People & Histories
1887 – 30 December 1896

José Rizal: the novels and the execution

A brilliant young doctor and writer publishes two novels exposing colonial abuses, is exiled, and is executed by firing squad in Manila, becoming the national hero.

  • The First Filipino: A Biography of José Rizal — León Ma. Guerrero, National Heroes Commission (1963)
  • The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895 — John N. Schumacher, Ateneo de Manila University Press (1997)
  • Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination — Benedict Anderson, Verso (2005)
  • History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech (1990)

Well established identityindependenceculturememory

José Rizal, born in Calamba, Laguna, in 1861 to a prosperous family of Chinese and Filipino descent, studied in Manila, Madrid and Germany, and became a doctor, poet, linguist and sculptor. In Berlin in 1887 he published Noli Me Tángere (“Touch Me Not”), a novel depicting the cruelty and hypocrisy of the friars and colonial officials. Its sequel, El Filibusterismo (1891), was darker, dedicated to the three executed Gomburza priests and imagining violent revolt.

  • The First Filipino: A Biography of José Rizal — León Ma. Guerrero, National Heroes Commission (1963)
  • Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination — Benedict Anderson, Verso (2005)

The novels were banned and Rizal was a marked man. Returning home, he founded La Liga Filipina, a reformist society, in 1892, and was deported days later to Dapitan in Mindanao, where he lived for four years as a doctor and teacher. Rizal was a reformer who did not support armed revolution; but when the Katipunan rose in 1896, the Spanish authorities tried him for rebellion and he was shot at Bagumbayan, now Rizal Park, on 30 December 1896. The night before, he wrote his farewell poem, “Mi último adiós”.

  • The First Filipino: A Biography of José Rizal — León Ma. Guerrero, National Heroes Commission (1963)
  • The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895 — John N. Schumacher, Ateneo de Manila University Press (1997)
  • History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech (1990)
His death made him the martyr of the nation that was being born. Some historians, notably Renato Constantino, have argued that Rizal was an “American-sponsored hero”, promoted after 1898 because he preached reform rather than revolution.
  • The Philippines: A Past Revisited — Renato Constantino, Tala Publishing (1975)

Why it matters today

The Philippines

Every Filipino student reads Rizal's novels; a 1956 law, passed over fierce objections from the Catholic hierarchy, made them compulsory. His face is on the one-peso coin, 30 December is Rizal Day, and his writings remain the touchstone for arguments about what it means to love one's country.