| Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash
Spanish was a required course at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) during my college years. Many of us struggled with it and took it lightly because we didn’t see its usefulness in our future careers. During class, my friend Rudy Gajita pulled a cheap prank on another friend, Juanito Manuel, by coaching him to say the most ridiculous Spanish word when asked by our Spanish-speaking professor, Sra. Arespacochaga. The class roared in hearty laughter at Juanito’s answer. From there on, he became the butt of jokes over the incident. As fate would have it, Rudy and Juanito became yogi teachers and missionaries of the yoga organization Ananda Marga in Latin America, thereby mastering the Spanish language. Today, Juanito is more comfortable in Spanish than in any other language.
I wasn’t as lucky; I failed the class and had to repeat it one summer. Luckily, my other courses pulled my GPA up to the required grade. My disdain for Spanish was rather short-sighted because, in my later career, I spent a substantial amount of time traveling and working in Latin America, where fluency in Spanish would have been helpful. It wasn’t out of reckless disinterest that I failed the class. I hated Spanish and all its colonial implications for our country.
Learning Spanish was an anathema, reminding me of my hatred for the Spaniards and their 350 years of oppressive, racist, and dehumanizing colonial policy in the Philippines. They denied us learning their language, so, I reasoned, why learn it now when it had little value to our survival?
“Colonialism is a brutal process of altering our sense of self, values, and indigenous beliefs that helped us survive for millennia until the invaders came. It robbed our ancestors of everything they held sacred and important and replaced them with their own self-serving beliefs, values, and attitudes.”
For a long time, I refused to visit Spain. My hatred has deep roots, a reaction to the Spanish colonial rule that left Filipinos unhealed scars in their psyche and the cause of our ambivalent and confused sense of self, values, and priorities. That long part of our history had corrupted us big time with all the historical and colonial trauma it left us. It manifests in how our government is run and the kinds of leaders we have. For it never ended after they left.
The scars they left are embedded in our genes, transmitted through generations in epigenetic inheritance. Colonialism is a brutal process of altering our sense of self, values, and indigenous beliefs that helped us survive for millennia until the invaders came. It robbed our ancestors of everything they held sacred and important and replaced them with their own self-serving beliefs, values, and attitudes.
We bought their propaganda by believing that light skin is better than brown, that the Americans gave us democracy and education, and that the Spaniards introduced us to Christianity. But at what price? Take it for what it is: most things we believed were shoved down our throats, not by choice but at the point of a sword or bullet. People say that it happened centuries ago, so why bother? No, sir, the past is like a shadow that has stalked us through the centuries.
I hope you now understand my sentiment about the Spanish language. And I now find the means of decolonizing our minds so monumental that I don’t know where to begin.
——————————————
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.
