From “Hey Joe” to “Afam”
March 17th, 2007
Up until the overwhelming onslaught of gay lingo within Philippine popular culture, foreigners, Caucasian men in particular, were all called “Joe” (in reference to the popular American nickname). Now this would be regardless of whether the person in question is European, Australian, white South African, Kiwi, or whatever. As long as your skin is white and your hair blonde or brown, you would automatically be lumped together with all the Joes of this world (this is still quite the phenomenon in the rural areas and some urban communities). I suppose this would be similar to the way Asians (whether you’re Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese or Cambodian, etc.) are lumped together as Chinese, or Oriental (hoowhee, bring on political correctness!).
I suppose from this you can tell how potent the American influence still is in our country. Other terms for hapless Caucasians would be “Kano”, or “Kana”—short for Amerikano or Amerikana—again, in reference to the United States.
Nowadays you will hear the term “Afam”. This would be considered as a popularized gay term for “foreigner”, with “Afamista/s” referring to the “Afam’s” local partner/s (usually of a romantic nature). Not yet included in Copongcopong’s Pinoy Slang Dictionary, other origin results for the term yielded the fact that the term is also short for African American. A friend said that perhaps in the Philippines it did refer to African Americans, then expanded to include all other foreigners. If anyone else has a more informed explanation, do let me know.
There are also terms for other types of foreigners (Indians, Chinese, etc.), some quite derogatory in nature too, but rather fun to discuss (maybe when we’re all drunk, yeah?).
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March 17th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I agree that alot of these terms can be very derogatory. For example in Thai - Indians are called “khaek”, which is known to be quite negative when used to call someone.
March 17th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Yeah. Just goes to show you can’t be onion-skinned when visiting other countries, right? It’s interesting to dig up the origins and development of these words though. Indians in the Philippines are called “bumbay”, or “paybsiks”. I’ll elaborate on that in a later post.