Jose Rizal's Birth - The Birth of Filipino Consciousness
Jose Rizal came into this world on June 19, 1861. Thirty years later, his writings gave birth to our consciousness as a race and as a nation. If Rizal had not been born on that day, we Filipinos might still be second-class, brown-colored pseudo-Spaniards. In Rizal's time and before he wrote his novels, we did not know who we are. In his book, El Filibusterismo, Rizal wrote that Spaniards called us natives as "Indios." Throughout the history of the Philippines, the natives across the islands showed some semblance of nationalism. They resisted the colonizers in small pockets and localized across the islands. Those expressions were like the flicker of fireflies in the night - fleeting. They were incomparable to the magnitude of the viral spread of Rizal's idea about self-identity and self-determination. His idea glowed like an ember in the forest that did not burn out but grew into a howling blaze spreading across the islands. Rizal's writings spurred the idea of bei