Filipinas

ISSN 2599—5391

Journal of the
Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

volume 2 • 2019
FILIPINAS Journal of the Philippine Studies
Association (ISSN 2599-5391) is the official
publication of the Philippine Studies
Association, Inc. The Philippine Studies
Association (PSA), founded in 1984, has
provided the venue to “promote the study,
criticism, and research in Philippine
languages, literature, culture and society,
and to further the interests of teachers
and scholars in these fields” (By-Laws,
Article 1, Section 2). Filipinas Journal
publishes selected and refereed articles
by young and upcoming scholars, as well
as recognized specialists on Philippine
culture and society. It promotes Philippine
Studies and encourages multidisciplinary/
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Bernardita Reyes Churchill
Executive Editor
Maria Diosa Labiste
Issue Editor
Editorial Advisory Board
Clement C. Camposano
University of the Philippines
Elizabeth L. Enriquez
University of the Philippines
Victoria T. Cayton
University of Asia and the Pacific
International Advisory Board (2020)
FILIPINAS Journal
Philippine Studies Association, Inc.
Patricio N. Abinales
Center for Philippine Studies
University of Hawai’i at Mano’a
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Belinda A. Aquino
University of Hawai’i at Mano’a
Honolulu, Hawai’i, USA
Greg Bankoff
University of Hull
Hull, United Kingdom
Maria Cynthia Rose Banzon-Bautista
University of the Philippines Diliman
Otto D. van den Muijzenberg
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research
Anmsterdam, The Netherlands
Yoshiko Nagano
Kanagawa University
Yokohama, 221-8686, Japan
Virginia A. Miralao
Secretary General (2011-2016)
UNESCO Philippine National Commission
Executive Director (1997-2010)
Philippine Social Science Council
Cherubim Quizon
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey, USA
Mary Racelis
Research Scientist
Institute of Philippine Culture
Ateneo de Manila University
Florentino Rodao
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Madrid, España
Rosanne Rutten
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Steven Rood
Fellow-in-Residence, Social Weather Stations
Country Representative (1999-2017)
Philippines and the Pacific Island Nations
The Asia Foundation
University of the Philippines Baguio (1981-1999)
David L. Szanton
University of California Berkeley
University of Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
Megan C. Thomas
University of California
Santa Cruz, California, USA
Filipinas JOURNAL OF THE
Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

Maria Diosa Labiste

Issue Editor

Bernardita Reyes Churchill

Executive Editor

VOLUME 2 • 2019
FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.
© Copyright 2020 by the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.
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Recommended entry:
Maria Diosa Labiste
Bernardita Reyes Churchill
Philippine Studies Association, Inc.
Bernardita Reyes Churchill
Maria Diosa Labiste

ISSN 2599—5391

1. FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

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in any form by any means without prior permission of the Philippine
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 Table of Contents

Foreword
Bernardita Reyes Churchill ...............................................................................i

Laughter in the Rain: The Trope of Resiliency in

International Media Coverage of Typhoon Haiyan
Daphne-Tatiana T. Canlas..............................................................................1

The Role of Local NGO in International Disaster

Risk Reduction Regime
Ma. Ivy A. Claudio .......................................................................................22

The Ideological Work of Music on Radio

in the Philippines in World War II
Elizabeth L. Enriquez................................................................................... 50

Power, Control, and Marriage: The Catholic Utilization

of Indigenous Wives in Early Colonial Philippines
Steven James Fluckiger ................................................................................. 78

Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal

V. Daniel Rogers ........................................................................................ 102

Historiography and Identity:

Histories of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Histories
Maria Nela B. Florendo ............................................................................. 115

Maritime Historiography and The Visayas – Islands in the Seas

Earl Jude Paul L. Cleope ............................................................................. 146

Muslim Filipino Historiography:

Towards National Unity through History
Calbi A. Asain............................................................................................. 178
BOOK REVIEWS

F. C. Llanes, ed., Sakunang Darating, Saklolo’y Tayo Rin:

Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Handbook
for Academic Institutions: The University of the Philippines Experience ........ 198
Mark Lester M. Chico

Richard Bolisay, Break It to Me Gently: Essays on Filipino Film ................203

