12 Ileto - Rizal and The Underside of Philippine History

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RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE

HISTORY
pon reflection, it seems to me that much of scholarly writ ing on the Philippines bears the
stamp of a certain famil
iarity with which the country's traditions and patterns of development have been treated.
In contrast to those parts of South east Asia that have been transformed by the great
traditions" of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism and which, as a result, have had
that aura of the exotic and impenetrable about them, the Philippines has appeared
transparent and knowable, a "natural" consequence of the experience of some four
hundred years of Spanish and American colonialism. It is difficult, for example, not
to be taken in by the Hispanic features of Philippine pueblo society: Christianity, the
diatonic scale, amor propio, caciques, and so on.
When John Phelan's book, The Hispanization of the P hilippines, appeared in 1959 it
made us review drastically the supposed ef fects of the Spanish conquest. Filipinos
were no longer deemed passive recipients of Spanish cultural stimuli; their responses
var ied from acceptance to indifference and rejection. Because Phelan had never set foot
on the Philippines nor learned a local language, however, his reading of Spanish source
materials was framed by his familiarity with the history of Latin America. Phelan
attempted to close the gap between Spanish observers and the strange, exotic natives
they wrote about, not by letting the natives speak but by assimilating them to the body
of knowledge concerning Hispanization in the Americas.
RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
AL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
The problem is not just that Phelan and most non-Filipino scholars before the late 1960s
failed to use indigenous source mate rials, but that such records bear the unmistakable
stamp of Spanish colonial influence. Furthermore, except for the rare diary or cache of
personal correspondence, such materials are often classified as devotional or literary
and fail to provide accurate documentation of the past. This has led to some anxiety among
Filipinos about whether it is possible to have a truly Filipino history prior to the
mid-nineteenth century. It is true that evidence exists about the islands prior to the
conquest, that certain regions such as the hill country of northern Luzon and the
Muslim south escaped Hispanization, and that violent reactions to colonial rule
were fairly regular. Such themes, however, have not been able to offset t he
familiar view, in educated circles at least, that a golden age was lost in the wake of the
conquest. A long dark past of Spanish rule sets in until there occurs, in 1872, a
turning point, the initial sign of a shift in consciousness from blind acceptance of
Spain's presence to an awareness of the causes behind the people's s uffering. In
that year, the public execution of three reformist priests stirred up so much public
sympathy and outrage that the bonds of subservience and gratitude toward Spain and
the friars were seriously weak ened. As the familiar textbook narratives go, from 1872
until the revolutions of 1896 and 1898 a nationalist spirit is born and reaches
maturity in the struggle for independence. Such is the frankly evo lutionist view of the
Philippine past that serves to instill Filipino pride in their nationalist struggle, the first of
its kind to occur in the Southeast Asia."
The problem with this view is that it rests on the assumption that before the impact of
liberal ideas in the second half of the nine teenth century, Filipinos lived in a kind of
static dreamworld some w hat like c hildren initially fascinated and eventually enslaved by the
cosmology introduced by the colonizers. In 1890 Jose Rizal, the foremost Filipino
intellectual and patriot which the nineteenth cen tury produced, provided in his
annotations to a seventeenth-cen t
ury Spanish text scholarly legitimization for the
view that, with Spanish rule, the people "forgot their native alphabet, their songs, their
poetry, their laws, in order to parrot other doctrines that they
did not understand." The result of their blind imitation of things foreign and
incomprehensible was that "they l ost all confidence in their past, all faith in their
present, and all hope for the future." Rizal had labored for a year in the British Museum
to document the image of a flourishing precolonial civilization, the l ost eden, which
he, the offspring of an era of enlightenment, awakened con sciousness and self-assertion,
felt burdened to put in writing. The Filipino people had to move forward, and in order
to do so had to be aware of their origin, their history as a colonized people, and the
general progress of mankind to which their future should be geared.
Rizal's construction of a "usable past" in effect privileged the status of the ilustrados,
the liberal-educated elite that viewed itself as among other things, released from the
thought-world of the his tory-less, superstitious, manipulated masses, the so-called
pobres y igno rante
s. In the very act of interpretation, then, Rizal sup
pressed-unconsciously, perhaps-phenomena that resisted his ordering mind. These,
nevertheless, exist on the fringes of his life and work, and can be retrieved if we set
our minds to it. In the 1960s and 1970s we wasted much effort by endlessly
debating whether Rizal was a realist or an idealist, whether or not he is de serving of
the veneration he receives. We continue to probe the intentions behind his actions,
Speeches and writings, and attempt to clarify his contribution to the process of
nation-building. Yet, there is no questioning of his evolutionist premises, particularly
the notion of emergence itself, which belongs to the realm of the familiar, the "common
sense." As we shall see, this notion is problematized in the meanings that Rizal's
gestures elicited a mong the pobres y ignorantes. Rizal became implicated in the
very world which the ilustrados sought to efface. What we shall seek to uncover in
particular is the play of meanings which his dramatic execution in 1896 set into
motion. If this event were sim ply a condemned man's attempt to perpetuate his own
memory, or his martyrdom against oppression and obscurantism, then why,
among many other acts of martyrdom and execution, was it singled out, remembered,
commemorated for decades after? What modes of thought apart from that of the
ilustrados informed the event?
RIZAL. AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
THE "FALL" IN ILUSTRADO CONSCIOUSNESS
How we understand change in the n

