Philippines • June 2026. Maharlika, Pacific Islander, or Asian? The Decolonization of Filipino Identity. maharlika meaning, filipino pacific islander, filipino identity, ferdinand marcos maharlika, mount pinatubo anniversary, austronesian filipino, decolonization philippines.

IDENTITY • PHILIPPINES • JUNE 2026

Maharlika, Pacific Islander, or Asian? The Decolonization of Filipino Identity

Thirty-five years ago today, Mount Pinatubo reshaped the islands. Today, two debates — Asian or Pacific Islander, Philippines or Maharlika — are reshaping the global Filipino identity. The truth is harder, and more beautiful, than either side admits.

Thirty-five years ago today, on June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo released the second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century. The blast injected so much sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that it cooled the global climate by roughly half a degree Celsius for two years. It also forced the closure of Clark Air Base and accelerated the end of nearly a century of permanent U.S. military presence on Philippine soil. The islands, geologically and geopolitically, did not look the same afterward.

Today, on the anniversary of that eruption, a different kind of upheaval is happening in the global Filipino diaspora — not in the earth's crust, but in the tectonic plates of identity. Two parallel debates have grown louder in recent years, especially among Filipino Americans who came of age scrolling through DNA result reels and self-identification think-pieces. The first asks whether Filipinos are, in any meaningful sense, Asian. The second asks whether the Philippines, named after a sixteenth-century Spanish king who never set foot here, should be renamed altogether — and whether the name we want back is Maharlika.

Both questions are decolonization questions. Both are being asked far more often in Vallejo, Daly City, Carson, and Jersey City than they are in Quezon City or Cebu. And both, on closer inspection, are harder than they first appear — because the honest answer requires confronting not just Spanish and American colonial fingerprints, but a more recent layer of historical distortion put down by a Filipino dictator.

🌟 Did You Know?

Despite the U.S. Census Bureau classifying Filipinos as Asian, standard population-genetics metrics show that Filipino populations cluster significantly closer to Samoans and Native Hawaiians than to Han Chinese or Japanese populations. The shared Austronesian ancestry — traced through the prehistoric "Out of Taiwan" maritime migration that populated Polynesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, and Indonesia — is genetic, linguistic, and technological (especially in seafaring tradition). The "Asian" label is geopolitical. The Austronesian heritage is older, and it reaches across the Pacific.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day

Maharlika  ma-har-LEE-ka

Meaning: In pre-colonial Tagalog society, the warrior class of freemen — neither slaves nor royalty. In modern Filipino, the word has drifted to mean "nobility" or "aristocracy," but that is not what it meant to our ancestors.

Etymology: A Sanskrit loanword from maharddhika (महर्द्धिक), meaning "a person of wealth, knowledge, or ability." It entered Tagalog through ancient Indianized maritime trade. It is a cognate of the Malay and Indonesian word merdeka — which means freedom.

✏️ Editor's Note

I learned to read in Marikina, on Carmine Street in SSS Village, before my family migrated to Chicago in 1976. By the second grade, I was reading about José Rizal, Andrés Bonifacio, and the Katipunan. The anti-authoritarian instinct I carry today was not something I picked up later in Vallejo or at UC Davis. It was set in my home country, in Tagalog and in English, before I was nine years old.

That is why this article is complicated for me to write. I oppose — without qualification — the decades of propaganda Ferdinand Marcos Sr. built on the back of a word he hijacked. The "Maharlika" guerrilla unit he claimed to have led during the Japanese occupation was found by the U.S. Army to be fictitious. The mythical "Maharlika Kingdom" his regime fed to Filipino schoolchildren was historical fabrication. Anything Marcos touched, I am instinctively skeptical of.

And yet, the more I learn about what maharlika actually means — not what Marcos pretended it meant — the more my support for renaming the Republic of the Philippines to the Republic of Maharlika grows. The truth is more beautiful than the myth. The truth is also harder to hijack.

— J.F.R. Perseveranda, Marikina '76, Hogan '85

Part One: The Census Box Question

Open any U.S. federal form that asks for race, and Filipinos confront the same boundary: a checkbox labeled Asian, separated by a small horizontal line from another checkbox labeled Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The boundary feels surgical, almost legal. That is because it is.

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget's Statistical Policy Directive 15 — the federal rulebook that governs how race and ethnicity are categorized across every agency from the Census Bureau to public schools — explicitly classifies Filipinos as Asian. The reasoning is geographic: the Philippines is an island nation in Southeast Asia, not in Oceania. By that ruler, Filipinos are Asian. End of category.

