José Rizal

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For other uses, see Rizal.
José Rizal
José Rizal in his youth.
Born(1861-06-19)June 19, 1861
Calamba, Captaincy General of the Philippines
DiedDecember 30, 1896(1896-12-30) (aged 35)
Manila, Captaincy General of the Philippines
OccupationsOphthalmologist, writer and linguist
SpouseJosephine Braecken
Parent(s)Francisco Rizal y Mercado
Teodora Alonso y Realonda

José Protasio Rizal-Mercado y Alonso-Realonda, better known as José Rizal (Calamba, June 19, 1861 – Manila, December 30, 1896), was a writer, physician, painter and linguist who lived in the Spanish Philippines during the second half of the 19th century. He is considered the national hero of the Philippines.

José Rizal stood out as a fundamental historical figure in the Philippines for writing influential literary works such as "Noli Me Tángere" and "El Filibusterismo", both written in the Spanish language, which were used to a great extent by revolutionary groups to give intellectual support to their pro-independence movements.

Tried for the crime of sedition by a court of the Spanish military government in Manila after the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution, he was found guilty and executed, despite pleading innocent and despite the numerous statements of support in his favor from different strata of society, both in the archipelago and in the Peninsula.

After his death, his figure was used on countless occasions to support various ideological programs, some of which Rizal had clearly opposed. In response to various political and institutional interests, his biography has been altered, completely distorted translations of his Spanish-language literary output have been made into English and Tagalog, and things have reached such absurd extremes as claiming that Rizal was the father of Adolf Hitler, or even "Jack the Ripper".[1]

Family

Rizal's house in Calamba, Laguna

José Rizal was the seventh of the 11 children of Francisco Rizal-Mercado and Teodora Alonso Realonda y Quintos, prosperous citizens of the town of Calamba, in the Province of Laguna. Spanish, Chinese and Malay lineages meet in his mixed ancestry.

On the Chinese side he descended from Domingo Lam-co, a merchant who came to the Philippines from the then city of Amoy, in China, at the end of the 17th century. Lam-co married Inés de la Rosa, a mestiza woman of Chinese and Malay descent.

Rizal's mother, Teodora, was the daughter of a Spanish mestizo engineer named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, who had become municipal captain of Biñan in 1824, as his father, Captain Cipriano Alonzo, had been before him.[2]

In 1849 Governor General Narciso Clavería issued an edict providing that the indigenous population adopt Spanish or Spanish-sounding surnames. The rule, administrative in nature, was given for the purposes of the civil census, land registry, service, fiscal policy, etc. Lam-co, being the merchant that he was, chose the surname Mercado to indicate his profession, also adopting the given name Domingo. Such was the surname that Rizal would use until his entry into the Ateneo Municipal of Manila, a Jesuit institution (today the Ateneo de Manila University) where he pursued his secondary studies. At that time, his elder brother Paciano urged him to change his surname to Rizal, derived from the word ricial.

In 1887, the Governor General of the Philippines, Emilio Terrero y Perinat, asked the town councils to report on the conditions of the haciendas, and on the collection of taxes and payment of rents to the religious orders. In principle, Rizal's family and the tenants of Calamba did not refuse to pay the rent, but they demanded that it be fair and reasonable, based on the actual value of the land. Rizal, who at the end of 1990 was in Madrid but was in active communication with his family, asked the Town Council of Calamba to open an investigation. The findings, compiled by Rizal's brother Paciano, revealed a series of abuses and unfair practices, especially on the part of the Dominicans, among which were an arbitrary increase in rents, without clear justification and without any improvement in the hacienda's infrastructure; an increase in the area of leased land without proper measurement, which resulted in tenants paying for land they did not cultivate or that did not belong to them; and various irregularities in the accounts. The conflict escalated to the courts, but owing to the influence of the religious orders, the Dominican friars obtained rulings in their favor. As a result, mass eviction orders were issued against those tenants of Calamba who refused to accept the rents, including Rizal's family. It was then that Wenceslao E. Retana published an article claiming that they had been expelled from their lands in Calamba for not having paid their rents, something that provoked Rizal's anger, as he saw it as an insinuation of irresponsibility and lack of honor on the part of his family and friends. In less than 24 hours, Rizal sent two of his close associates as his "seconds" (representatives) to formally challenge Retana to a duel. Upon receiving the challenge, Retana probably must have investigated the matter more thoroughly, because he ended up publishing a retraction and an apology in the newspapers. Rizal's reputation as a swordsman and marksman must also have influenced his decision. Retana would eventually become a great admirer of the Filipino writer, and the author of his most extensive biography, "Vida y Escritos del Dr. José Rizal", published in 1907.

