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Jose Rizal (full name: Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda) (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896), was a Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during Spanish colonial era and its eventual independence from Spain. He is considered a national hero and the anniversary of Rizal's death is commemorated as a Philippine holiday called Rizal Day. Rizal's 1896 military trial and execution made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution. |  |
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Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios The seventh of eleven children born to a middle class family in the town of Calamba, Laguna, Rizal attended the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and then traveled alone to Madrid, Spain where he studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid, earning the degree Licentiate in Medicine. He earned a second doctorate at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg. Rizal was a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages. He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. These are social commentaries on the Philippines that formed the nucleus of literature that inspired dissent among peaceful reformists and spurred the militancy of armed revolutionaries against 333 years of Spanish rule. As a political figure, Rizal was the founder of La Liga Filipina, a civic organization that subsequently gave birth to the Katipunan led by Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. He was a proponent of institutional reforms by peaceful means rather than by violent revolution. The general consensus among Rizal scholars, however, attributed his martyred death as the catalyst that precipitated the Philippine Revolution. |
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Jose Rizal's parents were Francisco Mercado (left picture) and Teodora Alonzo (right picture), prosperous
farmers who were granted by the Dominicans lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm. He was the seventh child of their eleven children (namely, Saturnina, Paciano, Narcisa, Olympia, Lucia, Maria, Jose, Concepcion, Josephina, Trinidad and Soledad.) |
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| Family Rizal was descended on his father's side from Domingo Lam-co, a Chinese immigrant who sailed to the Philippines from Amoy, China in the mid-17th century. Lam-co married Inez de la Rosa, a Sangley native of Luzon. To free his descendants from the anti-Chinese animosity of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname "Mercado" (market) to indicate their Chinese merchant roots. Their original application was for the name Ricial, apropos their main occupation of farming, which was arbitrarily denied. The name Rizal (originally Ricial, the green of young growth or green fields), was adopted by Jose to enable him to travel freely as the Mercados had gained notoriety by their son's intellectual prominence. From early childhood Rizal was already advancing unheard-of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which infuriated the authorities. Aside from indigenous Malay and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that Jose had traces of Spanish, Japanese and Negrito ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather (Teodora's great-grandfather) was Eugenio Ursua, a descendant of Japanese settlers, who married a Filipina named Benigna (surname unknown). These two gave birth to Regina Ursua who married a Sangley mestizo from Pangasinan named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora's grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a Spanish mestizo named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, the father of Teodora. Austin Craig mentions Lacandula, Rajah of Tondo at the time of the Spanish incursion, also as an ancestor. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
| Education Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He was sent to Manila to study, and upon enrolling at the Ateneo Municipal, changed his name to "Rizal" to escape the opprobrium of the name "Mercado". His brother Paciano had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora who had been tried as subversives and sentenced to death by garrote. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a land surveyor and assessor's degree, and at the same time at the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine specializing in ophthalmology at the University of Santo Tomas but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who were operating the school. |
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Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine specializing in ophthalmology at the
University of Santo Tomas but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who were operating the school. Without his parents' knowledge and consent,
but secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid in 1882 and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered an address in German in April 1887 before the anthropological society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language. |
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He left Heidelberg a poem, "A las flores del Heidelberg," which was both an evocation and a prayer for the
welfare of his native land and the unification of common values between East and West. Rizal's multifacetedness was described by his German friend, Dr. Adolf Meyer, as "stupendous." Documented studies show him to be a polymath with an uncommon ability to master various skills and subjects. He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, inventor, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting. He was a Freemason. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
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Rizal's life is one of the most documented of the 19th century due to the vast and extensive records written
by and about him. Most everything in his short life is recorded somewhere, being himself a regular diarist and prolific letter writer, much of these material having survived. His biographers,
