HISTORY 3

THOUGHT
PAPER

Submitted By:
Pamela Erika J. Emano
BS PSYCHOLOGY 1 - YB

Submitted To:
Mr. Roel Barros Absin, PhD
History 3 Instructor

Submitted on:
October 7, 2019
 Table of Contents
Topic Page
1. Cults Honoring Rizal 3-6

2. The Philippine Chinese Before 1850 7-9

3. The Filipinos in the Philippines and Other Essays 10-12

4. Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History 13-15

5. Jose Rizal and the Invention of a National Literature 16-18

6. Writer, Hero, Myth, and Spirit: 19-21

The Changing Image of Jose Rizal

7. The Tripartite View of Philippine History 22-24

8. Romancing Tropicality: Ilustrado Portraits of the 25-27

Climate in the Late Nineteenth Century

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 1. Cults Honoring Rizal
Rizal’s canonization was an expression of the “intensely, nationalistic phase”.

The concept of the man-god is as old as humanity itself and is

common among primitive peoples even to this day. The ancient Sumerians

and the Greeks, and even the Jews at the time of Moses, envisioned gods

who were, we might say, magnified human beings, with human bodies, and

human wants and needs.

Thus, it may be said that the belief that Rizal is a god may be

considered as an extension of the anthropomorphic belief of the ancient

Filipinos. In spite of the more than three centuries of Catholicism in the

country, fears of mysterious and occult powers, especially among the poor

unlettered folk, have remained. The concept of the man god, on the other

hand, might have originated from the ancestor worship of the ancient

Filipinos. It seems clear from our study that this idea has remained in our

midst, especially among the illiterate peasants living in mountain areas and

far-living barrios which education, secular, and religious, has not yet

reached, or are at least affected.

These sects which consider Rizal as a god are centered, as may be

expected, in rural areas where poor peasants folk live. Most of their

members we may be sure, were barely, if ever, instructed in the religion of

their forefathers, and, as such, seem to have identified religion with

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superstition. Indeed, the many superstitious beliefs that characterize these

sects may have appealed to their imagination and must have been greatly

instrumental in winning them over to these sects.

Most leaders of the sects also come from the peasant class and have

had the minimum of schooling, if any at all. There are, however, other

leaders who profess to have come from the “educated” class. For instance,

Jose B. Baricanosa, present head of the Watawat ng Lahi, claims to be a B.S.

graduate from a Chicago College, while among other leaders, Alfredo

Benedicto is a lawyer, and Crispin M. Penid was formerly a college student in

a Manila University.

All the sects studied appeal to the sense of patriotism. As has been

seen, these sects consider love of country and reverence for the national

heroes as among their most important principles. In the intent to preach this

“doctrine”, however, at least one sect (i.e. Bathalismo) has included among

its principal tents the belief that the Philippines is for Filipinos only. There is

here the subtle, if effective, way to preach hatred against the foreigners. The

reason for this may not be too hard to seek. Even through their leaders

profess love for fellowmen (which doubtless includes foreigners too) still

they would identify the Catholic Church with the “whites”. In some of their

pronouncements, many leaders of the sects still find it convenient to harp on

what they call the abuses of the Spanish friars, a thing of the distant past.

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Thus, in preaching against the foreigners, it is felt that they also preach

against the Catholic Church which is considered a common enemy. This line

has also been followed by the early Aglipayan Church and owing to the

peculiar conditions at the church’s establishment in greatly helped attract

many members. As subsequent events turned out, however, this appeal to

the patriotic sense eventually subsided and did not prevent members of the

Aglipayan sect from drifting away to other religions. It may be safe to

predict here that given time, this may yet hold true for the sects in honor of

Rizal.

Closely allied to the appeal to the patriotic sense is what may be

considered the principal doctrine of these sects. These sects profess the

belief that Rizal is a god, that he is the savior of his race and of his people,

that he did not die, and that he is present everywhere in the same manner

that God is present everywhere.

How long would these sects survive? Already, at least one sect (the

Sambahang Rizal) is now defunct, and there seems to be no indication to

show that it will be revived. Another set (Adarnista) has already divided into

two factions. Division into splinter sects may indeed contribute to their

eventual dissolution. Certainly the number of members of these sects may

still not have reached such proportions as the cause alarm, but we may be

sure that in places where poor, unlettered folk, prone to superstition, are

found these sects would surely thrive.

