Proceedings of The National Conference

On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2016

University of North Carolina Asheville
Asheville, North Carolina
April 7-9, 2016

Revolution, Redemption, and Romance: Reading Constructions of Filipino

Spanish American Identities and Politics of Knowledge in Rizal’s Noli me
Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside Filipino American Fiction

Steven Beardsley
English and Modern Languages Departments
Hamline University
1536 Hewitt Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55104 USA

Faculty Advisors: Veena Deo and María Jesús Leal

Abstract

This project analyzes the literary works and role of Filipino nationalist José Rizal before, during, and after the Spanish
American War of 1898. Rizal’s social activism and writing sparked a revolution against the Friarocracy in the
Philippines. He has also influenced Filipino American writers who reference Rizal’s construction of the Filipino
woman in Christianity and Filipinos’ fighting against oppression. Thus, the primary focus of this project is to look at
Rizal’s works through an interstitial lens showing how Filipino Spanish identity was created then and how it has
informed contemporary ideas about intersecting social identities. The project does this by analyzing how historical
figures such as Spaniards Unamuno and W.E. Retana have constructed Rizal as the quintessential Filipino Spaniard
of the Philippines. The project also analyzes Rizal’s writing such as his two novels: Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo. This analysis is supported through a synthesis of reading and writing on secondary research and theory
on his biographies, himself, his works, and on contemporary Filipino American literature through an interstitial lens.
In conclusion, reading Rizal shows that the Philippines is a country whose cultural history and literature has been
defined alongside Spanish and United States’ colonialism. Reading Rizal also deconstructs stereotypes about gender,
sexuality, race, and other social identities related to Filipino American identity.

Keywords: Filipino Spanish American Identities, José Rizal, Friarocracy

1. Introduction: José Rizal As The Politicized Signifier Of The Filipino Nation

José Rizal was born José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso in Calamba, Philippines, in the Laguna province, in 1861
and executed by Spain in 1896. He was the son of two prosperous Filipino parents, though like many, he was mixed
with Chinese and native heritage. At an early age he was educated at some of the best schools in Manila, including
the University of Santo Tomás and the prestigious Ateneo de Manila University. He also studied abroad in Europe for
nearly seven years at the Central University of Madrid, where he completed his degrees in medicine and in philosophy
of letters by the age of 24. Rizal was considered a polyglot, mastering up to 22 different languages. He also became
an ophthalmologist and performed cataract surgery on his mother. Hailed as a genius at a young age and throughout
his life, Rizal would also become an activist while in Spain, writing against the Philippine Friarocracy and Spain’s
colonial enterprise in the Philippines. His activism included his two major novels that critique Spanish colonial rule:
Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo. In addition to these novels, Rizal published articles in La
Solidaridad, a newspaper based in Madrid, Spain, that advocated for Filipino representation in the Spanish Cortes,
Spanish legislature of the time, with Puerto Rico and Cuba1. Rizal was executed for his writings by firing squad and
considered a martyr and example for what would happen to Filipinos who wrote anti-colonial writings against the
Spanish government.
 Rizal did not advocate for revolution, yet scholarship and biographies at the time and after Rizal’s death have argued
that he was chosen as a Filipino hero and nationalist for his martyrdom. Instead, Rizal advocated for Filipino
representation, education, and reform as part of The Propaganda Movement that preceded the Revolutionary
movement of the 1890s. For instance, Maria Luisa T. Reyes in her essay on “The Role of Literature in Filipino
Resistance to Spanish Colonialism” says:

The Propaganda Movement was reformist in nature. The intelligentsia, led by Rizal, advocated changes in
colonial policy that would bring Spain and her colony into closer harmony. When that failed, the struggle
turned to the Revolutionary Movement of the 1890s, led by the Katipunan (the secret society that toppled
Spanish rule), founded by Bonifacio and later led by Emilio Aguinaldo2.