ineteenth century is con nected to the
problem that Phelan raised about the nature of Hispanization. Given the incontrovertible
fact that the indios were converted to C
hristianity, we need to move beyond
established and familiar views o f how their world was affected by the new
religion. On one hand, professedly Catholic writers and Hispanophiles claim
that Christianity brought civilized ways, sal vation, and unity to the island." On the
other hand, nationalists argue passionately that Christianity was a weapon for
facilitating the political and economic subjugation of the native.
In either view, the indio is the p
assive recipient. The Spanish friar, as
representative of God on earth, is seen as exerting a power ful moral h old over
his native wards. For better or for worse, he interprets the proper rules of Christian
behavior, rewarding the obedient and submissive, and punishing evildoers.
Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that Christianity's impact can be
understood by reference to certain core characteristics, foremost among them being its
otherworldly orientation that encouraged resignation to the reality lived by the indios:
resignation to forced labor and the head t ax, submission to t he whims of the
maguindo, or native chiefs, and later the principales, who were mostly agents of
colonial rule. Those who are unwilling to criticize the religion itself view its
particular expression in the Philippine context as one of excessive pomp and pageantry,
of countless festivals, proces sions and rituals that kept the indios in such a state of
fascination that they failed to grasp the reality of colonial exploitation.
To whatever pole the argument tends-Christianity as the indios' salvation or Christianity as
the root of their alienation there is always room for allowing for or celebrating the
triumph of liberal ideas in the late nineteenth century. In the first place, the notion that
Christianity belongs to the realm o f the otherworldly as distinct from the secular and
political allows the data on popular disturbances and uprisings, and the rise of the
nationalist and separatist movements, to be constructed on a "secular" scale that rarely
touches upon the ideas of the "unenlightened" because
these appear to belong to the sphere of religion, narrowly defined." Following upon this,
Christianity is simply equated with some thing primitive and repressive that has to give
way to more pro gressive forms of consciousness."
The consequence of these modes of interpretation is obvious for the history of popular
disturbances and revolts. If they occur during the "preenlightenment" centuries,
they are regarded as in stinctive, largely localized reactions to oppressive measures,
"na tivistic" attempts to return to a precolonial past, at best primitive precursors to the
revolution." Her horizons narrowed by religion and the divide-and-rule tactic of the
Spaniards, the indio is deemed unable to comprehend her situation "rationally": thus
she reacts blindly, in the gut, to mounting irritants impinging upon her. Only with the
advent of Rizal and the ilustrados is there sup posed to be a clear understanding of the
causes of dissatisfaction. Only with the founding of Andres Bonifacio's Katipunan
secret society is there an organization with clear strategies and goals. When the
Katipunan is superseded by Emilio Aguinaldo's republi can government, the
Filipino people are seen to b e finally released not only from the colonial mother
country but also from a dark past. The history of "failure" ends with the birth of
the secular, progressive, enlightened republic in 1898.12
With the dominant constructs securely established, it is impos sible to regard as
anything but a curious sidelight the f act that President Aguinaldo, very much in the
style of the eighteenth-cen tury rebel D iego Silang, was also seen as the liberator
sent by God." Or that Rizal, like Apolinario de la Cruz in 1841, was hailed as a Tagalog
Christ and king. In 1898 and 1899 the republic, very much like the old colonial
administration, was beset with unrest led mostly by popes, christs, pastors, and
supremos. "5 Such "side lights" suggest that personalities and events toward the end
ineteenth century were repetitions, with variations, of t he past. They draw
of the n
our attention to the fact that limiting frameworks have been applied to
nineteenth-century Philippine history, and that excluded or "excess" data abound with
which we can attempt to confront the dominant paradigms, and elicit a play of meanings
in place of closed structures. If Rizal belonged to a series of christs
KIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF P
HILIPPINE HISTORY
UZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
One fact that renders the notion of a "fall" problematic, how ever, was the survival of
the indigenous languages. For example, the whole crop of foreign story lines in
Tagalog literature, which on the one hand suggest a certain loss of authenticity,
upon closer ex a mination turn out to be masks that conceal age-old preoccupa tions. We
shall see later on that the failure of such ternis as "soul" and "self" to encompass the
meanings of loób (lit., "inside") re leases the Tagalog passion of Christ (p asyon)
from the control of the church. The translation of alien storylines and concepts into Taga
log not only resulted in their domestication, their assimilation into things already
known, but gave rise to various p lays of meaning.
THE POWER OF KING BERNARDO
One of the "alien" stories that we can use to confront ilustrado constructions of
the past is that of the Spanish legendary hero, Bernardo del Carpio." In the Tagalog
awit version that appeared in the inid-nineteenth century, the scandals and
tragedies of Spanish royalty, the crusades against the Moors, and the personal
narrative of Bernardo are obviously of foreign origin. But after successive r eprinting
and oral recitations of the awit which ranks with the pasyon as the best-known story
in the late nineteenth century the hero Bernardo Carpio became the king of the
Tagalogs hidden or imprisoned within a sacred mountain from which he would
someday emerge to liberate his people. He became known as Haring (King) Bernardo
or San Bernardo, or simply Bernardo. Per haps if he had remained an isolated
creature of "folk beliefs" he would not b
e of much interest to l is now. But sometime
during the turn of the century, Rizal appeared at Bernardo's side. What does this
meeting signify? What does it suggest about the contours of popular thinking?
As we saw in the previous essay, reduced to its bare outlines, the awit is about a boy
of enormous strength and limitless energy who grows up unable to control or focus
these powers. This can be a ttributed to the fact that he is separated from his
parents, brought up by surrogates who deprive him of the lay aw and subsequent
disciplining that only true parents can give. He serves the king of Spain (his stepfather)
well but somehow remains the brash and uncontrolled youth who subdues his Moorish
adversaries through brute force ( lakás) . Nevertheless, the events w hich bring him
closer to reunification with his parents are marked by correspondingly greater control
and efficacy of his powers. Soon after a letter from heaven reveals to him the
identity of his parents, he accomplishes single-handedly the task of liberating Spain
from French domina tion. One can readily discern in the awit a refraction of the theme
of lost origins, Bernardo, being like the Filipinos who fell from an original state of
wholeness, came under the domination of surro gates (e.g. Spain, the friars) and
therefore remained in a s tate of d arkness and immaturity until they recognized their
true mother again. It is easy to see why ilustrados, as well, took an interest in this awit.
Rizal was familiar with the Bernardo Carpio story and its more evident folk meaning as
the imaging of the aspirations for freedom of the pobres y ignorantes. The revolutionist
Andres Bonifacio, as we saw, m ay even have tacked nationalist meanings on to
the awit's form. Still, however, King Bernardo was a "folk belief" or an expression of
"popular culture," to be noted and even used, but from whose underlying
presuppositions about power and the cos mos the ilustrados had been released.
Educated Filipinos tend to dismiss the complex articulations of the Bernardo Carpio
myth as p lain falsehood and s uperstition. And yet I would argue that the main
features of a powerful narrative of the past are contained in the myth. This kind of
history is alive even today particularly among those who live on the fringes of urban
society.
It is not difficult to imagine what historical consciousness was like in the nineteenth
century before mass education was imple mented. How does Rizal get implicated in it?
It does seem far fetched to link the intellectual who shunned violent uprising with the
youth who subdued the Moors through brute strength. But lakás (force) is only one of
Bernardo Carpio's attributes, associated with a certain lack of inner control, which is the
father's duty to teach his son. As we s hall see, the tale becomes the locus of thinking about the
nature of true power in the context of which Rizal then appears.
RIZAL, AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPMNE HISTORY
again. In the same manner, I that am now confined in my stone bed inside a cave will, in
time, be able to return to town. For almighty God has His reasons; He singles out one man as
savior of the oppressed. S
o tell t he oppressed people that their Bernardo will soon rise
and save them."
Our focus this time is not the main body of the Bernardo Carpio awit, but its ending and the
various supplements to it. Af ter the climactic scene in which Bernardo is reunited with
his par ents, the awit breaks free of the Spanish legend. We recall that the hero travels
about in search of pagan kingdoms to destroy. When he reaches a churchlike structure
guarded by t wo stone lions, a
bolt of l
ightning suddenly strikes and pulverizes one of the
lions. Agi tated, Bernardo disposes o f the other statue, and then challenges the
lightning itself, vowing to find and destroy it. In the distance are two mountains bumping each
other at regular intervals (i.e. , nag-u
umpugang bato). As Bernardo approaches it, a
dazzling angel appears and informs him that the lightning he is looking for has
gone into the mountain, where Bernardo can neither see nor get at it. When the
angel himself enters the mountain, Bernardo stub bornly follows with drawn
sword, and the mountain closes in on him.
At this point the awit formally ends, but various appendices have been added to it, not to
mention the belief in Bernardo as the Tagalog king, that verify its status as a living text. There is
the story of a stranger who manages to enter the cave in which Bernardo lies sleeping.
Awakened, Bernardo tells the stranger: "I am Bernardo Carpio who has lain here for a long
time. If you want to acquire my strength, give me your hand, let's be friends." But
the stranger, seeing the many skeletons lying around, wisely extends a piece of
bone which crumbles to pieces as Bernardo grasps it. Bernardo then declares:
Bernardo's journey in search of idolaters i s in effect an outward movement-away
from the narrative's core (which i s based on a Spanish model into the realm of thinking
about power, its concen tration in the mountain, and the problem of access t o it. At
this stage of Bernardo's c areer, he is an embodiment of kapangyarihan (lit.
power), the spiritual substance that "animates" the universe and is often concentrated
in certain power-full beings and objects. This is revealed in his challenge and pursuit of the
) and another form of
lightning, which is concentrated, intense light (lizanag
kapangyarihan. The lightning, the d
azzling angel, and Bernardo himself form a
series of such concentrations of light/ power which Successively enter the mountain.
Bernardo, as king of the Tagalogs, is thus little different from kings e
lsewhere in
Southeast Asia whose potency is derived from their ritual location at the centers or
summits of sacred mountains In Bernardo, however, there is a crucial difference: the king
is hid den, prevented by "almighty God" from leaving the mountain's interior. The potency
concentrated in the loób of Bernardo and the mountain-they are one and the same
cannot be demonstrated, cannot flow out and animate Bernardo's w orld. The
promise that he will one day be able to return to town suggests a g ap between
the king/mountain and the p opulace, a gap that did not exist in the past a nd will
be bridged in the future. B
y way of contrast, in the Indic states, the hill or palace
signifying Mount Meru is located at the center of the realin; the ruler is a node of
potency that radiates well-being and attracts followers
In explaining that his entrapment in the mountain is God's punishment for his sins,
Bernardo points to the Spanish and, in particular, Christian intervention in the
story. The awit says that Bernardo committed the sin of pride in thinking that he
was as powerful as God, who responded by enclosing Bernardo in what
You are lucky. Because you are intelligent, I am your friend on whom you can depend.
Take the little cross near my head as a gift from me. When you are in danger, just say
devoutly Christum and the danger will be averted by the power of the Son of God. I
am being pun ished here by God for my sins, but God is good and I am alive. I am hoping that
the time will come when I can a
rise from my imprisonment.
So go, and tell the people about my condition, so that they will be reminded that Jesus
after he was interred rose
temporally located in the period of the Katipunan uprising of 1896. The return to the
mountain corresponds to Rizal's execution in December 1896. In 1930, a student
reporting on Laguna, Rizal's home province, noted: "It is a common belief among the
country folk that Rizal is not dead. He was hidden somewhere and will appear again
when the Philippines regains her independence."
The virtual identification of Rizal with the hidden king raises many questions about the
shape of nonilustrado thought during the colonial period. What do we make of the
underlying repetition in the stories that have been brought up? What does Rizal's meet
ing with Bernardo suggest about the folk interpretations of the cru cial changes taking
place in Rizal's time? Rumors like the ones narrated above admittedly varied from
region to region, yet there is a consistency about them on the level of ideas of power
and change that invites us to reexamine certain key notions about so ciocultural
developments during the Spanish period. Only after interrogating such familiar notions
can we catch the manifold im plications of the Rizal-Bernardo meeting.
From the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth cen tury, increased economic
opportunities, such as commerce in ex port crops, land speculation, and tax
farming, brought to prominence a new class of Chinese mestizos often
enmeshed through kinship with the local maguinoo families. Rizal was of such
Tagalog-Chinese stock. Hailing from one of the vast friar es tates, his family, like
many others of the principalia, was in a posi tion to lease large tracts of farmland from
the Spanish friars to be cultivated by sharecroppers. The wealth and prestige of
the p rincipales made them second only to the friars in terms of respect and obeisance from
the common tao. By the second half of the nine teenth century, the period
coinciding with the rise of liberalism in Spain, the principales viewed the friars as
the remaining obstacles to their rise in power. Thus began the first stirrings of the propa
ganda movement against Spain.
The pattern of Filipino settlements—local churches as focal points of population
concentrations, looking to Vigan, Cebu, Ma nila, and other religiopolitical centers
for guidance and suste nance-bears comparison with centers of population in the
Indic s tates of Southeast Asia. Reinforced by Hindu-Buddhist ideas of kinship, a ruler in
the Indic states was a stable focal point for unifi cation. His palace was a miniature
Mount Meru; he himself was the source of the kingdom's well being-the
abundance of its har Vests, the extent of its trade relations, the glory of its name.
What made this all possible in the first place was the notion that the ruler
participated in divinity itself, represented by the supreme ancestor apotheosized as a Hindu
god. With the aid of a brahmin, the ruler was familiar with the formulas and rituals
needed to concentrate the power (sakti, kesa ktian) of the ancestor-god in himself, to
make him a living amulet whose efficacy was felt in decreasing levels of intensity as
one moved from the center to the peripheries of the realm. In turn, the nobility and
local elite participated in the ruler's power. To take an example from one of the few
surviving tradi tional states in Southeast Asia, in Luwu (South Sulawesi), a way of
talking about levels of potency is by reference to the amount of white blood in
people. Dewa, or gods, have pure, white blood, and they are invisible. The ruler is
an incarnate dewa, a god-king. The
THE UNDERSIDE OF HISPANIZATION
Rizal is often called "the first Filipino" because he figures the rise to dominance of the
principalia class, whose Europeanized sci ons became the nucleus around which a
modern nation could crys tallize. The roots of this progressive, largely nationalist class
are inextricably bound up with the initial ordering of Philippine soci ety in the afterinath
of the conquest. The main task of Spanish mis sionaries and soldiers in the
seventeenth century was to concentrate or resettle people within hearing distance of the
church bells. At the very center of a major settlement (pueblo) were a Catholic church, a
convent, occasionally a presidencia, o r town hall, surrounded by the houses of the
local elite. Coinprising the bulk of this elite up to the nineteenth century were the datu,
or maguinoo whom the Spaniards had transformed into a petty rul ing class that learned
to profit from an alliance—sometimes un easy-with the colonial masters.
nobles below him have some white blood (which marks them as nobles) in varying
concentrations but less of it than the ruler has.
With regard to the Philippines, it has always been taken as a matter of fact that a
Hispanic model came to prevail; therefore, any attempt to situate the pueblo in
the context of its counterparts in the Indianized states tends to be regarded as sheer
speculation. This outlook, however, rests upon centuries of Spanish writings that
stress the triumph of Hispanization, turning into minor or hidden themes the
actual interplay between different levels of thinking about power and the social
hierarchy. When the Span iards arrived, native chiefs, like their Khmer and Malay
counter parts a few centuries earlier, were attempting to make their access t o
deified ancestors a basis for legitimizing their claims of superior ity over others, Colin
remarks that "whoever can get away with it attributed divinity to his father when he died.
The suppression of such beliefs and their accompanying techniques of dealing with spiritual
substance was one of the objectives of the c onquest. The substitution of Catholic
saints for village spirits or anitos, scapu lars for anting-anting, liturgical songs for
chants invoking the spir i ts, and so forth, reflects, however, a inore realistic
project of assimilating "Malay" conceptions and practices. There is no d oubt that
as far as the elimination of "superstition" and "ani inism" among the folk was
concerned the Spanish efforts largely failed. On the other hand, the elite that was
nurtured in the pueblo complex could not rise to their position of prominence without
their thinking and behavior being thoroughly codified by the church/center. As we shall
see, in the process of suppressing or assimilating traditional thinking and practices
concerning power, the Spaniards inadvertently created an ambiguous relationship
(from the perspective of the Indic states) between the church/cen ter, the principalia,
and the ordinary tao.
Catholic churches were no doubt imposing structures dotting the Philippine
landscape. When topography permitted, they were located upon hills, "to achieve
a greater sense of monumentality," says Reed, but also perhaps out of the friars'
observation that hill tops were nodes of potency. Churches were also concentrated
sources of God's kapangyarihan, tapped during church rituals and
through its traces in holy water, statues of saints, other ritual ob jects, and even
candle-drippings. These potential sources of power were controlled by the parish
priests. Stories abound of Spanish missionaries and curates who worked miracles,
whose blessings were avidly sought for their potency, who were regarded as
second christs and revered even after death. The parish priests, it was w idely thought,
knew the meanings of the L atin inscriptions on amulets and there had access to
kapangyarihan..!
Catholic churches can certainly be regarded as concentrations of power just like
religious centers elsewhere in Southeast Asia. But unlike, say, the Cambodian nobility,
which participated in the ruler's power, the principalia, despite the location of their
fine dwellings around the church-convento-presidio core, cannot be re garded as
mediators of kapangyarihan. While they had the great est physical access to the
church-they sat at the center, closest to the altar, at mass—and the parish priest who
consulted them r egularly, this very fact exposed them more critically to a reli gion
which sought to "destroy idolatry and superstition." The persistence of "unchristian"
practices among the principalia was at least concealed from the priest or sufficiently
cloaked in approved practices. In fact, some principales were known by the townsfolk
for their powerful anting-anting. But one notices a predominance of anting-anting tales
in relation to principales who had repudiated their ties with the center to become hermits
or rebels. 13
Phelan notes that sons of chieftains were given a more inten sive training in the Catholic
doctrine. From the seventeenth through much of the nineteenth centuries, only children
close to the church-convento received regular instruction, mainly in reli gion. The best
among them, "all sons of the better class, looked up to by the indios themselves," could
train for the priesthood in Manila." When the principales in the nineteenth century went
to schools of higher learning--the colegios , seminarios, the University of Santo
Tomas-they further distanced themselves from the world of what they termed the
pobres y ignorantes. The knowl edge they gained was of a d ifferent order from the
lihim na k arunungan (secret knowledge) sought by village curers, pilgrims
to holy mountains, aficionados of anting-anting, and even the peasant farmer during
propitious times of the year. The traces of a world sustained and ordered by spiritual
energy which, despite their position, the ilustrados would not have failed to notice
around them, no longer had a place in their conceptual universe. Perhaps it was the
specific condition of being ilustrado that led to this group's anxiety over a lost tradition
and the attempt to recover it through historical writing. This writing, as pointed out
earlier, privileged the status of its practitioners through its underlying presuppositions of
emergence and enlightenment, and Rizal is seen at the forefront of this movement.
Rizal, however, is also implicated in that "underside" of ilustrado history which is
generally hidden but is always in play with the dominant threads of Philippine history. An
analogy can be made between pueblo society and the Bernardo Carpio story. Both are
Spanish-derived, products of the conquest; in both, the question of power is inscribed.
The church, like the mountain in the awit, is a node of potency which the friar, like God
who impris oned Bernardo, holds in check Kapangyarihan, or potenci a, is re leased in
the context of approved church rituals, particularly during holy week, or as a promise in
the afterlife. Close to the center, the preoccupation with kapangyarihan is disguised or
hid den. But farther and farther away from the pueblo-center, "tradi tion" becomes
the dominant element in the interplay. Love has observed that villagers at the fringe of
pueblo society tend to par ticipate more in the activities of samahan (associations) led
by mys tics, curers, and spirit mediums. Alfred McCoy likewise amply demonstrates
that in Visayan history ba baylane s-priests or priestesses of the "animist"
religion-have always had a tre mendous hold over the populace in areas beyond the
control of the pueblo-centers. 9
We can glimpse a world where "tradition" is fully manifest through scattered letters and
colonial reports concerning "distur bances" and rebellions. A striking case is that of
Apolinario de la Cruz, a mystically inclined lay brother who was prevented from
entering a religious order because he was an indio. In 1841, when the Cofradía de San
Jose he organized in Lucban, Tayabas, was
banned from attending its special masses in the town church, he fled with his
flock of thousands to the slopes of Mount Banahaw. There a commune was set up,
dominated at the center by "a large palm-thatched chapel of bamboo, the inside
walls of which were h ung with colorful tapestries and religious paintings, where Manong
Pule presided over ... mysterious prayer sessions and ceremonies." At least one of
the paintings was of this "king of Ta galogs," done in the style of portraits of the saints.
The Visayan counterpart of Apolinario was a certain Buhawi (Waterspout), also
called king or living God, whose popular movement created "dis turbances in 1887.
Buhawi's headquarters was a cave on a ledge of a steep cliff of whitish rock. Inside the
cave w as a mysterious room, the door of which opened with a rap from the leader's
cane to expose marvelous riches. When in the lowlands, Buhawi lived in a fine
wooden house, "so brightly illuminated with candles that it appeared as if the
dwelling were lighted with electricity." Prior to his flight to the hills, Buhawi was
known to be a devout C atholic. Our final example takes us to Cabaruan in central Luzon,
where a r eligious confraternity called Guardia de Honor built a commune at the
height of the Philippine-American war. At the center was a house where Antonio
Valdez, who styled himself as Jesus Christ, lived and performed rituals
together with the Virgin Mary. Dwellings for the mostly peasant mem bers were
built in straight lines radiating from the center, like spokes of a wheel.!
Certain parallels between the examples a bove and Indianized rulers elsewhere are
obvious: they distributed amulets, had the status of god-kings, their "temples" or
"palaces" were nodes of potency animating the world around them. It must not be
forgot ten, however, that these Filipinos are described as previously hav ing been
devout Catholics. They represent not aberrations, but Vivid glimpses of a general
condition of Philippine society under colonial rule. Rizal's connection with the "underside"
can only make sense when certain "familiar" notions about religion in the
pueblo-centers are reexamined. For this we shall have to look into the religious
mythology labeled "Catholic" which had a compel ling hold over lowland Filipinos:
THE PASYON INTERFACE