Before 1997, the federal government used a combined category called "Asian or Pacific Islander." That changed when Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander advocates argued — correctly — that lumping their communities together with much larger Asian populations was making their specific public-health and policy needs invisible in the data. The OMB disaggregated the category, creating two: Asian and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI). NHOPI covers Oceania — Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. The Philippines, by geographic fiat, stayed on the Asian side of the line.

What the Data Actually Says

In April 2025, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research published a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities with one of the most direct titles in recent demographic literature: "Data Disaggregation in Action: Filipino Americans Who Do Not Identify as Asian." The researchers — Riti Shimkhada, Andrew Juhnke, and Ninez A. Ponce — analyzed pooled 2019, 2020, and 2021 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) data, which uniquely includes open-ended write-in prompts for race and ethnicity.

Of the 1,859 Filipino respondents in the sample, 85.2% identified as Asian, 8.8% identified as Pacific Islander, and 6.1% selected "other." Roughly one in seven Filipinos in California, in other words, does not place themselves inside the box the federal government has assigned. The study also found that Filipinos who identified as Pacific Islander were more likely to also identify as Latino or Hispanic, more likely to be older, and more likely to be U.S. citizens compared with those who chose Asian.

That number — 8.8% — is small if you read it as a fringe. It is enormous if you read it as a community of hundreds of thousands of people who, when given a write-in option, actively reach across a federal line to claim a different shoreline.

Geography vs. Ancestry

The Asian classification, on paper, is hard to argue with. The Philippines is unambiguously in Southeast Asia. But geography is only one ruler. Pull out a second — linguistic and ancestral — and the picture changes considerably.

Filipinos are Austronesian. So are Polynesians, Micronesians, indigenous Taiwanese, Malays, Indonesians, and the Chamorros of Guam. The Austronesian language family is one of the largest on earth by geographic spread, stretching from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific — and the migration that carried it began, by the prevailing "Out of Taiwan" model, in maritime Southeast Asia roughly five thousand years ago. The seafaring outrigger technology that took Polynesians to Hawai'i and Aotearoa is a direct cousin of the balangay boats archaeologists have unearthed in Butuan.

Metric	"Asian" Alignment	"Pacific Islander" Alignment
Geopolitics / Geography	Strong — Philippines is in Southeast Asia	None — outside Oceania
Linguistic Family	Partial — shared with maritime SE Asia	Strong — Austronesian, shared with Polynesians, Chamorros
Genetic Distance	Distanced from mainland East Asia	Closer to Samoans, Native Hawaiians than to Han Chinese or Japanese
Colonial History	Less shared (apart from Japanese WWII occupation)	Shared — Spanish, American, missionary
Diaspora Geography (U.S.)	Shared with Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean Americans	Strong in Hawai'i, Guam, San Diego, Vallejo, Carson

The "Asian American" coalition itself is a relatively recent political invention. The term was coined by graduate-student organizers Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee at UC Berkeley in 1968, and it gained mass adoption during the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley in 1968–1969. It was never meant to imply that Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and South Asians share the same culture or history. It was meant to imply that we share political stakes in America. That is a real solidarity. It is also not the same as a claim about heritage.

Part Two: The Maharlika Question

The proposal to rename the Republic of the Philippines is not new, and it is not Rodrigo Duterte's. It is not Ferdinand Marcos Sr.'s either, though Marcos championed it more aggressively than anyone before or since.

1521 Ferdinand Magellan's expedition lands in the archipelago. The islands are later named "Las Islas Filipinas" by Spanish explorers in honor of King Philip II of Spain, who funded Magellan's voyage and would inherit the Spanish Empire. Philip II never set foot in the islands.

1970s Dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. embraces the name "Maharlika" as a centerpiece of his Bagong Lipunan ("New Society") propaganda — branding broadcasting networks, infrastructure, and his fabricated wartime persona around the word.

1978 Former senator Eddie Ilarde, then serving as a Mambabatas Pambansa (Assemblyman) in the Interim Batasang Pambansa under Marcos, files Parliamentary Bill 195 — the first formal legislative attempt to rename the Philippines to "Maharlika." The bill goes nowhere.

1986 A New York Times investigation, citing U.S. Army records, reports that Marcos's claimed World War II guerrilla unit "Ang Mga Maharlika" was fictitious — no such unit had been recognized by the U.S. military. The Marcos guerrilla mythology, central to his political brand, is exposed as fabrication.

