Rizal’s Annotation

of Sucesos de las
Islas Filipinas
Historical
antecedents

• Secularization controversy was

no longer the principal issue in
the 1880s

• At the beginning of the 1890s

the assimilationist issue was
already being edged out by
the more fundamental issue of
independence
Shift in the Filipinos’ consciousness
Filipinos began to realize that they could have
equal access to jobs monopolized by the
Peninsulars in the Church, the military, and the
bureaucracy only through a drastic change in the
Philippines’ colonial status itself.
Shift in the colonial ideology

Ingratitude of the
The myth of the
Filipinos to Mother
lazy native
Spain
The central thesis of the Filipino camp
• 300 years of colonization was 300 years of backwardness!

• The colony had not progressed because the ignorant and

immoral friars, through the complicity of a corrupt and
incompetent bureaucracy, had blocked the winds of
change and any form of modernization coming into the
islands.

• (Remember one of the themes in Rizal’s brindis speech?)

The possible course of action
• To debunk the colonial apologists’ myths, there
had to be a massive scholarly search into the
country’s precolonial past and the 300-year record
of Spanish colonialism.

• But the primary obstacle was: HOW?

 Efforts to examine the country’s past

José Burgos Isabelo Delos Reyes Pedro Paterno

“His references are relatively His contemporaries “did not “indigenous culture and
brief and not all accurate” hold his historical work in high institutions…were so similar to
(Schumacher, 1991). regard” (Schumacher, 1991). those of Spain..” (Quibuyen, 2008)
Rizal’s major writings and their relationships: A
project of national emancipation

El Filibusterismo
(Rizal charted the
Filipino course for
Annotation of the future)
Sucesos de Las
Islas Filipinas
(Rizal showed
the Filipino the
Noli Me Tángere roots of their
(Rizal presented nation)
the condition
under Spain)
Rizal’s intellectual tradition
• Excerpts from Rizal’s letter to Fr. Vicente Garcia (January 1891):

“In the titanic task of common regeneration, without stopping in

our forward march, from time to time we turn our eyes toward
our elders to read on their faces their judgment of our actions.
For this thirst of understanding the past, of knowledge, to enter
into the future, we go to persons like you. Leave us in writing
your thoughts and the fruits of your long experience so that
condensed in a book, we may not have to study again what
you have already studied and that we may increase the
heritage that we receive from you either expanding it or adding
to it our own harvest…”
Rizal’s intellectual tradition
• Excerpts from Rizal’s letter to Fr. Vicente Garcia (January 1891):

”…The smallness of the advancement that the Filipinos have

made in three centuries of Hispanism is all due, in my opinion, to
the fact that our talented men have died without bequeathing
to us nothing more than the fame of their name. We have had
very great intellects… Nevertheless, all that these men have
studied, learned, and discovered will die with them and end in
them, and [we] shall go back to recommence the study of life.
There is then individual progress or improvement in the
Philippines, but there is no national, general progress. Here you
have the individual as the only one who improves and not the
species.”
Rizal’s project to reclaim
history
Rizal originally requested Ferdinand
Blumentritt to write a Philippine history
book that would counter Spanish
colonial history of the Philippines.
Blumentritt declined.
Antonio de Morga
• 1559 – 1636 (Seville, Spain)

• Lawyer and high-ranking Spanish official

• Appointed as lieutenant general in the Philippines

in 1593, and also became a judge in the Real
Audiencia

• He was in charge of the Spanish fleet in the

Philippines against the Dutch invasion in 1600.
Reasons for Rizal’s choice of Morga
• A rare, civil, instead of ecclesiastical or religious, history of the
Philippines written during the colonial period.

• Relatively objective and trustworthy content.

• Rizal: “All the histories written by the religious before and after Morga,
up to our days, abound with stories of devils, miracles, apparitions.”

• Friar accounts were biased or downright racist in tone and

interpretation.