under the auspices of prominent principales and was therefore an occasion for wealth
and status to be demonstrated. The sinakulo (passion play) was usually staged right in
the local churchyard with the parish priest's blessing and the financial backing of the
principales. All this would suggest that the pasyon was a powerful tool in the center's
continual attempt to dominate and codify its surroundings.
The immense popularity of the nineteenth-century Pasión Pi lapil may even have
contributed to the forgetting of their "true" origins by the masses. For this pasyon-also
called Pasión H encsis provided a comprehensive story of mankind from the
adventures of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to glimpses of the apocalypse.
The impact of biblical time in shaping popular per ceptions of their origins was such
that the following stanzas could appear in a poem, published in 1900, urging a "holy
war" against the Americans:
To a great extent, the transplantation of the biblical world to the Philippines was
facilitated by the social appropriation of the epic story of Christ's passion, death,
and resurrection. In 1704, the first Tagalog rendition of the story in verse form
saw print. By 1760 the pasyon, as it was called, was already in its fifth edition."
Critics have pointed out that the popular appeal of the pasyon was due to the
creativity of its author, Gaspar Aquino de Belen, a bilingual native who worked in the Jesuit
press in Manila. Using a seven teenth-century Spanish passion as his model, de
Belen was able to transform biblical characters into truly native ones. Jeslis, Mary,
and Joseph talked and behaved so much like indios that their for eign origins were
ignored or forgotten. Any discussion of the pasyon and society, however, has to
move beyond the craft and intentions of its author. In the first place, the authorship of the
many versions that came after de Belen's is problematic. About a century later, anonymous
versions in fact began to appear, such as the extremely popular Pasyon Henesis or Pas ión
amed after the priest (Mariano Pilapil) who edited the anonymous text. In
Pilapil n
the second place, the appearance of a few heresies as well as the "pro fane" use of
the pasyon in native festivals and gatherings suggest that the meanings of the text
derived not so much from some au thoritative voice within it but from the social field in
which it moved.
As a text produced under the sponsorship of, and periodically censored by, the
church officials, the published pasyon might be seen as a device for drawing the
native population towards the pueblo-center. One reading of the text reveals that it
sought to cul tivate the virtues of meekness and resignation to suffering. The
"imitation of Christ" (pagtulad k ay Kristo) and participation in his passion repeatedly
suggested in the text perhaps translate into submissiveness to the Spanish friar, and
the acceptance of things a s they are because reward is forthcoming in heaven. In
the por tions of the text called aral (lesson, sermon), the fulfillment of con ventional Christian
duties is emphasized. Furthermore, the chanting of the text, at least during the colonial
period, was held
The Tagalog hail from Sem the beloved and those Chinese, from Cham the Spaniards,
from Jafet the youngest sons of old, respected Noah.
Ever since the holy Jesus descended following upon Moses of ancient times he has
been king of the Tagalog hailing from the line of Sem.
Christ's ancestry is identical to ours and not to those idolaters [the Americans] and
when this war ends in our victory our tribe's history will be proclaimed
Ang m ga Tagalog a y kay Sem mo i b ig/ a ng kay C ham naman silang mga
intsik ang mga Kastila s a bunsong kay J afet/ n aa nak n i Nueng a mang m atandang
giliw. // Mua m ong m amog si Jesus na mahal halili kay Moses ng naunang araw/
ng magiging ha
sia ri n
g k atagalogan/ d
isendencia ni S emi, ang pina
g buhatan./ / S
i
NL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
atin desendencia n agbuhat si K

