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, physician and valet of letters whose life and literary works were an inspiration to the Philippine chauvinistic movement.Rizal was the son of a prosperous landowner and sugar planter of Chinese-Filipino line of descent on the island of Luzon. His mother, Teodora Alonso, one of the most highly better 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 study medical specialty and liberal arts at the University of Madrid. A brilliant student, he in brief became the leader of the small community of Filipino students in Spain and committed himself to the sort out of Spanish rule in his home country, though he neer advocated Philippine independence. The chief enemy of reform, in his eyes, was not Spain, which was going by dint of a profound revolution, but the Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican friars who held the country in semipolitical and economic paralysis.Rizal continued his medical studies in Paris and Heidelberg. In 1886, he promulgated his first novel in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere, a passionate moving-picture show of the evils of the friars rule, comparable in its effect to Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin. A sequel, El Filibusterismo, 1891, established his news report as the leading spokesman of the Philippine reform movement. He annotated an edition in 1890 on Antonio Morgas Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, which showed that the native people of the Philippines had a long history to begin with 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, included consolidation of the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), the switching of the Spanish friars by the Filipino priests, freedom of assembly and expression, and equality of Filipinos and Spaniards forwards 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 dislodge for four years, doing scientific research and founding a school and hospital.