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2. The Philippine Chinese Before
1850
Long before 1850, the Chinese had been significantly involved in the

economic and social affairs of the Philippines. Direct contact between

China and the Philippines existed from at least the Sung Period.

The plurality in economic life was paralleled by cultural pluralism. In

areas penetrated by the Spaniards there quickly came to be cultural

communities of Spaniards, Indios, and Chinese. Formal social distinctions

between and among these cultural groups were built into the

administrative structure by the Spaniards. “Spaniards”, “Indio”, and

“Chinese” became terms of legal status. And when in the eighteenth

century a sizable number of Chinese-Indio half castes or mestizos

appeared, a legal classification was created for them too.

The policy of formalized social classification ought not to be labeled

simply “divide-and-rule”. It was, rather, a Spanish application of the

Roman traditional concept of recognition of cultural differences within the

empire. To the Spaniards, at least in the pre-nineteenth-century period, it

was important to classify individuals according to assumed cultural

differences. Thus, in Latin America, offspring of mixed marriages were

carefully classified as zambos, pardos, and so forth. To do otherwise was

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not so much to sow the seeds of revolution as it was to allow social

malfunctioning and “perversion of customs”.

This formalization and legalization of cultural differences as social

differences did not result in a strictly fragmented society. Individuals

within each group readily interacted with those of other groups and the

Spanish group excepted, individuals could change status and move from

group to group. Moreover, a culturally and socially unifying factor was

present: Spanish Catholicism. The Spanish colony in the Philippines was,

from the very beginning, as much a religious mission as it was a

commercial venture. The sense of religious-cultural mission to Catholicize

and hispanize the Philippines and all its inhabitants was a very real part of

Spain’s imperial philosophy. Spanish policy thus combined the recognition

of present cultural pluralism with the universal propagation of a culturally

unifying religious doctrine.

It must be emphasized that this cultural pluralism and social

classification existed only in those areas where Spaniards and Chinese

settles. For the rest of the archipelago, indigenous society, although not

unaffected by the Spanish conquest and Spanish cultural influence,

underwent no change of the kind described.

In dealing with the Chinese-Spain’s policies revealed the basic

compromise between religious-cultural ideals and economic interest

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characteristic of her action in the Philippines. Economic interest decreed

the presence of Chinese merchants and artisans, who filled occupations

which the Spaniards scorned and for which the indios were believed

unsuited. No less necessary was the China-Manila trade carried on by the

Chinese, as part of the Manila Galleon trading system, in which many

powerful Spanish residents had sizable investments. There were also the

taxes and miscellaneous contributions of the Chinese interests both to

government and to private individuals and institutions.

Balanced against economic interest was the mandate to Catholicize

and hispanize the Philippines and all its inhabitants. It appeared to the

Spaniards that the Chinese could not easily be converted or hispanized.

Moreover, intimate contract between uncoverted Chinese and barely-

converted Indios stood as possible threat to the lasting conversion of the

latter, which was, after all, the major Spanish concern.

While considered a cultural minority in the Spanish plan, the Chinese

were still, compared with the Spaniards, a numerical majority and hence

potentially dangerous. Thus, if the indios seemed to need protection from

the Chinese for religious-cultural reasons, no less did the Manila

Spaniards need it for the security reasons. Here was another argument in

favor of establishing controls over the Chinese. Therefore, as Spain’s

Chinese policy took form there were three major elements: taxation,

control, and conversion.

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 3. The Filipinos in the Philippines
and Other Essays
Jose Rizal is the fountain of all wisdom for all situations.
Rizal had the best education them available in the colony, provided

exclusively by the Religious Orders, notably the Dominicans and Jesuits. It

was an education that he later satirized mercilessly, but it gave him a

command of Latin (and some Hebrew), a solid knowledge of classical

antiquity, and an introduction to western philosophy, and even to medical

science. From very early on, Rizal exhibited remarkable literary abilities. At

the age of nineteen, he entered an open literary competition, and won first

prize, defeating Spanish rivals writing in their native tongue.