Rizal’s role in the eventual revolution of the Philippines in1896 lay in his power to illustrate the oppressive nature of
the Friarocracy through his two novels and other writing. His novels and his death would influence leaders, such as
Bonifacio, who led the independence movement against the Spanish colonial government using Rizal’s name as the
president and leader of the movement3. Despite the acts of other writers and political leaders of the time, José Rizal
has been appropriated as the signifier of the Filipino nation; biographies, scholarship, and his works are used to
construct and reconstruct him as a heroic and iconic figure of the Filipino nation often through the politicized
nationalizing projects of his biographers. For instance, Rizal’s creation as a nationalist is also prefigured before,
during, and after his death through his rivalry with the Spanish historian W.E. Retana, whose views on Rizal before
and after his death changed dramatically.
The deconstructing, constructing, and reconstructing of Rizal as a symbol of the Philippines in absolutist and
essential terms ironically causes Filipino identity to be rendered unstable. As Maria Theresa Valenzuela notes in her
essay “Constructing National Heroes: Postcolonial Philippines and Cuban Biographies of José Rizal and José Martí,”
scholars have attempted to read Rizal as an important national hero, often in efforts to justify Spanish or American
colonialism or to promote a postcolonial Filipino nationhood4. At the same time, these different acts of reading Rizal
render him, the Philippines, and Filipino identities as subjects that refuse to be rigidly defined as they cannot be
separated from Spanish and American colonialisms alone. In other words, the instability of Rizal’s appropriation as a
signifier also causes his signification of the Filipino nation and the Philippines as unstable.
This essay analyzes critical scholarship on Rizal, his life, and his works within the context of the War of 1898.
Rizal’s role as a heroic signifier of the Filipino nation has important consequences for the Philippines, Spain, and the
United States. Moreover, rather than seeing Rizal as an essentialized Filipino hero, he should be seen as representing
an interstitial subjectivity combining American, Spanish, and Filipino cultural influences of a nationhood. From this
lens, the characters and overall idea of nationalism that Rizal constructs in his works can be deconstructed from a
contemporary lens that understands the need for a transcultural individual that exists while keeping their race, gender,
sexuality, and other social identities influx and predetermined at the same time. Also, Filipino American writers have
written against constructions that Rizal perpetuates in his writing such as the construction of the subaltern or chaste
Filipino women. The goal of this essay is to see how Rizal’s influence has impacted Filipino subjectivities in terms of
nationalizing projects that connect the Philippines, Spain, the United States, and even Latin America.

1.1 Retana’s and Unamuno’s Rizal as the quintessential Filipino Spaniard

The appropriation of José Rizal played a significant role during the time period of the War of 1898. Before the
revolution he wrote texts that developed the idea of a Filipino prehistory before the occupation of Spain in 1521. These
writings include his additions to Historical Events of the Philippine Islands, by Dr. Antonio De Morga, in 1889
archived in a Historical Institute in Manila and his own essay “The Indolence of the Filipino.” In these texts Rizal
became an important historical authority on Filipino prehistory. From a nationalist viewpoint, Rizal sought to localize
a pre-colonial past that glorified the Philippines prior to Spanish arrival and even argued that the Philippines began its
decadence, in terms of educational stagnation and labor, directly after Spanish rule. For instance, in the preface to
Morga’s writing compendium, Rizal addresses Filipinos by stating the need to invoke the words of the Spaniard Morga
to better illustrate to them Rizal’s goal of awakening their “consciousness of our past, already effaced from your
memory, and to rectify what has been falsified and slandered”5.
The purpose of Rizal’s annotations in the text is to better illustrate this past in order to understand the then current
socio-political climate of colonial rule. At the same time, Rizal’s projection of a pre-colonial past also included
contemporaneous anticolonial rhetoric. For instance, in his essay “The Indolence of the Filipino,” Rizal deconstructs
the stereotype of the Filipino as being indolent and argues that their indolence actually stemmed from the arrival of