risto/ h
indi sa kanilang idolatriang tao, saka
kung matapos na m
analo tayo ipatatalastas ang dinaanang tribo
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 l oo
b
which defines, among other things, an adult's response to the mother for her love
and caring. A childhood life of freedom, comfort, and se curity, to cite some of the
meanings of "layaw," nurtures a bond between mother and child that endures until
death. It is the "layaw" she has showered upon her son that Mary invokes when, seeing
the apostles in tears and Jesus overwhelmed with grief, she senses an impending
tragedy and seeks clarification. Jesus, how ever, merely consoles his mother, saying "it
is not yet time" (75:10 1 1). Later, when Mary implores God the Father to spare
her son, she invokes memories of her motherly care and hardships:
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
to under friar domination. Rizal sought to rectify this by establishing a continuity
between his time and that of a flourishing pre-Spanish past. To him, the forma tion of
a national sentiment depended greatly on a sense of racial affinity and pride that only a
reatness could provide.
documented image of past wholeness and g
In tracing that historical line from past to present, Rizal had to introduce the concept of a
break, imposed by the conquest, to ex plain the backward state of the present. This "break"
and conse quent decline from a "golden age," however, could also be i nterpreted through
a religious template. In the manifesto, Ang Dapat M abatid n g
mga T agalog (What the
Tagalogs Should Know), the revolutionist Andres Bonifacio restates much of the content of
Rizal's research." But the words used to describe the pre-Spanish
situation-kasaganaan ( abundance of food, crops, etc.) and kaginhawaan
rosperity, a general ease o
(p f life)-are also the at tributes of paradise in the Pasyon
Pilapil. The high literacy level and extensive trading contacts of the early Filipinos are
reminiscent of the knowledge and oneness with the natural world of Adam and Eve.
When the Spaniards arrived, says the manifesto, they offered increased prosperity and
knowledge if the Tagalogs would ally with them. Here, the repetition of the Pasyon Pilapil
episode of the fall is accentuated, particularly when Bonifacio says that the lead ers of
the Tagalogs "became seduced by the sweetness of such en ticing words." For in the
pasyon the delightful existence of Adam and Eve begins to fall apart precisely when
Eve succumbs to the Sweet, e nticing words of the serpent. The history of the Tagalogs
thus returns to a biblical mode. The ilustrado conception of a fall into an age of
darkness effectively textualized.
In more ways than one, the popular acceptance of the Pasyon P ilapil s ignifies a
movement away from the center, away from its
You know full well how difficult it was nine months I bore him inside my womb this was
your will.
How even harder it was when you bade us

to flee to Egypt how immeasurably tiring to hold your Son on my lap.
And also, God my Father how great my anxiety was and incomparable my grief when
he, having come of age began to teach the multitude.
Batid m o na, t , m
aalaman/ ang lahat c ong calirapan/ dinalang siyam na bouan,/
sa t iyan co ay n amalay/ i to, i, siyang c alooban./ / Lalong hirap na totoo/ nang
mi, i, p
ca aalisin
mo/ naparo on sa
4LAND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
Egipto / pagod na d im

amagaano mang pagaalong si Amc mo. / 1 A no pa
Dios cong
A
ma) m
adla a ng agung b
alisa/ lapis na walang caipira ,/ m ang sia, 1,
ad a
lumadui n t mang
aral s a l a
hat na.
words of concern only intensify the apostles' weeping: "they cried even more / their
tears were like torrents of water" (75:5). When Mary herself starts to weep, her son's
words of comfort and explanation not only fail to console her but lead her to the brink of
death:
Such a doleful reply words that can bring death worse than a sharp dagger that can
snuff out the life of one who is pierced (78:16).
Li cang c alumbay-l umbay/ s agot na icamamata y/ daig ang mabisang p
u
ñal./ na

iquiquitil mang buhay n
g sino man
g
Tas S acian
In return for all that, says Mary, can't God accede to her plea? Or else, allow her to
die instead of her son? (79:9-1
5).
Nothing can alter Christ's mission, which is part of God's plan. Certainly not Mary's
suggestion that God should not allow lowly Crana c) people to surpass or get the
better of his own son (79:5-6). E
ven the day of departure cannot be postponed by an
appeal to the traditional custom that children, even though they happen to be in
distant lands, must be with their parents on the day of the pasch (77:13-15).
There is more to the pasyon than a reflection of social norms, for while these are
reiterated, there is simultaneously a movement away from them. After tearful scenes
in which Mary musters everything to hold back her son, Christ begins the lakarin
(journey on foot) that leads away from the mother, layaw, security, and filial
obligations, towards certain death on a mountain. The attachment to family—the
fundamentally pueblo-based, culturally codified unit of Philippine society-is thus
deprived of its rigid, almost sacred status. The possibility is present for any indio,
not just the remontados, v agamundos, f i rong , and other individuals of Linusual
character-to detach himself from his roots, to embark lipon a journey of c
hance and
even death."
The content of the pasyon episodes leading to the departure of Christ can thus be
interpreted as a movement away from a center. However, the examination of content
alone does not explain how meaning is created outside the text. The c ontent is
familiar enough to the audience of pabasa (pasyon chanting) and so it is not the
de l ivery of a certain body of information that really moves them. Quite
evident in the departure episodes is in fact the paucity of information and the extensive
repetition of intensities of grief, loss, and damay (participation in another
person's plight). Everyone in t hose scenes weeps, except Judas. F
or example,
having listened to Christ's words concerning his impending death, the apostles seem
to "lose their loob" (nawawalang l oob) and cannot conceal their tears from Mary.
When the latter starts to inquire about things, her
The efficacy of speech or formed sounds on the loób of characters in the pasyon hints
at the effect of the repetitive, mournful, chant ing of the text on its audience. In the
scene where Christ bids fare well (alam) , the fourteen-stanza repetition of the language
of pain, separation, grief, and loss, up to the point where Christ dis appears from Mary's
sight, creates the conditions for the separa tion itself. Without it, there would be no
meaning to the scene. Yet, because of it, because it puts the loób of the audience in a
similar state of damay, meaning cannot be predetermined either. Later we shall see
how a condition of damay induced among the masses by Rizal's Christlike death
intensified their support for the revolution. Prior to this event, sometime in 1896, the
separation of Christ from his mother was already transposed to a "national" key by the
brothers Andres and Procopio Bonifacio. A poem attributed to Procopio begins with the
following:
Oh, Mother Spain, we Filipinos your children, ask forgiveness the time has come for us
to separate because of your neglect, your lack of motherly care.
SZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
O i nang Espanya, h
umihinging tawad k aming P ilipino n
a
iyong anak/ panahon
na d umating na magkatituatizaing/ s a di mo p
agtupad, masamang l ingap
.
Uncaring Mother Spain, of course, does not exactly stand for Mother Mary.
Nevertheless, Spain was the center during the cen turies of colonial rule. Being part
of the ordered universe, Spain is textualized so the bonds of utang na loob between her
and her "children" may be broken. The transition from the old center to the new
(Tagalogs, Filipinos), loses its absolute uniqueness as Bonifacio speaks of it as a
lakaran:
Let us, lowly people, press on, bear the hardship head for the hills and forests Lise
our knives and spears let us now defend Mother Filipinas.
Lakad, aba tayo, t itigas ang hirap/ t u

nguhin a n
g bundok kaluungan n g
gubat/ gamitin ang gulo k at sampu
ang
sibat/ ipagtanggol ngayon Inang Pilipinas.
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 i n the relationship between the pasyon and the
war against Spain. But let us now examine i ts rela tionship with the sociopolitical
hierarchy. The attempt of the friars to assert control of authorship over the pasyon
text, and the ten dency of t he principales to sponsor pabasa and sinakulo as a way
of demonstrating and renewing their status, has already been mentioned. While
reading the text, however (generally skipping o ver the aral portions which reflect
the church's attempts to de limit the text), it becomes obvious that a social hierarchy based on
wealth, learning, titular rank, and monopoly over coercive power, is devalued, regarded
as illusory. The title maguinoo, the equiva lent of datu and reserved for principales,
is conspicuously used in the pasyon by the pharisees, scribes, and other pinunong
bayan ( town notables) who clamor f or Christ's death. This would have been viewed
positively by parish priests attempting to keep the principales in their place, to limit their growing
aspirations.
The pharisees, however, a re also the guardian of the official re ligion. It was just as
easy for ilustrado writers to put down the friars by identifying them with the villains of
the pasyon, which m akes no hard distinctions between church and state authorities. For
what ultimately matters is the condition of one's loób. Envi ous, treacherous
people—Judas is a prime example-are marked b y loob that are hardened (maiiga s),
perpetually unstable (di mapalagay) , a nd disjoined from their exteriors (labris) . With a
few exceptions the representatives of the sociopolitical hierarchy, from Pontius
Pilate and King Herod down to t he scribes and town offi cials, are characterized as
such. Christ, on the other hand, is poor and lowly (d
ukla at l umnak) but attracts a large
following mainly in the outskirts of towns. He draws people away from their families and their
maguinoo leaders by virtue of his overpowering attrac t iveness which is the
manifestation of a loób which is whole (buo) and beautiful (maganda) . His words
and his radiance produce in his f ollowers an initial disorientation or displacement of loób
which soon turns into calmness and a focusing of loob.
Why not, "onward warriors, annihilate the Spaniards? Why the image of a journey, of
lowliness and individual hardship, if the pasyon is not somehow being reenacted, albeit
in another scale? Moreover, what repeats itself is not merely the theme of separa tion,
but the emotional intensity of the event. When recited, Bonifacio's poem brings to the
audience a mixture of pleasure and sadness which is a sign of the melting of the loob,
its detachment from self-preoccupation. For the aim of this and other patriotic songs and
poems was to evoke damay from the audience; with damay participation in the struggle
was possible. No wonder there was much weeping in initiation rites of the Katipunan,
particularly after the leader's speech. * Isabelo de los Reyes notes that rural folk
were not ashamed to shed tears during the war against Spain. Their "interpretation of
the war coincided with the intensity of their damay with the country's pasyon.
YAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
One striking feature of Philippine uprisings is t hat leaders claimed to be Jesus
Christ or various representatives of God. To a c ertain extent, this was a mimicking
of certain roles of Christ in the pasyon: as the new king, the messiah, the God-Man. The
figure of Christ was either a model for rebel chiefs to emulate or a clever device
for attracting followers. Other identifications, such as that between the pharisees
and the friars, or Pontius Pilate and the gov ernor-general, can be made. Such
"familiar connections between text and "real world" are implied in any sociocultural
situation wherein the New Testament story has taken root, and has pro vided the impulse for
many millennial movements throughout the world. But if the biblical features of most
Philippine revolts are simply representations of the pasyon story, the ideological
victory of the Catholic church would seem to have been complete. This leads us
back to questions of church control, the experience of a "fall," and so forth.
If the loób is identical with the Christian soul, whose tarnish or glitter reflects the moral
history of the individual, then the damay called for by the pasyon means nothing
more than empathy with the suffering Christ for the purification and salvation of the
loób. But let us recall the image of Apolinario de la Cruz, a Tagalog Christ, praying in his
palace-chapel; of Buhawi, the "Living God." in his intensely lit house; of Antonio
Valdez, another Christ pray ing at the hub or center of Cabaruan. For these
leaders, the loób is not an inner self that defines a willing, thinking subject and gives it
an identity and personality. Kaluluwa (soul) is a term which better approximates the
notion of an inner spirit distinct from the body.
The difficulty in attaching the word loób to a particular mean ing lies in the fact that it
refers to nothing. Literally meaning "in side," loób serves the semantic function of permitting
discourse about what animates the external, visible world. In the letters of
Apolinario, the idiom of loob enables him to speak of concentra tions of liwanag (light,
knowledge, energy) in individual persons as well as the cofradía. The relative
intensity of liwanag is a function of the extent of control or steadying of loob that is
accomplished through prayer and acts of discipline. Loob is thus the place where
potency is concentrated and from which it emanates like the
radiance of Apolinario, Buhawi, and Valdez. Once we release loób from limiting notions
of self and self-purification we may, in fact, begin to understand why the idiom of loób
is so pervasive in the pasyon. Without denying its dominant, church-approved func
tions, the pasyon seems to have also served as a locus of deeply ingrained notions
concerning the accumulation and c oncentration of power
One of the most dramatic and popular scenes in the sinakulo is the pagdakip , the
capture of Jesus Christ by Judas and platoon of soldiers. The pagdakip is usually
performed in a field on the out skirts of town, some distance from the plaza or
churchyard where the sinakulo proper is staged. The excitement of the audience is due
partly to the fanfare accompanying the march of the "bad men" to the site, but more so
f deception (as practiced by Judas), loyalty (in
to the way in which popular notions o
Peter's armed de fense of his master) and concentrated power are inscribed in the
Tagalog rendition of the gospel episode. It is the last notion—that of concentrated
power—which has escaped the notice of commen tators.
According to the pasyon, the soldiers accompany Judas be cause of the widespread
belief that Christ is a fierce (mabangis) character, which isn't true at all:
He is truly the Lamb gentle and refined you may quarrel with him yet he w
on't fight
back at you or anyone else (96:1
).
yC
Siya a orderong t uma/ malinit, h
ind
im gaslao/ inyo may. quinacaguay/ siya ay hindi
a
lalaban/ s a
inyo at n
in
om
an.
It is interesting to note that the word mahinhin generally connotes modesty and
demureness, and is used in reference to women, while hindi magaslao connotes
smoothness, the absence of rough edges. This brings to mind the quality of halus
that distinguishes Javanese aristocrats (p rijaji) f rom ordinary people who are kasar
SIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF P
HILIPPINE HISTORY
to those traitors their feelings and potency (96:3-6).

