You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.
—Unknown

The L.A. Times Opinion section has an article entitled “In the beginning” by Gregory Rodriguez, in which he deconstructs the story of Hernán Cortés and Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche, the indigenous translator and mistress of the conquistador, and how her story has continued to sow conflict in the national psyche of Mexico. This is the first time I’ve run into the term malinchismo to denote sort of the same thing as vendido (sell-out) or even Quisling. In Filipino post-colonial studies, the term I’m most familiar with is colonial mentality. In the end, it all means the same thing: preferring the dominant/conquering culture over your own culture.

But it’s not a simple cut-and-dried story, good vs bad, sellouts vs the faithful. The most manifest result of colonialism that makes it much harder to tease things out are the children of the conquistador and the native: the mestizos.

Interestingly, one of the most iconic fictional characters in Filipino literature is Maria Clara, the bastard daughter of a Spanish priest and a native woman, the product of a twice-illicit affair, given that the priest is supposed to have a vow of celibacy and the fact that the woman is already married. Maria Clara is one of the main characters in the political satire Noli Me Tangere, which sometimes referred to in English as The Social Cancer, written by the national hero José Rizal, whose execution became the flashpoint of the Filipino independence movement.

The concept of Maria Clara persists to the present day in Filipino and Filipino American cultures, but in some ways, it seems like many of the sociopolitical implications of her character have been elided, or forgotten. (One of the biggest perpetrators of this selective amnesia is the Bayanihan Dance Troupe. Their misguided nationalism frequently caused them to omit various parts of Filipino history that are often deemed unsavory and that paint Filipinos—and subconsciously, our white conquerors, both Spanish and American—in a bad light. Unfortunately, their bawlderized description of history has been popularized by successor dance troupes, and have even metastasized to that peculiar social institution known as Pilipino Cultural Night, and even fifty years after the disbanding of Bayanihan, a lot of weird perception about Filipino and Filipino American culture continue to abound.)

Of course, there is always my own internal bias. While both my parents are of Austronesian/Malayan stock, with perhaps a few ancestors with Chinese or Spanish blood, my existence—like the existence of the mestizos—could not have come about without colonization. While I find the idea of imperialism repellant, I still have to come to grips with how—in terms of my own personal narrative—it seems like it was a necessary evil.

For the longest time, I’ve felt that, like it or not, we Filipinos have been absorbed into Western culture, and for better or for worse, it is the dominant narrative that propels our destinies. I’ve even thought it through in terms of mythology. Like Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth, I found myself trying to create a chain of destiny between the Great Empires of western culture.

Rome, once on the western periphery of Alexander’s great Hellenistic empire, conquers practically all of Europe, and subjugates Greece. Then, after the Dark Ages, England, once a peripheral part of the Roman Empire, becomes the dominant colonial power, and the center of the western world. And finally, the United States, a place England used to send its religious fanatics, its debtors, and its criminals, becomes the new hegemon, conquering almost an entire continent, and extending its own overseas empire.

One of its first colonial subjects was, of course, the Philippines. In this very western narrative of manifest destiny, of the conquered becoming the conqueror, the baton is passed on to this post-colonial nation-state, the first Asian nation that was conceived from its onset as a democracy, a system of government that was not foisted upon the people by their colonial oppressors, but rather assimilated by the grassroots. The Katipunan was well ready to establish a representative government before the Americans forestalled them.

The flip-side is that democracy is, of course, entirely a Western idea, conceived in the near-legendary era of the city-state of Athens, passed down through the Hellenes, then the Romans, and even trickling down to Spain, where Rizal and his Filipino contemporaries managed to learn about it, and grow to realize that it was an ideal form of government for their own people.

Growing up in the U.S., where they give a lot of lip service to the notion of democracy, it is difficult for me to conceive a more just and fair form of government, although like Winston Churchill, I agree that it is quite possibly the worst form of government, only it is far superior to any of its alternatives. I think I would rather live in an extraordinarily corrupt representative republic than in a monarchy, no matter how constitutional, and no matter how benevolent.

But maybe I’m horribly wrong about this. Maybe Western civilization is simply doomed.