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the Spaniards and Christianity and is maintained through Christian rules and institutions. Moreover, Rizal argues
emphatically that the misfortune of the Filipino lies in how he/she is convinced by the government and the church that

to get happiness it is necessary for him to lay aside his dignity as a rational creature, to attend mass, to believe
what is told him, to pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to pay; to work, to suffer and be silent,
without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to know or even to understand Spanish, without separating
himself from his carabao, as the priests shamelessly say, without protesting against any injustice, against any
arbitrary action, against an assault, against an insult, that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit: a creature with
arms and a purse full of gold [ . . . ] there’s the ideal native!6

In other words, Rizal reveals the exploitative nature of the friars and how they made Filipinos complacent through
Catholicism. Rizal argues, then, that the friars and the government did not give Filipinos the education they needed to
advocate for themselves. He sees the government as reducing the Filipino to an animal made of gold out of which the
priests and government can constantly get money. He also illustrates how contact between the people of the Philippines
and the colonial Spaniard mission constructed an idealized “indigenous” identity. This is an idealized identity for the
Spanish friar and government officials because they benefited from Filipinos acting complacent and they were able to
live idealized lives in the Philippines by exploiting the indigenous population. This is also demonstrated by the label
“Filipino” as a consequence of this contact and how Spain constructed and created the country’s name in honor of the
Spanish King Philip II7. In this sense, Rizal’s polemical argument is not only anticolonial but also criticizes an
essentialized native Filipino identity constructed by colonial powers and created by the colonial regime to exploit
indigenous peoples.
It is clear that Rizal’s writings before the war of 1898 were anticolonial and argued for Filipino rights in the Spanish
Cortes or Spanish legislature. Moreover, his writings were especially incendiary to his Spanish contemporary W.E.
Retana, who was a historical authority of Spain at the time. According to Christopher Schmidt-Nowara in his book
The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century, while Rizal aimed
to construct a pre-colonial history of the Philippines, Retana countered by saying that “[t]he Philippines . . . have no
history. . . . [T]he History of the Philippines is nothing more than a chapter of the History of Spain”8. While Rizal was
still alive, Retana would argue that Philippine historicity was only an extension of Spanish historicity and that the
colony owed much of its success to the mother country. Schmidt-Nowara argues that Retana’s opinion of Rizal would
adapt and change throughout this time period as Spain sought to regain control after the loss of its colonies to the U.S.
He would claim that individuals like Rizal from Spain’s lost colonies, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines,
benefited from Spanish colonialism because they became educated members of Spanish civilization. For instance,
Schmidt-Nowara writes that along with Retana, another important Spanish writer of the time, Miguel de Unamuno:

represented the history and culture of the Philippines as dependent on Spain; the peoples of the Philippines
were another example of primitives elevated by their inclusion in Spanish civilization. Rizal—like Maceo in
Cuba—in his very opposition to Spanish rule became the living, and dying, proof of its excellence9.

Retana and Unamuno appropriated Rizal’s ability to critique and oppose Spanish rule to show how it was emblematic
of Spanish civilization’s ability to elevate and cultivate the intellect of the Filipino. Yet Rizal’s status as an ilustrado,
or Filipino from an upper-middle class family, allowed him to study abroad in Spain and other parts of Europe,
becoming educated and influenced by European liberalism, nationalism, and modern developments in medicine and
science. Schmidt-Nowara suggests that Retana used this element of Rizal’s history and his opposition to the revolution
in the Philippines to justify the idea that Spanish civilization could cultivate the intellect of a Filipino such as Rizal.
This leads to the dangerous conclusion that writers after Retana would emphasize how Rizal’s intellectual
development and ideas would make him into an essentialized model of Spanish education for a brown race of Filipinos.
Before discussing the historical implications of how Retana and Unamuno read Rizal, Schmidt-Nowara tries to
explain Retana’s near about face after Rizal’s martyrdom. For instance, while Rizal was alive and criticizing the rule
of the friars, Retana came to their defense: in the “1890s, he founded the reactionary periodical La Política de España
en Filipinas to counter La Solidaridad, published numerous studies of the Philippine, several of them disparaging
accounts of popular culture and religion”10. Retana also sought to defend the Spanish colonial enterprise by using
accepted contemporary scientific thought that constructed inherent racial hierarchies to bolster his arguments. For
instance, Retana says of the overall intelligence of the Filipino, “Why should it cause offense that I conceive of the
Malay race as inferior to the European race? This is a purely scientific opinion that I do not sustain by myself but in
agreement with many learned anthropologists”11. Retana used popular pseudo-scientific thought, now debunked as
thoroughly racist, emphasize European and Spanish superiority over the colonized Filipinos. Rizal also became

