Rizal and the

Underside of
Philippine
History
Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History
✣ Scholarly writing in the Philippines has its influences no
only by its tradition and culture but also by Hispanic
features that developed during the American and Spanish
colonization.
✣ John Phelan’s book The Hispanization of the Philippines
talks about how the effects of Spanish rule affect the
Filipinos.
✣ 1890 – Jose Rizal the foremost Filipino intellectual and
patriot, hailed as a Tagalog Christ and king.
✣ Ilustrados – The liberal-educated elite.
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The Fall in Ilustrado Consciousness
✣ The Katipunan was formed, led by Andres Bonifacio
who made clear plans and strategies for a revolution.
✣ 1898 – Emilio Aguinaldo superseded the Katipunan by
his republican government, making the Filipino people
free from colonization.
✣ Metrical romances from Spain and Mexico were allowed
to be translated as a form of indigenous literature called
awit.

3
The Power of King Bernardo
✣ Bernardo del Carpio – a legendary hero of foreign
origin, who was narrated in a Tagalog awit version in the
mid-nineteenth century.
✣ He was named the king of the Tagalogs hidden or
imprisoned within a sacred mountain from which he
would someday liberate his people.
✣ He was even called the king of amulets or the anting-
anting.

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 The Underside of Hispanization
✣ Jose Rizal was called “the first Filipino”.
✣ The goal of Spanish missionaries and soldiers is to make people live within
the walls of the Catholic Church, a convent or a presidencia surrounded by
the house of the local elite.
✣ Philippine history when made contact with Indianized rulers gives of
parallel similarities with each other: they distributed amulets, had the status
of god-kings, their temples or palaces were places of power influencing the
world around them.

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 The Pasyon Interface
✣ The published pasyon might be seen as a device for drawing the native population
towards the pueblo-center.
✣ The “imitation of Christ” and the participation in his passion, the “aral” and the
“sinakulo” would suggest the pasyon was a powerful tool in the center’s continual
attempt to dominate and codify it surroundings.
✣ Pasyon Pilapil – contributes to the forgetting of their true origin by the masses. It
also signifies a movement away from the center, away from its ideological control
and hierarchical system.
✣ Pasyon Henesis – provided a comprehensive story of mankind from the adventures
of Adam and Eve to the glimpses of the apocalypse.

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 The Textualization of rizal
✣ Certainly, the American colonial administration sponsored Rizal as the
national hero because his philosophy of education before independence was
a fitting rationalization of the U.S. policy of “benevolent assimilation.” To
be sure, Rizal represented the aspirations of the emergent middle class
which had limited revolutionary goals, feared violence. Rizal was already a
national hero before the U.S. intervened, and that his name was on the lips
of many a peasant rebel who rose against the colonial regime far into the
twentieth century.

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 The Meanings of Death
✣ In a rare revolution of his inner self, Rizal wrote to fellow
propagandist Marcelo del Pilar in 1890.
✣ When Rizal was thrown into Fort Santiago prison in November
1896, one of the first things he did was to design and send to his
family a little sketch of “The Agony in the Garden,” beneath
which he wrote, “This is but the first station.”

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 The Meanings of Death
✣ Whether Rizal intended it or not, everything about his final hour was public,
subject to rumor and interpretation. He refused to be brought to the execution site
in a military wagon, as was customary, preferring instead to walk, to undertake a
lakaran.
✣ The sketch, the notes, the trial, his lakaran, his serenity and self-control, his final
words, the dawn breaking in the East--these and many other details confirm that
the execution of Rizal was an extraordinary event, not only because an
exemplary Filipino was shot for the upholding his ideals, but more significantly
because the event was “true to form.”