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José Rizal

(Redirected from Jose Rizal)

José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda (June 19, 1861 - December 30, 1896) is the national hero of the Philippines. He was a doctor, a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a dramatist, and a novelist. He was in fact a polyglot, who was able to speak several languages--including Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Malayan , Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Tagalog, and other native dialects.

He was born in the town of Calamba, Laguna, to Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo , of mixed Spanish, Filipino and Chinese descent.

He first studied under Justiniano Cruz in Laguna. He went to Manila to study at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila where he received his bachelor of arts in 1877. 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 then decided to study medicine 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.

He then went to Madrid, Spain, against the wishes of his father, to study Medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree of Licentiate in Medicine.

He continued his studies at Paris and Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate.

José Rizal was quite well known for writing two novels, Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891), which are social commentaries of the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. These two books are responsible for the development of an unified Filipino consciousness and identity.

Rizal was a reformer for a more open society, rather than a revolutionary for political independence; 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 rather than the Spanish Augustinians, Dominicans, or Franciscans
  • Freedom of assembly and speech
  • Equal rights before the law (for both Filipino and Spanish plaintiffs)

Note that if these reforms had been accepted, Rizal's books would have been legal. But, the authorities in the Philippines could not brook this nonviolent agenda, as the social reforms threatened the status quo; thus upon his return to Manila in 1892 he was exiled, being wrongly accused of subversion for forming a nonviolent reform movement La Liga Filipina. While exiled in Dapitan , Mindanao, he founded a school and a hospital.

However, when in 1896 the Katipunan national secret society rebelled, he was implicated by association, arrested, tried for sedition, condemned, and executed by firing squad in Bagumbayan (now Rizal Park ), in Manila. He was offered a chance to evade execution by serving as doctor in Cuba but chose death. On the eve of his execution, he wrote his last poem, Mi Último Adiós (My Last Farewell). He belongs to the greatest generation of Asian nationalist leaders- Jose Rizal and his fellow countrymen Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo along with Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore of India, and Sun Yat-sen of China all were born in the decade of the 1860s.

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Last updated: 11-08-2004 03:55:09