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educated and wrote extensively in the Spanish language against this racialization, but Retana saw Rizal as a threat to
his historical authority in Spain. In other words, he founded his own periodical and supported his arguments through
reasoning of the time to not only counter Rizal and monopolize and contain Filipino history but to also maintain his
authority as a historian of Spain.
Additionally, Retana countered Rizal’s claims that the Philippines had regressed after Spanish colonialism by saying
Spanish civilization had provided the Philippines with education, economic development, and religion: “the Spaniards
have done more than amass riches; they have educated millions of indios. . .They are, like brothers of ours of lesser
age, imitations of everything Spanish”12 . Retana claims here that Filipinos lacked these structural institutions prior to
Spanish rule and that they were better for being able to imitate Spanish customs and culture. This mimicry, however,
is dismantled in Rizal’s two novels as Filipino women try to adopt Spanish social mores and codes of behavior and
become demonized in the process. Moreover, Filipino subjectivity still retained indigenous cultural aspects prior to
and after Spanish colonialism, making Filipino subjectivity more complex and not as easily categorized through a
Spanish lens from the start of contact. Despite Retana’s counterarguments and rivalry with Rizal, he changed his
tactics after Rizal’s death and after Spain lost the Philippines and other colonies to the United States.
Though Schmidt-Nowara argues that Retana attempted to become the sole authority of Spanish and Filipino history
through his rivalry with Rizal, his change to Rizal’s advocate after Rizal’s death is not without its own political agenda.
For instance, Schmidt-Nowara says that Retana would shift his opinion of friar rule by taking Rizal’s position and
blaming the friars for friction between the Philippines and Spain13. In other words, Retana revised his earlier defense
of friar rule in order to assert the idea that Rizal was right all along. This assertion is not without significance, as
Schmidt-Nowara argues:

Retana’s Rizal was a monument to the achievements of Spanish colonization, the dying proof of Spain’s
efforts to recreate itself overseas. In other words, as in his pre-1898 writings, Retana continued, in more
subtle and conciliatory terms, to insist that Philippine history was an extension of Spanish history14.

Schmidt-Nowara then argues that instead of directly criticizing Rizal and asserting that Filipino history is merely an
extension of Spanish history, Retana used Rizal’s achievements and works as an example of the positive effects
Spanish colonialism can have on the Filipino. He argued that the Spanish colonial enterprise created a Rizal and that
all Filipinos should follow Rizal’s example despite the fact that Rizal is not representative of the Filipino illiterate,
women, subaltern, or many others. Additionally, Schmidt-Nowara argues that Retana practiced what was called
“hispanismo, a political and intellectual movement in Spain that emphasized the essential cultural identity between
Spain and its former colonies”15. In this sense, Schmidt-Nowara notes how other historians have interpreted Retana’s
hispanismo as being reactionary to the events of 1898 during the decline of Spain’s colonial empire. Moreover,
Schmidt-Nowara disagrees with how other historians have interpreted hispanismo by saying, “Instead of seeing it as
originating in response to the crisis of 1898 after decades of ignoring the Americas, I see it as the continuation of
efforts associated with the reconsolidation of empire over the course of the nineteenth century”16. This interpretation
reveals that Spanish national identity was also being constructed in terms of the colonized Philippines as well as
through the colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Spanish national identity and subjectivity in part also relied on colonies
for its self-identity, particularly the Philippines. The Philippine other promoted unity in the mother country because it
allowed Spain to see itself in control of its colonies. If the Philippines could be controlled and unified abroad, then it
offered the possibility for Spain to remain unified at home.

