Jose Rizal

Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was born on June 19, 1861, in the town of Calamba in Laguna province, on the island of Luzon in the Spanish Philippines ^[1]. He was the seventh of eleven children of Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso, a prosperous family that leased farmland from the Dominican friars' estate at Calamba. The household valued learning: his mother taught him to read at an early age, and family tradition holds that he was composing verses in Tagalog while still a boy ^[2].

Any fair account of a Jose Rizal biography must begin with the tensions that shaped his childhood. In 1872 the colonial government executed three Filipino priests, Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora, after implicating them in the Cavite mutiny. Rizal's older brother Paciano had been close to Burgos, and the executions left a lasting mark on the family ^[1]. Around the same time his mother was arrested on a dubious charge and made to walk to prison in Santa Cruz, an ordeal the young Rizal never forgot ^[3].

He studied first in Binan, then enrolled at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, a Jesuit school, where he earned top marks and a bachelor's degree in 1877. He went on to the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomas, initially taking courses in philosophy and then in medicine, partly because his mother was losing her eyesight and he hoped to treat her ^[2].

In 1882, without informing his parents, Rizal sailed for Spain to continue his medical education. He enrolled at the Universidad Central de Madrid, where he completed a licentiate in medicine in 1884 and also pursued a degree in philosophy and letters ^[1]. Madrid placed him at the center of a small but active community of Filipino students and expatriates who were beginning to press for colonial reform, a circle later known as the Propaganda Movement ^[4].

His training did not stop in Spain. Determined to specialize in ophthalmology, he studied under noted eye specialists in Paris and in Heidelberg, where he worked with the ophthalmologist Otto Becker ^[3]. In Germany he formed a lasting friendship with the Austrian ethnographer Ferdinand Blumentritt, with whom he exchanged hundreds of letters over the following decade ^[5]. Rizal's gift for languages became famous among those who knew him; accounts credit him with reading or speaking a remarkable range of European and Asian tongues, alongside his native Tagalog and Spanish ^[2].

These years also turned him into a writer with a purpose. In 1884, at a banquet in Madrid honoring the painters Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Rizal delivered a speech celebrating Filipino talent as proof that the colony's people were the equals of their rulers, a theme that would run through everything he later published ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Jose Rizal usually meets his novels first. Noli Me Tangere, written in Spanish and printed in Berlin in 1887 with money partly borrowed from a friend, told the story of Crisostomo Ibarra, a young Filipino who returns from Europe with plans to build a school and finds his hopes destroyed by a vindictive friar ^[1]. The book portrayed the abuses of the religious orders and the corruption of colonial administration in unsparing detail. Copies smuggled into the Philippines caused a sensation, and the authorities and friars condemned the work as subversive and heretical ^[3].

Rizal returned home briefly in 1887 but found himself under such suspicion that he left again within months. The pressure soon fell on his family and neighbors. When the tenants of Calamba, including the Rizals, disputed the rents and titles claimed by the Dominican estate, the courts ruled against them, and many families, among them Rizal's parents and sisters, were evicted from their homes ^[2].

His second novel, El Filibusterismo, appeared in Ghent in 1891. Darker and angrier than the first, it followed Ibarra transformed into the vengeful jeweler Simoun, who plots to destroy the colonial order from within. The novel weighed revolution and found it wanting, ending in failure and a call to earn freedom through worthiness rather than bloodshed ^[4]. Between the two novels Rizal also produced an annotated edition of Antonio de Morga's 1609 chronicle Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, published in Paris in 1890, using the old Spanish account to argue that Filipinos had possessed a developed culture long before colonization ^[5].

Among the central Jose Rizal facts is that he consistently urged reform within the Spanish system rather than armed uprising. In Europe he wrote for La Solidaridad, the Barcelona and Madrid newspaper of the Propaganda Movement, publishing essays such as The Philippines a Century Hence and The Indolence of the Filipinos, which analyzed colonial policy and defended the character of his countrymen ^[4]. He campaigned for representation of the Philippines in the Spanish Cortes, for freedom of the press, and for the replacement of friar power with secular administration and public education ^[1].

