Jose P. Rizal :: essays research papers

In full, JOS PROTACIO RIZAL MERCADO Y ALONSO REALONDA (born 19 June 1861, Calamba, Philippines- died 30 December 1896, Manila, Philippines), patriot, medical student and man of letters whose life and literary works were an inspiration to the Philippine nationalist movement.Rizal was the son of a prosperous landowner and sugar plantation owner of Chinese-Filipino descent on the island of Luzon. His mother, Teodora Alonso, one of the most highly educated women in the Philippines at that time, exerted a powerful influence on his intellectual development.He was educated at the Ateneo de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. In 1882, he went to meditate medicine and liberal arts at the University of Madrid. A brilliant student, he soon became the leader of the small community of Filipino students in Spain and connected himself to the iron out of Spanish rule in his home country, though he never advocated Philippine independence. The chief enemy of reform, in his eyes, was not Spain, which was loss through a profound revolution, but the Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican friars who held the country in political and economic paralysis.Rizal continued his medical studies in Paris and Heidelberg. In 1886, he published his first novel in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere, a hot exposure of the evils of the friars rule, comparable in its effect to Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin. A sequel, El Filibusterismo, 1891, constituted his reputation as the leading spokesman of the Philippine reform movement. He annotated an magnetic variation in 1890 on Antonio Morgas Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, which showed that the native people of the Philippines had a long narrative before the coming of the Spaniards.He became the leader of the Propaganda Movement, contributing numerous articles to its newspaper, La Solidaridad, published in Barcelona. Rizals political program, as expressed in the newspaper, include integration of the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), the replacement of the Spanish friars by the Filipino priests, freedom of assembly and expression, and equation of Filipinos and Spaniards before the law.Against the advice of his parents and friends, Rizal returned to the Philippines in 1892. He found a nonviolent reform society, La Liga Filipina, in Manila, and was deported to Dapitan, in northwest Mindanao, an island south of the Philippines. He remained in exile for four years, doing scientific research and founding a shallow and hospital.