Jose Rizal

José Protasio Rizal-Mercado y Alonso-Realonda, better known as José Rizal (Calambá, June 19, 1861 - Manila, December 30, 1896), was a writer, physician (he became an ophthalmologist in Madrid), painter and linguist who lived in the Spanish Philippines in the second half of the XIXth century< /span>. He is considered the national hero of the Philippines and was a founder in 1892 of the Philippine League, an organization that called for greater autonomy and reforms for the Philippines.

He was shot by the Civil Guard for the crime of rebellion after being tried by a Spanish court in Manila, after the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution.

Family history

José Rizal was the seventh of 11 children born to Francisco Rizal y Mercado, and Teodora Alonso y Realonda, prosperous peasants from the city of Calambá, in the province of Laguna. In his miscegenation the Austronesian, Chinese and Spanish lineages are crossed. On the Chinese side, he descended from Lam-co, a merchant who came to the Philippines from the then city of Amoy, in China, at the end of the XVII century . Lam-co married Inés de la Rosa, a mixed-race woman of Chinese and Tagalog descent. Rizal's mother, Teodora, was the great-granddaughter of a mixed-race Hispano-Tagalog.

In 1849, Governor General Narciso Clavería published an edict ordering the indigenous population to adopt Spanish surnames or surnames with a Spanish resonance. The norm, of an administrative nature, was given for the purposes of civil census, cadastre, service, fiscal policy, etc. Lam-co, like a merchant that he was, chose the surname Mercado to indicate his profession, also adopting the given name Domingo. Such was the last name that Rizal would use until he entered the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, a Jesuit institution (today Ateneo de Manila University) where he continued his secondary studies. It would not take long for the young student, mature and with a special level of conscience, to take political risks by criticizing the Spanish colonial authorities with clear courage. At that time, his older brother Paciano urged him to change his last name to Rizal, derived from the voice ricial .

Education

Known as "Pepe" in his family circles, Rizal began to be instructed by his mother. Of curious temperament, one night he carefully observed a butterfly that, flying around a candle, would end up burning itself. The mother then took advantage of the example to warn the child what could happen to someone who yearns 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 earning the degree of topographer, surveyor, and estate property assessor. It was at the University of Santo Tomás, managed by the Dominican order, where he began his career in Philosophy and Letters, which then combined studies in Philosophy, Literature, Philology, Latin and Humanities.

When he found out that his mother was going blind, he leaned towards the study of Ophthalmology, beginning his General Medicine courses at the aforementioned Dominican institution. In order to pursue the long-awaited specialty, he left the Philippines to study in Europe, not without strong parental opposition. His first destination was Madrid, at whose university he validated subjects from his Philippine university, both Medicine and Philosophy and Letters, finally graduating cum laude . He would then work for a few months as an ophthalmologist's assistant in a clinic in Paris and, later, in Heidelberg (Germany), where he worked as a regular ophthalmologist.

Legacy

Far from showing himself to be a revolutionary, he was rather the cultured young bourgeois who yearned for administrative reforms for the archipelago, including the recognition of the Philippines as a full-fledged Spanish province. This entailed the end of the colonial statute and, above all, of the clerical guardianship, which according to some prevented the progress of the islands. In Madrid he became the natural leader of the "Propaganda" movement, through which Filipino students from the Spanish capital expressed their demands in favor of the progress and development of the distant colony; In this, Rizal contributed articles to the biweekly La Solidaridad, edited by some of his Filipino countrymen such as Marcelo Hilario del Pilar, Panganiban, López Jaena, Lete, first in Madrid and then in Barcelona.

The idea behind the publication was as follows:

• that the Philippines therefore obtains parliamentary representation in the General Courts, a right that it had only briefly in the early centuryXIX;
• that the parishes run by Spanish priests were gradually ceded to the native clergy;
• to grant the people of the Philippines freedom of assembly and expression;
• to establish equality between Filipino and peninsular Spaniards, especially in access to certain places in the administration and church.

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 on the islands. For this reason, when Rizal returned to Manila in 1892, he was accused of subversion for having founded a civic movement called 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 and independentist armed society, of which Rizal refused to be a part, began a revolution inspired by certain patriotic phrases taken from Rizal's novels. The young doctor, who in order to redeem himself from his exile had obtained from the Spanish Government a position as a field doctor in Cuba (also involved in a war of independence at that time), was arrested on board the ship that was taking him to Spain. Back in the Philippines, Rizal was accused of having instigated the revolt and of wanting to conspire with the Cuban independentistas.

Death

José Rizal's rifle.

At the instigation of some religious orders, Rizal was accused of illicit association with other revolutionaries. Tried by a military court and convicted of sedition, he was shot in the Bagumbayan area (now Rizal Park) in Manila on December 30, 1896. On the eve of his execution, he wrote a poem entitled My last goodbye, as well as a letter to his close friend and Austrian collaborator Fernando 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.

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 during his exile, and whom he married. Before his execution, he asked that he not be blindfolded and that they shoot him head-on; The first was granted, but the second was denied, as he was considered a traitor. However, before the shots were fired, Rizal turned to face the front; he fell thus, showing conviction in his own righteousness.

Rizal is a member of the most distinguished generation of great Filipino nationalists, along with his countrymen Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo. He is also considered a member of the Filipino Writers of the Golden Age of Filipino Spanish-language literature. At present there is a monument on the site where Rizal fell, modeled by the Swiss sculptor Richard Kissling, author of the statue of William Tell. The following is read on the monument to Rizal: I want to show 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 you die for what you love: the country and loved ones.

Works

Novels

• Noli me tangere (1887)
• The filibusterism (1891)

Theater

• The advice of the gods (1915)

Poems

• To the Philippine Youth (1879)
• My last goodbye (1896)
• To Heidelberg Flowers

Daily

• Two Youth Journals (1882-1884) (Madrid, 1960)

Zarzuela

• Next to the Pasig (1880)