Adrian Mendizabal

The Authors..............................................................................................206
PSA/ICOPHIL History 1984-2020 ....................................................... 207
PSA Board of Trustees............................................................................. 215

On the Covers

FRONT COVER
Murillo-Velarde map

The front cover features the map entitled Carta hydrographica y chorographica de las Yslas
Filipinas: dedicada al Rey Nuestro Señor por el Mariscal d. Campo D. Fernando Valdes Tamon
Cavallo del Orden de Santiago de Govor. Y Capn, more popularly known as the Murillo-Velarde
map. Courtesy of the United States Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

BACK COVER
National Gallery of Fine Arts
National Museum of the Philippines

The National Gallery of Fine Arts is one of the buildings that comprise the National Museum
of the Philippines. This building dates back to the American colonial period when it was first
designed as a public library by Ralph Harrington Doane and Antonio Toledo. Its plans were
later revised by Juan Arellano when it was decided that the building should also be used by the
Legislature. Construction began in 1918 and upon its completion in 1926, the National Library
occupied the ground floor while the three upper floors housed the Legislature.

The building sustained extensive damage at the end of World War II in 1945 when fighting
devastated Manila. The following year reconstruction began. In 1996, the Senate moved out of
the building. In 2003, renovation began to transform it into a permanent home of the National
Gallery of Fine Arts of the National Museum of the Philippines. It was the site of the National
Conference of the Philippine Studies Association in 2014 and 2018. Photo from the personal
collection of Bernardita Reyes Churchill.
Filipinas Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc. (2019):102-114
The Philippine Studies Association, Inc., 2019

Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal

V. Daniel Rogers

Abstract

In this paper I argue for a return to a close analysis of the original

Spanish texts of Rizal’s work. To adequately locate his rhetorical
strategies for bounding and displacing the “other,” I argue that his
audiences in the Philippines and in Spain must be considered. The
bivalent cultural reach of the novel requires a consideration of both
Filipino and Spanish cultural tropes.

In 1886, a young intellectual named José Rizal changed the course of

Filipino history when he published a novel in Spanish, with a Latin title, in
Berlin, Germany, that helped touch off a revolution in his Asian homeland.
Rizal was a wide-ranging traveler and reader whose middle-class, mestizo
parents could trace their ancestry from China and Spain, all the way to
Calamba, Laguna just south of Manila.1 And Rizal was fortunate on
at least two counts: his parents could afford to support him in Europe
to continue his studies, and he had the intellectual talent to leave a deep
impression on his professors and colleagues. And so, in 1885, with a degree
in ophthalmology from the University of Madrid in hand, he set out to
explore and read his way across Europe, pursuing advanced studies first in
Paris and then in Heidelberg. Rizal was one of the last Filipino intellectuals
raised and educated in the colonial period. As Benedict Anderson might
say, the imagined community to which he belonged was extraordinarily
heterogeneous, comprising European, Asian, and autochthonous elements.
As such, Rizal’s work provides a unique perspective into the position and
status of ethnic Chinese populations in a cultural field dominated by Spanish
colonial systems of signification.

Spain’s colonization of the Philippine archipelago in the late 16th century

was at once, the last major colonial project of the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty
and the first opportunity for sustained economic and political contact with
Asian peoples in general and Chinese culture in particular. And by the
time Miguel López de Legazpi, armed with soldiers, priests, and most
importantly, a charter from King Phillip II, left Mexico in 1564 bound for
V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 103

the archipelago that Ferdinand Magellan had claimed and died for nearly
a half century before, the mechanisms for establishing a new colonial
bureaucracy were well-developed and tightly managed. After all, by the
1560s, Spain had had decades of experience in the Americas to invent,
practice, and hone a variety of techniques to execute its imperial agenda,
from the deployment of clerics and evangelization in local languages, to co-
opting local elites with economic and political privileges. These processes,
carefully documented by John Leddy Phelan in his foundational study,
The Hispanization of the Philippines (1959), as well as more recent studies
by scholars like Christopher Schmidt-Nowara in Spanish Colonialism and
National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006).

