Reading RizalFilipinas and the World

San Diego Central Public Library

Ethnolinguistic diversity of the Philippines

Colonial society, 16th-18th centuries

Barangay, sultanate, tribe

Christian doctrina or mission

Spanish town or pueblo

Spanish aims in the PacificMilitary outpost protecting New Spain from rearguard attackTerritorial conquest and / or trade with China and East AsiaMissionary endeavor

Capitalism and the birth

of export agriculture

Caste in Mexico1. Mestizo: Spanish father and Indian mother 2. Castizo: Spanish father and Mestizo mother 3. Espomolo: Spanish mother and Castizo father 4. Mulatto: Spanish and black African 5. Moor: Spanish and Mulatto 6. Albino: Spanish father and Moor mother 7. Throwback: Spanish father and Albino mother 8. Wolf: Throwback father and Indian mother 9. Zambiago: Wolf father and Indian mother 10. Cambujo: Zambiago father and Indian mother 11. Alvarazado: Cambujo father and Mulatto mother 12. Borquino: Alvarazado father and Mulatto mother 13. Coyote: Borquino father and Mulatto mother 14. Chamizo: Coyote father and Mulatto mother 15. Coyote-Mestizo: Cahmizo father and Mestizo mother 16. Ahi Tan Estas: Coyote-Mestizo father and Mulatto mother

The Age of Empire reflected the ideology that nation-states were in global competition with one another for the world’s finite natural and

human resources, and that capitalism was to be the dominant international mode of production.

Noli me tangere – “touch me not”

Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold / touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father; but go to my brothers, and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” John 20:17

Noli me tangere in Rizal’s own words

“It is the first impartial and bold book on the life of the Tagalogs. The Filipinos will find in it the history of the last ten years (1877-1887)…. Here I answer all the false concepts which have been formed against us and all the insults which have been intended to belittle us.”

Fathers and Sons“I ask you first, is there among you any one who has not loved his father, who has not loved his father’s memory; any one born in shame and abasement? See, hear this silence! Priest of a God of peace, thy mouth full of sanctity and religion, thy heart of corruption! Thou canst not know what it is to be a father; thou shouldst have thought of thy own! See, in all this crowd that you scorn there is not one like you! You are judged!”

“Away from us, and listen, priests, believing yourselves different from other men, giving yourselves other rights! My father was an honorable man. Ask the country which venerates his memory…. “You who are here, priests, magistrates, have you seen your old father give himself for you, part from you for your good, die of grief in a prison, looking for your embrace, looking for consolation from any one who would bring it, sick, alone; while you in a foreign land? Then have you heard his name dishonored, found his tomb empty when you went there to pray? No? You are silent; then you condemn him!”

Simoun, destroyer“Yes, I am the one who came thirteen years ago, ill and heartbroken, to render my homage to a great and noble soul, who wished to die for me. Victim of a vicious system… Today I have returned to destroy the system, precipitate its corruption, push it to the abyss to which it runs insensate, even if I have to spill torrents of blood and tears” (El filibusterismo, 20).

From the father’s honor to the laws of nature

“[we] will put to the sword not only the counter-revolutionists but also all the males who refuse to follow us to arms!… It is necessary to renew the race. Cowardly fathers breed only slavish sons…. Away then with effeminate scruples Let us follow the eternal laws, assist them, and then the earth is that much more fecund, the more it is fertilized with blood!” (El filibusterismo, 32).

The world will applaud as it always does, agreeing with the strongest and most violent…. Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions of natives in America…. Look at North America with its egoistic liberty, its Lynch law, its political deceptions…. Europe applauded when powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds when England destroys primitive races in the Pacific in order to replace them with its own émigrés. -- Simoun / Crisóstomo Ibarra, in El filibusterismo

On Europe’s response to revolutionary violence

Padre Florentino’s response

“You fomented social decay without sowing a single idea…. An immoral government assumes a demoralized people, an administration without conscience, rapacious and servile citizens in the towns; bandits and brigands in the mountains! Like master, like slave; like government, like country” (37).