mestizo - a hybrid culture

I was born in Negros Island in the Philippine Ocean and migrated to the U.S. Spending time back and forth - half in and out of each country provides more insight and perspective into my family's hybrid culture. 

One day in an art history class, I read an article about migration and identity that discussed the amalgamation of culture. What is created when someone physically crosses a border and occupies new space? 

Sitio Tabucol in Barangay Bacong, Bago City, Negros Occidental

I thought of our parents and the ways my family participates in local and mestizo traditions. It made me dissect what our family’s hybrid culture presents as. Join me in an exploration of these sentiments. 

There are endless, discombobulating permutations of the word mestizo - starting with the simple, straightforward definition offered by the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, the official lexicographic arm of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, located in Madrid. 

The dictionary says the word comes from late Latin, mixticĭus, meaning mixed - a juxtaposition of mixto and mezclado - and not as some linguists assume from an aboriginal source. It then offers three definitions which translate as: 

1. Said of a person born from parents of different races, especially a white man and an Indian woman, or an Indian man and a white woman. 

2. Said of an animal or vegetable, resulting from two different genus. 

3. Said of a culture, of spiritual events, etc.; coming from the mixture of different cultures. 

A few lines before, the Diccionario describes mestizaje as the crossbreeding of different races. But the dictionary ignores the intricacies of identity, a striking absence given that nowadays, mestizo is a buzz term favored by millions all around the world. 

A region that in pre-colonial times included multifaceted cultures with shared agricultural, religious, technological, and economic lives. The PBS documentary When Worlds Collide provides a suitable opportunity to meditate on the elasticity of the word. 

The film explores the transmutations of the concept. The message it delivers is clear-cut - the encounter of the Old and New Worlds in the annus mirabilis 1492 not only forced the original nations into a premature modernity. In turn this too reshaped the ethnic, political, economic, spiritual, and culinary contours of Europe. 

How is the term mestizo applied? Who is referred to by that term? What do governments invest in its meaning? What epistemological wars surrounded it? How is the word understood in each country where it manifests in countless diverse variations? 

Watch the documentary When Worlds Collide airing during Hispanic Heritage Month. Although it centers on Mezo America which differs from the earlier Asian colonization - there still is information here useful to us. 

Especially for folks like us with shallow roots, too new in the country of our birth. Now living abroad, settling into an even newer home base where we are once more outsiders. On the outside looking in where we once again root around to belong. 

It makes me wonder when or if I will ever settle down to grow my own roots, where would I choose to do so, and what would entice me enough to stay?