(lit., "coarse"). Benedict Anderson s uggests that the meaning of " halus,"
which is hard to pin down, "i s to a certain extent covered by the idea of
smoothness, the quality of not being disturbed, spot ted, uneven or discolored." A
halus person is almost effeminate-- to an outside observer, at least-but because
halus-ness is achieved only by the concentration of energy, such a person is believed to
be invulnerable. In typical wayang (shadow play) battle scenes be tween halus satria
(knight) and kasar giants, ogres, or wild men from overseas, the satria stands
perfectly still, eyes downcast, a p parently defenseless, while his demonic adversary
strikes at him with dagger, club, or sword—but to no avail."2 The satria could just as
well be described as "mahinhin," yet he is invincible. Compare him to Christ in the
pasyon; in the passage that fol lows, Christ has just asked the interlopers i n the
garden who they are looking for:
Ang tugon n ang mg a l ilo/ ay s i Jesus N azareno/ Ang sag ot ni Jesucristo,/ ego sum
ang hanap n inyo/ aco n ga niya, i , a
co.
// Dito sa s agot n a ilan/ ni Jesus sa manga
larangha ng/ para-parang n aluurusan/ n angahapay n angatimbua ng / n
anaq ui i, m
an ga
pata y.
/ / I pinakilalang l u bos,/ ni J esu
s ang p ag
ca Dios/ c apangyarihang
tibob os, / s a c at agang isinagot/ p amang 11 0ngawalang loob.// A t sa p agc a
talaga n a n i Je sus ang pagdurusa; / ay ang m anga palamara, / pinagsaulong
capgdaan/
tang caramdama, I, p otencia.
The treacherous men said Jesus of Nazareth Jesus Christ's r eply was, ego si17 you
are after It is I, he said, I .
With these words of Jesus to the idiots their hearts seemed to be struck they drooped
and fell over as if they were dead.
The feeling of the soldiers is not the result of Christ's decision to fight back after all. Nor
is it an effect of their recognition of Christ's divinity. The words "ego sum" (I am)
constitute a straightforward reply to their question "Who among you is Jesus of
Nazareth?" and reveal nothing about his nature. It is the sound of "ego sum" that makes
the soldiers "lose their loob, " which is taken to mean their "feelings and potency" until these
are restored by Christ. The efficacy of "ego sum is signified by its retention as a Latin
phrase in the text. Rather than refer to a particular object, "ego sum" is a form of
speech that makes Christ's potency felt in the world.
"Ego sum" is the same as the word Christum, which activates the concentrated power
given by Bernardo Carpio to the stranger. And just as Bernardo and the lightning are
constituted of the same stuff imaged as intense light, the same goes for Christ. In the fol
lowing account of his emergence from the tomb, light has the same effect as
sound:
Jesus demonstrated fully his Divinity and absolute kapangyarihan upon his mysterious
utterance they all lost their loob.
And because it was ordained that Jesus should suffer he immediately restored
Of radiant beauty unmatched of utmost splendor his body c ompletely engulfed in
light, was this victorious second Person who had gone to the hills.
When from the tomb emerged his holy body the sentries there were stunned and
toppled over falling flat on t heir faces.
An Angel descended on the t omb's s

tone lid his radiance so delightful no one with
weak loob c ould stare at him fully ( 177: 13-16).
Diqui t n
a walang c atulad/ catauai, s acdal n
ang d pagcaliuanag/ n
ilag/ l ubos ang itong
manalong n angubat n a icalawang Per so nas.// Pagcalabas sa bauman/ nang
ma hal niyang catawan/ matulig a t nangabowal / raparapra, t , p asugabang/
ang d oroong w anga bantay-// Isang Angel ang manoog/ sa batong inquip ay u
ocloc/ diquit a
y c alugod-lugod) d im atitigan fibobos/ M IMO mang m ahinang loob
powers are activated by their possessors. Present-day practitioners of invulnerability
magic are even referred to at times as nag-e egosum (persons engaging in
"egosum"). One cannot draw the line here between "Christian" and "animistic"
features of holy week rituals. Concomitant with the chanting of the pasyon and
performance of the sinakulo, various kinds of magical powers ranging from
invulnerability to bullets to charms for attracting women-were acquired and tested. Men
sipped potions concocted from unbaptized fetuses and oil on a series of Fridays
culminating on Good Friday. Men and women placed objects inside the glass case
housing the image of the dead Christ, or scrambled for the candle drippings, parts of
crucifixes and other objects lised in church rituals. They carried wooden crosses and
rocks to the tops of sacred hills or through the streets of towns, to be like Christ not only
in the sense of purifying themselves but also of concentrating power in objects or in
themselves. In an awit describing a pilgrim's passage through the ritual sites of Mount
Banahaw, the desire to emulate Christ is a dominant theme, and yet when the end of
the pilgrim's trials is almost reached, he dreams of being able to disap pear at will, fly
through the air, ward off bullets and bladed weap ons, and attract beautiful
women-all demonstrations of anting-anting power."
The rituals of holy week which centered around the chant ing of the pasyon were thus
the scene of various "superstitious" practices dealing with the accumulation of power.
The fact that local elite and townspeople under the sway of the codifying processes of
the church engaged in approved modes of cleans ing their souls, reenacting the pasyon
and so forth, should not prevent us f rom interpreting holy week as a powerful time
to which the masses synchronized their loób. This was the time when hermits,
vagabonds, bandits, prophets, and renegade principales, who with their followers often
"disturbed" the pe ripheries and occasionally threatened the centers, reaffirmed the
sources of their prestige: not wealth or educational attain ment, certainly n ot rank in
the colonial establishment, but the ability to tap the potencies released by the
suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ.
We recall that it was a dazzling angel who tried to prevent Bernardo Carpio from
entering the mountain. The f act that he did involved him in an intricate system of
repetitions. The "victorious" Christ emerging from his tomb is the liberated Bernardo
emerging from his cave to h elp his people. Since Bernardo never gets to free
himself, a series of patriots, foremost among them Rizal, e nter and leave the cave
bearing some of Bernardo's power. What is the na ture of this power? In the
resurrection scene above, the soldiers are thrown to the ground by the force of
Christ's liwanag, or intense light. This radiance, like the sound of Christ's voice, is
beautiful a nd delightful, yet it brings physical harm to those "of weak 106b" who are
exposed to its full force. S ound and i mage do not repre sent ideas or convey
Christ's message; they are manifestations of the energy concentrated in Christ's
loob.
"Ego sum," by itself or together w
ith a string of Latin, Spanish, or vernacular
words, is commonly inscribed in orac iones, effica cious prayers pronounced at
the point at which anting-anting
ZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL

