Since I have been living in Mexico for the last two years, I brought my lifestyle from Canada with me. I mow my own grass. I do my own landscaping in general. Do our own cleaning, like sweep my own floor. Wash my own car. Sounds mundane, something us in the anglo world would consider mundane and just part of life. But in Mexico, the very activity I mentioned acts as a thick line between the white and brown. The racial divide.

It is a Monday morning. I just finished jogging. I started to sweep the floor and prepare the trash for the pick up. As it hits 7AM to 8AM in the morning, waves of cleaners, gardeners, car washers, cooks enter the privada. One thing that stuck like a sore thumb. They are predominantly of Mayan descent. It makes me wonder, if the Spanish never left the Philippines, would my father be just some servant of some family/families in the Philippines? Would the cycle just repeat, making me take his place? Would I be on the wrong side of the divide?

Being a pure blood Filipino, it does make me think. When I speak to a Mayan, they seem to be conditioned to this.. servanthood. Everytime I bring up the perspective of my anglo saxon world where commitment to equality and blurred racial lines is stronger (far from perfect, but much better to the spanish), they seem to not know where I am coming from. They seem to be happy in their position and would not think of changing it. 

Filipinos… Let me take you to a dark side of my culture. Really, really dark side. You just landed in Manila, capital of the Philippines. You are now riding a taxi to your hotel. On the bill boards, they have skin whitening advertised. On the non-skin whitening adverts, the models are white… basically. On your way there, the taxi driver might have a radio playing, blasting commercials about the very same skin whitening. Disgusting. Without a doubt, if the Spanish stayed. We would be sucking up so hard. There is a restaurant in Regina, Canada where this Filipino white worship was so hard, none of the customers were taken care of because they were busy doing a metaphorical blow job to one white customer. But that is a story for another day.

I am proud of my Filipino roots, and I also acknowledge and adopt the Anglo Saxon world’s more self-sufficient lifestyle of doing it yourself unless absolutely necessary. Not everyone does it of course. But they are exceptions, not the rule. Just open your window on a summer afternoon and you can hear a man mowing his own lawn, proud to get his hands dirty. Yes, racial relationships are far from perfect either, but at least the zeitgeist is to be equal and to strive to be, even in this dark divide in our contemporary times, this still holds.

I hope one day the Mayans and other indigenous people will move up in life. I hope I can help on this in the future by inspiring the next generation to be more exploratory, to dream more of what is out there and to never be satisfied. It is nice to be satisfied and content for the current. But to our indigenous friends, one must be hungry for what else is out there. For tomorrow.