1.2 Austin Craig’s and Leon Maria Guerrero’s Rizal as an Anglo-Saxon trained scholar and first
Filipino
While Spaniards such as Retana and Unamuno constructed Rizal as a quintessential example of the effects of Spanish
civilization on the Filipino, American biographer and Philippine university scholar Austin Craig who wrote in 1909
The Story of José Rizal: The Greatest Man of the Brown Race and Filipino ambassador and historian Leon Maria
Guerrero who wrote The First Filipino: A Biography of José Rizal would have similar yet different political agendas
for their respective constructions. Maria Theresa Valenzuela argues in her essay “Constructing National Heroes:
Postcolonial Philippine and Cuban Biographies of José Rizal and José Martí” that Austin Craig’s Los errores de
Retana is a critique of Retana’s Vida y escritos. Valenzuela argues that the
discourse between Errores and Vida y escritos is symptomatic of the regime change going on in the Philippines from
Spain to the United States. Craig crafts Rizal through an American lens rather than a Spanish one, replacing the Rizal
of Retana with one more palatable for a Western (US) audience17.

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 Austin Craig’s critique of the historical inaccuracies of Retana’s account reveals the political need to represent Rizal
as someone who was educated through western ideology but not necessarily through Spanish civilization. In this sense,
Craig’s biography reconstructs Rizal as someone who owes his success more to European, particularly Anglo-Saxon,
training as opposed to Spanish language and culture. Valenzuela further supports this argument by saying that “Craig
moved to the Philippines at the beginning of the US colonial period to pursue a career in Philippine universities [ . . .
] The purpose of Craig’s scholarship was to build upon the growing body of work on the Filipino martyr and gear it
toward an Anglo-Saxon consciousness”18. Craig’s political agenda is elucidated by his desire to implement the
American school system in the Philippines to replace the existing Spanish school system. Additionally, this highlights
Craig’s challenge to Retana’s historical authority, noting how American colonialism had superseded that of Spanish
empire. Craig promoted a historical account of Rizal that was emblematic of the United States’ imperialist success in
the Pacific. Yet Craig’s works themselves express a condescending attitude to Rizal, such as the title of his other work
on Rizal, The Story of José Rizal: The Greatest Man of the Brown Race. Valenzuela argues that the text in “itself is
an anthropological nod to the exotic, a kind of guide to the ‘brown race’ as the modifier ‘brown’ in the title also
categorically separates Rizal into a ‘not like us whites’ category”19. While Retana argued that Filipino history existed
as Spanish history, Craig creates a clearer binary opposition between Filipinos of the “brown race” that are seen as
racially inferior to “whites,” in this case, the American colonizers. Craig reconstructs Rizal as a “model” of Filipinos,
an individual that all other Filipinos should aspire to as their heroic, nationalized signifier.
This version of Rizal echoes a similar articulation of the Asian American community in the United States both in the
past and currently as the “model minority.” Valenzuela takes up the “model minority” mythology through the way
Craig illustrates Rizal’s martyrdom. She writes that after the memorial page in Craig’s biography a quotation by United
States President William Howard Taft says, “The study of the life and character of Dr. Rizal cannot but be beneficial
to those desirous of imitating him”20. While Valenzuela argues that this is a paternalistic desire for other Filipinos to
become like Rizal, it also reinforces a historical mythos dependent on the “American Dream.” Rizal not only becomes
an ideal “Filipino” subjugated by U.S. imperialism; rather, he becomes the representation of hard work, intelligence,
and humility that U.S. imperialism desired of not only the Filipinos but other Asian American communities that were
and continue to be marginalized in the United States. Taft’s quote and Craig’s rendering of Rizal imply that Filipinos
and other Asian Americans would benefit from following Rizal’s example instead of fulfilling their potential as their
own separate selves. At the same time, this rhetoric, instead of reinforcing U.S. imperialism, undermines it and reveals
the slippages present in the inability of Filipino women, the subaltern, and other Asian American communities to
imitate an already unstable representation of the figure of the Filipino national/native since he continues to be
(re)appropriated for conflicting political interests.
While Valenzuela illustrates Rizal’s reconstruction to fit the political aims of Spanish and American colonialism
and imperialism, she also illustrates the idea of the “secret-self” used in biographical studies. Valenzuela quotes from
Leon Edel that:

