Culture Expos Project Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Culture Expos Project - Research Paper Example market. In assessing the Filipino culture, the study hopes to suggest some strategies to attract and fulfill the needs of this particular market. Filipinos are natives of the Philippines, a country in the Asia Pacific region near Hong Kong and Malaysia. Historians have noted that the Filipinos have a mixed culture due to their mixed ancestry. The earliest generations of this culture are Malays who came to the Philippine islands for settlement (Halili, 2004). They scattered all over the country, and because the Philippines is an archipelago, the Filipinos speak different dialects or local languages (Agoncillo, 1974) but like their Chinese neighbor, manage to maintain a national language also called Filipino. Chinese inhabitants are also all over the country but they settled in the Philippines merely for business, hence the Filipino of today also bears some Chinese ancestry. In 1521, the Philippines was discovered by Spanish colonizers led by Magellan (Halili, 2004). This started the c olonization of the Philippines by the Spaniards whose settlement lasted for more than three centuries (ibid.). This long history of colonization has a great impact on the Filipino culture. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the colonizers kept a distance between the natives and the former. Rizal, the Philippine’s national hero whose name is acclaimed in some Western countries like Germany, noted in his writings how the Spaniards, especially the rulers of the Church treated the Filipinos with lambasting words, unjust imprisonment and disappearance, denial of property, among many other acts of injustice (Capino, Gonzales, and Pineda, 2005). The Philippines was liberated from the Spanish regime when the Americans came in 1901. Unlike the Spaniards who did not teach their language for fear of being overpowered, the Americans, through the Thomasites taught English to the Filipinos and promoted education, especially free elementary education. The Thomasites were the first American teache rs who came to the Philippines to teach the Filipinos (Halili, 2004). The Americans noted the lack of education and the poverty that loomed in the Philippines after the Spanish regime. They attempted to improve the living conditions of the Filipino by sending some scholars in the U.S. to study (ibid.). Those Filipinos may have inspired others to come to America, thus explaining the wide population of Filipinos in the U.S. at present. When the WWII broke up, the Philippines was invaded by Japan and along with Filipino soldiers, some American soldiers were tortured by the Japanese to march several miles from Bataan Province to Manila (ibid.). This is known today as the Bataan Death March, in which some soldiers died of hunger and thirst. After four days, when additional American troops were sent to the Philippines, the Japanese invaders were ousted, making the Filipinos free from another threat of colonization. The different settlers in the Philippines impacted the Filipino culture, m aking it a combination of the Spanish, American, and Japanese culture superimposed by the Malay ancestry it has. Filipinos nowadays have healed from their past and seen on American television, for instance, Charice Pempengco, ultimately project easy adaptability with other cultures. Their clothes are a cross between Western and Asian influences. They have developed a cultural adaptability style that tends to accept differences and unify