however, have faced the difficulty of translating his writings because of Rizal's habit of switching from one language to another. They drew largely from his travel diaries with their insights of a young Asian encountering the west for the first time. They included his later trips, home and back again to Europe through Japan and the United States, and, finally, through his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong. This period of his education and his frenetic pursuit of life included his recorded affections. Among them were Gertrude Becket of Chalcot Crescent (London), wealthy and high-minded Nelly Boustead of the English and Iberian merchant family, last descendant of a noble Japanese family Usui Seiko, his earlier friendship with Segunda Katigbak and eight-year romantic relationship with his cousin, Leonor Rivera. He left more than goodwill among his European friends who kept almost everything he gave them, even doodlings on pieces of paper. In the home of a Spanish liberal, Pedro Ortiga y Perez, he left an impression that was to be remembered by his daughter, Consuelo. In her diary, she wrote of a day Rizal spent there and regaled them with his intellect, social graces, and sleight-of-hand tricks. In London, during his research on Morga's writings, he became a regular guest in the home of Dr. Reinhold Rost of the British Museum who referred to him as "a gem of a man." The family of Karl Ullmer, pastor of Wilhelmsfeld, and the Blumentritts saved even buttonholes and napkins with sketches and notes. They were ultimately bequeathed to the Rizal family to form a treasure-trove of memorabilia. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
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As Blumentritt had warned, these led to Rizal's prosecution as the inciter of revolution and eventually, to a military
trial and execution. The intended consequence of teaching the natives where they stood brought about an adverse reaction, as the Philippine Revolution of 1896 took off virulently thereafter. As a leader of the reform movement of Filipino students in Spain, he contributed essays, allegories, and poems to the Spanish newspaper La Solidaridad in Barcelona. The core of his writings centers on liberal and progressive ideas of individual rights and freedom, specifically rights for the Filipino people. His commentaries reiterate the following agenda:
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| Persecution Wenceslao Retana, an acquaintance in Spain, had slighted Rizal by a reference to his parents and promptly apologized after being challenged to a duel. Aware that Rizal was a better swordsman, he issued an apology, became an admirer, and wrote Rizal's first European biography. Memory as a ten-year old of his mother's treatment at the hands of the civil authorities, with the approval of the church authorities, hurt so much as to explain his reaction to Retana. The incident stemmed from an accusation that Rizal's mother, Teodora, tried to poison the wife of a cousin when she only intervened to help. Without a hearing she was ordered to prison in Santa Cruz in 1871, and made to walk the ten miles from Calamba. She was released after two and a half years of appeals to the highest court. After writing Noli me Tangere, among the numerous other poems, plays and tracts he had already written, he gained further notoriety with the Spaniards. Against the advice of relatives and friends, he came back to the Philippines to aid his family which was in dispute with the Dominican landlords. In 1888, he wrote a petition on behalf of the tenants of Calamba and the following year led them to speak out against friar attempts to raise rent. They initiated a litigation which only resulted with the Dominicans evicting them from their homes, including the Rizal family. Eventually, General Valeriano Weyler had the buildings on the farm torn down. In 1896 while Rizal was in prison in Fort Santiago, his brother Paciano was tortured by Spaniards trying to extract evidence of José's complicity in the revolution. Two officers took turns applying pins under the fingernails; with his hands bound behind him and raised several feet, he was dropped repeatedly until he lost consciousness. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
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In Dapitan, the Jesuits mounted a great effort to secure his return to the fold, led by Father Sanchez, his former
professor, who failed in his mission. The task was resumed by Father Pastells, a prominent member of the Order. In his letter to Pastells, Rizal sails close to the ecumenism familiar to us
today. "We are entirely in accord in admitting the existence of God. How can I doubt his when I am convinced of mine. Whoso recognizes the effect recognizes the cause. To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for? Now then, my faith in God, if the result of a ratiocination may be called faith, is blind, blind in the sense of knowing nothing. I neither believe nor disbelieve the qualities which many attribute to him; before theologians' and philosophers' definitions and lucubrations of this ineffable and inscrutable being I find myself smiling. Faced with the conviction of seing myself confronting the supreme Problem, which confused voices seek to explain to me, I cannot but reply: 'It could be; but the God that I foreknow is far more grand, far more good: Plus Supra!...I believe in (revelation); but not in revelation or revelations which each religion or religions claim to possess. Examining them impartially, comparing them and scrutinizing them, one cannot avoid discerning the human 'fingernail' and the stamp of the time in which they were written... No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However, brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light. I believe in revelation, but in that living revelation which surrounds us on every side, in that voice, mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die. What books can better reveal to us the goodness of God, his love, his providence, his eternity, his glory, his wisdom? 