the biographer’s job is to infer what lies out of sight below, the ‘secret myth’ that’s causing that particular
and individual pattern of bumps and lumps that’s presented to the world. Simply put, the biographer searches
for internal motivation21.

This “secret-self” Valenzuela then identifies for Craig is Rizal’s “Anglo-Saxon” training that makes him the “Greatest
Man of the Brown Race.” Put simply, this “secret-self” is constructed through the lens of the biography and this
particular case does not acknowledge Rizal’s work as an individual born in the Philippines and who still retains his
own transcultural identity in being not only in the Philippines but traveling Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. as
well. That is, his “Anglo-Saxon” training is not what drives Rizal’s writings and activism against Spain, and is instead,
what Craig uses to justify American imperialism in cultivating the intellect of a “brown race.”
The next significant biography, The First Filipino: A biography of José Rizal (1965), on Rizal politicizes Rizal
further and restructures him as a postcolonial representation of Filipino Nationalism. Though Valenzuela mentions
the creation of other biographies on Rizal by other Filipinos, she argues that Leon Maria Guerrero’s scholarship
radiates with credibility on the part of the author as a historian of the Philippines and how Guerrero, by naming Rizal
The First “makes the birth of a ‘Filipino’ identity concomitant with the birth of the Philippine nation”22. Guerrero’s
goal, unlike that of the Spaniards Retana and Unamuno and American Craig, is to maintain and essentialize a Filipino
nation and culture. As a Filipino ambassador, Valenzuela argues that “if Craig can be said to have made his career on
the back of Rizal, Guerrero’s career was devoted to Philippine national formation”23. If anything, Rizal returns as the
signifier of Philippine nationhood, but this time he is devoid of foreign influences in a nationalizing project to solidify
Filipino nationalism.