bully opened his eyes also and found himself perspiring with fear. 67
Having looked into the thinking inscribed in the stories of awit hero Bernardo Carpio and
the pasyon hero Jesus Christ, let us now turn to the national hero, Rizal. As a young
boy, he was undoubt edly precocious and from this fact biographers have traced a con
tinuous line to his ilustrado future. But i n 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 body
building that included swimming, horseback riding, and long hikes up Mount
Makiling. In a way this was to be expected of a well-bred youth. Kalaw notes that "the
tests of bravery that a man is put through since childhood teaches him endurance to
pain, se renity in danger and, above all, the spirit of bravery." In Rizal, however, it was
a remarkable combination of intelligence and physical endurance that spawned rumors
that he could perform unusual physical and mental tricks because of his exceptional con
trol of loob. There is, for example, the story of Rizal's healing pow ers at the age of
twelve. When a sickly farmer, seeing Rizal eyeing his ripe cashew fruits, gladly
offered them to the boy, the latter turned around in surprise "and when the sick farmer
saw his face and kindly features, he felt restored to health." Some people in Calamba
claim that their elders had seen R izal restore vigor and "radiate comfort" to others.
There is also the story of the boy Rizal dared at a party by a bully to demonstrate his
magical powers:
There are many other stories of Rizal's boyhood powers, his meetings with witches
and mermaids, his invulnerability, and s o forth. A lot of these accounts, of course, were
told after his death, when he had already b een enshrined as a martyr and national
hero. These readings of his early life, more often than not lacking in hard evidence,
nevertheless point to the ability of that "life" ( whose presence can never be recovered
by thought) to generate interpretations from below. This textualization of Rizal
problematizes his neat, but just as "constructed," biographies. In a society where King
Bernardo Carpio was no less real than the Spanish governor-general, stories of Rizal's
prodigious boyhood activities, as retold again and again, could not but have resonated with
popular knowledge of the young Jesus or the young Bernardo, who both possessed
unusual concentrations of power. The "myth of the young Rizal merely repeats the
pasyon episode of the boy Jesus among the scribes and early sections of the
Bernardo Carpio awit (a bestseller then) which describe the boy Bernardo's strength. Rizal,
Christ, and Bernardo are, in a sense, merely proper names that mask thinking about
power and identity.
In biographies of Rizal, careful attention is paid to the national hero's activities in
foreign countries from 1882 to 1887 a nd 1888 to 1892. During these years he
earned a degree in ophthalmology, became recognized as well in the fields of
ethnography and lin guistics, wrote two influential novels and numerous scholarly
works, distinguished himself in the Propaganda movement, and s o forth. All of
is absence from his homeland, in the same manner that the pasyon
these took place in h
and awit stories happened not just in another time but in another place as well. Rizal's
absence, it seems to me, was the condition that made possible the final loosen ing of
his proper name from its anchorage in actual experience. Once w e cease to
preoccupy ourselves with a certain "real" Rizal (or a "real" Christ, a "real" King
Bernardo) then we can interrogate the past about the other meanings of Rizal's travels
abroad. We can turn to such questions as: What knowledge did Rizal seek and,
Just then a flock of herons was flying over the town to the rice fields. As they were
nearing the house where the party was going on, Rizal went to the window and kept looking
at them. His attitude attracted the attention of the whole crowd . . . . As the birds
were almost over the house, he pointed his finger at them and they all dropped one by
one to the ground. There was complete silence, then the bully fainted. He dropped to
the floor like the birds on the ground .... Then Rizal relaxed himself, and the herons
flew back to the air onwards to the riceland. The
4L AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
apparently, obtain in his travels? To what ends of the earth did this search bring him?
What powerful personages did he encounter to whom he could prove his worth?
Who, really, was Rizal?
Upon his return from Europe in 1887, Rizal himself saw-and came to accept-the extent to
which his life, his biography, was not fully under his control. In the first place, there were the
persistent rumors that he was a German spy, a Protestant, a mason, and a h eretic. 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. But the deliberate
sowing of ru mors, it seems, o nly compounded t he friars' problems. For, in a situation of
intense speculation about this young man returned from abroad, any unusual
attribute, whatever moral implications it had, was bound to be interpreted as a sign of
power. Apart from the rumors which abounded, there were also the readings people
made of his day-to-day activities. Always fond of excursions into the countryside, Rizal
and a Spaniard assigned to guard him once climbed to the top of M ount Makiling
and hoisted a white cloth to signal their arrival to the Rizal household. The cloth was
seen by others and interpreted as a German flag hoisted by Rizal and a European
on Makiling as a prelude to launching a
rebellion Rizal at the head of a liberating
army? This image would be more p
ro nounced in the 1890s.
Upon his first return in 1887, it was Rizal's newly acquired knowledge, his being
ilustrado, that was interpreted in a drasti cally unforeseen manner. For security
reasons, Rizal was kept at home by his family and his movements curtailed.
Deciding to make the best of the situation, he set up a surgery practice and performed a
number of successful eye operations. Since at that time ophthalmic surgery was
practically unknown in the country, the restoration of sight to the blind was
recounted with amazement as a miracle. Almost immediately rumors began to spread
about t he "Doctor Uliman" (a corruption of "Aleman") who could cure not only
blindness but all other afflictions as well.
When Rizal returned in 1892 from his second sojourn abroad, he was continually
followed in the streets by a multitude of people seeking the mysterious elixir he would
prescribe. His nephew once
e Sco
heard him pronounce the cure: Emulsion d tt. This was simply a multivitamin
preparation, since most ailments at that time were t he result of malnourishment. But did it
matter what, scientifically, the cure was as long as it c ame from him? Austin Coates, one of
Rizal's more p erceptive biographers, suggests that Rizal's miracu lous curing
powers were b elieved in, "just as charms worn round the waist, the tattooing of
mystic symbols, and the power of spells were believed in, whether the friars liked it or
not."
What Coates forgets to mention is that the friars themselves had introduced the figure
of Christ, the miracle worker and curer par excellence, whose story is retold in the
fficial biographies. The ability of Christ and Rizal to cure the
underside of Rizal's o
sick stems, of course, not from the "scientific knowledge of medicine but from
the condition of their loób which is equivalent to having true "knowledge." 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
following stanzas from a Rizalist song, which is found in several versions, illustrate this
form of thinking
Is it not that many patriots in the world have gone forth in search of Christ's commands
which no one has ever found but for Rizal who traveled throughout the world.
And Jose Rizal of the seventh group whom the Philippine nation reveres pored over
all of the commands in holy doctrine and written laws.?!
Di ba
ga' y maraming ba yani sa m
und o/ l umitat humanap n
g WIOS n iK
risto/ w
alang n akakita
kahiman s ino/ k u ng hindi si R iz al n aglibot ng m undo? / / A
t s i J ose R izal i kapitong
pangkat) na
iginagalang b
ayang P
ilipinas/ hinalungkot n tos na lahat sa s
iya ang u anta
t l ey
doctrina a es n
a s ulat.
DZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
If what Rizal learned were simply the teachings of Christ, why did other illustrious
people fail in their quest, and why did he have to travel to the ends of the earth for this
knowledge?
Notions of power, writing, and curing intersect in a story, which is typical, told by one
Isidro Antazo, a servant of Rizal who followed him from Calamba to his place of exile in
Dapitan. Whether or not the story is true or factual is irrelevant. As a read ing of Rizal,
it is consistent with the body of popular myths that we are presently examining.
The story goes that on one occasion when Rizal had to leave his clinic to attend to a
very sick man, he instructed his servant Isidro to attend to other patients who might
come in. Knowing neither medicine nor the dialect of Dapitan, Isidro protested, upon
which Rizal got a notebook and wrote things in it, which the servant could not even
read. This would take care of any problems, accord ing to Rizal. True enough, when
some patients came in and "con sulted" Isidro, he turned to the notebook:
It moved slightly, then the writings of Dr. Rizal on it be came his image, and it spoke
to him clearly. At first, it frightened him with wonder [sic], but its eyes restored his
confidence and he followed carefully what it dictated for him to do. The patients
submitted themselves obediently for treatment, though they, too, were surprised almost
to the brink of fear, but their faith in the voice and image of Dr. Rizal on the notebook held
them steady. After all the pa tients had been treated, the image and the voice became
writings again?
could read. "To those who could read Spanish," says Coates, "[Rizal] was the author of
Noli Me Tanger e; to the vast majority who either did not or could not read he was the
doctor who could cure all ills." Writing here is regarded as a substitute for the voice of
the author which is somehow anterior to the written word. In the story of Isidro and
the notebook, however, the distinction between author and work, writing and curing,
collapses. Rizal's writing does not refer to some knowledge external to it. What Rizal
knows cannot be "learned" by Isidro because it is unintelligible and proper only to a
person of Rizal's stature. This knowledge is power itself and the writing on the
notebook is, like the "E go sum" in the pasyon and the inscriptions on
anting-anting, an illustration of that power, equivalent to Rizal's presence and
convertible to image and sound. It might be argued that since Isidro could not
read, the voice and image into which writing was converted translated its
content, which Isidro then followed in detail. The story, how ever, is silent about the
treatment itself. What it seems to underline is the efficacy of Rizal's presence.
The initial reaction of Isidro and the patients is one of fear, but this soon turns into
"confidence" and "steadiness," or control of loób effected by the image's gaze and
the sound of Rizal's voice.
The appearance in their midst of an ilustrado replica of the aniteros and babaylane
s 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 M e Ta
ngere and the well-balanced and documented
report of January 1888 on the economic situation in the Dominican estate of
Calamba. Feeling themselves under at tack, the friars demanded Rizal's arrest
and imprisonment. Pre vailed upon by his family and friends, Rizal left the country in
February 1888. Barely three weeks later, the gobernadorcillos of Ma nila presented the
civil governor with a petition demanding the e
xpulsion of the friars: the "Manifestation
of 1888" which "showed the extent of the discontent lying beneath the surface of
Philippine life, which Rizal had touched and activated."7
Rizal's sojourn in Europe from 1888 to 1892 is marked by his sustained activation of
Filipino sentiments on behalf of the mother
One of the questions raised by the story is that of the status of writing. The aim of the
Propaganda movement in which Rizal was involved was to expose the ills of the colony
and foster nationalist sentiment through writing. Since the friars and the Guardia Civil
were fairly efficient in suppressing nonreligious public gatherings and speeches, the
written word, often smuggled from Spain via Hongkong, was the medium for
communicating ilustrado thoughts to the local principalia and eventually to anyone
else who
AND THE UNDERSIDE OF P
HILIPPINE HISTORY
land. Through his writings during this period he attempted to in still 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 a ct, helped organize the movement La Solidaridad, and
generally got involved in the myriad activities and squabbles typically en g aged 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 next phase (armed struggle) is
initiated by Bonifacio in 1892 with the founding of the Katipunan. If we, how ever,
cease for a moment to retrace R izal's footsteps in Europe and look into the
history of his absence from his homeland, we become aware of another series of
events in which Rizal is just as fully im p
licated.
Rizal's departure from the scene at the height of his promi nence as a miracle curer intensified
the popular textualization of his career. His absence, in a way, enlarged the space for
the inter play of hopes, speculations, patterned expectations and the bits and
pieces of news that filtered into the colony. The exact process by which this occurred is
perhaps beyond construction. We have evidence only of the striking outcome. In 1889, a
towninate wrote excitedly to Rizal: "Alas, Jose! All the people here ask about your
return. It seems that they consider you the second Jesus who will liberate them from
misery!"** Two years later, a Dominican scribe p enned the following r eport:
Blumentritt. He indeed, won great respect in German scholarly circles. He would, if he
could, have liberated Calamba from Spain, redistributed friar landholdings and set up a
model republic. Be neath these "historical" events, however, lies the structure of myth:
Rizal is the Son who goes to the Father and will return with an army of angels; he is the
lost King Bernardo who will descend from Mount Tapusi with a liberating army; he is all
of those patri ots from Apolinario de la Cruz to Artemio Ricarte, who went to heaven or
foreign lands and would return with supernatural aid, flying machines, and vanquishing
armies.
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 rail
way through the provinces of Bulacan, Pampanga, and Tarlac, dis covering along the
way the extent to which his name had fired the popular imagination. Not only were his
ideas discussed, but anec dotes of his bravery and accomplishment were told as well.
On one occasion, a particularly excitable old man praised Rizal so much that the latter
felt obliged to reveal himself, if only to put a stop to it. "When he did so," narrates
Coates, "the old man stared at him unbelievingly, then kissed his hand, calling him hero
and re deemer. Everywhere, too, he found his tricks of sleight-of-hand re called, people
averring that he had supernatural powers."
This other, "fantastic," Rizal has become a victim of the histori cal consciousness of the
ilustrado class. The national narrative tells us that in 1892 Rizal founded the La Liga
Filipina, a patriotic orga n ization advocating national unity, inutual help, education, eco nomic
development, and reforms in the colonial order. The story goes that among those
present during the launching of the Liga was Bonifacio, a warehouseman and great
admirer of Rizal who nevertheless found the pace of the Liga too slow. When, less than
three weeks after his return, Rizal was deported to Dapitan, Bonifacio began to
reorganize segments of the Liga into the revolu tionary Katipunan. Efforts by Katipunan
agents to harness the exile's support failed. The year 1892 thus appears to mark the
end of Rizal's effective involvement in the anticolonial struggle. It was
In Calamba all the talk is about Rizal's triumph, his prom ises, the reception
accorded him by the scholars in Europe, one of them being the grand Teacher of
Filibusterism, Blumentritt; of h
is travels through Germany, of t he power and wide
influence he exercised over the nation, of a Ger man squadron he will lead; of the lands he
will give to his countrymen from the C
alamba estate, where a g
reat state will rise, a
model republic.79
Most of what the scribe says can be linked to an actual event or a plausible
occurrence. Rizal did have a prominent friend in
70
RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPTINE H ISTORY
AL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
opened up by his works even in his absence and death. The commonsense notions of
the historical enterprise must be held in abeyance; "familiar" categories of meaning
must be questioned; and the submerged data must be allowed to complicate the field of
investigation. The year 1892 may constitute a momentous break in one reading of
events, but be meaningless in another. It may be a mistake to read "reyolution" only in
Bonifacio's fiery demeanor and raised bolo, and to read "reaction" or "reform" in the
calm, almost effeminate gaze of Rizal, just as it is a mistake to regard the suffering
Christ as the emblem of weakness and submission. And as we shall see, Rizal's
execution, far from serving as a solemn pause in the forward march of events, ought to
be treated as one of the more complex texts of the revolution.
THE MEANINGS OF DEATH

