Volume 1, Issue No. 9
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and the Philippine Village Voice (PhilVoiceNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America . . . . . .
Our latest as of Sunday, September 22, 2019
~ It took almost five years and a badass, foul-mouthed chief executive - that's President Rodrigo Duterte - to make me decide to reacquire my birthright citizenship for the miracles he created and continues to create since 2016, the year he trounced a slew of traditional politicians and ideologues, eliminating corruption and their practitioners, and restoring confidence in government, law, and order. "I solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines and obey the laws . . . " the Philippine Oath of Allegiance reads. This is quite different from Canada's, which states: “I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada, and fulfill my duties as a Canadian citizen.”
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DUAL CANADIAN, DUAL FILIPINO
Reacquiring My Hearth and Home
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
“It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” ―
TORONTO - This Thursday, September 19, 2019, I reacquired my Filipino citizenship by taking an oath before Philippine Consul General Orontes V. Castro, the new head of the Toronto mission, who replaces the well-loved Consul General Rosalita S. Prospero who passed away on May 28, 2019. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0VxMwMAyq4).
Twenty-nine others did the same at the Consulate General's office on Eglinton Ave. in midtown Toronto. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OK9giuF1T4). And so, we are Filipinos again, and at the same, Canadians. Dual citizens, we are called. Dual Canadians or Dual Filipinos, either way, we're citizens of two countries. (https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/visit-canada/dual-canadian-citizens-visit-canada.html).
Five years earlier, I chose to be a subject of a monarchy and excitedly pledged allegiance to the Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms, of which Canada is one, which means that she's also the Queen of Canada, the 93-year-old Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, more popularly known as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.
That act on my part effectively ditched my Filipino citizenship I had acquired by birth. Rightly or wrongly since then, I struggled over the loss of my birthright, a conscious choice I made in the euphoria that followed the move from San Diego, California where I lived for 16 years, to Toronto.
However, a Philippine law, the Citizenship Retention and Re-acquisition Act or Republic Act No. 9225 which took effect on September 17, 2003, declares that natural-born Filipinos who acquired foreign citizenship through naturalization are deemed to have not lost their Philippine citizenship under some conditions. (Full text of law: https://www.senate.gov.ph/republic_acts/ra%209225.pdf).
That law was a blessing. To be candid, I felt detached from my mooring once I naturalized. I had the attitude that I had lost my sense of belonging here in Canada. "Feeling that you belong," says Karyn Hall, Ph.D., "is most important in seeing value in life and in coping with intensely painful emotions".
Nothing is wrong in gaining the citizenship of another country. After all, in the adoptive country, there's the promise of a new life, a rosy outlook of the immediate future, a reassuring feeling of security, and almost unbridled freedom to be what I personally wanted to be as a journalist.
If this sounded like an oblique condemnation of the home country, I would say it is. Yes, it is. Not until the badass, folksy, foul-mouthed curser named Rodrigo Duterte, now age 74, coasted to a landslide victory in the May 9, 2016 election to become the 16th President of the Philippines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte).
"Digong," or "Mayor," as the down-to-earth Duterte likes to be called, is nobody's stooge. Not by major powers like the US (he barked at President Obama as an SOB), and neither by China nor Russia.
He minces no words in articulating his feelings . . . against the United Nations over his alleged human rights violations, against Canada over its garbage, against the high princes of the Catholic church over sexual abuses, against crook members of his cabinet, against the armed forces (military and the police), against the corrupt bureaucracy, among others . . . to the extent that he has offered to quit. That, to me, is leadership. That is my President!
The home country had sheltered and fostered my journalism career, and despite the existential threat that the martial law regime had posed in the 70's and 80's, I came out unscathed, but not quite really, because of a deeper and more painful tragedy - the loss of my wife, a desaparecido since 1984.
A decade later, and before my 25-year work contract with a European news agency would expire in 2009, I moved to California and joined my parents and siblings. I thought relocating to the United States would split me from my countrymen.
It seemed then that the farther I stayed away practising mainstream journalism, the more I felt obligated to share what I knew and apply it on the community level. Thus the birth of my three newspapers there, namely, the broadsheet Diario Veritas, and the tabloids The District Times and The Philippine Village Voice. Their broad mission was to expose corruption in all its forms in the community.
I had intended to continue The Philippine Village Voice in Toronto in 2010 but for the numerous weekly and monthly tabloids that saturated the community and competed for revenues a small market could generate. It showed the glut was causing a head-to-head rivalry among the publications that basically peddled the same entertainment content from Manila newspapers.
After almost 10 years in Toronto, I still can not wean myself away from everything that my birth country epitomizes. I just can't shake off the Philippine DNA that enwraps my body and soul and imbues me with traditional Asian values which are hard to find in Canada.
I can not identify with the struggles for sovereignty of the first European conquerors of indigenous peoples who had fought their own kind - the waves of European settlers who had colonized the country - the way I identified with the Philippines' own battle for self-rule at the turn of the 19th century.
That is because I had two grandfathers, Rafael and Prudencio, who had contributed their youth and grit in fighting under the Katipunan banner to overthrow the Spanish colonizers. That was their gift, their humble share, which enables us to enjoy independence in the last 121 years. I can not claim the same endeavour in Canada.
Being Canadian makes me feel I abandoned my rich heritage and the value system handed down by my forebears, which in turn I bequeath to my own progeny. I do not have the material treasures as a Canadian although I acknowledge learning a lot even as it failed to reshape me as a person.
By choice, I am a Canadian citizen, and by virtue of that, I belong here. Canada is now my home. Queen Elizabeth II is my queen, a fact shared by millions of others who are part of a vast kingdom where the sun, once, never set. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXOhE7L5KTo).
But I can't feel the essence of being in an empire where kings and queens rule over the lives and fortunes of their subjects. Its immensity makes me an insignificant national.
I can't feel the value of being in the second-largest country in the world, next only to Russia, with a population three times smaller (35 million) than the Philippines, my country of origin, at 109 million.
In Canada, citizenship for non-whites comes with the label "visible minority" that, in my view, forever diminishes the person. The description is enshrined in official documents mainly, I believe, to institutionalize segregation and to remind one how little he is and who dominates.
I am a minority in Canada made visible only by an act of Parliament. It's not much different from the "people of colour" label in the United States. In the Philippines, my visibility need not be decreed, for I am seen, and treated, and respected, as part and parcel of the whole landscape.
The more Canadian I should have become, the more it nudges me to pull out of the mainstream because it brings back memories of oppression by Spanish conquerors on our ancestors who, in fact, had suffered the same brutality inflicted on First Nations people by colonizers who disrespected them and stole their lands.
I can not move away from our history, especially the part where my grandfathers fought for and achieved independence, even if the invaders had exploited us for nearly 400 years and lived off the fat of our land and the fruits of our labor. That is one great heritage I never have in Canada.
Canada is a vast community of immigrants, mostly from Europe, but even as the Philippines has a much bigger population, the country is still a tightly-knit populace of relations where everyone is linked by blood, name, friendship, marriage. In Canada, your name had to sound Anglicized and your skin white to find easy acceptance, or you're doomed to being a visible minority.
If a Philippine law deems I have not lost my birthright as a Filipino despite becoming Canadian, who am I to refuse the warm welcoming embrace of the people I knew since birth? The Philippines remains my hearth and home. (Copyright 2019. All Rights Reserved).
