What Filipino Migration Teaches Us About Language and Culture
By: Alessandra Cabrera
Everyone in my family is an immigrant. We speak a native language that is not taught in primary schools, and although we speak English, our curled and wily tongues will always give us away. Being raised in this culture, there are two questions I have always been asked as a child: first, nakasabot Bisaya ka? (Do you understand Bisaya?) followed by the inevitable nag skwela ka ug nursing? (Are you studying nursing?). Regardless of one’s answer to these questions, I think the questions themselves reveal something deeply fundamental about the culture of growing up as a first-generation child of Filipino immigrants—the assumption that not all American-born Filipino children are connected to the spoken language and that rooted in the profession of nursing, lies a deeper history of strife and opportunity.
Last summer, I began the monumental task of compiling years of genealogical research to reconstruct a digital version of my family tree. In doing this work, it became apparent to me that many family members studied nursing in order to leave the Philippines, but I didn’t understand how or why they left. To fill in these historical blanks, this essay seeks to connect my family’s labor and migration patterns to historical waves of immigration to the United States, in addition to discussing how that impacts my first-generation experiences with Philippine language and culture.
Migration has always been a part of Philippine culture. Archaeologists have been able to infer that ancient Filipinos were sophisticated seafarers, from recovered boatmaking tools and fishing artifacts, such as weaved nets and ropes. While the nature of their migration is unknown, it has been proven, through the remains of fiber technologies and the presence of foreign materials, such as obsidian, that inter-island migration did occur between the different kingdoms and sultanates (Fuentes, R. & Pawlik, A., 2025).
The year 1521 marked the arrival of the Spanish, which marked a profound cultural shift. Their impact on Philippines, can still be felt today in the local cuisine, the Spanish-influenced names of people and places (the Philippines, itself, was named after King Phillip II), and the fact that many Filipinos still identify as Roman Catholics. Religious missionaries played a large role in the spread of Spanish-influence on the local languages, as they studied the languages to preach their faith and even developed grammar books and dictionaries, which furthered the Latinization of various Filipino languages. It is reported that approximately over 6,000 Tagalog words are rooted in Spanish, especially for nouns relating to time, food, and clothing. For better or for worse, Spanish colonization lasted over three-hundred years and was followed by a fifty-year period of American occupation starting with the Treaty of Paris in 1898, which officially ended the Spanish-American War and ceded the Philippines to the United States.
For much of the 20th century, “international migration” was considered to be movement between the Philippines, the United States and its other Pacific territories (Asis, M., 2006). Filipinos were sent abroad to work in manual labor positions like sugarcane and pineapple plantations in Hawaii and fish canneries in Alaska. Before the 1920’s, there arose a small number of young male scholars called pensionados, which were sponsored by the U.S. government to study at higher education institutions like the University of Michigan, Cornell and Harvard University (Bonus, R, & Tiongson A.T., 2022). They were sent to America with the hope that they would return to the Philippines to administer their own government in a similar fashion. However, these pensionados were part of an underlying plan as they “embodied extensions of colonial education in the Philippines that furthered the US military’s “pacification” objectives that drew from educational curricula aimed at maintaining the subordination of other students of color” (Bonus, R, & Tiongson A.T., 2022).
The arrival of the Americans brought, not only jeepneys and Spam, but also a restructuring of the education system and the increased English language presence in schools. A high proficiency in English allowed immigration of highly educated professionals, mostly in the healthcare field to seek work abroad. However, it is important to note that not all immigrants worked in healthcare, since between the years of 1935–1965, many Filipino families immigrated to the U.S., as, but not limited to, “war brides, World War II veterans, professionals and students.” (Asis, M., 2006).
In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed many Asian residents to apply for U.S. citizenship. Essentially, it permitted those who served in the U.S. Armed Forces the opportunity to become eligible for naturalization and it also allowed U.S. citizens and permanent residents to sponsor family members to immigrate as well. This was the starting point for the start of my family’s migration to America. My lola’s sister, Flor, came to the United States on an H-1B Visa in 1974 and worked as a graduate nurse until she passed the board exam. She was sponsored by a nursing recruitment company, along with ten other Filipino nurses to come to the United States, and they all lived together in a dorm across from the hospital. Her story mirrors many immigration stories in my family that followed. Many of her brothers and sisters were able to come to the United States, which helped paved the way for my mom’s own nursing journey, which brought her to Texas.
Inspired by her older relatives, my mom knew she wanted to move to America. By studying nursing in college, she used her degree as a way to leave the country, as did many of her nursing classmates that left the Philippines for places all around the world, like the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. When I was growing up, these people (and their first-generation children) were like a second family to me and we shared an inherent bond over the fact that our parents were from somewhere far away, but here we were, living their American dream.
