hi, filipino here. just want to say that our independence day is june 12, not july 4. july 4 is when the united states government decided that they would recognize our freedom, specifically because it is your independence day and they wanted to cement their cultural hegemony over our country. and because of their influence on our country this was recognized for a time as our independence day. we still commemorate it, but i hope you can understand why we don’t want our independence day to be associated so closely with our former colonizer. it wasn’t even a work holiday for us.
june 12 is the day that we filipinos declared our own independence for ourselves, and that is what we celebrate as independence day