The validity of Rizal’s teachings today, sixty three years after his

death, is both a measure of his greatness and of our lack of greatness as a

nation. The importance of Rizal’s ideas for our generation has twofold

basis—first, their applicability to present-day problems, and second, their

inspirational value. Rizal holds a mirror to our faces and we see ourselves,

our vices, our defects, our meanness. Because the conditions he describes

are the very conditions we see around us, and the characters he portrays

are people we continue to meet, we readily respond to his earnest desire for

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basic changes in our society and in ourselves. One hand holds a mirror to

shame us and the other points the way to our regeneration. Yet, the truth is

that the mirror was not meant to reveal our image, but the image of the

people and the society of Rizal’s time. The fact that Rizal’s aim was to

deepen the society in which he lives, and the fact that we nevertheless find

that he is also speaking about the society in which we live, have given rise

to two schools of thought about Rizal.

Rizal is still applicable today, be must have possesses uncanny powers

of prophecy. Because he is still valid today, Rizal will be valid for all time. In

their sincere reverence for our national hero, they have transformed him

into a demigod whose teachings will constitute the final word, the definitive

Bible, on any and all aspects of Filipino life now and in the future.

Rizal would be horrified and be greatly saddened to learn that we are

celebrating his centennial precisely by extolling his validity for our times. His

zeal as a social reformer, his dedicated efforts to improve his countrymen,

all his patriotic labors were directed toward one goal—reforms. If we revere

Rizal, if we wish to honor him, if we want to follow in his aspirations, then

let’s be clear.

The predicament of our student populations whose scholastic life is one

continuous struggle with the English language is one more case that bears

out Rizal’s thesis. Those who are honest among us will have to admit that

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our inadequate grasp of the mances of the language is the greatest obstacle

to our acquisition of knowledge. The hordes of semi-literate professionals

that our educational system produces, year in and year out, are eloquent

proof of the need for a change.

We exhibit the same attitude toward Westerners which Rizal sought

to/expose in his works. In our country today, the foreigner out to make his

fortune has the best chance for success. Many doors of opportunity are open

to him. Because we have gotten used to regarding the white man as our

superior, we have accorded him more privileges than he would enjoy

elsewhere. Rizal must have seen many instances of this same attitude

during his time, for many incidents in his novels are good examples of this

defect in our character.

In the current move of nationalistic elements to instill the Filipino First

ideal among our people, Rizal’s words on the subjects are most applicable.

Those elements in our country who are still resisting the resurgence if

nationalism should read Rizal’s The Philippines a Century Hence and The

Indolence of the Filipinos for in these essays he tried to show that centuries

of systematic brutalization had transformed the proud, free Filipinos into a

servile slave without individuality and pride.

If we read Rizal carefully, we will soon realize that his dream for

country can be attained only by a dedicated, hard-working, socially

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responsible citizenry. It is tragic, therefore, that there are so very many

Basilios among us today, Basilio was essentially good. He was hard working,

did no one any harm. In an already stable and prosperous country, such

citizens as Basilio might be desirable; but to Rizal’s Philippines as well as in

ours where so many reforms are still needed.

4. Rizal and the Underside

of Philippine History

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5. Jose Rizal and the Invention of
a National Literature

The space of literature is not fixed and immutable, but a site of

incessant struggle, innovation, and challenges to authority. Hence,

histories of Philippine nationalism built on neatly segmented, dichotomous

understandings of history. Assimilationist or separatist, reformist or

revolutionary, Rizal or Bonifacio— misrepresent a complex and dynamic

continuum in which ideas can simultaneously exist and one position for

already prefigured in another.

In 1880, Rizal stood at that point in time when the country’s literature

scene was qualitatively changing from “pre-national” to one that would, in

the course of events, become distinctly “national” in its ambition. Here, I

would like to describe the series of intellectual moves that brought about

this change and created the lineaments of a “national” literature.

In inventing a national literature, the first move is that of asserting

difference, done typically on the basis of a claim to a distinct culture,

history, and identity. To assert difference was to disengage from a

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dominant discourse that rendered one voiceless and invisible, carve out

autonomous space, and lay claim to one’s own resources for creative

production. It involved claims in a deep “native tradition” and a wealth of

local linguistic and cultural resources. Asserting difference was a

dominant theme of the Propaganda. It inspired the effort of Rizal and

colleagues, like Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, and Isabelo de los

Reyes, in embedding the Philippines in a “high” and “ancient” Malay

civilization; in studying and extolling the virtues of local languages; and

in harnessing the “popular” and the “folk” as resources for the creation of

an integral culture.

Rizal was the first to attempt to write a “national” history that would

disengage the country from being treated as a mere appendage to Spain.

