Biography

José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino and Chinese-mestizo family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. His parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. He was the seventh child of their eleven children.

Dominican friar landlords granted the family the privilege of the lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm, but contentious litigation followed the friars' attempts to raise tenant rental fees, which the farmers, led by Rizal, disputed while exposing the non-payment of taxes due on friar land taken over by the Dominicans from the Jesuits after their expulsion; later, General Valeriano Weyler had the buildings on the farm torn down.

Upon enrolling at the Ateneo, Rizal changed his surname 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 declared subversives, suffering horrible death by "garrote".

Rizal was descended from Domingo Lam-co, a Chinese immigrant who sailed to the Philippines from Amoy, China in the mid 17th century (see Chinese Filipino). 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, although their original application was for the name Ricial, apropos their main occupation of farming, which was arbitrarily denied. The name Rizal, originally Ricial, or the green of young growth, was adopted as an alias with Paciano to enable Jose to travel freely, as the Mercados had gained notoriety by their son's intellectual prominence. It is to be noted that Rizal was from early childhood already advancing unheard of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which to the authorities must have been infuriating.

Aside from his indigenous Malay and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that José 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 Pangasinán named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora's grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a mestizo (half-caste Spaniard) 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.

Contributions

Writings

José Rizal's most famous works were his two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, social commentaries on the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. These books, inspired by the ideals in Cervantes, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Don Quixote and The Count of Monte Cristo, angered both the Spaniards and the Hispanicized Filipinos, due to the blatant and insulting symbolism in the books. Rizal's first critic was Ferdinand Blumentritt, the sympathetic Philippine Expert, a Researcher and Scholar, whose first reaction was of grave misgiving. The longest and most arduous argument for the truth contained in his novels was with the Austrian, whose mother was the daughter of Andreas Schneider, Imperial Treasurer at Vienna, an orthodox and far advanced thinker in defense of the Catholic Faith. But this did not dissuade him from writing the preface of 'El Filibusterismo,' after he had translated 'Noli me Tangere' into German. 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 the obverse reaction, as the Philippine Revolution of 1896 took off virulently thereafter. Rizal's trial was regarded a travesty even by the prominent Spaniards of his day. Soon after his execution, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in an impassioned and unforgettable utterance, recognized Rizal as a Spaniard, raised in the best traditions of the country, "...profoundly and intimately more Spanish than those wretched men--forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did--those wretches who, over his still warm body, hurled like an insult heavenward that blasphemous cry, 'Viva Espana'." Even in death, Rizal's words inspired. When the Philippine Organic Act was being debated in the U.S. Congress, doubts about the capacity of Filipinos for self-government were swept by a passionate speech by Congressman Henry Cooper of Wisconsin in which he recited an English translation of the valedictory poem "ultimo adios," and capped by a stirring peroration, "Under what clime or what skies has tyranny claimed a nobler victim?"

Wenceslao Retana had slighted Rizal by a careless reference to his parents, and promptly apologized after being challenged to a duel. He survived by issuing an apology, became an admirer, and wrote Rizal's first European biography. Memory as a ten-year old of his mother's unjust treatment at the hands of the civil authorities, doubtless with the knowledge and approval of the church authorities, hurt so much as to explain his reaction to Retana. The incident stemmed from an unfounded accusation that his mother tried to poison the wayward wife of a cousin when she only intervened to help. Without as much as a hearing she was ordered to prison in Santa Cruz and made to walk the ten miles from Calamba. Only after two and a half years of costly appeals to the highest court, the Royal Audiencia, was his mother finally released.

Moments before his execution by a firing squad of Filipino native infantry, backed by an insurance force of a squad Spanish infantry, 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 squad to silence when they began raising "vivas" with the partisan crowd. His last words, 'consummatum est', Jesus' own, prefigured in ways that he knew but could not exactly foresee, that his death would be the end of Spain in the Philippines, and she would lose her moral right to rule. He was the best friend Spain had, and she failed to see it. Indeed, the shot that the crowd heard that moment was the shot that brought Spanish Rule in the Philippines to an end.