Spanish colonial possessions in the Americas were exceptionally

diverse. The myriad categorization schema created over the years by
scholars to describe indigenous American linguistic and ethnic diversity
rivals the number of proposed language families themselves. Lyle
Campbell’s encyclopedic American Indian Languages (1997), perhaps the
most conservative classification system, describes seventeen linguistic
families in Mesoamerica alone–five of which are now extinct, which is
a politely euphemistic way of describing the carnage that followed in the
wake of European colonial projects. 2 Although Spain encountered internal
cultural diversity in Nueva España, it faced no real external competitors or
challengers until the arrival of the British in the late 17th century.

The Philippines presented a very different set of challenges for the

Spanish. The archipelago, with an area of about 300,000 square kilometers,
represented only a fraction of Spain’s total holdings (which were measured
in the millions of square kilometers), but the colonial vanguard of priests
and soldiers accompanying Legazpi confronted an even greater degree
of linguistic and cultural diversity in the Philippines. And unlike the
Americas, Spain didn’t have the Philippines all to herself. Muslim traders
had beaten her to the southern islands and were spreading Islam more than
a century before Magellan stumbled upon Cebu. And contact between the
Chinese mainland and the Philippines dates even further back to the Sung
dynasty in the 10th century BCE. 3

José Rizal is the most important Filipino writer that Hispanists have
never heard of. A footnote, at best, in Spanish graduate programs, Rizal’s
liminal status in the U.S. academy mirrors the ambiguous status of the
Philippine archipelago. Born in 1861 near the capital city of Manila,
Rizal’s parents were prosperous farmers and who could count indigenous
Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish among their ancestry. From the
16th to the 19th-centuries in the Philippines, Spanish was the language
104 FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

of ruling elites in politics, religion, and education. As was typical of his

generation and economic class, Rizal was bilingual. He was fluent in
Tagalog, the dominant language of the northern islands of the Philippines,
and he learned to speak Spanish from his mother.4 An exceptionally gifted
student, Rizal left the Philippines to study medicine (ophthalmology,
specifically) at the Universidad Central de Madrid in 1882. He learned
a lot more than medicine, traveling and studying in Spain, France and
Germany (and mastering English, French, German, Greek, and Latin as
well).

Several sources document the fact that while studying in Paris, Rizal
became fascinated with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
And while some have criticized Stowe’s use of racial stereotypes (Becker)
in what they take to be an overly sentimental and poorly conceived novel
(a very long story that begins perhaps with James Baldwin’s 1949 critique
of the novel, see Rothstein), Rizal, reading it only two decades after it was
published, saw it as a formidable indictment of slavery and oppression.5
Wildly popular in Europe (see the interesting recent book, American Slaves
in Victorian England by Audrey Fish), Rizal’s response was to transpose
the themes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a specifically Filipino context in a
novel he titled Noli me tangere (Latin for “touch me not” or “do not hold
me”). One of Rizal’s earliest biographers in English describes the situation
leading to the writing and publication of Noli Me Tangere by emphasizing
the social conditions in the Philippines to which he responded.

[Rizal] pondered with awe the far-reaching effect upon history and human
progress of that inspired [Uncle Tom’s Cabin]. The thought occurred to him
that similarly wrought pictures of the servitude of the Filipinos might
awaken them to a knowledge of the yoke that was slowly crushing them,
pictures that might at the same time reveal to the world the justice of the
Filipino cause. He went so far as to suggest such a work to the Filipino club
[an expatriate gathering place] at Madrid….This was the beginning of Noli
Me Tangere, the greatest work in Philippine literature and one of the great
achievements of all times and all lands.6

While the principal theme of Rizal’s novel is tyranny and oppression in

the Philippines, the apparently familiar narrative of landowners and slavery
in the American South and its attendant horrors of racism, is transposed
in Noli me tangere into the Filipino struggle of indigenous, peasant, tenant
farmers versus the institutions of colonial exploitation. Lisa Surwillo, an
American academic who has painstakingly traced the translation and
reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 19th century Spain, notes:
V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 105

Although Stowe’s novel was foreign in its geography and religious culture,
the issues of slavery and slave traffic transcended the national boundaries of
their fictional landscape and had a real, immediate importance for Spanish
readers. Once granted the censor’s approbation, Stowe’s abolitionist novel
enjoyed unbridled proliferation and offered an adaptable lens through which
to consider Spain’s role in the slave trade across the Atlantic, outside official
discourse.7