Education

José Rizal as a student of the Ateneo Municipal de Manila

Known as "Pepe" in his family circles, Rizal began to be taught in Spanish by his mother. Of a curious temperament, one night he carefully watched a moth that, flying around a candle, would end up burning itself. His mother then took advantage of the example to warn the boy of what could happen to one who longs excessively for wisdom.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1877, Rizal continued his education at the same institution with a view to obtaining the degree of surveyor, land surveyor and landed property assessor. It was at the University of Santo Tomas, run by the Dominican order, that he began his degree in Philosophy and Letters, which at that time brought together studies in Philosophy, Literature, Philology, Latin and the Humanities.

When he learned that his mother was going blind, he leaned toward the study of Ophthalmology, beginning his courses in General Medicine at the aforementioned Dominican institution. In order to pursue the longed-for specialty, he left the Philippines to study in Europe, not without strong opposition from his father. His first destination was Madrid, at whose university he had subjects from his Philippine university validated, in both Medicine and Philosophy and Letters, finally graduating Cum Laude. He would then work for a few months as an assistant ophthalmologist at a clinic in Paris and, later, in Heidelberg (Germany), where he worked as a full ophthalmologist.

Political activities

Rizal was also a Freemason, joining the Acacia Lodge No. 9 during his time in Spain, where he became a master mason in 1884.

Rizal's loyalty to Spain was at that time unquestionable, as he himself attested in numerous writings. Far from showing himself to be a revolutionary, he was rather the cultured young bourgeois who longed for administrative reforms for the archipelago, among them the recognition of the Philippines as a Spanish province with full rights.

Front page of "La Solidaridad"

One evening, on the occasion of the tribute being paid to two Filipino painters awarded prizes by the Directorate of Fine Arts in Madrid, Rizal improvised a speech in which, while including a tactical declaration of adherence to Spain, he at the same time called for an end to peninsular ecclesiastical hegemony in the archipelago, and for urgent measures to modernize its institutions. It should be noted in this regard that, paradoxically, the Philippines was at that time the most developed territory in Asia and the Pacific, with infrastructure that did not even exist in many places in the Peninsula, and with the highest literacy rate in the entire region.[3]

From that speech onward, Rizal became the natural leader of the "Propaganda Movement", through which Filipino students in the Spanish capital expressed their demands in favor of the progress and development of the distant colony. For this cause, Rizal contributed articles to the fortnightly La Solidaridad, edited by some of his Filipino compatriots such as Marcelo Hilario del Pilar, Panganiban, López Jaena, Lete, and others, which was published first in Madrid and then in Barcelona.

The publication's platform was as follows:

  • that the Philippines obtain parliamentary representation in the Cortes Generales, a right it obtained only briefly at the beginning of the 19th century;
  • that the people of the Philippines be granted freedom of assembly and of expression;
  • that equality be established between Filipino Spaniards and peninsular Spaniards, especially in access to certain posts in the administration and the church;
  • that the native clergy gradually obtain greater representation in the parishes run mostly by peninsular priests.

Had such a program been carried out, Rizal's works (especially his two novels, Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo) could have been published in the Philippines, but the authorities sensed that such reforms would compromise peace and order in the islands.

However, Rizal never wanted to take part in the revolution started by Andrés Bonifacio, which he described as «absurd, savage, plotted behind my back, which dishonors us Filipinos and discredits those who might plead for us».[4] Despite this, when Rizal returned to Manila in 1892 he was accused of subversion for having founded a civic movement called the Liga Filipina, for which he was sentenced to exile in Dapitan, on the island of Mindanao.

