Social Rizal

What would Jose Rizal have made of today’s social media phenomenon? Two and a half years ago, as part of the many activities to mark the hero’s 150th birth anniversary, the Inquirer’s own Learning section offered a possible answer: Rizal, a tireless letter-writer and pamphleteer, would have taken to blogging like a natural, but because he was arguing new concepts for the first time, he would have found the 140-character limit of Twitter very limiting indeed.

We would like to add one more possible answer: He would have embraced the social part of the social media phenomenon.

When in 1896 the Spanish colonial authorities raided the warehouse where Andres Bonifacio worked, they found letters of Jose Rizal and Marcelo H. del Pilar among Bonifacio’s personal effects. These were “letters of,” not “letters from.” They were not addressed to him personally, but to others. Like many such letters, however, they were meant to be shared.

The letters were copied by hand. And like the carefully concealed copies of the “Noli Me Tangere” that were smuggled into the Philippines, or Del Pilar’s stinging antifriar broadsides, letters from the leading propagandists were also passed from hand to hand.

It wasn’t just Bonifacio, that supremely able organizer, who must have used the letters he managed to get hold of as inspiration, instruction—and recruitment tool. A reserved intellectual like Apolinario Mabini managed to read some of these letters, too, and shared them; there is one from Rizal to a brother-in-law, for instance, written when Rizal was already in exile in Dapitan. Mabini assiduously related the contents to his correspondent in Madrid … Del Pilar himself.

It should be an interesting exercise to draw a sociogram, a map of the network of patriots, say between 1892 and 1896: propagandists in Spain, freemasons and anarchists in various parts of the world, early members of the Katipunan and Rizal in Dapitan. We would be better able to appreciate the self-reinforcing loop of connections that bound the anticolonial forces in the Philippines before the outbreak of the Revolution.

Perhaps the central node would be Rizal, because of his foundational role. He did not only write the book which summarized the essential dilemma of the colonized or pen the crucial articles in La Solidaridad which crystallized the arguments against Spanish colonial injustice. He was also an inveterate organizer, like Bonifacio.

But Jim Richardson’s “Light of Liberty”—a paradigm-shifting collection, translation and annotation of many of the Katipunan documents confiscated during the Revolution and preserved in Spanish military archives—adds many more layers to that social graph. Factor in the hundreds of Katipunan members identified in that book, and Rizal would no longer be the central figure. Every single node in the sociogram, representing an actual individual, would have known of Rizal; Rizal, however, would not know many of them. (That may help explain why, when the Katipunan’s envoy, Pio Valenzuela, visited him in Dapitan to seek his approval for the planned uprising against the Spaniards, he declined. Four years into his emasculating exile, he did not know the very revolutionaries who had voted him honorary president of their secret organization.)

But there is plenty in Rizal’s writings to support the conclusion that he would have relished the idea he was no longer the central node (of course, he did not think in social media terms then). In the mid-1880s, before the “Noli” saw print, he thought of his work as part of a whole; after publication of his first novel turned him into the leading Filipino of his generation, he sought to surface other voices and encouraged talented but diffident propagandists like Mariano Ponce to take up the pen.

That is why, wherever he was, Rizal was able to attract some of the finest minds of his time. Some of those who came from the same privileged section of society as he did had qualms about his preeminence; those who didn’t, or who only knew of him through the shared word, followed him, whose death anniversary we mark today, wherever he led.