Achievements

Dr. José Protacio Mercado Rizal y Alonzo Realonda, variously called the "Pride of the Malay Race," "The Great Malayan," "The First Filipino," "The Messiah of the Revolution," "The Universal Hero" and "The Messiah of the Redemption." He is the national hero of the Philippines. Despite his relatively short life, Rizal's passion as a patriot together with his intelligence as one of the first Third World intellectuals of the post-colonial era have inspired succeeding thinkers and revolutionaries of the centrality of national identity as a social force in the project of nation-building. He is called by Benedict Anderson as one of the best exemplars of nationalist thinking.

Rizal was a polyglot. The medium of instruction in various academies in the Philippines and Europe where he studied were Spanish, French, Latin and German. There are facsimiles of letters of his that are in excellent German, and he also had correspondence in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, German and Dutch. He made translations from Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Sanskrit. In addition he had at least some knowledge of Malay, Chavacano, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Subanun besides his native Tagalog.

He was a poet. As a polymath, he was also an amateur architect, artist, educator, amateur economist, amateur ethnologist, scientific farmer, historian, inventor, journalist, mythologist, internationalist, naturalist, novelist, ophthalmologist, physician, propagandist, sculptor, martial artist, and amateur sociologist.

A patriot of the highest order, the anniversary of Rizal's death, December 30, is now celebrated as a holiday in the Philippines, called Rizal Day.

Education

Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He went to Manila to study at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente, or super excellent. He continued his education in the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a degree in land surveying and assessor, and at the same time in the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine (ophthalmology) in the University of Santo Tomas, but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who operated the University.

Without his family's knowledge and consent, but wholly and secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid 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 a learned address in German before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language, a shining moment in the relations between East and West. Ten years later, the society met to honor him in death with a reading of a German translation of his farewell poem. 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, but which presaged the unification of common culture and common values, of a melding of East and West, the hoped-for relations between peoples, the relations of today.

He left much 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 Rey, he left an impression that was to be remembered by his daughter, Consuelo Ortiga y Perez, in her diary, a moment, she wrote, to be cherished for a lifetime, of a day Rizal spent there and regaled them with his brilliant intellect and 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, head of the India Office Library of the British Museum, who referred to him as "a gem of a man." The Ullmers, family of Karl Ullmer, pastor of Wilhelmsfeld, and the Blumentritts were aware of the aura of destiny surrounding him that they treasured everything he gave them, even buttonholes and napkins with sketches and notes, which were ultimately bequeathed to the Rizal family to form a treasure trove of memorabilia which today offer a glimpse of the man who truly is 'A Man For All Climes.'

As a leader of the Propaganda Movement of Filipino students in Spain, he contributed newspaper articles to La Solidaridad in Barcelona with the following agenda:

• That the Philippines be a province of Spain


• Representation in the Cortes (Parliament)


• Filipino priests instead of friars Augustinians, Dominicans, or Franciscans in parishes and remote sitios


• Freedom of assembly and speech


• Equal rights before the law (for both Filipino and Spanish plaintiffs)

The colonial authorities in the Philippines did not favor these reforms, even if they were more openly endorsed by Spanish intellectuals like Morayta, Unamuno, Pi y Margal and others. Upon his return to Manila in 1892, he formed a civic movement called La Liga Filipina. This league advocated these moderate social reforms through legal means, but was disbanded by the governor. At that time, he had already been declared an enemy of the state by the Spanish authorities because of his incendiary novels. Noli me Tangere, in particular, had portrayed the friars in a very bad light, with little or no hope of redemption.

As a political reformer, he is the peer of Gandhi, Tagore and Sun Yat Sen as pioneers who remoulded thinking on the Asian continent, but as modernist who accepted the best that European civilization could offer he transcends both nation and continent, a far-seeing visionary with a relevant message for our time.

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