Jose Rizal: Short Biography of the Filipino Hero
Editor’s note: This “Jose Rizal Biography” talks about basic facts about him, who is Jose Rizal (summary), why is he a hero, and what he did for our country. A known textbook author in Rizal discusses these topics for us here. So join us, as we study the controversial life of our hero.
THE MAN TIED ELBOW TO ELBOW refused the traditional blindfold and even requested to face the firing squad that would seal his fate on that day.
Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was born on June 19, 1861, approximately 35 years before that fateful day. The seventh of the eleven children born to a relatively well-off family in a Dominican-owned tenant land in Calamba, Laguna, Jose Rizal lived and died during the Spanish colonial era in the Philippines.
Jose Rizal Biography: His parents
Jose’s father, Francisco Mercado Rizal, was a productive farmer from Binan, Laguna, while his mother, Teodora Alonzo y Quintos, was an educated and highly cultured woman from Sta. Cruz, Manila. (Read: Jose Rizal Family Tree: The Ancestry of the Hero)
Rizal as a child prodigy
In his early childhood, Jose had mastered the alphabet and learned to write and read. His early readings included the Spanish version of the Vulgate Bible. At young age, he already showed inclinations to arts.
He amazed his family by his pencil drawings, sketches, and moldings of clay. Later in his childhood, he showed special talent in painting and sculpture, wrote a Tagalog play which was presented at a Calamba fiesta, and penned a short play in Spanish which was presented in school.
Jose as a student
At age eleven, Rizal attended the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and obtained at age 16 his Bachelor of Arts degree with an average of “excellent”. In the same year (1877), he took Philosophy and Letters at the University of Santo Tomas, while at the same time enrolled in a course in land surveying at the Ateneo.
He finished his surveyor’s training in 1877, passed the licensing exam in May 1878, though the license was granted to him only in 1881 when he reached the age of majority. He enrolled in medicine at the University of Santo Tomas in 1878. Sensing however that the Filipino students were being discriminated by the Dominican professors, he stopped his studies at UST without finishing his course.
Rizal as a student abroad
On May 3, 1882, he went to Spain and enrolled at the Universidad Central de Madrid. In June of 1884, he received the degree of Licentiate in Medicine at the age of 23. A year later, he completed his course in Philosophy and Letters with the grade of “excellent.”
Wanting to cure his mother’s advancing blindness, Rizal went to Paris, Heidelberg, and Berlin to get further knowledge and training in ophthalmology. In Heidelberg, he completed his eye specialization.
‘Jose Rizal contributions’
Being well-traveled, Rizal was said to have learned 22 languages. He wrote extraordinary poems, contributed nationalistic essays to publications, religiously kept his diary, and corresponded to his friends and relatives.
In March 1887, he published in Berlin his first controversial novel, the Noli Me Tangere, which revealed the tyranny and arrogance of the Spanish clergy and officials in the Philippines. To bring to light that the Filipinos had an impressive civilization even long before the Spanish colonization, he annotated and reprinted in Paris Morga’s Successos De Las Islas Filipinas. On September 18, 1891, Rizal’s more militant novel, El Filibusterismo was printed in Ghent.
Rizal as a leader and a patriot
As leader of patriotic Filipinos, he became one of the leaders of the literary and cultural organization Propaganda Movement, the patriotic society Asociacion La Solidaridad (Solidaridad Association), the temporary social society Kidlat Club, the society of Filipino patriots in Paris Indio Bravo, the mysterious Redencion de los Malayos (Redemption of the Malays).
He founded the La Liga Filipina, a civic organization that subsequently gave birth to the Katipunan. In various ways, Rizal asked for radical reforms in the Spanish colonial system and clerical powers in the Philippines and advocated equal rights before the law for Filipinos.
Jose’s First Homecoming
From Europe, Rizal went home in August 1887. He practiced medicine in Calamba and restored his mother’s eyesight. But the friars he had enraged through his novel and involvement in the Calamba agrarian trouble pressured the governor general to ‘advise’ Rizal to leave the country.
