As Las Islas Filipinas, Spain placed us into castes based on how Spanish one's blood was, colorism by DNA. It's why Filipino pop culture today still puts light-skinned celebrities on a pedestal (just look at our Miss Universe winners.)

Our clothing, our bodies, and even our names were reframed as inferior to those of our colonizers.

Immigrants and people of color are forged in such fires, shaped by heat and pressure. But in my four years at Vassar, I was chosen to be privileged. As a model student and Asian American, I never risked getting burned.

Like most Filipino immigrants I knew, I traded my accent for class anxiety.

In this schema, as in today's, your lot in life is determined by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin. So the current use of 'mestizo' isn't so far off from the original...To dismiss the world's current popular usage is to deny the racism, classism, and colorism in this country's past, as well as their continued prevalence today.