é Rizal

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José Rizal

Born José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda[1]

June 19, 1861[2]

Calamba, Laguna, Captaincy General of the

Philippines, Spanish Empire[2]

Died December 30, 1896 (aged 35)[3]

Bagumbayan, Manila, Captaincy General of the

Philippines, Spanish Empire[3]

Cause of death Execution by firing squad of the Spaniards

Monuments Luneta Park, Manila,

Calamba, Laguna,

Daet, Camarines Norte,

Carson, California

Other names Pepe, Jose (nicknames)[4][5]

Alma mater Ateneo Municipal de Manila (BA)

Universidad Central de Madrid (MD)

University of Santo Tomas

 Organization La Solidaridad, La Liga Filipina

 Noli Me Tangere (1887)
Notable work
 El Filibusterismo (1891)
Josephine Bracken
Spouse(s)
 

(m. 1896)
[6]

Parents Francisco Rizal Mercado (father)

Teodora Alonso Realonda (mother)

Relatives Saturnina Hidalgo (sister)

Paciano Rizal (brother)

Trinidad Rizal (sister)

Signature

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda [7] (Spanish: [xoˈse riˈsal]; June 19,
1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath during the
tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is considered as the
national hero (pambansang bayani) of the Philippines.[8][9] An ophthalmologist by
profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda
Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after
the Philippine Revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke out. Though he was not
actively involved in its planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which
eventually led to Philippine independence.
He is widely considered one of the greatest heroes of the Philippines and has been
recommended to be so honored by an officially empaneled National Heroes Committee.
However, no law, executive order or proclamation has been enacted or issued officially
proclaiming any Filipino historical figure as a national hero.[9] He was the author of the
novels Noli Me Tángere and El filibusterismo, and a number of poems and essays.[10][11]

Contents

 1Early life
 2Education
 3Personal life, relationships and ventures
o 3.1Affair
o 3.2Association with Leonor Rivera
o 3.3Relationship with Josephine Bracken
 4In Brussels and Spain (1890–1892)
 5Return to Philippines (1892–1896)
o 5.1Exile in Dapitan
o 5.2Arrest and trial
 6Execution
 7Works and writings
o 7.1Novels and essays
 o 7.2Poetry
o 7.3Plays
o 7.4Other works
 8Reactions after death
o 8.1Retraction controversy
o 8.2"Mi último adiós"
o 8.3Later life of Bracken
o 8.4Polavieja and Blanco
 9Criticism and controversies
o 9.1National hero status
 9.1.1Made national hero by colonial Americans
 9.1.2Made national hero by Emilio Aguinaldo
o 9.2Critiques of books
o 9.3Role in the Philippine revolution
 10Legacy and remembrance
o 10.1Species named after Rizal
o 10.2Historical commemoration
 11Rizal in popular culture
o 11.1Adaptation of his works
o 11.2Biographical films/TV series
o 11.3Other
 12Ancestry
 13See also
 14Notes and references
o 14.1Explanatory notes
o 14.2Citations
 15General sources
 16Further reading
 17External links

Early life

José Rizal's baptismal register

Francisco Rizal Mercado (1818–1898)

Teodora Alonso Realonda (1827–1911)

José Rizal in P2 note

José Rizal was born in 1861 to Francisco Rizal Mercado y Alejandro and Teodora

Alonso Realonda y Quintos in the town of Calamba in Laguna province. He had nine
sisters and one brother. His parents were leaseholders of a hacienda and an
accompanying rice farm by the Dominicans. Both their families had adopted the
additional surnames of Rizal and Realonda in 1849, after Governor General Narciso
Clavería y Zaldúa decreed the adoption of Spanish surnames among the Filipinos for
census purposes (though they already had Spanish names).
Like many families in the Philippines, the Rizals were of mixed mestizo origin. José's
patrilineal lineage could be traced back to Fujian in China through his father's ancestor
Lam-Co, a Hokkien Chinese merchant who immigrated to the Philippines in the late
17th century.[12][13][note 1][14] Lam-Co traveled to Manila from Xiamen, China, possibly to avoid
the famine or plague in his home district, and more probably to escape
the Manchu invasion during the Transition from Ming to Qing. He finally decided to stay
in the islands as a farmer. In 1697, to escape the bitter anti-Chinese prejudice that
existed in the Philippines, he converted to Catholicism, changed his name to Domingo
Mercado and married the daughter of Chinese friend Augustin Chin-co. On his mother's
side, Rizal's ancestry included Chinese, Japanese and Tagalog blood. His mother's
lineage can be traced to the affluent Florentina family of Chinese mestizo families
originating in Baliuag, Bulacan.[15] He also had Spanish ancestry. Regina Ochoa, a
grandmother of his mother, Teodora, had mixed Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog blood.
His grandfather was a half Spaniard engineer named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo.[16]
From an early age, José showed a precocious intellect. He learned the alphabet from
his mother at 3, and could read and write at age 5. [13] Upon enrolling at the Ateneo
Municipal de Manila, he dropped the last three names that made up his full name, on
the advice of his brother, Paciano and the Mercado family, thus rendering his name as
"José Protasio Rizal". Of this, he later wrote: "My family never paid much attention [to
our second surname Rizal], but now I had to use it, thus giving me the appearance of an
illegitimate child!"[17] This was to enable him to travel freely and disassociate him from his
brother, who had gained notoriety with his earlier links to Filipino priests Mariano
Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora (popularly known as Gomburza) who had
been accused and executed for treason.
Rizal's house in Calamba, Laguna