In February 1888, Rizal thus left the country again. He sailed first to other Asian countries and then to various places in the West.
Rizal’s Second Homecoming and exile to Dapitan
When Rizal returned to the Philippines in 1892, he was imprisoned in Fort Santiago from July 6 to July 15 on a trump-up charge that anti-priest leaflets were found in the pillow cases of his sister Lucia who arrived with him from Hong Kong.
He was then exiled to Dapitan, an island in Mindanao. While an exile, he engaged in agriculture, fishing, and commerce while operating a hospital and maintaining a school for boys. Moreover, he did scientific researches, collected specimens of rare species, corresponded with scholars abroad, and led construction of water dam and a relief map of Mindanao.
Rizal fell in love with Josephine Bracken, a woman from Hong Kong who brought her stepfather to Dapitan for an eye operation. Josephine became Rizal’s ‘common-law wife’. The couple had a child who was born prematurely. The baby boy named Francísco Rizal y Bracken died a few hours after birth. (Read: What happened to Josephine Bracken When Jose Rizal Died?)
Jose Rizal Biography: His love life
An important and interesting part of “Jose Rizal Biography” is his colorful love life. Prior to his relationship with Josephine Bracken, Jose Rizal had become romantically involved with other women. (Related: Jose Rizal Girlfriends)
The most notable of Rizal’s “girlfriends” are Segunda Katigbak, his first love, and Leonor Rivera, his so called true love. (Read: Leonor Rivera: Why Rizal did not end up marrying his true love and Segunda Katigbak and Jose Rizal: Their secret strange last meeting)
Implication to Rebellion
In 1896, Rizal received a permission from the Governor General to become a volunteer military physician in the revolution in Cuba, which was at the time also raged by yellow fever.
But the ‘Katipunan’ started the Philippine Revolution in August 1896. The powerful people whose animosity Rizal had provoked took the opportunity to implicate him to the rebellion. After a trial in a kangaroo court, he was convicted of rebellion and sentenced to death by firing squad at Bagumbayan Field (now Luneta).
Jose Rizal’s death
Dressed in a black coat and trousers and tied elbow to elbow, Rizal refused to kneel and declined the traditional blindfold. Placid and a bit pale, he even requested to face the firing squad, maintaining that he was not a traitor to his country and to Spain. (Read: Jose Rizal’s Death (The Last Hours of the Filipino Hero))
After some sweet-talk, Rizal agreed to turn his back but requested that he be shot in the small of the back, for that would twist his body and cause him to fall face upward.
The night before his execution, Rizal perhaps had a mental flash backs of the meaningful events in his 35-year existence we outlined here in “Jose Rizal Biography”. But more than anyone, he himself had known for long that his execution would certainly come to pass—that not even an Andres Bonifacio nor Emilio Aguinaldo could have saved him from the executioners’ Remingtons and Mausers.
Facing the sky, the man died in that serene morning of December 30, 1896. But since then, Jose Rizal has lived perpetually in the hearts and minds of true Filipinos. (Continue reading: Memoirs of a Student in Manila by P. Jacinto (a Pen Name of José Rizal))
Copyright © 2014-present by Jensen DG. Mañebog
Jensen DG. Mañebog, the contributor, is an author of textbooks and professorial lecturer emeritus in the graduate school of a state university in Metro Manila. His unique e-books on Rizal (available online) comprehensively tackle, among others, the respective life of Rizal’s parents, siblings, co-heroes, and girlfriends. (e-mail: [email protected])
Read Also:
The Interesting Tales of the Jose Rizal Family by Jensen DG. Mañebog
Questions for Discussion:
What are the basic facts about Rizal? Who is Jose Rizal (summary)? Why is Jose Rizal a hero? What Rizal did for our country (Philippines)?