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 suc cessor, 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 ex tremely 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?81 Together with Renato Constantino, another influential textbook author, they
pose the disturbing ques tion: Why is our national hero not the leader of our
revolution 252
Certainly, the American colonial administration sponsored Rizal as the national hero
because his philosophy of education be fore independence was a fitting rationalization
of the U.S. policy of "benevolent assimilation." To be sure, Rizal represented the aspi
rations of the emergent middle class which had limited revolution ary goals, feared
violence, and was thus easily "bought off" by the U.S. Such arguments, however, are
derived from a certain reading of the complex "text" which Rizal was and still is.
Among other things, they overlook the fact that 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 problem of Rizal's status as national hero follows from the overarching narrative of
modernity in which nineteenth-century Philippine history has been situated. Notions of
evolution and ra tionality from the nineteenth century itself are responsible for ex cluding
from this history the "repetitious" and "mythical" aspects of reality. The pervading
discourse of subjectivity has led to a pre occupation with Rizal's intentions, the authentic
voice behind his texts. The very notion of "text" has been drastically limited to
his speeches and writings, and we ask what he really meant at the moment of
utterance instead of the possibilities of meaning
Coates has noted that "the prescience of Rizal, in which dreams contributed only a
small part, was extraordinary, verging on the psychic. In the context of Philippine
rural life, of course, this quality is almost expected of individuals such as faith healers,
seers, and possessors of powerful anting-anting. It was not the more common
intellectual's romanticizing of death, but a true pre sentiment, I think, that made him
dwell on the subject. 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
RIZAL, AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
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
uan [ Ever Prepared) is my real name. 84
myself for any eventuality. Laong L
What is remarkable about this dream is that it reveals, not so much some inner self of
Rizal, but the contours of his accession, since boyhood, to the order of myth. In the
southern Tagalog re gion, at least, there are innumerable stories of brilliantly illumi
nated caverns beneath the earth, particularly in the bowels of sacred mountains, where
legendary kings and ancestors dwell. The examples of Bernardo Carpio's cave and the
tomb of Jesus Christ immediately come to mind. After his execution, Rizal him self
would be regarded by the peasants of Laguna as the lord of a kind of paradise in the
heart of Mount Makiling, a place "as bright as daylight" without any apparent source of
illumination. De s pite his ilustrado status ("I do not believe in such things," he says) Rizal in
his unconscious moments is the body through which so cial conceptions of death
reveal themselves or speak. Dying is not an extinction of self but a passage into a
state of pure, brilliant po tency (.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 I mitation of C hrist. Rizal's be havior was not
unusual for someone who deeply admired Christ while condemning the obscurantism of
the church. But inore signifi cant, I think, than his feelings about his impending death is
the fact that by sending to his family the biblically inspired sketch and note, which would
later come to the attention of more and more people, Rizal was shedding signs of an
impending reenactment of the pasyon.
The publicized trial was a farce, but it fitted the scenario per fectly. The prosecutor
called Rizal "the soul of this rebellion," who "doubtless ... dreamed of power, pomp,
and circumstance." His countrymen render him "liege homage and look up to him
as a superior being whose sovereign commands are obeyed without q uestion." A
document from the office of the governor-general re ferred to the court described
Rizal, with "no hesitation," as "the g reat agitator of the Philippines who is not only
personally con vinced that he is called to be the chosen vessel of a kind of
redemp tion of his race, but who is considered by the masses of the native
population to be a superhuman being." The judge advocate gen eral, lending his support to
this portrayal of Rizal, s aw i n the latter "the idol, in short, of the ignorant rabble and
even of more impor tant b ut equally uncultured individuals [i.e., the katipuneros) who
saw in this professional agitator a superhuman being worthy to be called the
supremo (a title actually used by Bonifacio].
The "superhuman" image of Rizal, to the "ignorant rabble" at least, was in fact fairly
accurate and much of what Rizal had done or said before 1892 contributed to it.
Furthermore, during the trial, Spanish correspondents noted something about Rizal,
the signifi cance of which would not have escaped the audience. "His look is
hard ...." Wrote Manuel Alhama, "He tries to appear serene and stares at
people as if to challenge them; ... Rizal remains with his hands crossed, body
motionless, and outwardly showing great seren ity." Speaking in his defense, he
shows "much composure." Even the Spaniards sensed that a remarkable event was
taking place,
Rizal could only plead that he had had nothing to do with po litical affairs since July
1892, and that he was opposed to the Katipunan armed conspiracy. Naturally, "the
words of Rizal pro duced no e ffect at all." The judge advocate general refused to
allow publication of Rizal's manifesto condemning the uprising because, in effect, it
"said in substance: 'Let us subject ourselves now, for later I shall lead to the
Promised Land.' " At the trial's end, news of Rizal's impending execution quickly
"spread everywhere, produc ing a deep impression."
Whether Rizal intended it or not, everything about his final hour was public, subject
to rumor and interpretation. He refused to
IZAL, AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY
comprehended by all lowland, Christianized Filipinos: a Filipino Christ had been put to
death by the authorities with the prodding of the friars. It was now time for the people
as a whole, regardless of regional, linguistic, and racial barriers to participate in a "na
tional" pasyon by joining the revolution. As Francisco Laksamana, a Katipunan veteran,
put it in 1911: "Thus, in 1896, when Rizal willingly met his death (magpakamatay) ,
when his teachings and example became widely known and rooted in the Filipino soul, it
became the people's turn to go willingly to their deaths."". The re publican government
itself encouraged this reading of Rizal. In a pamphlet published on the second
anniversary of his death in De cember 1897, with the words Mahalagang Kasulatan
(lit., "Highly Important Writings") splashed on its cover, the national hero is re ferred to
as
be brought to the execution site in a military wagon, as was cus tomary, preferring
instead to walk, to undertake a lakaran. On the way, several people heard him say:
"We are walking the way to Calvary. Now Christ's passion is better understood. Mine is
very l ittle. He suffered a great deal more. He was nailed to a Cross; the bullets
will nail me to the cross formed by the bones on my back." 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 ev
eryone from the bottom of my heart." Entering the square formed by a company of
soldiers, his executioners, he maintained a
n
amazing serenity," t aking firm steps as if on a stroll. A Spanish doctor, wondering at
his calmness, took h is pulse and found it per fectly normal. Despite his objections,
Rizal had his back to the fir ing squad, but he was prepared with his special stance
and sudden t wist around in death, to fall face upwards. And indeed, after his final words,
Cons ummatum es
t! pronounced in a clear, steady voice, followed by a barrage of musket fire,
he lay dead facing the breaking dawn."
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 o nly because an exemplary Filipino was shot
for upholding his ideals, but more significantly because the event was "true to form." It
was a reliving of the trial and crucifix ion of Jesus Christ, but with new elements a dded to its
field of meanings. In this context, it is not surprising that Rizal's poem Mi Liltimo
Adios (My Last Farewell), written on the eve of his death and translated into Tagalog by
Bonifacio and others, rivals if not exceeds his novels in popular esteem. Not only is
it good poetry, but it contributes as w
ell to the scenario of h is death by repeating
the extended Panlan ( Farewell) scene in the pasyon. Rizal bids an emotional farewell
to his parents, relatives, beloved, and in par ticular, his Motherland Filipinas, on the
eve of the sacrifice of his life for the redemption of this motherland.
For those who could understand neither Spanish nor Tagalog, Rizal's mode of
death engendered a system of signs that could be
The WORD named Jose Rizal, sent down by heaven to the land of Filipinas, in order to
spend his whole life, from childhood, striving to spread throughout this vast Archi
pelago, the notion that righteousness must be fought for wholeheartedly
VERBONG nagn galang J ose Rizal, n

