My name is ____ and I would like to share about my ethnicity. I moved to New Jersey, United States of America straight from the Philippines, located in Southeast Asia. I am included as an Asian. I have come across people think we should be called Pacific Islander. I have tried to explain that Pacific Islander has nothing to do with my ethnicity, but geographic location. Most of the Philippines Island is not situated in the Pacific Ocean, and therefore we are not Pacific Islanders. I grew up in Pangasinan, northern part of the Philippines. Our main language in the Philippines is tagalog. I speak Ilocano dialect which is related to the languages Indonesian, Malay, Hawaiian, and more. I spoke my dialect since then and will still use it with family and other people I meet that speak the same. Back in the Philippines, we were taught how to write and speak English language. I graduated High School in the Philippines and continued my college education here with my bachelor's degree. For my two years in the community college so far I have never faced racial discrimination though I have seen other ethnicity experienced that kind of treatment. I have browned skin and an average height but that did not seem to matter at all. As of my knowledge about the history of the Philippines, the colonization of Spanish and ruling over the Philippines claiming our beautiful islands, their ancestors and our ancestors were mixed up. You will notice that Filipinos have Spanish names because our ancestors were inhabited in the past generation. Traditions, cultures, and religions began. Many of the groups converted to Christianity from Roman Catholic. The culture here in the United States did not surprise me because Filipino culture has some similarities to the American culture because not only Spanish ruled in the Philippines but many other countries including the Americans. Our culture and traditions are a little more conservative because we also had freedom that our heroes fought for our ethnic group.