2017 Magdalo Representative Gary Alejano files House Bill 5867, proposing a "Geographic Renaming Commission" to study renaming the country. Notably, Alejano does not propose "Maharlika" specifically — a deliberate distancing from the Marcos legacy.

Feb 11, 2019 In a speech in Maguindanao, President Rodrigo Duterte publicly endorses renaming the country to the Republic of Maharlika, telling the crowd that Marcos was right and that the country should drop a name that honors a Spanish king.

In that Maguindanao speech, Duterte explained the rationale this way: that the word is Malay in origin and means, in his telling, "serenity and peace." It is one of the more striking instances in recent memory of a sitting Philippine president being substantively wrong about Filipino etymology, in public, on tape. Maharlika is not a Malay word, and it does not mean serenity and peace.

What Maharlika Actually Meant

To understand the word, set aside both Duterte's "serenity and peace" and the modern Filipino dictionary entry that equates maharlika with "nobility." Neither matches the historical record.

In pre-colonial Tagalog society, primarily in Luzon, the maharlika were a feudal warrior class of freemen. They sat below the hereditary noble class — the maginoo, who included the datu (chief) and his family. The maharlika owed military service to their datu in time of war, supplied their own weapons, and received a share of the spoils. They were exempt from regular tribute. They were not royalty. The Visayan equivalent was the timawa. The Franciscan friar Juan de Plasencia, writing in the late sixteenth century, distinguished them clearly from the maginoo. After the Spanish conquest, Spanish administrators translated maharlika as hidalgos — Spanish minor nobility — or simply as libres, "free men."

And the word itself is not purely indigenous. Philological research traces maharlika back through a metathesis of the Sanskrit maharddhika (महर्द्धिक), meaning "a man of wealth, knowledge, or ability." It entered Tagalog the same way many Sanskrit-derived terms entered Old Malay, Javanese, Balinese, and the Moro languages of Mindanao — through the ancient Indianized maritime trade networks that connected the archipelago to the rest of Southeast Asia centuries before any European arrived. The Indonesian and Malay word merdeka — "freedom," "independence" — is a direct cognate. So is Kapampangan mardika, Maranao maradika, and Tausug mahardika.

This is the part that gets buried in the Marcos-Duterte mythology, and it is the part most worth recovering. Maharlika is not a fairytale word for a kingdom that never existed. It is a real word, attested in early Spanish dictionaries of Tagalog (San Buena Ventura, 1613), with a real meaning: freemen. Its cousins across maritime Southeast Asia all carry variations on the same theme: freedom from bondage, autonomy, the right to one's own person. That is a far more honest, and far more powerful, foundation for a national identity than a fictional pre-colonial empire.

"It's actually a term that was used to describe freemen." Dr. Deirdre de la Cruz, Filipina historian, University of Michigan — PRX The World, Feb. 18, 2019

The Kingdom That Never Was

The "Maharlika Kingdom" — the supposed unified pre-colonial polity that ruled the archipelago before the Spanish arrived — does not exist in the primary historical record. Pre-colonial Philippine societies were organized into independent barangays, each led by a local datu. Larger polities did exist (the Sultanate of Sulu, the Sultanate of Maguindanao, the Kingdom of Tondo, the Rajahnate of Cebu, the Confederation of Madyaas), but there was no single state called "Maharlika" ruling the archipelago. Historian Ambeth Ocampo and others have documented the "Maharlika Kingdom" as a modern political fabrication that gained traction during the Marcos era as part of a hyper-nationalist mythology designed to flatter a regime.

This is the part Duterte and the Marcoses got — and continue to get — fundamentally wrong. They invoke "Maharlika" to summon an idyllic pre-colonial empire that European colonizers supposedly spoiled. The Spanish empire was real, and it was brutal: slavery, forced conversion, and mass killing visited the archipelago in the same patterns Christopher Columbus brought to the Caribbean. But the existence of Spanish atrocity does not require the existence of a Maharlika golden age to be condemned. One does not need the other.

Part Three: The Diaspora Tilt

Both of these debates — the census-box question and the renaming question — burn hottest in the diaspora. Inside the Philippines, the average citizen does not lose sleep over whether they are technically Pacific Islander. They are Filipino, full stop. The debate is much louder in Vallejo, in Daly City, in San Diego, in Honolulu, in Carson, in Jersey City — in the U.S. neighborhoods where Filipinos share blocks, parishes, gyms, and military-base genealogies with Samoan, Tongan, Chamorro, and Native Hawaiian communities.