Despite the name change, José, as "Rizal", soon distinguished himself in poetry writing
contests, impressing his professors with his facility with Castilian and other foreign
languages, and later, in writing essays that were critical of the Spanish historical
accounts of the pre-colonial Philippine societies. Indeed, by 1891, the year he finished
his El filibusterismo, this second surname had become so well known that, as he writes
to another friend, "All my family now carry the name Rizal instead of Mercado because
the name Rizal means persecution! Good! I too want to join them and be worthy of this
family name..."[17]

Education

Rizal, 11 years old, a student at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila

Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna, before he was sent
to Manila.[18] As to his father's request, he took the entrance examination in Colegio de
San Juan de Letran but he then enrolled at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and
graduated as one of the nine students in his class declared sobresaliente or
outstanding. He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to obtain a
land surveyor and assessor's degree, and at the same time at the University of Santo
Tomas where he did take up a preparatory course in law and finished with a mark
of excelente or excellent. He finished the course of Philosophy as a pre-law. [19] Upon
learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to switch to medicine at
the medical school of Santo Tomas specializing later in ophthalmology. He received his
four-year practical training in medicine at Ospital de San Juan de Dios in Intramuros. In
his last year at medical school, he received a mark of sobresaliente in courses
of Patologia Medica (Medical Pathology), Patología Quirúrgica (Surgical Pathology) and
Obstretics.
Rizal, known for being an intelligent student, had some difficulty in some subjects in
medical school such as Física (Physics) and Patología General (General Pathology).[20]
Rizal as a student at the University of Santo Tomas

Without his parents' knowledge and consent, but secretly supported by his
brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid in May 1882 and studied medicine at
the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine.
He also attended medical lectures at the University of Paris and the University of
Heidelberg. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society
and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the
famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered an address in
German in April 1887 before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and
structure of the Tagalog language. He left Heidelberg a poem, "A las flores del
Heidelberg", which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land
and the unification of common values between East and West.
At Heidelberg, the 25-year-old Rizal completed in 1887 his eye specialization under the
renowned professor, Otto Becker. There he used the newly
invented ophthalmoscope (invented by Hermann von Helmholtz) to later operate on his
own mother's eye. From Heidelberg, Rizal wrote his parents: "I spend half of the day in
the study of German and the other half, in the diseases of the eye. Twice a week, I go to
the bierbrauerie, or beerhall, to speak German with my student friends." He lived in a
Karlstraße boarding house then moved to Ludwigsplatz. There, he met Reverend Karl
Ullmer and stayed with them in Wilhelmsfeld, where he wrote the last few chapters
of Noli Me Tángere.
Rizal was a polymath, skilled in both science and the arts. He painted, sketched, and
made sculptures and woodcarving. He was a prolific poet, essayist, and novelist whose
most famous works were his two novels, Noli Me Tángere and its sequel, El
filibusterismo.[note 2] These social commentaries during the Spanish colonization of the
country formed the nucleus of literature that inspired peaceful reformists and armed
revolutionaries alike. Rizal was also a polyglot, conversant in twenty-two languages.[note 3]
[note 4][21][22]

Rizal's multifacetedness was described by his German friend, Dr. Adolf Bernhard

Meyer, as "stupendous."[note 5] Documented studies show him to be a polymath with the
ability to master various skills and subjects.[21][23][24] He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor,
painter, educator, farmer, historian, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and
creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in
architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics,
martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting. He was also a Freemason, joining Acacia
Lodge No. 9 during his time in Spain and becoming a Master Mason in 1884.[25]

Personal life, relationships and ventures

Rednaxela Terrace, where Rizal lived during his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong (photo taken in 2011)

José Rizal's life is one of the most documented of 19th century Filipinos due to the vast
and extensive records written by and about him. [26] Almost everything in his short life is
recorded somewhere, being himself a regular diarist and prolific letter writer, much of
the material having survived. His biographers, however, have faced difficulty in
translating his writings because of Rizal's habit of switching from one language to
another.
They drew largely from his travel diaries with their insights of a young Asian
encountering the West for the first time. They included his later trips, home and back
again to Europe through Japan and the United States, [27] and, finally, through his self-
imposed exile in Hong Kong.
Shortly after he graduated from the Ateneo Municipal de Manila (now Ateneo de Manila
University), Rizal (who was then 16 years old) and a friend, Mariano Katigbak, came to
visit Rizal's maternal grandmother in Tondo, Manila. Mariano brought along his sister,
Segunda Katigbak, a 14-year-old Batangueña from Lipa, Batangas. It was the first time
they met and Rizal described Segunda as "rather short, with eyes that were eloquent
and ardent at times and languid at others, rosy–cheeked, with an enchanting and
provocative smile that revealed very beautiful teeth, and the air of a sylph; her entire self
diffused a mysterious charm." His grandmother's guests were mostly college students
and they knew that Rizal had skills in painting. They suggested that Rizal should make
a portrait of Segunda. He complied reluctantly and made a pencil sketch of her.
Unfortunately for Rizal who had referred to her as his first love in his memoir Memorias
de un Estudiante de Manila, Katigbak was already engaged to Manuel Luz.[28]