Author Description

PrefaceThis modest book came to be written because of Facebook exchanges between Filipino friends: Tiz Wezza of Australia, Joey Miguel of New Zealand, and myself.Our conversations in FB revealed that we are not just "Filipinos", a name given to us by Spanish colonizers in 1564, when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi occupied Maynila and declared the whole territory, as "owned" by the Spanish monarch (Phillip or Felipe), and all peoples within it, as subjects of the Spanish crown.Tiz and Joey sent me a lot of materials since October 2017 which I kept and now use them for a sketch history of us Filipinos - as part of a larger Austronesian rfamily of peoples in the Pacific.We share customs, traditions, culture, artifacts, textile weave designs, houses of nipa, family-closeness, remembrance of ancestors, food types, traits, language, food, herbs, boat-designs, our brown skin and our physiognomy - with our cousins spread over 54 billion square miles of the Pacific Ocean and its adjacent seas and islands.Our cousins are in the farthest west in Madagascar, adjacent to the "black continent" of Africa, easternmost to "Rapa Nui" or the Easter Islands where a remnant of Polynesians remain under the governance of Chile, a South American government.We are cousins to the Hawaiians to the north of the Pacific who, themselves, came from Tahiti, in the middle of the Pacific, and southernmost to New Zealand - the Maoris.Our closest relatives are in the ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asian Nations).There are four parts: An Overview, Part One about Austronesians in general, Part Two are sketches of particular countries, and the last Part is a pictorial of "Old Philippines, capped by a "fast-forward" to 2015, when a beautiful Filipina Austroneisan with European blood, won the title of Miss Universe.Emmanuel ikan Astillero1592 Camino de la Fe, Guadalupe Nuevo, Makati City, 1212 PHILIPPINESe-mail astilleroe@gmail.com, noelastillero@yahoo.comFacebook: "Emmanuel Ikan Astillero" October 6, 2017 (my 7