RIZAL AND THE

UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE
HISTORY
BY:
(PAGES 29 – 47)
(PAGES 48 – 78)
RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY

• Scholarly writing in the Philippines has its influences not only by its
tradition and culture but also by Hispanic features that developed during
the American and Spanish colonization. The writings bear a stamp of how
these influences treated the Philippine tradition and culture.
• John Phelan’s book The Hispanization of the Philippines talks about how
the effects of Spanish rule affect the Filipinos, they as citizens chose to
accept indifference or rejection. But because Phelan and other non-
Filipino scholars have never set foot in the Philippines, their references
are of foreign origin instead of traditional references. Phelan wrote his
book based on his understanding in the history of Latin America. But
using these traditional materials is also questioned because it has been
influenced by the Spanish. This led to the Filipinos, thinking that could
they ever have a Philippine history written.
RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY

• 1872 – A turning point occurred, the initial sign of a shift from a blind acceptance of
Spain’s presence to an awareness to the suffering of the Filipinos. Three reformists
priests were executed which gave fuel to the people to stand up against Spain.
• 1890 – Jose Rizal the foremost Filipino intellectual and patriot, hailed as a Tagalog
Christ and king provided in his annotations that the Spanish reign, the people
“forgot their native alphabet, their songs, their poetry, their laws, in order to parrot
other doctrines that they did not understand.” “They lost all confidence in their
past, all faith in their present, and all hope for the future.”
• Ilustrados- The liberal-educated elite that viewed itself as among other things,
released from the thought-world of the history-less, manipulated masses the so
called pobres y ignorantes. They were the middle class who were educated in
Spanish and exposed to Spanish liberal and European nationalist ideals.
THE FALL IN ILUSTRADO
CONSCIOUSNESS
• Christianity flourished in the Philippines and the Indios were converted to its
religion paving the way to a civilized life, salvation and unity in the country.
Liberal ideas triumphed in the late nineteenth century which led to the rise
of nationalists and separatist movements. Only with the advent of Rizal and
Ilustrados people learned the dissatisfaction of oppressors.
• 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.
• 1898 to 1899 the republic of Aguinaldo was harassed by popes, christs,
pastors, and supremos.
 THE FALL IN ILUSTRADO
•CONSCIOUSNESS
This suggests that events and personalities at the end of the nineteenth century
were repetitions of the past. (Some examples are the Cofradia de San Jose by
Apolinario de la Cruz, Katipunan ni San Cristobal and Santa Iglesia which are
revolts that failed) Jose Rizal becomes less the intellectual achievement of the
century than a complex figure who offered readings of his life and work.
• Lowland literature were being replaced by religious poetry written by Spanish
missionaries, their themes are divorced from Philippine context: love for the
Holy Family, God the light of the world, Mary star of the sea.
• Metrical romances from Spain and Mexico were allowed to be translated as a
form of indigenous literature called awit.
• These events are interpreted as the total Filipino subjugation by the Spain.
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. After successful reprinting and oral recitations of the
awit, the hero 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. The said awit portrayed
Bernardo as the Filipinos who were under domination of
oppressors (eg. Spain, the friars) and therefore remained in a
state of darkness until they recognized their true mother
again.
THE POWER OF KING BERNARDO
• The time of revolution was compared to Bernardo’s unsuccessful
escape from the mountain. It is even said that Jose Rizal met King
Bernardo in the mountain and that he was given an instruction to
spread the word that the people’s king will return someday to liberate
them.
THE UNDERSIDE OF HISPANIZATION
• Jose Rizal was called “the first Filipino” because he figures the rise to
dominance of the principalia class that was the centre of modern life. He
was also involved in the underside of Ilustrado history that is hidden but
always moving with its plans through dominant threads in Philippine history.
• 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. Catholic churches were prominent buildings
dotting Philippine landscape, Reed stated “to achieve a greater sense of
monumentality.” These churches were concentrated places infused with the
power of God. The datu or the maguinoo were treated as second people in
their ruling.