The United States was seen as a desirable location for many Filipino nursing students, due to its long-standing relationship with the Philippines. However, despite having proficiency with the English language, it did not guarantee that the transition was necessarily seamless. The Filipino accent is a double-edged blade that can be used as a form of othering by those from the host country, but also as a form of covert prestige among other Filipinos. In the early years of their nursing careers, my parents were mentored by older Filipino nurses who helped ease the transition into the new country. Although my parents had to learn to assimilate to American ways, they were still able to maintain their native languages with each other at home and in conversation with their Filipino coworkers at work.
Though journeying abroad is filled with many challenges, many Filipinos legitimize their struggles through the concept of “sacrifice” in the Filipino Catholic context. which entails “always relating the self to other people and is connected to modes of exchange.” (Christ, Simone, 2016). Many parents make sacrifices to ensure that their children can grow up in a comfortable home and that they can pursue their educational dreams. Although it is impossible to repay them for everything that they’ve done, excelling in school is often a means for children of immigrants to reward our parents’ sacrifices. This has the adverse effect of causing disproportionate amounts stress for children to succeed in school, in order to prove that our parents’ decisions to move abroad was not a wasted effort.
The experiences of Filipino migrant children can vary widely, depending on where one was raised. The majority of adult Filipinos have settled in the West, particularly in California (66%), but South is the next largest population, in states like Texas (16%) (Geographic Distribution | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, n.d.). My sister and I grew up in a New Jersey town with only a handful of Filipino kids. Although there was never a shortage of Filipino nurses in the hospital my parents worked in, somehow, it felt like they all lived in the town next over, or further up north. There was a rather robust community of Filipino nurses at my parents’ workplace, and we would always have somewhere to go to stream the latest Manny Pacquiao fight or watch the yearly Miss Universe beauty pageant. However, when it came to my public-school education, there was a severe lack of Filipino representation in my history classes. We would learn about history of China and Japan, but never spent time on other Asian countries, like Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, where some of my classmates were from. Except for when we read “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling for class, I never truly saw my own culture reflected in my high school curriculum, which quietly contributed to an internal cultural dissociation. It felt like my history was never really mine, and that if it all happened so long ago, how could it possibly relate to me?
A large form of dissonance was the sheer distance between the Philippines and America. Many of my peers had grandparents that lived with them, or a few streets away, but mine were halfway across the world, in another country. Though I will say, that despite the distance, they were rather present in my younger years. However, I never felt the same closeness that one would, if they lived in the United States. For reasons similar to this, I believe that children of immigrants experience time and place differently from peers whose world is generally centered in one location.
From a young age, children of immigrants have a greater connection to places beyond their grasp and an awareness of life happening beyond their immediate surroundings. Before talking to my grandparents over the phone, it was important to consider the time difference between the Philippines and America. This always reminded me that daytime, in the United States, could be another person’s nighttime. Balikbayan boxes are another cultural entity that transcend place and time. Historically, they have been a popular form of transporting goods back to the Philippines since the 1970’s, as a way for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) to maintain ties with their families through tax-free packages. These cardboard boxes, stuffed with American clothing, toys and snacks, would be loaded onto a barge, which could take months to reach their recipient. This longer sense of waiting did not adhere to typical American ways of transport, which confused me as a child, but ultimately taught me about how time could move differently in other places.
In many ways, my exploration of this topic has been very eye-opening in understanding how my culture impacts the way I move through the world. I was amazed to find a plethora of books and academic papers about Filipino migration, since much of what I know is from my lived experiences. It was inspiring to see people clearly articulate cultural patterns that have been weaved into my family’s way of life, and it provided more questions for me to consider in my own genealogical research. This work has allowed me to reclaim aspects of my heritage language and culture and serves as a basic framework for understanding the effects of immigration in other cultures and contexts.
References
Fuentes, R., & Pawlik, A. (2025). Testing the waters: Plant working and seafaring in Pleistocene Wallacea. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, 62, 105020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105020
Asis, M. (2006). The Philippines’ Culture of Migration. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/philippines-culture-migration
Bonus, R., & Tiongson, A. T. (Eds.). (2022). Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation (1st ed.). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2gmhh8s
Christ, S. (2016). The Culture of Migration in the Philippines: Of Jeepneys and Balikbayan Boxes. regiospectra Verlag. https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy2.library.drexel.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=ece9584c-5c7a-4402-81be-04b9ffcae6f0%40redis&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHVybCx1aWQmc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZlJnNjb3BlPXNpdGU%3d#AN=2374137&db=e000xna
Geographic Distribution | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. (n.d.). https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Growing-Diversity/Geographic-Distribution/#:~:text=Of%20the%20largest%20group%2C%2049,largest%20population%20at%2016%20percent.