Though what he produced, lacking the time, was a shadow-history in the

form of a critical annotation of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas

Filipinas (1890), still it stands as the first attempt by a Filipino to

rehearse a national history of the Philippines.

Rizal appreciated that a people’s literature must be grounded in their

history and store of social, psychological, and linguistic resources. Yet a

second and simultaneous move, he recognized as well that this literature

can only grow through a vital conversation with the rest of the world.

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 For Rizal and his contemporaries, to “internationalize” was not an

option but a necessity. Colonialism incorporates native subjects into

“world-system” and puts them in a position where they have to engage

with an external power. They recognized, moreover, that in the work of

nation-creation, they had to begin with the living reality of a culture

already contaminated, and vitalized, by the intrusion of foreign elements.

What after all, can be said of national literature that has for its first

knowledge authors a seventeenth-century printer who wrote a manual for

learning the Spanish language and an eighteenth-century priest who

penned book of classical epigrams in Latin?

Yet for all this, Rizal had a very strong sense of location, of where he

was in the world, where he was speaking from, and what knowledge was

to be harnessed for. Of Colonialism, he had written: “The existence of a

foreign body in another endowed with strength and activity is against all

natural and moral laws. Science teaches us that either it is assimilated, it

destroys the organism, it is eliminated, or it is encysted.” This could well

be Rizal speaking on the question of foreign literary influences. Rizal

traveled widely, learning all he could, but the horizon towards which he

moved was always that of his country.

Finally, Rizal recognized that a country’s literary capital is not just a

collection of texts but a living discourse. Literature-- to borrow the words

of Octavio Paz-- “is not so much the sum of individual works as the

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 system of relations between them.” It is “a field of affinities and

oppositions,” “intellectual space” where, through the medium of criticism,

works meet and enter into active dialogue with each other. Hence-- in the

third move in creating a national literature—Rizal argued that a broad and

vital conversation within the nation must be enabled through an

infrastructure of academies and an active community of writers, critics,

and readers.

6. Writer, Hero, Myth, and Spirit:

The Changing Image of Jose
Rizal
Smita Lahiri, a Ph.D Candidate from the Department of Anthropology at

Cornell University authored this module.

She mentioned that encountering the novels of Jose Rizal in a country

seminar taught by Ben Anderson during her first year at Cornell did more

than anything else to draw her into the study of the Philippines.

Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere and EL Flibusterismo have fascinated and

eluded generations of scholarly readers since their first publication in

Germany in the 1890’s. Since that time, they have withstood waves of

adulation, vilification, and dismissal, followed by nationalist reappropriation

and finally canonization, while continuing to reward new readers with

pleasure and abundant interpretive possibilities. Although Rizal is more

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renowned for his political writings and role as a public intellectual in the first

wave of Philippine nationalism in the 1870s, I found myself far more

interested in the voice of Rizal the novelist. More than Rizal’s explicit

polemics, it was the Noli’s story of an intellectual-returned to the Philippines

from overseas-pushed to radicalism by the corruption of Spanish rule in the

Philippines, which demonstrated Rizal’s keen social intelligence and

command over the intellectual currents of his time. In the Noli and Fili, Rizal

overtook his teachers and superiors. Writing in Spanish, he cast off the

intellectual hegemony of Spain in the Philippines with every appearance of

effortlessness.

Her appreciation of these novels was shaped in large part by a number of

Cornell teachers, alumni, and fellow students. First and foremost, Ben

Anderson drew my attention to their subversive irony, evident in how the

Noli indicts the colonial state system or “frailocracy” by ridiculing the self-

serving friars and posturing gobernadorcillos who held power within it. He

also pointed out Rizal’s subtle yet powerful idealism in using fiction to give

shape to his pluralistic idea of the Philippine nation-as Ben memorably put it,

to “imagine it whole.” Other important insights into Rizal came from Vicente

Rafael’s “Contracting Contractualism” (a book that was based on his Cornell

history thesis). According to Rafael, the Noli both depicts how the friars

maintained the colonial hierarchy by withholding access to Latin and Spanish

from the vast majority of Filipinos and illustrates that Filipinos nonetheless

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managed to produce new and destabilizing meanings from the language and

religion of their colonizers. But even as she absorbed these cele-bratory

interpretations of Rizal as part of my course work, quite a different note was

being sounded: her fellow student Carol Hau was already pointing out that

despite the levity on their surfaces, Rizal’s novels are a dark, even

despairing meditation on the incompatibility of Enlightenment ideals of

modernity with the Philippines, and a warning of the violence that might

ensue from transplanting them there.