In his place of exile, Rizal founded a school and a hospital. Meanwhile, in 1896, the Katipunan, a clandestine, armed, pro-independence society that Rizal had refused to join, began a revolution inspired by certain patriotic phrases taken out of context from Rizal's novels, which later served as the basis for the accusation.

To redeem himself from his exile, the young physician had obtained from the Spanish Government a post as a military field doctor in Cuba (then also embroiled in a War of Independence). On August 1 he set sail for Manila. He arrived on the 6th, the day after the ship that was to carry him to Cuba had departed. He had to wait another month until a new ship left for the Peninsula. On August 30, Governor Ramón Blanco y Erenas sent him letters of recommendation for the Minister of War, stating that his conduct in Dapitan had been excellent and that he had no connection with the revolution threatening the islands.[5]

Although several friends advised him to escape when the ship stopped in Singapore, Rizal refused, saying that he was not a fugitive. On arriving in Barcelona he was arrested aboard that same ship and sent back to the Philippines, where he would be accused of having instigated the revolt, and of seeking to make common cause with the Cuban pro-independence fighters.

Death

Execution of José Rizal by firing squad.

Instigated largely by the inflammatory reports of the journalist Santiago Mataix (the only Spanish correspondent covering events in the Philippines, and later personal secretary to Camilo García de Polavieja, the new governor who had replaced Blanco), and despite the numerous pieces of evidence and testimonies in his favor, Rizal was accused of illicit association with other revolutionaries.

Tried by a military court and found guilty of all the charges against him, he was shot at the site of Bagumbayan (now Rizal Park), in Manila, on December 30, 1896. To the eve of his execution are attributed a supposed poem titled Mi último adiós, as well as a letter to his close friend and Austrian collaborator Ferdinand Blumentritt, in which he stated: Dear brother, when you receive this letter I will already be dead; tomorrow at 7 I will be executed, although I am not guilty of rebellion.

His execution order was signed by the new governor of the Philippines, Camilo García de Polavieja, who had been in office for less than two weeks and did nothing to pardon Rizal, just as neither the colonial bourgeoisie nor, of course, Archbishop Nozaleda, whom Rizal had parodied in his satirical work "Por teléfono", lifted a finger. Only his family and Francisco Pi y Margall officially requested his pardon, a request that was denied by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.

In the early morning of December 30, 1896, he attended Mass with Josephine Braecken, a young woman from Belgium who had decided to accompany him for the duration of his exile, and whom he married; and he bade farewell to his grief-stricken septuagenarian mother and to his sister. Before his execution, he asked not to be blindfolded and to be shot facing the squad; the first request was granted, but the second was denied, as he was considered a traitor. Nevertheless, before the shots of a squad made up exclusively of Filipino volunteer soldiers, Rizal turned to face the front; thus he fell, showing conviction in his own righteousness, amid cries of Long live Spain from the crowd present.

In Spain, Rizal's execution generated considerable controversy and provoked reactions from different sectors of society. Intellectuals, politicians and activists spoke out against the execution, considering it an unjust and repressive act. Protests were held in several cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. In the following years, all the leading intellectuals and writers of the archipelago composed pages and poems in his memory, beginning with the principal poets of the Philippine Revolution contemporary with Rizal: José Palma, Pacífico Victoriano and Cecilio Apóstol.[6] Within a few years his works, which had been practically clandestine or remained unpublished, began to circulate and be translated, and his figure was more venerated than understood.

Javier Gómez de la Serna stated forcefully the political significance of Rizal's execution in Spanish politics:

There are two Spains! One great, generous, with legendary qualities extolled all over the planet, with its legions of gentlemen, heroes at home and in the world, serenely sacrificing their lives for a love, for an idea, for a military or scientific discipline: the Spain that Rizal loved until his death, for which he asked to go to Cuba to attend to our wounded in the hospitals, and toward which he was officially heading when they seized him… And another Spain, black, the one that seized him in that glorious hour of his life; an ever more diminished Spain, made up of the wicked and the inept, the cruel and the fanatical, heads without honor and honors without heads, with which one must not have even the complicity of silence.[7]

