The 75th Miss Universe, and the Question of Who Counts as Filipino
On November 24, the Miss Universe Organization crowns its 75th titleholder in San Juan, Puerto Rico, closing out a three-quarter-century run for one of the most-watched pageants on earth. The Philippines is sending Bea Millan-Windorski to chase the country’s fifth crown, a win that would tie the Philippines for the most Miss Universe titles of any nation. But Millan-Windorski didn’t need to wait for the stage in Puerto Rico to find herself at the center of a very old argument. The moment she was crowned Miss Universe Philippines back in May, the question started again, the way it always does: who actually gets to call themselves Filipino?
Millan-Windorski, born Beatrice Rebecca Millan-Windorski on August 15, 2002, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the daughter of a Filipina mother whose family comes from San Juan, La Union. Her father’s side traces to German and Polish immigrants. She grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, but spent long childhood stretches in her mother’s hometown in La Union, and now keeps a residence there. She says she has held Philippine citizenship since birth. Before this year, she’d already made pageant history once: she won Miss Earth USA 2024, reportedly the first Filipino-American to hold that U.S. title, then took the supplemental title Miss Earth Water 2024 while representing the United States at the Miss Earth finals. In May, she was crowned Miss Universe Philippines 2026.
That win set off an argument that hasn’t really stopped. Some pageant fans objected online that “a foreigner won Miss Universe Philippines,” pointing to the fact that she’d spent most of her life in the U.S. and had worn a U.S. sash just two years earlier. One commenter said they’d have accepted a mixed-heritage winner if she’d lived in the Philippines a while, knew the culture, spoke some Filipino — and objected to someone who seemed to have shown up mainly to improve her odds. Millan-Windorski answered on an entertainment talk show that she holds documents recognizing her as a Filipino citizen since birth, and that she grew up “feeling rejected by both Americans and Filipinos at home” before she ever wore a crown. “I’ve worked so hard to pick the Philippines as my home,” she said. Miss Universe Philippines national director Ariella Arida called her “impossible to ignore,” and Miss Philippines Earth 2025 Joy Barcoma said, pointedly, that she considers Millan-Windorski more Filipino than some people born and raised in the country. Scholar James Zarsadiaz has tied the whole dispute to what he calls the “messiness of history and geopolitics” between the Philippines and its diaspora, plus a nationalist instinct to police who counts as authentic.
It’s worth saying plainly: this isn’t new, not even for this specific crown. Two of the Philippines’ four Miss Universe titleholders already carried mixed heritage into the role — Pia Wurtzbach, crowned in 2015, is usually described as German-Filipino, and Catriona Gray, crowned in 2018, as Filipino-Australian. And if you go back further than pageants altogether, the pattern holds for the country’s most canonized hero. José Rizal’s family tree runs through Lam-Co, a Hokkien Chinese merchant from Fujian who settled in Manila in the late 1600s and was baptized Domingo Mercado; a half-Spanish maternal grandfather; and a Tagalog mother from Baliuag, Bulacan. The man whose face is on the thousand-peso bill was Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog before he was anything else. Go back further still, past any of that, and the archipelago itself was never one bloodline to begin with — it has long held dozens of distinct peoples and languages, from the Ivatan in the north to the Tausug in the south, centuries before Spain drew a line around all of it and called it one country.
In 2003, Philippine law actually caught up to that plurality on purpose. Republic Act 9225, the Citizenship Retention and Re-Acquisition Act, signed into law that August, lets natural-born Filipinos who become citizens of another country keep — or formally reclaim — full Philippine citizenship for life, simply by taking an oath. It was the state saying, in effect, that leaving doesn’t un-make you Filipino, and that the diaspora gets written back in by right, not by a vote on who seems convincing enough.
That’s the root — ugat — this brand keeps coming back to. We were never one bloodline, one accent, or one passport stamp to begin with, and the instinct to gatekeep “real” Filipino-ness usually traces straight back to the same colonial habit of sorting people into who’s pure and who isn’t. Ugat doesn’t run that test. Whether you grew up in Milwaukee, Manila, or San Jose, California, whether your Filipino is fluent or fragmentary, the pull toward home doesn’t ask permission first, and neither do we.
Follow @ugatclothing on Instagram and shop the archive at UgatClothing.com — where pre-colonial pride isn’t a purity test, it’s a starting point.
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