That proximity has shaped how second-generation Filipino Americans process the category. The dominant Asian American narrative in U.S. media, schools, and pop culture has historically centered on East Asian experiences — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — with the model-minority myth attached. Many Fil-Ams have grown up feeling that their island culture, their Spanish-sounding surnames, their Catholic upbringing, and their colonial history map more naturally onto Pacific Islander or Latino American spaces. Some claim Pacific Islander identity sincerely. Some claim it strategically, to sidestep a model-minority script that does not describe their families' lives.

The renaming debate follows the same diaspora logic. It is in the United States — where being named after a Spanish king now sits awkwardly next to discussions of Indigenous land acknowledgments and decolonization — that the question of whether the country should still be called "the Philippines" feels most urgent. In Manila, it is mostly a slow-burning intellectual conversation. In the diaspora, it doubles as a debate about who Filipino Americans want to be.

Part Four: An Editor's Position

I want to be direct about where this article lands, because PinoyBuilt is not a neutral wire service and I do not pretend otherwise.

On the census-box question: the federal classification is geographically defensible, but it is not the whole of who we are. Filipinos are Southeast Asian by geography, Austronesian by ancestry, and Pacific in our seafaring traditions and diasporic kinship. The UCLA data — the 8.8% of Filipino Californians who, given the chance, write themselves outside the Asian box — is not a fringe miscount. It is a signal. Our identity is not contained by Statistical Policy Directive 15, and we should not pretend it is.

On the renaming question, my position has shifted as I have learned more, and it continues to shift in one direction. I support renaming the Republic of the Philippines to the Republic of Maharlika. I support shedding the Spanish king. I support honoring a non-European, pre-colonial root word. The longer I sit with what maharlika actually meant to our ancestors — a class of freemen, etymologically tied to the same Sanskrit-derived root that gave Indonesia its word for freedom — the stronger that support gets.

But I refuse to let Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Rodrigo Duterte own the conversation. They were wrong about what the word meant. They were wrong about the kingdom that never existed. The Marcos "Maharlika" guerrilla unit was a fabrication, and the Marcos-era "Maharlika Kingdom" was a fabrication, and propaganda built on fabrication is not the same as decolonization. Real decolonization requires real history.

The case for renaming the country to Maharlika should not rest on a fairytale empire. It should rest on what the word has actually carried for centuries across maritime Southeast Asia: freemen, autonomy, the rejection of bondage. That is a name worth claiming. And it is a name that can be taken back from the propagandists who tried to hijack it — by telling the truth about what it means.

Thirty-five years ago today, Mount Pinatubo rewrote the geography of the islands without asking anyone's permission. The identity tectonics moving through the global Filipino community now are slower, and ours to decide. The question is not whether the plates will shift. They are already shifting. The question is whether we will let the loudest voices — including the dead dictator's still-living political family — define what they shift into. I'd rather we did that ourselves, with the historical record open in front of us.

The Filipino is worth the truth.

Sources

1. Shimkhada, R., Juhnke, A., & Ponce, N. A. (April 2025). "Data Disaggregation in Action: Filipino Americans Who Do Not Identify as Asian." UCLA Center for Health Policy Research / Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. healthpolicy.ucla.edu
2. "Duterte's wild proposal: Changing the name of the Philippines." PRX The World, February 18, 2019. theworld.org
3. "Duterte: Marcos was right in wanting to change PH's name." CNN Philippines, February 11, 2019. cnnphilippines.com
4. "Duterte wants Philippines renamed Maharlika." GMA News Online, February 11, 2019. gmanetwork.com
5. National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP). Reports on the historical record of the Marcos "Maharlika" guerrilla unit. nhcp.gov.ph
6. Wiktionary contributors. "maharlika." Etymology entry citing Sanskrit maharddhika and Austronesian cognates. en.wiktionary.org
7. San Buena Ventura, Fr. Pedro de. (1613). Vocabulario de lengua tagala. Pila, Laguna. Early Spanish-Tagalog dictionary attesting "Maharlica" as libre (freeman).
8. Pilipino Express. "Maharlika and the ancient class system." January 16, 2009. pilipino-express.com
9. U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Statistical Policy Directive 15 — Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.
10. U.S. Geological Survey. The June 15, 1991, climactic eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines. usgs.gov
11. Wikipedia contributors. "Eddie Ilarde" and "Maharlika." en.wikipedia.org

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Founder & Editor

J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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