In June 1892 he sailed home despite warnings that he faced arrest. In Manila he founded La Liga Filipina, a civic association intended to unite Filipinos for mutual protection, education and economic development through lawful means ^[3]. The organization alarmed the authorities. Within days of its founding, Governor General Eulogio Despujol ordered Rizal deported to Dapitan, a remote town on the Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao ^[1].

His arrest split the reform movement. Some members of the dissolved Liga concluded that peaceful change was impossible, and in July 1892 Andres Bonifacio and others founded the Katipunan, a secret society committed to independence through revolution ^[4]. Rizal himself never joined it and later stated that he opposed a premature uprising, yet the revolutionaries invoked his name as a symbol and even used it as a password ^[3].

The four years Rizal spent in Dapitan, from 1892 to 1896, showed the breadth of his abilities in a small provincial setting. He practiced medicine, and patients traveled long distances for his skill as an eye surgeon; he successfully operated on his own mother's cataracts ^[2]. He opened a school for local boys, teaching languages, mathematics and practical skills without charging tuition, and asked his pupils to help with community projects instead ^[3].

He engineered a water system for the town, installed lighting, and drained marshland to reduce disease. He farmed, collected specimens for European scientists, and corresponded with scholars abroad; several species he gathered were later named in his honor, including the flying lizard Draco rizali ^[5]. He also won a share of a lottery prize and used part of the money to buy land and expand his projects ^[2].

It was in Dapitan that he met Josephine Bracken, a young woman of Irish descent who had accompanied her blind foster father from Hong Kong seeking treatment. The two formed a lasting attachment. A church wedding proved impossible because Rizal would not retract his writings, so they lived as common law partners, and their only child, a son, died shortly after birth ^[3].

In 1896 Rizal volunteered to serve as a physician with Spanish forces in Cuba, where yellow fever was killing soldiers, and the governor general approved the request. He left Dapitan in July, but while he was en route to Spain the Katipunan uprising broke out in August. Though he had no part in it, he was taken from his ship, returned to Manila, and imprisoned in Fort Santiago ^[1].

A military court tried him in December 1896 on charges of rebellion, sedition and forming illegal associations. The prosecution leaned heavily on his writings and on his founding of La Liga Filipina; his defense, that he had counseled against the revolt, was brushed aside. The court convicted him and sentenced him to death ^[4]. During his final days in Fort Santiago he wrote an untitled farewell poem in Spanish, later known as Mi Ultimo Adios, which was smuggled out hidden inside an alcohol lamp given to his sister ^[2].

On the morning of December 30, 1896, a firing squad executed Rizal at the field of Bagumbayan, now called Luneta or Rizal Park, in Manila. He was 35 years old ^[1]. Contemporary accounts record that he faced death calmly. His execution, far from ending the unrest, hardened Filipino resolve, and the revolution he had cautioned against continued until Spanish rule collapsed ^[3].

Rizal's reputation grew rapidly after his death. During the American colonial period the government designated December 30 as Rizal Day, and the monument raised over his remains at Luneta in 1913 became one of the most recognizable landmarks in Manila ^[1]. A province near his birthplace bears his name, as do countless streets, schools and towns across the Philippines and monuments in cities abroad, from Madrid to Chicago ^[3].

His intellectual standing has traveled well beyond his homeland. Scholars have called him the first exponent of Asian nationalism, and his novels remain required reading in Philippine schools under the Rizal Law of 1956, which mandates the study of his life and works in all colleges and universities ^[4]. Historians continue to debate the choices he made, especially his opposition to the 1896 uprising, and some, notably Renato Constantino in a famous 1969 lecture, questioned the way the hero was canonized. That argument itself is a measure of how central he remains to Filipino self-understanding ^[5].

Among Jose Rizal achievements, the most durable may be the idea at the heart of his work: that a colonized people could prove their equality through learning, conduct and art. A doctor, novelist, sculptor, linguist and scientist who died before turning 36, he gave the Philippines both a literature of national identity and a martyr whose example outlived the empire that killed him ^[2].