She estimates that Stowe’s novel reached at least 5% and perhaps as many
as 20% of Spain’s literate public making it possibly the most widely known
American novel in 19th century Spain Uncle Tom’s Cabin certainly made an
enormous impression on a young Jose Rizal for whom it became a lens to
consider, not just Spain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, but her oppressive
colonial practices in his native Philippines. For anticlerical, progressive,
Spanish radicals, troubled by a colonial legacy of slavery, Stowe’s novel was
literary dynamite. For the young Filipino medical student, it was inspiration.
By the time he met Ferdinand Blumentritt during his studies in Heidelberg,
Rizal was finishing the manuscript that his new German friend would help
him publish in 1886.

Noli me tangere would go on to become the most widely read novel in the
Philippines, and with its sequel, El filibusterismo, the match that would light
a Filipino nationalist rebellion. In his review of the best-known English
translation of the novel, anthropologist Charles Kaut noted:

The two novels provided a major source for the development of the intellectual
framework of Philippine nationalism and far-reaching stimuli in the
revolutionary movements of 1896 through 1901 against the Spanish and
American administrations. They are now required reading by enactment of
the legislature in Philippine colleges and universities.8

The explosion of nationalist sentiment that Rizal’s novels helped

organize led to the end of the Spanish colonial era, the beginning of the
U.S. occupation (and a young William Howard Taft serving as Governor
General of the Philippines), and most tragically, Rizal’s own death. Spanish
authorities became so concerned about the influence of Noli, that Rizal
was executed by Spanish firing squad in 1896, just a year before the end of
Spain’s rule.

Rizal’s execution was, according to Raquel Reyes (the most influential

current scholar of his life and work) something of an irony. She writes, “Noli
would have been inaccessible to most Filipinos even had it been permitted
to circulate freely, because it was written in Spanish, a language that most
106 FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

Filipinos had difficulty reading, and published as a book whose cost would
have been prohibitive.” 9

In her book, Love, Passion, and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine
Propaganda Movement, Reyes is particularly interested in describing the irony
of the cultural uses of Rizal’s novel among the group of Filipino intellectuals
known as the ilustrados. For Reyes, Rizal is better understood as a nationalist
and reformer turned accidental revolutionary who was hampered by “his
elitist, severely unforgiving opinion of the Filipino lower classes.”10 And
for Reyes, Rizal’s problematic attitudes included more than issues of class.
Her work also shows that Rizal, at times, displayed an elitist (and deeply
conservative) Spanish attitude about the Chinese in the Philippines, tending
to represent them as wholly other.

Rizal’s positioning of ethnic Chinese is also apparent in another book

published by Rizal soon after Noli and immediately before its sequel, El
filibusterismo (1891). With the help of his German friend Blumentritt, Rizal
annotated and published a new edition of a 17th century history of the Spanish
colonization of the Philippines by a former lieutenant Governor-General
and later chief Judge named Antonio de Morga. Originally published by
Morga in 1609 to enlighten Europe about the Philippines, Rizal’s version,
published in Paris with Blumentritt’s help almost three hundred years later in
1890, was, for Rizal, a necessary link between the two novels. And just like
his novels, this new version of Morga’s history had two distinct audiences:
one in the Philippines, and just as importantly, one in Europe. On the one
hand, Rizal begins his prologue to the updated version of Sucesos:

En el Noli me tángere principié el bosquejo del estado ‘actual de nuestra

Patria: el efecto que mi ensayo produjo, hízome comprender, antes de
proseguir desenvolviendo ante vuestros ojos otros cuadros sucesivos, la
necesidad de dar primero a conocer el pasado, a fin de poder juzgar mejor el
presente y medir el camino recorrido durante tres siglos.11

In Noli me tangere I began to outline the ‘actual state of our Nation’ [the
Philippines as colonial subject]: the effect that my essay produced made me
understand, before continuing to unwrap before your eyes further scenes,
the necessity of first making known the past, so as to better be able to judge
the present and measure out the path walked during three centuries (My
Translation).