When Smita Lahiri set off for the Philippines to conduct anthropological

fieldwork, she didn’t expect new encounters with Rizal the novelist, since she

planned to spend the bulk of her time outside university settings. In

addition, since she knew that in the Philippines, Jose Rizal’s novels had been

subjected to “normalization” through reverence-inducing translations. This

had the effect of blunting their immediacy and holding the reader at a

distance from the world of the text-all part of the process of enshrining Rizal

as a national hero whose worship was obligatory. She said that as although

her expectations proved correct, she was in fact constantly reminded of Rizal

the novelist, since she found herself surrounded by the image of Rizal the

national hero on movie billboards, TV Advertisements, infomercials

commemorating the centennial of the Philippines’ independence from Spain,

and book displays in the national bookstore. This Rizal jostled for face space

with other heroes like Andres Bonifacio, but his dreamy good looks

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(accentuated by a wave of hair springing back from his youthful forehead

and fixed forever in his most-often-reproduced portrait) gave him a distinct

edge. Less prominent than the hero’s image were his political writings and

views, which were nevertheless also receiving attention from intellectuals

and columnists.

7. The Tripartite View of

Philippine History

One sees that Rizal’s conception of the tripartite historical ideology of

the Propaganda was the most extreme. In contrast to Jaena and del Pilar,

Rizal saw the problem more holistically, from the perspective of the entire

cultural development of the Filipino people and not simple from that of

the actual possession of political power by any social group, foreign or

local. Thus, for him, it was not just “frailocracy” or “monastic supremacy”

which was at cause: the entire Spanish regime from its very inception

was at the root of the social cancer which had declared itself by the late

nineteenth century. With Jaena and del Pilar, Rizal quite naturally

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believes in the innate capacity of the Filipino for progress; but, to him, it

was the colonial system as such—the very existence of the Spanish

domination – which was the cause of the disease that afflicted Filipinas.

Monkish predominance, as it were, was in this case just a symptom of the

cancer that gnawed at the vital parts of the nation. For this reason, the

third period is likewise conceived in medical terms as some kind if

recovery which released the creative forces of the patient, giving Filipinas

new life, new strength: a future. The kind of therapy used actually

mattered very little. Rizal was willing to try even the most benign

remedies, for which in Noli he would even implore passers-by in front the

temple, as in biblical times. But his diagnosis – as well as the analyses of

both del Pilar and Jaena – pointed clinically to swift surgery as the

appropriate therapy.

The Filipinos at Spanish advent had an indigenous sense of history

which, basically cyclical, was concerned with history as story relevant

(may kasaysayan) to a particular group. The Spaniars brought in a two-

part historical consciousness and the broader archipelagic frame of

reference. Relevant to the colonial enterprise was the declared “mission”

of Spain in the Philippines, which was to Christianize and civilize the

“natives” of the island which got the name of the Spanish King, Felipe

Segundo. Kasaysayan came thus to be conceived as “the history of Spain

in the Philippines,” with the entire previous period considered as the

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prelude to the Spanish task of bringing lisght to the “Felipinas.” As

objects of the civilizing mission, the Filipinos would have to be not only

pagans but savages. This is the hispanized intellectuals (ilustrados) of the

late nineteenth century could not accept. For del Pilar, the Filipinos were

actually being hampered from progressing by the monastic orders,

although it had indeed become the duty of the Spanish motherland to

lead daughter Filipinas on the road to enlightenment. For Lopez Jaena,

whatever progress Filipinas had attained was due to the Filipinos

themselves, and to foreigners and in spite of the monks. Finally, for Rizal,

Filipinas in fact experienced decline under Spanish rule. For all, the

second period of Philippine history was thus intolerable and, because it

was a product of tyranny, would have to be superseded by a third one of

freedom and creative endeavor.

