Rizal’s revolutionaries

Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Mariano Ponce. Photo: WikiCommons

Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
Tim Harper
Penguin: 2020
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I walked along those wide, clean streets, macadamized as in Manila, crowded with people, attracting the attention of everyone,’ wrote José Rizal, the so-called first Filipino, upon his arrival in Barcelona in the early 1880s.

Fresh off the boat, he took immense delight in the reassuring familiarity of the Spanish milieu; and as a polymath, who would soon learn to write eloquent letters in half a dozen languages, Rizal felt at home in all major cities, if not the whole world.

Nonetheless, he was shocked at the humiliating anonymity of his homeland, the Philippines islands, with people in Barcelona ‘call[ing] me Chinese, Japanese, American [i.e. Latin American], etc., but no one Filipino! Unfortunate country—no one knows a thing about you!’

As his contemporary and (undeclared) rival Isabelo de los Reyes would put it, the Philippines was largely seen as a ‘remote Spanish colony on which the light of civilization shines only tenuously’.

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