a inihulog n ang langit sa lupang Filipina s, na
ng b
gugulin a oong buhay mula sa p agkaba ta, s a pa gsusumikap n a k umalat s a
nilapadlapad niton g Sangkapidoan a ng wagas na pag tang
gol ng katowiran.
In the revolutionary newspapers La I ndependencia a nd El H

eraldo de la R
evolution
in
late 1898 and early 1899 can be found descriptions of the commemoration of Rizal's
death in various towns. In the town of Batangas, the whole populace is described as
having g athered, tearfully wailing, before a portrait of Rizal "which made them
f sorrows traversed by the Christ of our pueblo."
recall the desert o
When the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno calls Rizal "the Tagalog Christ
suffering in the garden of Gethsemane," we begin to wonder whether Rizal, like most
things Filipino, is not being assimilated into the realm of the "familiar." Is Rizal's death
76
simply a reenactment of the pasyon story, albeit on a different scale, the expression of
modern anticolonial sentiments in the Christian idiom of self-sacrifice and salvation?
The rituals of holy week, as we discussed earlier, were, after all, the scene of various
practices connected with the accumulation and control of spiritual power. There is that
aspect of Christ in the pasyon that relates more to the halus satria of Javanese mythology
than to Spanish m odels. The usually perceptive Coates seems to be missing
some thing when he asserts that "constructing from the past, Gandhi was
obliged to look back; Rizal, constructing from the present, looked solely forward.
Whether Rizal intended it or not, t he signs he shed looked equally to the past. When
he fell lifeless at Baguinbayan, c ountless of his countrymen "broke through the
square, to make sure, said the Spanish correspondent, that the mythical, the
godlike Rizal was really dead, or, according to others, to snatch away a relic and
keepsake and dip their handkerchiefs in a hero's blood."* In death, Rizal had entered
the realm of pure potency. It was widely believed that he had arisen or would soon
arise from his grave; that he had gone to Bernardo Carpio's cave; that he had
gone to Mount Banahaw to join another martyr, Fr. Jose Burgos; that his spirit could
be reached for cures and advice. We wonder whether the popularity of his farewell
poem is not due to the repeated suggestion in stanzas 12 to 23 that he will remain a
disembodied presence in the natural world, recognizable only through his lainenting
voice." Bonifacio's translation of the poem's final sentence, Morir es descansar (To
die, to rest-it is the same), as mamatay ay s iyang p
agkagupiling gives us the
promise of awakening from a short, restful sleep (pagkagupiling) which the Spanish
descansar does not."
If Rizal's p
assion, death, and resurrection, with all t heir levels of meaning in the
Philippine c ontext, are seen as the central events of the revolution, many puzzling
things about the latter are better understood. Death in battle, for instance, takes
on a meaning be yond that of personal loyalty to leaders or plain fanaticism. Vari
ous types of documents speak of the revolution as the pasyon of Inang Bayan
(mother country) in which all of her s ons participate; Rizal was the model of this behavior. The
veterans of the
Katipunan were known to at least a generation after the event as "men of anting-anting.ll
Folkloric tales of their exploits rarely fail to note their possession of talismans, secret
prayer books and dia grams, and other potent objects on or inside their bodies. Like
other relics of the war, they were sediments of a power-full time. Rizal was the prime
source of this power. In fact, for a time at least, the problem of access to the kapangyarihan
which the friars with held, was s olved.
In early Southeast Asia, the landscape was highly decentered, with many small states
and regional identities existing in isolation and in endemic conflict among themselves. The
problem for the chiefs was how to extend social ties and create more complex iden tities.
The bilateral kinship system in most Soutieast Asian societ ies made them indifferent
towards lineage descent to forebears; ancestor status had to be earned. The
unification of large segments of the landscape became possible, according to O. W.
Wolters, when Hinduized men of prowess made a correspondence between their superior
spiritual property and atman by participating in the god Shiva's sukti. Those who
partook of the divinity were thus paid homage 10 A hierarchical system came to be
developed, with the king at the apex or center, the talisman of the state embodying the
qualities of prowess and inner control, situated above personal re lations, which are too
fragile to be the sole basis of state formation.
In the Philippines, as we saw earlier, not only did the pre-Span ish chiefs who
distinguished themselves attribute their prowess to divine forces and take pains to select
burial sites that would be come centers of ancestor worship, but many rebel leaders
also at t ributed their strength to Christ, the Virgin Mary, or certain saints, and apparently were
revered for decades after their deaths. The colonial order and its codifying processes,
however, prevented the development of a sociopolitical hierarchy similar to those in the
Indianized states of Southeast Asia. In the complex text that Rizal is, this question of the
"center" seems to be inscribed. On one hand, Rizal is definitely a product of the colonial
order who, through modern education, heralded the birth of modern South east Asian
nationalism. On the other hand, the signs he scattered about, his gestures, works, his
absences even, and finally, the
RURAL LIFE IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION

mode of his death, generated meanings linked to other-largely hidden--narratives of the
Philippine past.
In a country without a tradition of hierarchy, Rizal became the necessary center, the
"ancestor" in the sense of being a source of kapangyarihan for leaders of peasant
movements against both for eign and local oppressors. In almost every report of
"disturbances" during the first decade of American rule, there is mention of Rizal
as reincarnated in "fanatical leaders, as the object of communica tion in seances, as the
object of worship in churches; in general, as literally the "spirit" behind the unrest. In
the 1920s, Lantayug pro claimed himself a reincarnation of Rizal and won a wide
following in the eastern Visayas and northern Mindanao. Another influential peasant leader
named Flor Intrencherado proclaimed himself em peror of the Philippines, claiming that his
powers were derived directly from Jose Rizal, as well as the martyr Fr. Jose Burgos and
the Holy Ghost. Other peasant leaders who challenged the colonial order in the 1920s and
1930s claimed to be in communication with Rizal. These leaders have, until recently at
least, always be longed to the "dark underside of the struggle for independence
dominated by such ilustrado notables as Quezon, Roxas, and Osmena. Even their
recognition today in the works of such writers a s Sturtevant and Constantino fails to liberate
them from the cat egories "irrational," "fanatical," and "failure" to which i lustrado and
colonial writing initially condemned them. Indeed, so much of what undergirds present
historical writing will have to be brought to light and challenged before it can even be
imagined that these peasant leaders were Jose Rizal, just as Rizal was Bernardo Carpio and
Jesus Christ.
Tt is not enough to say that Filipinos rose against Spain in 1896
and formed an independent nation-state in 1898. From hind Lsight it is all too easy to
locate the origins of our nation in those events. But what did the revolution really mean
to those who formed part of an ancien r egime that lasted centuries? I have sought to
answer these questions in my research on the history of some towns in southern Tagalog,
particularly Tiaong, Dolores, Sariaya, San Pablo, and others that encircled Mt. Banahaw.
This is a "his tory from below," about how fundamental social and political rela tionships
in these towns were slowly transformed by the events of the late nineteenth century,
particularly the revolution of 1896–97.
THE TWO REALMS
In the usual town histories, the foundation of a town coincides with the building of some kind
of church and convent to h ouse the parish priest. The indio populace was organized
around this center in fixed settlements called barrios or sitios, within hearing distance of the
church bells.
The church-convent complex was what we might term a "codi fying" or "organizing"
center. The indios willingly organized their lives around this church center, which
was the "house of God." From it emanated a promise of salvation, an end to
uncertainty

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-2

RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE

THE "FALL" IN ILUSTRADO CONSCIOUSNESS

How we understand change in the n

THE POWER OF KING BERNARDO

THE PASYON INTERFACE

atin desendencia n agbuhat si K

How even harder it was when you bade us

Egipto / pagod na d im

Lakad, aba tayo, t itigas ang hirap/ t u

to those traitors their feelings and potency (96:3-6).

An Angel descended on the t omb's s

THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL

THE MEANINGS OF DEATH

VERBONG nagn galang J ose Rizal, n

In the revolutionary newspapers La I ndependencia a nd El H

RURAL LIFE IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION

THE TWO REALMS

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12 Ileto - Rizal and The Underside of Philippine History

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-​2

RIZAL ​AND ​THE ​UNDERSIDE ​OF ​PHILIPPINE

THE ​"​FALL​" ​IN ​ILUSTRADO ​CONSCIOUSNESS

How ​we ​understand change ​in ​the n

THE ​POWER ​OF ​KING ​BERNARDO

THE ​PASYON ​INTERFACE

atin ​de​sendencia n ​ ​a​g​buh​at ​si K

How ​even ​harder ​it ​was ​when ​you ​bade ​us

Egipto /​ ​pagod ​na d ​ im

L​a​kad, ​ ​aba ​tayo​, t​ itigas ​ang ​hirap/ ​ t​ u

to ​those ​traitors ​their ​feelings ​and ​potency ​(​96​:​3​-​6​).

An ​Angel ​descended ​on ​the t​ omb​'​s s

THE ​TEXTUALIZATION ​OF ​RIZAL

THE ​MEANINGS ​OF ​DEATH

VERBONG ​na​gn ​ galang J​ os​e ​Rizal,​ n

In ​the ​revolutionary ​newspapers ​La I​ ndependencia a ​ nd ​E​l H

RURAL ​LIFE ​IN ​A ​TIME ​OF ​REVOLUTION

THE ​TWO ​REALMS

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-2

RIZAL AND THE UNDERSIDE OF PHILIPPINE

THE "FALL" IN ILUSTRADO CONSCIOUSNESS

How we understand change in the n

THE POWER OF KING BERNARDO

THE PASYON INTERFACE

atin desendencia n agbuhat si K

How even harder it was when you bade us

Egipto / pagod na d im

Lakad, aba tayo, t itigas ang hirap/ t u

to those traitors their feelings and potency (96:3-6).

An Angel descended on the t omb's s

THE TEXTUALIZATION OF RIZAL

THE MEANINGS OF DEATH

VERBONG nagn galang J ose Rizal, n

In the revolutionary newspapers La I ndependencia a nd El H

RURAL LIFE IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION

THE TWO REALMS