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2. Conclusion
Valenzuela notes that “[a]lthough Rizal himself did not acknowledge and participate in the Katipunan, the chief
revolutionary group opposing Spain in the Philippines, Guerrero describes Rizal himself as ‘chosen’ because the
Katipunan adopted ‘Rizal’ as a code word”24. Even today, Rizal’s importance as a political signifier is representative
of the “Rizal Law,” a law in the Philippines that requires the study of him and his two seminal works in the classrooms
of secondary and postsecondary institutions. Rizal also has a park named after him, and “Rizal Day” is celebrated in
the Philippines on December 30. Recently, the small population of Filipinos in California have also celebrated “Rizal
Day”25. In other words, though Guerrero and other Filipino scholars claim that Filipinos chose him to be their national
hero, his importance as the Philippine national hero and Philippine Spanish literature are rarely studied by Spain and
the United States in Spanish, English, or Modern Languages Departments. According to Adam Lifshey in “The
Literary Alterities of Philippine Nationalism in Jose Rizal’s El Filibusterismo,” the reason for this lies in how
Hispanists have been divided into two categories of peninsularists and Latin Americanists and how this binarism leads
to a lack of awareness of other literature such as African literature in Spanish26. Moreover, Lifshey points to not only
the necessity of examining this group of literature rarely studied outside of the Philippines, but the globalized
importance of Rizal and his works on Filipino, Spanish, and American subjectivity and identity. Lifshey, referring to
how the Philippines has been constructed and developed after Spanish and American colonialism asks, “What does it
mean for one of the most globalized nations in the world, both historically and currently, to be consistently
marginalized in the most prominent academic debates on globalization?”27. Therein lies one of the main purposes of
this study, to shed light on the importance of Rizal scholarship on contemporary debates around transcultural identity
as well as promoting the understanding of a Filipino, Spanish American subjectivity. Rizal is of geopolitical
importance as a historical writer located at many sites of transcultural exchange and construction. While biographers
and historians have appropriated Rizal, his two seminal novels critique this appropriation of a particular Filipino to
signify an idealized Filipino national and nation. Reading his writings alongside contemporary Filipino American
literature offers a way of “un-oneing” these conflicting (re)appropriations of Rizal in order to see Filipino how Filipino
Spanish American literature should be read within a transcultural and interstitial context.

3. References
1. Álvarez-Tardío, Beatriz. "María Clara y La Comunidad Imaginada En Noli Me Tangere De José Rizal." CIEHL:
Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura 19 (2013): 110, MLA International Bibliography
(1521-8007).
2. Reyes, Maria, Luisa T. "The Role of Literature in Filipino Resistance to Spanish Colonialism." A Historical
Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires. Prem Poddar and Rajeev Patke.
Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Credo Reference: 2,
http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/edinburghpcl/the_role_of_literature_in_filipino_resistance_to_spanis
h_colonialism/0.
3. Rafael, Vicente L. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish
Philippines. (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), quoted in Lifshey, Adam. "The Literary Alterities of Philippine Nationalism
in José Rizal's El Filibusterismo." PMLA 123.5 (2008): 1437, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501945.
4. Valenzuela, Maria Theresa. "Constructing National Heroes: Postcolonial Philippine and Cuban Biographies of
José Rizal and José Martí." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 37.3 (2014): 746, doi: 10.1353/bio.2014.0063.
5. Morga, Antonio de. Historical Events of the Phillipine Islands (Publications of the National Historical Institute).
(Manila: National Historical Institute, 1990), VII.
6. Rizal, José. “The Indolence of the Filipino.” Ed. Austin Craig. Trans. Charles E. Derbyshire. (United Kingdom:
Dodo Press, 2009), IV.
7. Ponce, Martin, Joseph. Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading. (New York: New
York UP, 2012), 11.
8. W.E. Retana. “Contra un documento . . . dos,” La Política de España en Filipinas (Madrid, 1891) quoted in
Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories. (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh, 2011), 164.
9. Ibid., 164.
10. Ibid., 175.
11. W.E. Retana, “A ‘El Día’,” La Política de España en Filipinas (Madrid, 1891), quoted in Ibid., 176.

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 12. W.E. Retana, “Indios,” in Martínez de Zúniga, Estadismo de las islas Filipinas, quoted in Ibid., 178.
13. Ibid., 186.
14. Ibid., 186.
15. Ibid., 191.
16. Ibid., 191.
17. Valenzuela, 751.
18. Ibid., 751.
19. Ibid., 752.
20. Ibid., 752.
21. Edel, Leon. Literary Biography: The Alexander Lectures 1955–56. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1957), quoted in
Ibid., 753.
22. Ibid., 753.
23. Ibid., 754.
24. Ibid., 755.
25. Angeles, Steve, “Rizal Day Becomes Official Holiday in California City,” Balitang America. ABS-CBN
International, 30 December, 2013, http://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/12/30/13/rizal-day-becomes-official-
holiday-california-city.
26. Lifshey, 1441.
27. Ibid., 1441.

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