This tripartite historical view worked out by the Propaganda,

particularly in Rizal’s version of it, became part of the ideology of the

Katipunan and, consequently, of the Revolution. In the rites of entry into

the Katipunan, the new member had to know the correct answer to the

three questions derived from the tripartite view – i.e., concerning the

condition of Filipinas before the Spaniards came, her condition since then,

and her condition from liberation from Spanish rule. The answers were to

be found in detail in Bonifacio’s “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mg Tagalog”. “Of

old, prior to the arrival of the Spaniard,” according to Bonifacio, “these

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 islands were governed by our own compatriots who were then living in

the greatest abundance and prosperity.” Furthermore, they maintained

good relations with the neighboring countries like Japan, trading with

them in “commodities of all sorts.” Wealth and good customs were then

“a common patrimony” and everyone knew how to read and write in the

ancient Filipino script. Then came the Spaniards and “with the pretense of

peace… deceived (us) by their offers to guide us on the paths of wisdom

and increased prosperity.” This Plaridelian blood compact with Rizal’s

thesis of Filipino decadence under Spanish rule, Bonifacio adds that the

Spaniards “have endeavoured to make us abandon our good customs,”

initiating the people in “a false belief” and dragging its honor “into the

mire.”

8. Romancing Tropicality:
Ilustrado Portraits Of The
Climate In The Late
Nineteenth Century

Rizal’s reference to “many calamities” was aimed at the depredations

caused by Spanish policies that decimated the native population. He also

pointed to calamities brought about by drought, rinderpest, and locust

infestation, but decried the Spanish friar’s solution of resorting to nothing

more than prayers, exorcisms; and processions. “If the climate and nature

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are not enough in themselves to confound him and deprive him of all

vitality”, then misplaced religiosity and the overall colonial dispensation

conspired to promote native indolence. Rizal deemed colonial

misgovernment the “real calamity” exceeding all others. In the context of

the late nineteenth century, political exiles in Europe beheld the homeland

from afar and romanticized it, even as their political sentiments heightened

their enstrangement from Spain’s environment. Given European notions

about the tropics, the ilustrados’ idealization of the climate was a discursive

political strategy. In romancing the tropics as generative of life and

creativity, they were asserting a perspective that inverted the prejudiced

view of Spaniards and other Europeans, but remaing within the

environmental determinism. Despite contradictions in their appropriation of

tropicality, it became the basis for claiming cosmopolitan equality with the

colonial master, while it also helped crystallize a collective identity, of being

of the tropics, not as degenerate but as civilizable people capable of

producing genius.

Rizal’s return visit the homeland in 1887 reversed his thinking, a

homecoming process anticipated in the experience of Crisostomo Ibarra in

Noli me Tangere, who confronted the demon of comparisons on his return to

Manila. Rizal’s visit to the homeland marked a dividing line in his writings on

the climate, a product of wrestling with the heat while haunted by the

specter of comparisons. Henceforth, he would cease to idealize the

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climatological conditions of the Philippines and would veer closer to the

ilustrados’ opponents’ assertion about the inimical effects of a hot climate—

in an exposition marked by putative objectivity and scientificity.

Rizal’s reinvented discursive strategy enabled him to look beyond the

climate and pin the blame on colonial rule for native indolence, even if this

trait was seen as already predisposed by climate. Unlike natural disasters

that could be anticipated and for which some precautionary measures taken,

the educated native elite in both Spain and the homeland deemed colonial

rule as a worse calamity, a chronic disaster against which no possible state

of preparedness was possible. Anthropogenic, colonial misrule matched and

even exceeded the disasters spawned by meteorological and geophysical

phenoma. At this worse calamity the ilustrados trained their sights.

In the closing stage of his Rizal wrote two lengthy poems that meditated

on the climate as well as the landscape of his homeland. Penned in 1895

during his exile in Dapital in northern Zamboanga, where he was banished

from July 1892 until July 1896, the twenty-four-stanza poem with the

quiescent title:”Mi Retiro” (My Retreat) looked back to the years he spent

overseas until his second and final return to the Philippines, where he

thought he would be in his family’s embrace only for a “demon” (fiera) to

rapidly roar in and break into a violent “squall” (turbonada). His metaphor

for the colonial state’s act of deporting him so suddenly to the south is

consistent with the portrait of colonial misgovernance as a calamity. But in

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the end he thanked the hurricane that “whisked” him to the “bosom of his

native soil”, a pleasant refuge on the foot of a forested hill by the sea. On

the night that he awaited his execution, which would happen early on 30

December 1896, Rizal penned what is now alled “Mi Ultimo Adios”, the poem

through which he bid goodbye to his beloved country, a “realm caressed by

the sun”. Having lived amid nature in Dapitan, Rizal, on the eve of his death,

took us back to the nature in the Brindis.

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