) and homeland (the Philippines).
Given the centrality of migration to this perspective on Filipino American folk culture, it is necessary to briefly detail the relationship between the Philippines and the United States. While Filipino immigrants settled in Louisiana as early as the 1800s, Filipino migration to the United States intensified after the latter country’s acquisition of the islands from Spain in 1898. Following this acquisition, Filipinos began migrating in greater numbers to the continental United States and Hawaii to work and to attend school. Filipino laborers filled the need for agricultural workers to farm cash crops like tobacco, sugar, and coffee, while Filipino students were expected to eventually apply their acquired knowledge of American educational and political systems to the benefit of their homeland’s national government.
However, despite the close ties between countries generated by this colonial relationship, Filipinos were not initially allowed to become formal citizens of the United States. And, furthermore, when the Philippines became politically independent from the United States in 1946, the United States responded by denying further entry, although Filipinos were still able to enter Hawaii to satisfy demonstrable labor shortages. This action created a damaging rift within Filipino communities and families, many of whom were separated indefinitely due to the extreme nature of such immigration restrictions. However, a succession of ensuing legislative acts, including the Luce-Celler Bill of 1946, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, gradually eased entry barriers and, eventually, opened paths to citizenship that helped reconcile Filipino families.
These historical circumstances produced a concern for cultural dispersal, diversity, and continuity in Filipino American communities that all made use of an extant canon of Filipino folklore and folktales. Critically, this canon already dealt with similar themes. In other words, Filipino Americans had at their disposal a trove of applicable folklore and folktales that helped make sense of their experience of migrating to the United States and ultimately empowered them to self-define a distinctly Filipino American identity. To this end, Filipino American folkloric culture is rooted in the many indigenous, imported, and outright imposed beliefs and practices that define the colonized island culture of the Philippines. These beliefs and practices were always associated with the local adaptation of the diverse cultural influences circulating in the Philippines and were thus in many ways well suited to addressing the new and evolving situation of Filipino Americans. For this reason, it is necessary to emphasize the prior amalgamation of Filipino folklore, even before its contact with the United States and Spanish colonial cultures. In this case, “amalgamation” refers to the many languages, religions, ethnicities, and narrative variants associated with foundational Philippine myths.
This amalgamation expresses itself in traditional Filipino mythology through the joint presence of several different ethnic identities, names, languages, religions, geographies, and socioeconomic conditions. It also grows from the oral tradition (including folk songs and recited epics) through which this mythology was preserved and circulated. Due to the lack of written standardization, this oral tradition produced a great degree of variability in even the most canonical of Filipino myths. And so while Spanish colonization introduced Roman Catholic themes to the overall mythology of the islands, it is important to note that instead of shattering a previously coherent Filipino cultural unity, such themes merely intensified the archipelago’s characteristic diversity. The myths of the Philippines were always influenced by prior migrations from neighboring regions, to such a degree that many Filipino folktales are difficult to separate from stories and ceremonies originating in India, China, and more proximate island communities. For example, one can cite the hermaphroditic fertility deity alternatively called Lakapati, Ikapati, Lakanpati, and/or Lakan Bacor. While strongly associated with the Tagalog ethnic group in the Philippines, Lakapati also resembles the entity Barong in Balinese theater. Lakapati’s role in Filipino folklore is thus at least in part influenced by its origins outside the Philippines.
Once imported to the Philippines, however, Lakapati’s meaning and function shifted fluidly from a specifically agricultural protector to a major figure in creation myths, depending on the island community in question. In Lakapati, we can thus observe the characteristic Filipino adaptation of an imported figure, which assumes further variations through its passage between specific tribes and the reinventions resulting from such passage. This variability makes establishing standardized versions of Filipino mythology itself difficult and thus doubly complicates the task of relating definitive versions of Filipino American folktales and folklore.
The flexibility of Filipino folklore is inherent even in its core creation myths, as foreshadowed by Lakapati’s only occasional participation in such myths. The emphasis on dispersal and continuity found in Filipino creation myths invites their subsequent, revised use by Filipino Americans, who experienced their own forms of dispersal and engaged in their own efforts to preserve continuity. The story of Malakas and Maganda constitutes one such myth. As noted, the tale has many versions; and yet, its importance for Filipino Americans derives exactly from this variability rather than in spite of it. Most versions begin with a universe composed of two elements: personified versions of the sea and the sky. A bird creates a conflict between these elements, which is only resolved when the sky throws down boulders upon the sea. These boulders become the Philippines; and their creation coincides with the marriage of the land and sea breezes, which give birth to a child that is personified as a bamboo tree. Again, a bird creates the conflict that drives the next part of the tale, as it collides with the tree/child and, angered at this interruption in its flight, pecks at the bamboo until it splits in half. Accounts vary as to the bird’s motives—sometimes it is looking for water and strikes the tree coincidentally, while at other times the tree instigates its actions.