THE UNDERSIDE OF HISPANIZATION
• Chinese Mestizos were introduced to the people giving opportunities for
commerce in export crops, land speculation and tax farming.
• Catholic churches were prominent buildings built on Philippine grounds,
especially hills, Reed says, “to achieve a greater sense of
monumentality.” Churches were important seats of power coming from
God, rituals performed tapped this power into holy water, statues of
saints and other ritual objects.
THE UNDERSIDE OF HISPANIZATION
• Sons of chieftains as noted by Phelan were given more attention and
learning to Catholic doctrine. They believed that the people in high
places were the best that could learn priesthood.
• 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. Filipinos were a reminder of vivid
glimpses of a general condition in the society under colonial rule.
 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 participation in his passion, the “aral” and the “sinakulo” would
suggest that 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. One demonstration of this is in the meanings that are generated in the pasyon's
extensive treatment of Christ's departure from home. That the text should dwell so much on
the separation of mother and son is undoubtedly a reflection of the society's preoccupation
with “utang na loob” which defines, among other things, an adult’s response to the mother
for her love and caring. A childhood life of freedom, comfort, and security, to cite some of the
meanings of "layaw," nurtures a bond between mother and child that endures until death.
 THE PASYON INTERFACE
• Pasyon Henesis – provided a comprehensive story of mankind from the
adventures of Adam and Eve to the glimpses of the apocalypse.

• The incorporation of the tagalog race into the biblical scheme of history was to
the ilustrados one of the symptoms of the ignorance and backwardness of the
common tao under the friar domination. So Rizal sought to rectify this by
establishing a continuity between his time and that of a flourishing pre – Spanish
past. To him, the formation of a national sentiment depended greatly on a sense
of racial affinity and pride that only a documented image of past wholeness and
greatness could provide.
 THE PASYON INTERFACE
• What made the pasyon fulfill the role of a social epic in many lowland
Philippine regions was precisely its immediate relation with the world,
which explains the futility of ascribing a core of meaning to it. This is
evident in the relationship between the pasyon and the war against
Spain.
• But what was its relationship with the sociopolitical hierarchy?
The social hierarchy based on wealth, learning, titular rank, and
monopoly over coercive power, is devalued and regarded as illusory.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• Rizal, as a young boy, he was undoubtedly precocious and from this
fact biographers have traced a continuous line to his ilustrado future.
But in the world of Calamba where he grew up, his boyhood activities
were later interpreted as signs of power. Because he was a frail child,
Rizal supplemented his intellectual feats with a program of physical
exercise and bodybuilding that included swimming, horseback riding,
and long hikes up Mount Makiling. In a way this was to be expected of a
well-bred youth that has a remarkable combination of intelligence
and physical endurance.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• 1887 – when Rizal return to the Philippines from Europe, there were the
persistent rumors that he was a German spy, a Protestant, a mason
and a heretic. The friars were undoubtedly responsible for some of
these in their attempt to identify him as a subversive and alienate him
from the more timid flock.
• Rizal’s newly acquaired knowledge, his being ilustrado, that was
interpreted in a drastically unforeseen manner.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• 1892 – when Rizal returned to the Philippines from his second sojourn
abroad, he was continually followed in the strees by a multitude of
people seeking the mysterious elixir he would prescribe.
• Everything that made Rizal ilustrado—his travels abroad, education,
writings, meetings with prominent people, and so forth—can also be
interpreted in terms of his search for the secret knowledge (lihim na
karunungan) that would enable access to kapangyarihan.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• The appearance in their midst of an ilustrado replica of the aniteros and
babaylanes at the fringes of the town centers went largely unnoticed
by the Spanish authorities. What concerned them above all were the
political consequences of Rizal's writings such as the subversive novel
Noli Me Tangere and the well-balanced and documented report of
January 1888 on the economic situation in the Dominican estate of
Calamba. Feeling themselves under attack, the friars demanded Rizal's
arrest and imprisonment. Prevailed upon by his family and friends,
Rizal left the country in February 1888.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• Rizal's sojourn in Europe from 1888 to 1892 is marked by his sustained
activation of Filipino sentiments on behalf of the mother land. Through
his writings during this period he attempted to instill in his compatriots
pride in their precolonial past. He examined the effects of Spanish
domination and reflected on the possibility of armed revolution. He
prodded his more sluggish countrymen to act, helped organize the
movement La Solidaridad, and generally got involved in the myriad
activities and squabbles typically engaged in by Asian nationalists in
Europe. This period of Rizal's life tends to belong to the history of the
nationalist awakening and its reformist phase.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• In June 1892, Rizal was back in Manila, where he was quickly recognized in the
streets and followed by a large crowd of excited, questioning people half-running
to keep up with him. During the week of comparative freedom before his arrest,
he traveled by railway through the provinces of Bulacan, Pampanga, and Tarlac,
discovering along the way the extent to which his name had fired the popular
imagination.
