jose rizal - José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896), known as Jose Rizal, was a Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during Spanish colonial era and its eventual independence from Spain. He is considered a national hero of the Philippines and the anniversary of Rizal's death is commemorated as a Philippine holiday called Rizal Day. Rizal's 1896 military trial and execution made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution. The seventh of eleven children born to the Mercado family, a prosperous middle class Filipino and Chinese-mestizo family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna, Rizal attended the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and then traveled alone to Madrid, Spain where he studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid, earning the degree Licentiate in Medicine. He earned a second doctorate at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg. Rizal was a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages: Spanish, French, Latin, Greek,German, Portuguese, Italian, English, Dutch and Japanese.[1][2][3] He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere[4] and El Filibusterismo. These novels are social commentaries on the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule that formed the nucleus of literature that inspired dissent among the European-educated Filipino peaceful reformists and spurred the militancy of armed revolutionaries against 333 years of Spanish colonial rule. As a political figure, Rizal was the founder of La Liga Filipina, a civic organization that subsequently gave birth to the Katipunan led by Bonifacio and Aguinaldo.[5] He was a reformer for an open society rather than a revolutionary for political independence; he advocated popular representation in effecting institutional reforms by peaceful means rather than by violent revolution. The general consensus among Rizal scholars, however, attributed his martyred death as the catalyst that precipitated the Philippine Revolution. Historians contend that Rizal's patriotism and his standing as one of Asia's first intellectuals of the post-colonial era have inspired succeeding thinkers and revolutionaries of the centrality of national identity as a social force in the project of nation-building.[ José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. His parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. He was the seventh child of their eleven children (namely, Saturnina, Paciano, Narcisa, Olympia, Lucia, Maria, Jose, Concepcion, Josephina, Trinidad and Soledad.) Dominican friar landlords granted the family the privilege of the lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm. However, contentious litigation followed the friars' attempts to raise tenant rental fees. The farmers, led by Rizal, disputed this while exposing the Dominicans' failure to pay taxes due on friar land. These haciendas were taken over by the Dominicans from the Jesuits after the latter's expulsion. Later, General Valeriano Weyler had the buildings on the farm torn down. Upon enrolling at the Ateneo, Rizal changed his surname to 'Rizal' to escape the opprobrium of the name 'Mercado'. His brother, Paciano, had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora who had been tried as subversives and sentenced to death by garrote. Francisco Mercado, Rizal's father Enlarge Francisco Mercado, Rizal's father Rizal was descended on his father side from Domingo Lam-co, a Chinese immigrant who sailed to the Philippines from Amoy, China in the mid-17th century (see Chinese Filipino). Lam-co married Inez de la Rosa, a Sangley native of Luzon. To free his descendants from the anti-Chinese animosity of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname 'Mercado' (market) to indicate their Chinese merchant roots. Their original application was for the name Ricial, apropos their main occupation of farming, which was arbitrarily denied. The name Rizal, originally Ricial, or the green of young growth which also means 'green fields', was adopted as an alias with Paciano to enable Jose to travel freely as the Mercados had gained notoriety by their son's intellectual prominence. Rizal was from early childhood already advancing unheard of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which infuriated the authorities.[7] Aside from his indigenous Malay and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that José had traces of Spanish, Japanese and Negrito ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather (Teodora's great-grandfather) was Eugenio Ursua, a descendant of Japanese settlers, who married a Filipina named Benigna (surname unknown). These two gave birth to Regina Ursua who married a Sangley mestizo from Pangasinán named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora's grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a mestizo (half-caste Spaniard) named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, the father of Teodora. Austin Craig mentions Lacandula, Rajah of Tondo at the time of the Spanish incursion, also as an ancestor. Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He went to Manila to study. He was accepted at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He continued his education in the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a degree in land surveying and assessor, and at the same time in the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine (ophthalmology) in the University of Santo Tomas but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who operated the university.[8] Without his family's knowledge and consent, but wholly and secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered a learned address in German before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language, considered a shining moment in the relations between East and West. Ten years later, the society met to honor him in death with a reading of a German translation of his farewell poem and Dr. Virchow delivering the eulogy.[9] He left Heidelberg a poem, 'A las flores del Heidelberg,' which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land. Its message presaged the unification of common culture and common values and the melding of East and West. Rizal's multifacetedness was described by his German friend, Dr. Adolf Mayer, as 'stupendous.'[10] He developed an uncommon ability to master various skills and subjects. Documented studies show him to be a polymath. [1] [2] [11] He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, inventor, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting. He was a Freemason. Judging by the vast and extensive records written by and about Rizal, [13] one can safely conclude that Rizal's is the most documented Asian life of the nineteenth century, perhaps of any Asian ever. Most everything in his short life is recorded somewhere, being himself a regular diarist and prolific letter writer, much of these material having survived. He can be seen from many angles with unusual clarity. His biographers have faced the difficulty of translating his writings which switch from one language to another with facility, drawing more from his travel diaries with their insights of a young oriental encountering the occident for the first time. They included his later trips, home and back again to Europe through Japan and the United States, and, finally, through his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong. This period of his education and his frenetic pursuit of life, included his recorded affections. Among them were Gertrude Becket of Chalcot Crescent, wealthy and high-minded Nelly Boustead of the English and Iberian merchant family, the idyllic romance with Usui Seiko--'The last descendant of a noble family, true to an unfortunate vengeance, you are beautiful..,'and his earlier friendships with Segunda Katigbak and his cousin, Leonor Rivera. His relationships have kindled abiding interest in his story. He left much more than goodwill among his European friends who kept almost everything he gave them, even doodlings on pieces of paper. In the home of a Spanish liberal, Pedro Ortiga y Perez, he left an impression that was to be remembered by his daughter, Consuelo Ortiga y Rey. In her diary, she wrote of a moment to be cherished for a lifetime of a day Rizal spent there and regaled them with his brilliant intellect, social graces, and sleight of hand tricks. In London, during his research on Morga's writings, he became a regular guest in the home of Dr. Reinhold Rost, head of the India Office Library of the British Museum, who referred to him as 'a gem of a man.'[13] The Ullmers, family of Karl Ullmer, pastor of Wilhelmsfeld [12], and the Blumentritts were aware of the aura of destiny surrounding him that they treasured everything he gave them, even buttonholes and napkins with sketches and notes. They were ultimately bequeathed to the Rizal f