Legacy

Monument to José Rizal on the Avenida de Filipinas in Madrid (Spain).
  • Today there is a monument at the site where Rizal fell, modeled by the Swiss sculptor Richard Kissling, which reads as follows: I want to show to those who deprive people of the right to patriotism that we do know how to sacrifice ourselves for our duties and principles. Death does not matter when one dies for what one loves: the Fatherland and one's loved ones, a sentence he never wrote, like so many others attributed to him before and after his death by different sectors of Philippine society, in order to take advantage of his political stature to support various ideological programs, some of which Rizal had clearly opposed.
  • The American Taft Commission created the Province of Rizal out of the former District of Morong. Today there are countless towns, streets and parks in the Philippines named in his honor.[8]
  • The Rizal Law, passed in 1956 by the Philippine legislature, requires all secondary schools and universities to offer courses on his life, works and writings, although based on translations made by American cultural advisers who translated him from Spanish into English, to then be translated from English into Tagalog.
  • There are monuments erected in his honor in Madrid;[9] Cádiz, Spain;[10] Tokyo;[11] Wilhelmsfeld, Germany; Jinjiang, China; Chicago;[12] Jersey City, New Jersey; Cherry Hill, New Jersey;[13] in Mexico City;[14] Lima, Peru;[15] Litoměřice, Czech Republic;[16] Toronto;[17] Markham;[18] and Montreal, Canada.[19]
  • Sculpted monuments in honor of Rizal are also built in various plazas or urban parks of various towns and cities in the Philippines, which are generally located in the poblacion.[20]
  • The USS Rizal (DD-174) of the United States Navy was a destroyer named after Rizal, launched on September 21, 1918.
  • The José Rizal Bridge and Rizal Park in the city of Seattle are dedicated to Rizal.[21]
  • In the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the Place José Rizal is a small square named after Rizal. In 2022 a bust of Rizal (by the sculptor Gérard Lartigue) was erected in the square on the Rue de Maubeuge, a street frequented by Rizal.[22][23]

Works

Although generations of schoolchildren have been taught that Rizal's most famous quotation is written in Tagalog, and reads as follows: "Ang hindi magmahal sa sariling wika, masahol pa sa hayop at malansang isda" ("He who does not know how to love his own language is worse than beasts and putrid fish"), this has been shown to be manifestly false, even by renowned Filipino historians.[24]

José Rizal wrote his entire literary output in Spanish, but unfortunately the immense majority of Filipinos only have access to biased and distorted translations of his works, made first by "cultural advisers" attached to the American invasion troops, and from there translated again into Tagalog.

Novels

Short stories

Theater

Poems

Essays

Zarzuela

Diaries

Biographies

The first biography of Rizal appeared in Singapore in 1898, two years after his execution. It was written in German by his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, and was published in English in a translation by Howard W. Bray.

In 1905 the Filipino writer M. M. Paterno published in Manila a Biografía de José Rizal, the first written in Spanish.

The fundamental book on Rizal dates from 1907. It was written by Wenceslao E. Retana and published in Madrid by the Librería Victoriano Suárez. Its title is Vida y escritos del Dr. José Rizal and it is accompanied by an important epilogue by Miguel de Unamuno.

