‘Exploring’ Rizal from a wheelchair

There is a place honoring Jose P. Rizal without fanfare day in, day out, come sunshine or rain, with or without Rizal Day celebrations, with or without a 150th birth anniversary. There, in that place, many of the street names are reminders of the life and times of the national hero amid the sounds, smell and the hectic pace of city existence. The street names serve to honor Rizal, for they are part of the residents’ living and breathing, part of their unconscious, a common-enough way of remembering. To stroll these streets is to relive history and to revive memories of events, places and people first encountered in the classroom during school days, those happy, carefree days, those wonderful days of promise, adventure and discovery.

Where is this place? The City of Manila, in its Sampaloc district.

So take time out for that street tour into history and have your promenade along streets notable only from the fact that their names connect to the Rizal story.

Start with Dimasalang Street. Dimasalang was one of the aliases Rizal gave himself. Dimasalang Street is the main road that bisects into two parts the original Rizal Park development north of the Pasig River: Sampaloc to the east and Santa Cruz to the west. Given that the name Rizal forms part of the development’s full title, it was natural for its streets to have names associated with the national hero.

You know you are on Dimasalang Street when you see the Dangwa flower market, a bright spot of fresh flowers with colors of the rainbow. The fragrance of roses fills the air, competing with the perfume of lilies. If you fancy garlands of the white, sweet sampaguita with pendants of orange champacas, or green ylang-ylang, the place to go is Blumentritt market in Santa Cruz district, Manila.

Across from the flower market, find Maria Clara Street which abuts Dimasalang Street. Maria Clara or Clarita, was the beautiful, unfortunate heroine of Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere.”

From Maria Clara Street, walk a distance along Dimasalang to Dimasalang Bridge. At its highest point, it gives an aerial view of multi-colored roofs. Directly below the bridge’s high point are railroad tracks over which trains rolled regularly from the provinces once upon a time.

Upon getting down Dimasalang Bridge, one is greeted by a street sign which reads Makiling. No trace of a mountain here, not even trees. Not far from the corner of Makiling and Dimasalang Streets is a small street called Sisa which is short for Narcisa, one of Rizal’s sisters. Another Sisa in the Rizal world was a female character in “Noli Me Tangere,” the demented mother of two young, exploited church boys.

Craig Street is the one next to intersect Dimasalang after Makiling. Craig Street is named after Austin Craig, Rizal’s biographer. Enter Craig Street and walk a length until you get to its corner with Calamba Street. Calamba in the province of Laguna was Rizal’s birthplace. Further into Craig, traveling westward, you get to a point where Craig meets Dapitan Street. That part of Dapitan is relatively quiet compared to its noisy side, an interesting aspect calling for an extended examination later in this article.

But first, retrace your steps back to the junction of Craig and Dimasalang. Opposite Craig is a narrow street named Elias. In Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere,” Elias was the second male lead character, a faithful friend of Crisostomo Ibarra, the novel’s hero said to personify and portray Rizal himself. Elias Street ends in the well-provided Blumentritt wet market which takes its name from the German historian Ferdinand Blumentritt, a close friend of Rizal.

From Elias Street, get back eventually to Dapitan by a detour to Dimasalang Bridge. Where Rizal is, Spain has to be. And so it is in the streets of Sampaloc. Within walking distance of the Dimasalang-Maria Clara junction is España Street, Manila’s main artery to Quezon City and beyond.

Rising on a five-hectare land sprawl on España is the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, named after the eminent theologian, Thomas Aquinas, author of “Summa Theologica.” With its 400 years of existence, UST is older than Harvard University. The back gates of the UST campus open to that portion of busy Dapitan Street, noisy with student activity—a world apart from Rizal’s Dapitan community in Mindanao. The Dapitan community which came into being during Rizal’s four-year exile in 1892-1896 translated to practical reality Rizal’s ideas on education, public health, agriculture and town planning, thereby demonstrating that his ideas on civic matters were not mere pipe dreams. Can it be that by his Mindanao community Rizal was showing, consciously or not, the marvels of a peace initiative to a revolution?

Cristina Asprer, 93, has been encouraged to write by her neurologist as a form of therapy. This article is inspired by Dr. Encarnacion Alzona, the author’s professor in Social Studies at the University of the Philippines. Alzona was a distant relative of Rizal and also one of the translators of  the original of Rizal’s writings.