In other words, Rizal annotates and republishes Morga’s work to instruct

his fellow Filipinos about a shared national and cultural past (note the use
of the first person plural). But if Reyes is accurate in her assertion that his
V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 107

novel would have been inaccessible to the tiny, Spanish-literate population of

the Islands, his newly annotated Sucesos would have been perhaps even more
out of reach. Published in Paris, Succesos would have been read first, not by
Filipinos in the Philippines, but rather Spanish intellectuals and expatriate
Filipinos in Europe. In the presence of those two different audiences, one
European and another Filipino, Rizal’s extensive annotations of Morga’s
encyclopedic chronicle produce a kind of counter-narrative that explains
and defends Filipino culture. Reyes is most interested in what this double
voicing reveals about the way that Rizal reinforces Morga’s prejudicial
attitudes toward the Chinese.

In the Sucesos, for example, Morga asserts that corrupting, “deviant” sexual
practices such as sodomy were imported to pristine, Edenic Philippines by
the Chinese and other “foreigners.”

A pesar de lo que dice Morga, y a pesar de haber trascurrido desde entonces

casi tres siglos, el Filipino sigue aborreciendo este crimen, y tan poco le ha
contagiado, que para cometerlo tienen los Chinos y otros Extranjeros que
valerse.12

In spite of what Morga says, and in spite of what transpired for almost three
more centuries, the Filipino still abhors this crime, and has been so little
contaminated by it, that to commit it has the Chinese and other foreigners to
thank (My Translation).

Reyes, in the section of her book titled, “Footnoting Fornication,”

uses this to show that Rizal was deeply committed to reinforcing Morga’s
speculation that “deviance” was a consequence of outsiders. Rizal here
appears to support the conservative 19th century position that homosexuality
must have spread to indigenous Filipinos from outsiders like the Chinese
since Filipinos (in Morga and Rizal’s paternalistic colonial narrative) were
themselves fundamentally viral and “natural” in their pre-colonial sexual
habits.13 The irony, of course, is that in his attempts to naturalize Filipino
culture and history for a European–Spanish audience, Rizal displaces any
articulation of “otherness” from Filipinos to the Chinese. While Reyes
broaches the issue of 19th century representations of Chinese identity, she is
less interested in the position of ethnic Chinese in the colonial cultural field
and more concerned in her scholarship with unpacking the attitudes toward
women and sexuality shared by Rizal and other expatriate intellectuals in
the so-called Philippine Propaganda Movement.

Whatever their shared traditional Hispanic ideological framework,

Antonio de Morga, and José Rizal, his enthusiastic annotator, seem deeply
108 FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

fascinated by and obsessed with the imbrication of Chinese and colonial

Spanish identity and culture. Morga wrote his history shortly after the
most violent period in Chinese-Spanish relations in the Philippines: the
1603 Sangley uprising. Morga was an eyewitness and describes the conflict
in detail.14 From his perspective, the presence of the Chinese is at once
an important economic opportunity and a dangerous threat as a potential
source of unrest and rebellion. Morga underscores, from the first pages of
his chronicle, the important commercial role played by the Chinese, and
then describes the violent confrontations that arose as a consequence. As
Rizal annotates the chronicle, he appeals to 19th century stereotypes as
he articulates what he deems to be the fundamental elements of Chinese
national and ethnic character:

Los comerciantes chinos se creerían tal vez ser los más fuertes, porque esta
nación– y sobre todo sus mercaderes–siempre ha sido humilde y pacífica,
pero muy insolente cuando se cree poderosa. Pagaron con su muerte y sus
haciendas el grosero error de suponerse, siendo meros tratantes, más fuertes
que los expedicionarios guerreros armados y prevenidos para una campaña.15

The Chinese businessmen would perhaps consider themselves the stronger

because this nation–and most of all its merchants–has always been humble
and pacific, but very insolent when they believe themselves to be powerful.
They paid with their lives and lands for the crude error of supposing, being
mere traders, that they were more powerful than the expeditionary soldiers
armed and prepared for a campaign (My Translation).