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork'." As a gift to his mother on her birth anniversary he wrote the other of his poems of maturity, "Mi Retiro," with a description of a calm night overlaid with a million stars. The poem, with its concept of a spontaneous creation and speaking of God as Plus Supra, is considered his accommodation of evolution. ...the breeze idly cools, the firmament glows, the waves tell in sighs to the docile wind timeless stories beneath the shroud of night. Say that they tell of the world, the first dawn of the sun, the first kiss that his bosom inflamed, when thousands of beings surged out of nothing, and peopled the depths, and to the heights mounted, to wherever his fecund kiss was implanted. His best friend, Blumentritt, kept him in touch with European friends and fellow-scientists who wrote a stream of letters which arrived in Dutch, French, German and English and which baffled the censors, delaying their transmittal. Those four years of his exile coincided with the development of the Philippine Revolution from inception and to its final breakout, which, from the viewpoint of the court which was to try him, suggested his complicity in it. He condemned the uprising, although all the members of the Katipunan made him honorary president and used his name as a war-cry. Near the end of his exile he met and courted the step-daughter of a patient, an Irish woman named Josephine Bracken. He was unable to obtain an ecclesiastical marriage because he would not return to the religion of his youth and was not known to be clearly against revolution. He nonetheless considered Josephine to be his wife and the only person mentioned in the poem, Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, my joy... Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
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In his letter to his family he wrote: "Treat our aged parents as you would wish to be treated...Love them greatly in
memory of me...30 December, 1896." In his final letter, to the Sudeten-German professor Ferdinand Blumentritt - Tomorrow at 7, I shall be shot; but I am innocent of the crime of rebellion... He had to reassure him that he had not turned revolutionary as he once considered being, and that he shared his ideals to the very end. He also bequeathed a book personally bound by him in Dapitan to his 'best and dearest friend.' When Blumentritt received it he broke down and wept. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
| Execution |
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Moments before his execution by a firing squad of Filipino native infantry, backed by an insurance force of Spanish
troops, the Spanish surgeon general requested to take his pulse: it was normal. Aware of this, the Spanish sergeant in charge of the backup force hushed his men to silence when they began raising
'vivas!' with the partisan crowd. His last words were "consummatum est",--it is finished. He was secretly buried in Paco Cemetery in Manila with no identification on his grave. His sister Narcisa toured all possible gravesites and found freshly turned earth at Paco Cemetery with civil guards posted at the gate. Assuming this could be the most likely spot, there being no ground burials in that cemetery, she made a gift to the cemetery guardian to mark the site "RPJ." |
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A statue now stands at the place where he fell, designed by the Swiss Richard Kissling of the famed William
Tell sculpture.The statue carries the inscription: I want to show to those who deprive people the right to love of country, that when we know how to sacrifice ourselves for our duties and convictions, death does not matter if one dies for those one loves – for his country and for others dear to him. That his burial was not on holy ground led to issues raised on the veracity of accounts of his 'retraction,' which the Church ever since has been vigorously defending. Many continue to believe that Rizal neither married his sweetheart Josephine Bracken in Roman Catholic rites hours before his execution nor ever retracted those parts of his writings that were anti-Roman Catholic. Those who deny the retraction point out to a revealing clue tucked in 'Adios', I go where there are no slaves, no hangmen or oppressors, where faith does not kill... Whether this stanza was his final comment on the Catholic Church is a subject of dispute. In most of his writings Rizal maintained that the men of the cloth were the real rulers and the real government. Much of the Church's case rests on claims of a signed retraction, a copy of which could not be produced and shown to the Rizal family despite their repeated requests. Whether this stanza was his final comment on the Catholic Church is a subject of dispute. In most of his writings Rizal maintained that the men of the cloth were the real rulers and the real government. Much of the Church's case rests on claims of a signed retraction, a copy of which could not be produced and shown to the Rizal family despite their repeated requests. Exile in Dapitan - Last days - Execution - Mi Ultimo Adios top |
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| Mi Ultimo Adios | |||
| The poem is more aptly titled, "Adios, Patria Adorada" (literally "Farewell, Beloved Country"). By virtue of logic and literary tradition, the words come from the first line of the poem itself. It first appeared in print not in Manila but in Hong Kong, when a copy of the poem and an accompanying photograph came to J. P. Braga who decided to publish it in a monthly journal he edited. There was a delay when Braga, who greatly admired Rizal, wanted a good job of the photograph and sent it to be engraved in London, a process taking well over two months. It finally appeared under 'Mi ultimo pensamiento,' a title he supplied and by which it was known for a few years. |  |
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Thus, when Balaguer's anonymous account was appearing in Barcelona, no word of the poem's existence reached
him in time to revise what he had written. His account was too elaborate that Rizal would have had no time to write "Adios." Rizal's words rang through the halls of Congress six years after his death. When the Philippine Organic Act of 1902 was being debated in the United States Congress, Representative Henry Cooper of Wisconsin, after a speech, rendered an English translation of the valedictory poem capped by the peroration, "Under what clime or what skies has tyranny claimed a nobler victim?". The Americans, however, would not sign the bill into law until 1916 and did not grant full autonomy until 1946--fifty years after Rizal's death. |
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