Rizal: Unimpressed by the US

While we do not lack for primary source materials on the Philippines from the 16th to the 18th centuries, almost all of these were written by foreigners, leaving us without an insider’s account. Nevertheless, the sharp historian is able to turn this given bias around on its head to tease out from within the silences of the pages, or what the late William Henry Scott called “cracks in the parchment curtain,” the Filipino voice in history.

Many years ago, I compiled travel accounts of Europe and the United States by Filipinos for a yet unpublished book called “The Empire Strikes Back.” Can you imagine if, aside from Antonio Pigafetta’s eyewitness account of the 1521 Battle of Mactan, Lapulapu had a chronicler whose account gives our side of the story?

When I was reading Jose Rizal’s letters from abroad and collating these with his many travel diaries, I noticed that he wrote the least about his 19-day trip through the United States of America. That trip is not very well known. He studied medicine in Madrid and did further training in ophthalmology in Heidelberg and Paris. He published “Noli me tangere” (1887) in Berlin, a profusely annotated edition of Antonio de Morga’s 1609 “Sucesos de las islas Filipinas” (1890) in Paris, and “El Filibusterismo” (1891) in Ghent. The inspiration of many Filipino seamen and junketing politicians who have women in every port, Rizal had love interests in Madrid, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Brussels.

Traveling by sea, he made stopovers in cities not in the usual tourist routes today. In each place, Rizal took detailed notes and sometimes drew what he saw and experienced, his jottings made relevant because he often compared the foreign place unfairly with the Philippines, particularly places back home painted in the soft light of nostalgia and the glow of homesickness.

Before writing this column, I plotted on a Google map the places he mentioned in his US diary, starting with his arrival in San Francisco, California from Yokohama on April 28, 1888, to his departure from New York for Liverpool on May 16, 1888. It was quite a journey then, and I hope to follow Rizal’s route someday without taking an airplane.

After two days at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco (May 4-5, 1888), Rizal traveled to Oakland on May 6, took the train ferry from Port Costa to Benicia, had dinner in Sacramento, and slept on the train. He had breakfast in Reno, Nevada on May 7, and was in Ogden, Utah by May 8 to change trains. He saw young Mormon men in Farmington, Utah, and proceeded to Salt Lake City and Provo, noting in his diaries that there were more women in Utah than men, judging from restaurant tables in that state that were served more by waitresses than waiters.

I wonder what train sleepers were like in his day, because Rizal woke up in Colorado on May 9 noting with annoyance that “the porter of the Pullman car, an American, was somewhat of a thief.” In Colorado, the clock was adjusted by an hour, and he noticed that the place had “more trees than the three states we passed.” He woke up at dawn of May 10 in Nebraska, and by 4 p.m. was in Omaha. The Missouri River he estimated at “about twice the Pasig in its widest part.” He woke up on May 11 in Chicago, Illinois where he strolled around the city before his evening departure. In Chicago, he noted that “every tobacco shop had a statue of an Indian and always different.”

Stopping at Ontario on May 12, he saw Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. Standing at the foot of the majestic falls led him to say: “Though not as pretty nor as mysteriously beautiful as that in Los Baños… it is much more gigantic and imposing that no comparison is possible.” His train departed that night, and he woke up on May 13 in Albany, New York. Then he passed the Hudson River “whose banks are beautiful although a little lonely in comparison with the Pasig,” finally arriving in New York City where he stayed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on May 14 and 15, before catching the second largest ocean liner at the time, City of Rome, for Liverpool.

It is not surprising that Rizal was unimpressed by America. He was an old soul with a cosmopolitan mindset, a man who matured and was formed by education and travel through Europe. Even New York failed to amaze him, “because there, everything is new.”

(Conclusion on Wednesday)

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