“The Mango Bride” is a 2013 novel by Marivi Soliven about two Filipinas who immigrate to the United States — one departing the Philippines as a “mail-order bride”, the other fleeing the personal shame of an unwanted pregnancy in Manila.
The novel is out of print, but it has been adapted for film. Production of the movie began in 2022, but no release date has been set.
While “The Mango Bride” cannot properly be called a “romance”, novellas about young Filipinas falling in love with American men are a subgenre of romance fiction in the Philippines, and the number of Filipinas who marry foreigners is on the rise.
In the United States, the number of K-1 so-called “fiancée visas” spiked at 7,134 in 2019, but the number dropped significantly during the pandemic and has not yet recovered. In the Philippines, of 430,000 marriages annually, about 15,000 are between Philippine women and foreign men, mostly Americans.
Unfortunately, most American men have little understanding of Philippine culture — and, consequently, little appreciation of the psychology of their Philippine brides.
Luckily, the development in the 1970s of “Sikolohiyang Pilipino” — Philippine Psychology — opened a window on a homegrown psychological perspective that elucidates Filipino values, experiences, and worldviews.
At the forefront of this movement, which is characterized as part of a rise in nationalist, anti-imperialist sentiment in the early 1970s, was Virgilio G. Enriquez. He was a professor of psychology at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where he was known as “Doc E” by students. Enriquez also was founder of the “Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino” — the National Association for Philippine Psychology — and sometimes called the father of Philippine Psychology.
Indigenous psychology movements like this one, sometimes labeled “liberation psychologies”, are frowned upon by hard-core positivists at research institutions such as Stanford, Harvard and University College London, which take a strictly empirical — that is to say, “experimental” — approach to psychological research. At most, the empiricists will concede only that indigenous psychologies are essential correctives uncovering dimensions of human behavior invisible to Western paradigms.
In the Philippines there is another organization, the Psychological Association of the Philippines, that adheres to Western empirical research traditions. It was founded in 1962 by, among others, Agustin Alonzo, who received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1926 from the University of Chicago and was a long-time chairman the Department of Psychology at UP Diliman.
Enriquez, who was born in Bulacan Province in 1942, attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the United States, where he received a Ph.D. in social psychology. While at Northwestern, he became disillusioned with the inability of Western psychology to account for Filipino behavior in its native context.
After completing his doctoral studies in the United States, Enriquez returned to Manila in 1971 to teach on the acacia-lined campus at UP Diliman, where he was chair of the Department of Psychology from 1977 to 1982.
Enriquez’s seminal work, “From Colonial to Liberation Psychology”, published by the UP Press and still in print, is a shift away from imperialist models that viewed Filipinos as inferior or deviant when measured against Western standards. Instead, he championed an alternative psychology rooted in the language, philosophy, and cultural practices of the Filipino people.
This shift was not merely academic: It was an assertion of cultural dignity and intellectual sovereignty.
Central to Philippine Psychology is “kapwa”. In contrast to the individualism prized in Western thought, kapwa emphasizes interconnectedness, community, and mutual obligation. Loosely translated as “shared identity” or “fellow being”, kapwa signifies a recognition of the self in others — a core relational value that defines Filipino social interactions.
As Enriquez himself put it, kapwa is the “unity of the self and others”. This concept forms the foundation of many Filipino values and behaviors, including “pakikisama”, or getting along; “pakikipagkapwa”, relating to others as equals; and “bayanihan”, communal unity and cooperation. In a society where group harmony often takes precedence over individual desires, kapwa is a fundamental principle.
The Filipino psyche is also characterized by a deep emotional sensitivity known as “damdam”, empathic awareness and internal emotional attunement. This sensitivity is reflected in the unspoken emotional cues within relationships, where feelings are often inferred rather than explicitly stated.
“Hiya”, or shame, is a social regulatory mechanism. “Hiya” helps maintain harmony and propriety by discouraging disgraceful, inappropriate or dishonorable behavior that might bring embarrassment to oneself or one’s group.
Another essential value is “utang na loob”, or a debt of gratitude that carries a long term, inner sense of reciprocity. While gratitude in Western contexts implies a short-term obligatory or transactional reciprocity, “utang na loob” in Philippine Psychology is a long-term, internalized sense of trust and mutual care — not only between individuals, but also between families, sometimes for generations.
“Pakikibagay”, or adjusting, and “pakikisama”, complying for the sake of harmony, are often employed to avoid hiya or to uphold kapwa. These behaviors reflect a desire for “pakikipagkapwa-tao”, the ideal interpersonal relationship based on mutual trust and respect.
At the deeper level of moral evaluation, concepts like “dangal”, or dignity, and “puri”, or moral integrity, come into play. While “hiya” may operate at the level of social shame, “puri” refers to the inner sense of worth and moral standing. “Dangal” is about maintaining one’s self-respect in the eyes of others and in accordance with personal values. Together, these form a culturally anchored sense of identity that is both individual and communal.
Full treatment of Enriquez’s work is not possible here, and it should be added that many concepts from Philippine Psychology appear in modified form in neighboring Southeast Asian cultures.
Broadly speaking, most Southeast Asian cultures share collectivist values, communal ties, and relational harmony. Social connectedness is deeply embedded in the cultures of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, to name a few, and their indigenous psychologies are replete with their own native psychological concepts. The only outlier in Southeast Asia is Singapore, which, due to its 144-year history as a British colony, has a more Western, individualistic cultural identity.
Additionally, it should be noted that these traditional cultural values are presumably eroded by exposure to Western culture in urban areas such as Manila and Cebu, not to mention the highly individualistic societies of the United State, Canada and the UK.
Virgilio Enriquez died in 1994 at the age of 51 in San Francisco, where he sought treatment for colon cancer. He once said, “Sikolohiyang Pilipino ay sikolohiya para sa Pilipino, galing sa Pilipino, at gamit para sa Pilipino” — “Philippine Psychology is a psychology for Filipinos, from Filipinos, and used by Filipinos.”
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA