Topic: Rizal and Popular Nationalism

Main Question:
What does it mean for Rizal to be textualized? How does
your view of Rizal compared with the “underside”?

- Ileto (1998). Rizal and the underside of Philippine history

Established Effect of the Spanish conquest:

- Filipinos were no longer passive recipients of

Spanish cultural stimuli.
- The responses varied from acceptance,
indifference and rejection.

Problems in Philippine historiography

- Failure to use indigenous source materials and

records bear stamp of Spanish colonial influence
Standard Plot of Nationalist Histories:

Glorious
The Fall Dark Age
Past

Birth of
the Recovery
Nation
 Standard Plot of Nationalist Histories

Evolutionist Premise

Problem is

- Assumption that before the impact of liberal

ideas in the second half of the 19th century,
Filipinos lived in a kind of static dream world

Pobres y ignorantes superstitious and manipulated masses

Ilustrados Liberal-educated elite, thinkers

The “Fall” in Ilustrado Consciousness

- colonization based on the biblical narrative

- it follows the idea that the natives are passive recipient

- consequence = organization of petty revolts

- The history of “failure” ends with the birth of the

secular progressive, enlightened republic in 1898.

* Rizal was implicated with the Christ – like figure

emerged before him
The Underside of Hizpanization

- the other side of Philippine history

- Could be perceived as the original or real story of the

Philippines, not from the perspective of the colonizers

- Stories of the natives/primitive practices, beliefs and

animistic religion/supertitious

- Strategies employed = divide and rule,

resettlement/reduccion, plaza complex

- History from the perspective of the natives was lost

The Textualization of Rizal

- Rizal’s ideas, intellectual feats, well-bred youth

- To textualize Rizal is to understand his views,

imagined modern society, his life from birth to death

- The death of Rizal is one of the most complex “texts”

- Likened to the death of Jesus Christ

- Rizal should be textualized and to textualize Rizal is to

understand him completely (or atleast read his writings
as a whole/interconnected and not part by part)
The Story of
King Bernardo Carpio

- An example of how
the underside perceive
Philippine History

- The origin of the story

is Spanish and ended
to be the myth of the
natives.
- Their King/Savior and
hope to free them from
bondage