The reading written by Antonio Tiongson Jr., Filipinos Represent, presents a severely overlooked issue in which the Filipino race as a whole does not have a direct and significant amount of representation in today’s society. It is an issue that struck out to me because there are many articles and issues that highlights minorities being overlooked, and yet despite that, I have never thought about the struggle for an identity for people that are Filipino. Hip hop appears to be an accessible form for these DJs to express themselves, and it allows them to attain a certain type of cultural integrity.
On page 51, Tiongson Jr. makes it clear that these DJs rely on hip hop as their signifying feature, but one of his interviewees also makes the distinction of hip hop as a unifying and transcendent phenomenon that Filipinos have adapted to and even helped further along its cultural evolution. This distinction is further cemented when, on page 53, Tiongson Jr. describes that his interviewees have grown up within an environment that offered a rich experience in hip hop during their youth, rather than piggybacking off an African American’s or Puerto Rican’s experience.
A quote that stood out to me when learning about their establishment was, “In other words, assertions of belongingness are made on the basis of affective claims that allow anyone to establish cultural legitimacy and become part of a broader community that transcends, geography, culture, and race” (page 54). The writer seems to have driven this point home; it is a pivotal turn in the explanation for Filipinos coming into their own cultural capital. He continues to expand on how the race is continuously overlooked and classified as Asian despite his interviewees showing detest for that. Although the whole piece was interesting, the first half was more intriguing because in a way it shows another even smaller minority struggling to become its own under the shadow of another minority.
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