Jose Rizal: The First Filipino
VAN YBIERNAS
FOR this term, I have been tasked anew to teach a course on the Life, Works and Writings of Jose Rizal. This column will serve as one of their introductory reading materials.
President Ramon Magsaysay issued Executive Order (EO) 52, series of 1954 on Aug. 10, 1954, creating the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission (JRNCC) to, among other duties and functions, “edit and publish all the works of Jose Rizal and such works of others about him as are considered necessary in the proper understanding of the meaning of his life and labors.”
On June 14, 1956, Republic Act 1427 was enacted into law, appropriating P2 million — a sizable sum in those days — to carry out the objectives set forth in EO 52. Two months before he met his untimely death, Magsaysay issued EO 226 on Jan. 2, 1957, creating a national committee tasked to raise funds in relation to the planned celebration of Rizal’s birth centenary in 1961. Noteworthy in EO 226 was a provision for the sponsorship of a national contest “to select a popular but simple biography of Rizal in English and National Language, and the translation thereof into other major dialects (sic) of the Philippines.”
“The First Filipino” is the prize-winning biography of Jose Rizal written by journalist and diplomat Leon Ma. Guerrero in the contest sponsored by the JRNCC in 1961. National Artist for Historical Literature Carlos Quirino judged Guerrero’s work to be “undoubtedly the best biography of the national hero of the Philippines.”
Guerrero considered Rizal the main architect of the Filipino nation-building project during the 19th century. Essential to this nation-building project is the forging of a sense of national consciousness and identity, independent of colonial consciousness and identity, themselves the foundation of the revolutionary and independence movements of the same period.
Scholars agree that this authentic national consciousness and identity, as well as the reform/propaganda/revolutionary/independence movement, all drew strength from the revisionist history and historiography initiated by Rizal and other Filipino expatriates during the late 19th century in Europe.
The great historian Zeus Salazar, in particular, explains that this revisionist history/historiography sought to counteract the dominant bipartite Spanish colonial history/historiography depicting Philippine pre-colonial history in a negative light (“dilim”) and the colonial era in the most positive (“liwanag”) sense.
To wit, the Spaniards claim that Filipinos were uncivilized prior to the arrival of Catholicism and Spanish colonialism in the 16th century. Moreover, civilization enveloped the Philippines only after Filipinos embraced Catholicism and subjected themselves to Spanish colonial rule.
The tripartite revisionist history/historiography portrayed the pre-colonial era positively (“liwanag”) and the colonial era negatively (“dilim”), with projections for the post-colonial future also in optimistic (“liwanag”) terms. This kind of revisionist history/historiography is particularly evident in Rizal’s influential essay, “Filipinas dentro de cien años” (The Philippines A Century Hence).
In “Filipinas dentro de cien años,” Rizal combined the findings of Antonio de Morga’s seminal work Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas proving the existence of a flourishing civilization in the archipelago before the advent of Spanish colonization and the subsequent moral decay — the social cancer — of the Philippines under colonial rule presented in “Noli Me Tangere” to arrive at the revisionist tripartite history of the country.
Historian and diplomat Prof. Ferdinand Philip Victoria — now based in Jakarta, Indonesia — explains how Rizal is considered the “first Filipino” nowadays in a different sense. Rizal is held as the foremost Filipino by the country in its interactions with the outside world. Victoria emphasizes that Rizal is often viewed as the primary connection the country has with the rest of Asia through his advocacy of Pan-Malayanism (with archipelagic Southeast Asia) and Pan-Asianism. Our national hero continues to be an important figure among nationalists in Indonesia, in particular, where “Rizal” is a fairly common Indonesian name until now.
In the West, on the other hand, Rizal is viewed as the country’s most important link to the literary, intellectual and political/nationalistic traditions of 19th century Europe. Historian Benedict Anderson’s highly influential book, “Imagined Communities,” uses Rizal’s novel “Noli Me Tangere” as evidence of the intimate connection between the manifestation of nationalism as “imagined communities” and the rise of “print capitalism” in the 19th century.
For most Filipinos projecting the country to the rest of the world, and for the rest of the world seeking to understand the Philippines, Rizal serves as an important link both ways: Rizal represents the very best of the Filipinos. Rizal highlights the intrepidity, intellect, labor and ambition of the Filipinos on the global stage. He is an image that the Philippines is proud of and seeks to emulate, particularly for the large number of expatriate Filipinos seeking to carve space for themselves overseas.
Thus, it is unsurprising that Rizal’s memory is utilized by expatriate Filipinos every opportunity they can get, and not only during Rizal Day celebrations.
Rizal represents the brightness of our history and our ambitions for the future.