The Spanish terms that Rizal uses to describe the Chinese is curiously
multivalent. On the one hand, the Chinese are “humble” and “pacific”
comerciantes and mercaderes: Spanish for “businessmen” and “merchants.”
But, according to Rizal, they can become “insolent” and overconfident in
their own power–an error that costs them their lives and property when the
Chinese population in Manila takes up arms against the better prepared,
battle-hardened Spaniards. When they act too brazenly, Rizal demotes them
from comerciantes to meros tratantes, or “mere traders.” The word “tratante” has
a more pejorative connotation including “black marketeer” or “smuggler.”
Rizal seems to effortlessly move between these two poles in his commentary.
On the one hand, the Chinese are peaceful, humble businessmen, and on the
other, unsavory, dishonest profiteers. His language is unhappily suggestive
of the rhetoric of European and Spanish anti-Semitism.

Morga narrates the 1603 uprising and its seculae, including the enforcement
of laws restricting non-Christian Chinese immigrants and traders to an
area of Manila called the Parian (although Morga also indicates that the
V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 109

Chinese population also congregated in the Parian for mutual protection).16

Contemporary scholars describe the function of the Parián as a kind of
ghetto established by Spanish colonial authorities to “protect themselves
from the Chinese.”17 By the late 19th century, according historian Richard
Chu, Chinese in the Philippines were compared to Jews in the United States:

Those who were against the Chinese would compare them to equally
“undesirable” groups of people. For instance, the Chinese was compared to
the Jew…. In this comparison to the Jews of the United States, the Chinese
were seen as “parasites” of the Philippine economy since their economic
activities did not redound to the benefit of the country.18

The segregation of non-Christian Chinese in the Philippines was a

natural extension of their policy toward non-Christians back home. Edgar
Wickberg, in his somewhat dated, but still unparalleled study, The Chinese
in Philippine Life (1965), recognizes deep influence of Spanish history on its
policies in Manila:

Another factor conditioning Spanish attitudes and policy toward the

Chinese was the Iberian experience with the Moors and Jews, groups that
were both economically necessary and culturally difficult to assimilate. There
[the Iberian Peninsula] the Spanish had tried segregation, hispanization,
and expulsion. Bringing this experience with them to the Philippines, the
Spanish used some of the same methods in dealing with the Chinese.19

While Wickberg did not have access to the cultural theory developed in
recent years, his work describes, in other words, the Spanish articulation of
Chinese identity as profoundly other – even more so than the indigenous
Filipinos who they simply classified as indios. In the cultural field of the
Spanish colonial Philippines, Chinese were seen as a potentially dangerous
contagion to the necessarily “innocent” and “childlike” indios who needed the
paternalistic oversight and guidance of the Catholic religious orders. As late
as 1892, just six years before the end of Spanish colonial rule, Chinese men
who wanted to marry indigenous Filipina women had to first be baptized
in the Catholic Church, and then apply for and be granted citizenship,
baptism being a prerequisite for citizenship. Only then could a marriage
license be issued.20 As Filipino nationalism increased in intensity during
the 19th century, the Chinese community experienced ever-higher levels
of persecution. The situation had deteriorated to the point that Filipino
Chinese appealed directly to China for consular protection in 1880.

Rizal does not address directly the situation of Filipino Chinese in Noli
me tangere, but he orients them in the novel’s field of signification in ways
110 FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

that are strikingly similar to tropes used to represent Jews in Spain. To be

fair, unlike the political rhetoric that Chu documents, Rizal never overtly
equates Chinese and Jewish identity in his novel. Moreover, while his novel
became very popular in the Philippines during the same political moment
described by Chu, Rizal wrote and published his novel in Europe, not in
Manila. The narrator of Noli does not avail himself of the deeply offensive
rhetoric and specious claim that both communities are economic “parasites”
that might potentially spread some kind of religious or cultural “contagion.”
But European Spanish readers might have heard echoes of their own
troubled historical treatment of Jews and other non-Christians.