• Morga was an eyewitness on the Philippines and its people at

the time of the Spanish arrival.
Rizal’s dedication in his annotation of the
Sucesos (Propaganda and Revisionism)
Threefold Agenda:
1. To awaken in the Filipinos “a consciousness of our past,
now erased from our memory”

2. To correct “what has been distorted and falsified”

concerning the Filipinos

3. “to better judge the present and assess our movement in

three centuries.”
Burgos’ influence
Rizal nurtured the seeds in
Burgos’ Filipinization
project (appeal to the
past to further the cause
of the secularization) into
full fruition.
Some of Rizal’s Instructive
Footnotes in the Sucesos
The Indio as Filipino
• One striking feature of Rizal’s footnotes on the
Morga was his reference to the precolonial
natives as Filipinos, indio Filipinos, or antiguas
Filipinos.

• Morga: “Indios” or “naturales”

• During the colonial times, Filipino was the colonial

label for the Spanish creoles.
The Indio as Filipino
• Ambeth Ocampo (1998) claimed that “Rizal did not refer
to non-Christian Filipinos collectively as ‘Filipinos.’”

• Rizal’s footnote:
• “In the Philippines, the Negritos, Igorots and other independent
tribes were still tattooed… tattooing has much resemblance to
what the Japanese practice today. However, the Filipinos
apparently did not use any color but black…”
Immediate impact of
Spanish conquest:
Death and destruction

• Rizal’s footnote:
• Death has always been the first sign of
the introduction of European civilization
in the Pacific… the Pacific islands which
became “civilized” suffered dreadful
depopulation.

• Impacts of Spanish conquest for Rizal:

• Death and destruction (e.g. native
industries)
• Violence and oppression
• Decline (e.g. trade) and depopulation
Long-term consequences of colonial
rule
• Rizal notes that the long-term effects of colonial rule, such
as the encomienda system, the oppressive policies of the
colonial regime, and the rapacity of the friar corporations
brought the following impacts:

a) Economic underdevelopment

b) Destruction of the indigenous culture and the

worsening demoralization of the native population
Deconstructing colonial discourse
• Rizal debunked the “white mythologies” in the Spanish
colonial discourses.

• Colonial discourses deploy words that perform an insidious

double function:
1. They mask the violence and irrationality of colonial practice
2. They attribute such violence on the natives who are being
colonized.

• Examples of such words in Morga: “pacify” “entrust”

“treachery” “piracy”
Deconstructing colonial discourse
• Examples:

• Rizal’s footnote:
• “The raid by Datus Sali and Silonga of Mindanao, in 1599 with 50 sailing
vessels and 3,000 warriors, against the capital of Panay, is the first act of
piracy by the inhabitants of the South which is recorded in Philippine
history. I say "by the inhabitants of the South" because earlier there had
been other acts of piracy, the earliest being that of Magellan's
expedition…”

• Spanish forces’ “pacification” campaign in Mindanao in which

Captain-General Esteban Rodriguez de Figueroa was
“treacherously killed” by a native warrior named Ubal.
What was Rizal’s response to the
Spaniards’ “ingratitude” claim?
“The Spaniards, however, say that the Philippines bring nothing to Mother
Spain, that is the Islands that owe her. Probably; the enormous quantity of
gold that she took from the Islands in the first years, the tributes of the
tenants of the encomiendas, the nine million duros paid to military men,
employees, diplomatic agents, corporation, etc. the salary not only of the
people who go to the Philippines but also of those who return and even
those who had never been or will ever be in the Islands nor have any thing
to do with them – undoubtedly all this is nothing in comparison with so many
captives, soldiers who died in the expeditions, depopulated islands,
inhabitants sold as slaves by the Spaniards themselves, the death of industry,
demoralization of the inhabitants, etc. etc. – wealth brought to these Islands
by that holy civilization.”
Question to Ponder on:
In recent times, the Philippines is experiencing another case
of historical revisionism. Like the Spanish colonial discourse
claiming that the natives had been "civilized" upon
conquest, a growing number of Filipinos nowadays believe
that the authoritarian interval in our post-colonial history
was the country's "golden age" that was interrupted when
the people began to call for democratization.

How do we protect the truth and challenge such a

revisionism?
References
• Craig, A. (1927). Rizal’s Life and Minor Writings. Philippine
Education Co.

• Ocampo. A. (1998). Rizal’s Morga and Views of Philippine

History. Philippine Studies vol. 46, no. 2: 184–214

• Quibuyen, F. (2008). A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American

Hegemony, and Philippine Nationalism. ADMU Press.