However, in all cases, one section of the split tree becomes Malakas (a man) and the other becomes Maganda (a woman). Malakas and Maganda have many children together; but at some point, they became tired of the disruptive behavior and idleness of their brood and force them to flee from home. Eventually, these children voluntarily return home; but upon their return, they assume different colors and speak different languages. Some versions of the tale specify which children fled to sea, which children fled into the walls of the home, and so forth, and link these details to later social roles like island chief, slave, or even European colonizer (the last role was likely added long after the first iterations of the myth). Other versions stress that the children flee on account of a savage beating administered by Malakas. Such variations suggest attempts to localize the myth or to address more recent events (for instance, contact with the Europeans). In all of these retellings, the tale can be mined for insights into Filipino gender dynamics, family structure, and relation to the natural world. But for our present interest in Filipino American folklore, the story of Malakas and Maganda is particularly important because it suggests the degree to which dispersal and cultural amalgamation are woven into the very fabric of Filipino creation myths.
These emphases on dispersal and amalgamation observed in Malakas and Maganda offer a template for exploring how Filipino Americans adapt the origins and features of their folklore and folktales to address their relationship to the Philippines while residing in the United States. In this way, Filipino American folklore establishes a form of cultural continuity with the Philippines that emphasizes and contributes to the cumulative nature of these islands’ particular folkloric tradition. For instance, the Filipino folk figure Lakshmi shares major similarities with Lakambini, the Hindu goddess of wealth. The figure was thus clearly imported and adapted to suit an indigenous Filipino context.
These adaptations are far from trivial, however; in the case of Lakshmi, Filipino mythology emphasizes the figure’s offspring, which are called Aswangs. These greatly feared creatures are best described as vampiric werewolves with witch-like characteristics, which search in flight for victims by night (especially pregnant mothers and infants). Crucially, these specifically Filipino figures take on additional meaning in the context of Filipino American folklore, as Aswangs follow mothers and their infants to America. As a result, many Filipino Americans wear sacred amulets and engage in other ritual practices (like offerings and prayers) to ward off these creatures. The ambiguous, mutable nature of Aswangs has not changed from the original Filipino folklore in its movement across the Pacific. However, the implicit and explicit fears raised by Aswangs (for example, infant vulnerability and mistrust of neighbors) assume different resonances in the context of life as an ethnic minority in the United States.
It is in this sense that Filipino American folklore and folktales are best understood as efforts to negotiate the difficult relationships between homeland and hostland, accompanying histories of involuntary or semivoluntary migration. In general, the island myths that tend to be adapted by Filipino Americans are the ones more overtly concerned with cultural continuity. They also, by extension, tend to be associated with ritual acts of respect for elders both distant and present. Such acts show how adapted mythologies are intertwined with the daily concerns and practices of Filipino Americans.
Again, such mythologies assume the colonial influences and migration histories associated with the Philippines. Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim Filipino Americans all have traditions that involve ritual offerings meant to offer respect to the dead, and to ensure protection from vengeful spirits. Catholic Filipino Americans, for example, celebrate the feast days of patron saints, which are deeply associated with local village customs from the Philippines, despite being imported from a foreign culture (Spain) and exported to another such culture (the United States). Similarly, for Buddhist and Confucian Filipino Americans, ritual offerings are meant to ensure that departed souls do not become ghosts due to negligence on the part of the living. Across these traditions, the relationship between the living and the dead is ongoing and requires active participation. For this reason, it is emblematic of Filipino American folklore and folktales generally. Filipino American folk culture thus extends from the variability and multiculturalism dominating Filipino mythology. However, it mobilizes these features to maintain connections to the homeland culture of the Philippines, while also, in keeping with tradition, revising them to address the further pressures, opportunities, and influences resulting from migration to America.
Nathan A. Jung
See also Creation Stories of the Native Americans; Malakas at Maganda, a Filipino American Creation Myth; South Asian American Folklore and Folktales
Further Reading
Almirol, Edwin B. 1985. Ethnic Identity and Social Negotiation: A Study of Filipino Community in California. New York: AMS.
Bulosan, Carlos. 2014. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lopez, Mellie Leandicho. 2006. A Handbook of Philippine Folklore. The Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
Meñez, Herminia Quimpo. 1996. Explorations in Philippine Folklore. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Veltisezar, Bautista. 2002. The Filipino-Americans (1763–Present): Their History, Culture, and Traditions. Naperville, IL: Bookhaus.