Conclusion

An early scene in Noli me tangere establishes the principal conflict between the
protagonist, a bright and ambitious (and most importantly, Europeanized)
young Filipino named Crisóstomo Ibarra, and his antagonist, Padre Dámaso,
the local Catholic priest. Crisóstomo returns to his family homestead near
Manila after spending seven years abroad studying medicine in where he
soon discovers that his father, Rafael, has died during his absence, the
victim of religious and colonial tyranny. Accused of heresy by the corrupt
local priest and falsely imprisoned, his father succumbs to the deplorable
conditions of his incarceration. Crisóstomo and his servant search for the
father’s gravesite which is supposed to be marked with an enormous cross
and flowers. However, they make a horrifying discovery while talking to the
gravedigger.

“Tell us which is the grave and where the cross is.”

The gravedigger rubbed his ears and replied yawning: “Well, the cross—I
have already burned it.”

“Burned it? Why did you burn it?”

“Because the head parish priest so ordered.”

Ibarra touched his forehead with the palm of his hand.

“But at least you can tell us where the grave is. You must remember.” The
gravedigger smiled.

“The dead body is no longer there,” he calmly replied.

“What are you saying?”

V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 111

“Oh,” continued the man in a jesting tone, “in its place I interred a woman
last week.”

“Are you mad?” countered the servant. “It has not been a year yet since we
buried him!”

“But that’s it!” I dug him up some months ago. The head parish priest ordered
me to take it to the cemetery of the Chinese [my emphasis]. But it was so
heavy, and that night it rained . . .”

“Don’t be angry with me, Señor,” answered the gravedigger, pale and
trembling. “I did not bury him among the Chinese. It is better to drown
than to be with the Chinese, I said to myself, so I threw the dead body into
the water.” 21

Rizal’s narrator excites nationalist sentiment by describing the worst fate

imaginable for a Christian mestizo: burial in the cemetery of unbelievers. In
Spain, the scene would have just as much sense if the punishment had been
burial in a Jewish cemetery. Rizal transposes this familiar peninsular trope
onto the colloquial cultural field of the Philippines. The ease with which
he substitutes Chinese otherness for Jewish shows that the articulation of
subaltern identity in the Philippines, during the colonial period at least, was
ideologically congruent with the powerful rhetorical forces deployed by the
Spanish in the Americas and Europe. As importantly, it points to the bivalent
nature of the novel: Noli me tangere is a novel whose implied readership is
familiar with Filipino and Spanish literary and historical tropes. Without a
thorough grounding in the nineteenth century rhetorical discourse of both
the Philippines and Spain, scenes in the novel that describe the “othering”
of non-indigenous ethnicities must remain opaque.

Notes
1
Raquel A.G. Reyes, Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda
Movement, 1882-1892 (Seattle: NUS Press, 2008), 271-72.

2
Lyle Campbell, American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 156-69.

3
Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850-1898 (New Haven: New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1965).
112 FILIPINAS: Journal of the Philippine Studies Association, Inc.

4
Charles Edward Russell and E.B. Rodriguez, The Hero of the Filipinos: The Story of José
Rizal (New York: Century, 1923), 30.

5
Russell and Rodriguez, 88.

6
Russell and Rodriguez, 88-89.

7
Lisa Surwillo, “Representing the Slave Trader: Haley and the Slave Ship; Or, Spain’s
‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’” PMLA 120, 3 (2005): 769.

8
Charles Kaut, “Review” American Anthropologist 64, 5, Part 1 (1962): 1090-1.

9
Reyes, 129.

10
Reyes, 128.

11
Antonio de Morga and Jose Rizal, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas: obra publicada en Méjico el
año de 1609. Nuevamente sacada à luz y anotada por José Rizal y precedida de un prólogo del
prof. Fernando Blumentritt (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1890.

12
Morga and Rizal, Sucesos de Islas Filipinas, 308-309.

13
Reyes, 206-207.

14
Jose Eugenio Borao, “The Massacre of 1603 Chinese Perception of the Spanish in the
Philippines,” Itinerario 22.01 (1998): 22-40.

15
Morga and Rizal, 44.

16
Morga and Rizal, 18, 219, 223.

17
Richard T. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture,
1860s-1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 58-59.

18
Chu, 284-85.

19
Wickberg, 8-9.

20
Wickberg, 156.

21
Jose Rizal, Noli me tangere, trans. Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 1997), 72-73.
V. Daniel Rogers | Rhetorics of ‘Otherness’ in Rizal 113

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