Recently, two very different biographies of Rizal have appeared in Spain. The first is by Antonio M. Molina and is titled Yo, José Rizal (Madrid, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1998); it is a biography of the hero based on texts by Rizal himself, annotated by the biographer. The other is a classic biography, translated from English and published in that language in 1968, titled Rizal. Nacionalista y mártir filipino (Madrid, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 2006), by Austin Coates.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Rizal and fake news Prof. Ambeth Ocampo - Manila Bulletin
  2. ↑ "The Mercado – Rizal Family".
  3. ↑ Fundación Santa María (Madrid) 1994, p. 508
  4. ↑ Ortiz Armengol, «Prólogo», al Noli me tangere, cit., pp. 27-28.
  5. ↑ El tiempo de José Rizal María Dolores Elizalde Pérez-Grueso. Instituto de Historia, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC. (in Spanish)
  6. ↑ Return from Oblivion. Poems to Rizal, Manila, Asvel, 1962.
  7. ↑ Prólogo, Javier Gómez de la Serna, en Retana, ob. cit., p. vii.
  8. ↑ Ley que extiende las disposiciones de la Ley de Gobierno Provincial a la Provincia de Rizal June 11, 1901
  9. ↑ artehistoria.net/frames.htm?http://tienda.artehistoria.net/tienda/banco/cuadros/20647.htm Monumento a José Rizal (Madrid) /web/20151031005626/http://www.artehistoria.net/frames.htm?http%3A%2F%2Ftienda.artehistoria.net%2Ftienda%2Fbanco%2Fcuadros%2F20647.htm Archived October 31, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved January 10, 2007
  10. ↑ spain-friendship-day "Busto de Rizal inaugurado en Cádiz para conmemorar el XI Día de la Amistad Filipinas-España". Embajada de Filipinas en Madrid. 2013-06-18. Retrieved 2022-10-05. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  11. ↑ /format/view037.html 日比谷公園 見どころ [Hibiya Park Sights]. www.tokyo-park.or.jp (in 日本語). www.tokyo-park.or.jp/park/format/view037.html Archived from the original on June 26, 2014. Retrieved March 26, 2015. {{cite web}}: Check |archive-url= value (help); Check |url= value (help)
  12. ↑ Sir Choy Arnaldo, KGOR. París en primavera: ¡los caballeros y las damas florecen! .org/content/ Archived January 19, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Rizal Bulletin, March 29, 2010.
  13. ↑ Monostra, Mike (April 13, 2017). cherry-hill/ "Jueves de retroceso: Memorial de la Marcha de la Muerte de Bataan en Cherry Hill". thesunpapers.com. Newspaper Media Group. Retrieved October 1, 2023. En Cooper River Park a lo largo de Park Boulevard {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  14. ↑ .r_gc.r_pw.&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=rizal+statue+ciudad+de+mexico&fb=1&gl=us&hq=rizal+statue&hnear=Mexico+City,+Distrito+Federal,+Mexico&cid=7217792380293812954 "Monumento a José Rizal". Monumento a José Rizal. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  15. ↑ XNWYIuvHPCo=# "Presidente filipino abrirá parque en Lima durante Cumbre APEC". Andina.com.pe. Retrieved December 30, 2009. {{cite web}}: |archive-url= is malformed: path (help); Check |url= value (help)CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  16. ↑ "Huellas de la visita de Rizal a Litomerice (Leitmeritz)". www.univie.ac.at. /apsis/aufi/rizal/litom1.htm Archived from the original on October 18, 2012. Retrieved March 26, 2015. {{cite web}}: Check |archive-url= value (help)
  17. ↑ "Toronto Arts Online - Neighborhood Arts Network". neighbourhoodartsnetwork.org.
  18. ↑ .org/web/20191030152406/https://markhamreview.com/city-unveils-dr-jose-rizal-monument/ "Markham presenta el Monumento al Dr. José Rizal – Markham Review". markhamreview.com. Archived from / the original on October 30, 2019. Retrieved October 30, 2019. {{cite web}}: Check |archive-url= value (help); Check |url= value (help)
  19. ↑ INQUIRER NET U.S. Bureau (2020-11-05). respalda-la-instalación-del-parque-de-la-estatua-rizal "Ciudad canadiense respalda la instalación en el parque de la estatua de Rizal". INQUIRER.net USA (in español). Retrieved 2021-03-02. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  20. ↑ "Monumentos de Rizal en Filipinas". Jose Rizal punto com. Retrieved December 9, 2023.
  21. ↑ cityofseattle.net/Seattle/parks/parkspaces/joserizal.htm Parque Dr. José Rizal /parks/parkspaces/joserizal.htm Archived March 17, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Seattle Parks and Recreation information
  22. ↑ [https:/ /rtvm.gov.ph/place-jose-rizal/ "Place Jose Rizal"]. RTVM. Gobierno de Filipinas. Retrieved December 8, 2023. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  23. ↑ Eychenne, Roger (July 5, 2022). "Gérard Lartigue: una nueva obra en París". La Dépêche. Retrieved December 8, 2023.
  24. ↑ Ocampo, Ambeth (1999), Rizal Without the Overcoat (Expanded ed.), Pasig: Anvil Publishing, Inc., ISBN 971-27-0920-5
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