• This other, "fantastic," Rizal has become a victim of the historical consciousness
of the ilustrado class. The national narrative tells us that in 1892 Rizal founded
the La Liga Filipina, a patriotic organization advocating national unity, mutual
help, education, economic development, and reforms in the colonial order.
 THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL
• The year 1892 thus appears to mark the end of Rizal's effective involvement in the
anticolonial struggle. It was only after hostilities had broken out against Spain in 1896
that Rizal, aboard a ship bound for Cuba, was brought back to Manila, tried, and
convicted of sedition.
• Rizal's public execution on 30 December 1896 figures in history textbooks as a
solemn pause in the saga of Bonifacio and his successor, Aguinaldo. This solemn pause,
however, is ultimately what confounds historians' efforts to rank the personalities and
events of the revolution. If, ask Agoncillo and Guerrero, Bonifacio were the ''legitimate
Father of the Revolution," without whom "it is extremely doubtful whether the Philippine
revolution would have become a reality at a time when everybody seemed in despair
without doing anything about it," why is he overshadowed by Rizal as the national hero?
Together with Renato Constantino, another influential textbook author, they pose the
disturbing question: Why is our national hero not the leader of our revolution?
 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.
 THE MEANINGS OF DEATH
• In a rare revelation of his inner self, Rizal wrote to fellow propagandist Marcelo del
Pilar in 1890:
In my boyhood it was my strong belief that I would not reach the age of thirty, and I
do not know why I used to think in that way. For two months now almost every night I
dream of nothing but of friends and relatives who are dead. I even dreamed once
that I was descending a path leading into the depths of the earth; and there I met a
multitude of persons seated and dressed in white, with white faces, quiet, and
encircled in white light. There I saw two members of my family, one now already
dead and the other still living. Even though I do not believe in such things, and
though my body is very strong and I have no sickness of any kind, nonetheless I
prepare myself for death, arranging what I have to leave and disposing myself for
any eventuality. Laong Laan [Ever Prepared] is my real name.
 THE MEANINGS OF DEATH
• Dying is not an extinction of self but a passage into a state of pure, brilliant
potency (i.e., being "encircled in white light"). It is a passage to the depths of
the earth, to the center of the world, where potency is supremely concentrated.
This dream of 1890 is important because it serves as a counterpoint to Rizal's
intention that his mode of death should follow Christ's example.
• 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."
With him in his cell were a bible and a copy of Kempis's On the Imitation of
Christ. Rizal's behavior was not unusual for someone who deeply admired Christ
while condemning the obscurantism of the church.
 THE MEANINGS OF DEATH
• Rizal could only plead that he had had nothing to do with political
affairs since July 1892, and that he was opposed to the Katipunan
armed conspiracy.
• 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.
• As they neared the site that poets would later designate as his
"Golgotha," Rizal exclaimed: "Oh, Father, how terrible it is to die! How
one suffers . . . " This was followed by: "Father, I forgive everyone from
the bottom of my heart."
 THE MEANINGS OF DEATH
• 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 upholding
his ideals, but more significantly because the event was "true to form."
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THANK YOU
FILIPINOS AND THEIR REVOLUTION BY
REYNALDO C. ILETO
RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE
HISTORY, PAGES 29 - 78