As a Filipino, you would be hard-pressed to find a place in this country where Jose Rizal is not quietly looming over your shoulder. School? Rizal studies. A quick grocery run? His face says hello from the one-peso coin. Manila traffic? Ride a jeepney, a tricycle, or any vehicle, really, and chances are you will pass by his monument. Everywhere you look: Rizal, Rizal, Rizal. He comes with an entire checklist of titles: polymath, genius, writer, artist, hero. Some even believe he is the Filipino equivalent of Jesus Christ. And honestly, can you blame people for thinking that way?

But admiration, even when deserved, can turn suffocating. It is no secret that many students grow nauseous at the mention of his full, glorified name, Dr. Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, as if memorizing it were a civic duty. I have heard classmates, from junior high to college, groan about Rizal’s Rizal-ness being shoved down their throats. While I still believe his works remain relevant more than a century later, the frustration is understandable. Our history books have long favored placing Rizal alone on a pedestal, often at the expense of other figures whose sacrifices were just as crucial. In doing so, we underestimate the collective labor, suffering, and time it took for the Himagsikan to happen.

We are taught, sometimes too insistently, that without Noli Me Tangere or El Filibusterismo, the Philippines might not exist as it does today. For skeptics like me, that argument feels dangerously close to a slippery slope, one riddled with convenient hero worship and logical shortcuts. History does not move because of one man with a pen. It moves because conditions ripen, ideas circulate, and many people act.

This is where Jose Diokno’s Rizal for Today becomes useful, even refreshing. Diokno urges us to study Rizal not as an untouchable saint, but as a product and sharp observer of his time. Rizal’s novels are less monuments to his genius than artistic historical records. They force us to reflect on what the Philippines did wrong, continues to do wrong, and may yet do wrong again. Studying Rizal, then, is not about venerating a man. It is about understanding a country. History is not made by lone heroes. It is made by a collective.

Whenever I feel the urge to bang my head on the table at yet another Rizal-centric discussion, I remind myself that this irritation is not really about Rizal. It is about how history has been recorded: hagiographic, selective, and obsessed with neat narratives. Rizal himself makes more sense when placed firmly back into the messy, complicated nineteenth century that produced him.

Rizal’s nationalist thought did not emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by a convergence of economic, political, cultural, and religious developments that transformed the Philippines in the nineteenth century. After 1830, the country experienced significant economic growth through a new export economy driven largely by agricultural products. Filipino hacenderos and inquilinos, many of them leasing friar lands, benefited alongside British and American merchants. This prosperity, however, also produced friction. As land values rose and rents increased, disputes between friars and prosperous inquilinos intensified. These conflicts were not merely economic. They were deeply political. Challenging friar ownership meant challenging friar power. Rizal’s own family would be embroiled in such a dispute in Calamba, a personal experience that sharpened his critique of colonial injustice.

Politically, Spanish colonial governance was a study in inconsistency and neglect. Frequent shifts between liberal and conservative governments in Spain resulted in unstable colonial policies. The Philippines became a dumping ground for bureaucrats more interested in lining their pockets than governing responsibly. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 only worsened this, allowing officials to come and go quickly and extract what they could before leaving. Corruption flourished, public services deteriorated, and Filipinos were gradually pushed out of even minor bureaucratic roles. Taxes rarely returned to the people in the form of roads, schools, or infrastructure. Protective tariffs forced Filipinos to buy expensive Spanish goods instead of cheaper alternatives, stifling further progress. For reform-minded Filipinos like Rizal, it became increasingly clear that Spain was not merely absent. It was an obstacle to growth.

Culturally, the return of the Jesuits in 1859 marked a turning point. Institutions like the Ateneo Municipal introduced a more modern, humanistic education that emphasized literature, science, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Rizal would later suggest this type of education as the “soul of the nineteenth century” through his character Pilosopo Tasio. While these schools did not explicitly teach nationalism, they instilled ideas of human dignity, justice, and equality. Education expanded beyond the elite, creating an ilustrado class that was not necessarily wealthy but increasingly conscious. Rizal himself acknowledged that it was through his studies that his “patriotic sentiments greatly developed.” Once exposed to broader intellectual horizons, these Filipinos could no longer accept the established colonial order.

Religion, perhaps more than any other force, complicated the rise of nationalism. The Spanish government relied heavily on the friars to maintain control, treating Catholic devotion as a political tool. Conflicts between Filipino secular priests and Spanish friars intensified throughout the century, culminating in the 1872 execution of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora. GOMBURZA’s martyrdom did not create nationalism, but it crystallized it. Jose Burgos, in particular, articulated one of the earliest assertions of Filipino equality with Spaniards, a demand not yet for independence, but for dignity and justice. Rizal would inherit this legacy, transforming it into a broader, more radical vision of national freedom.

Rizal’s anticlericalism, often misunderstood as anti-Catholicism, was really an attack on how religion was weaponized to justify abuse. Through characters like Elias in Noli Me Tangere, he condemned superstition and exposed how faith had been distorted to preserve the status quo. To attack the friars, Rizal felt compelled to attack the false religiosity they hid behind. In doing so, he struck at one of the strongest pillars of Spanish colonial rule.

By the time Rizal emerged as a central figure in the Propaganda Movement, several currents were already in motion: the reformist, the liberal, the anticlerical, the modernizing, and the strictly nationalist. Rizal embodied aspects of all of them, but what set him apart was his ultimate goal. He favored reform, modernization, and education, yes. But above all, he envisioned a free people, not necessarily free from Spain, but free from tyranny itself. A nation proud of its past, united by shared ideals, and capable of shaping its own future.

Every year, Filipinos commemorate Rizal’s execution on 30 December, a regular holiday dedicated to his memory. And yet, interestingly enough, there is no law that officially proclaims him a national hero. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts has pointed out that even Rizal’s status is a product of popular veneration rather than formal declaration. Emilio Aguinaldo’s 1898 decree established 30 December as a day of mourning, and Act 137 named a province after him. Beyond that, Rizal’s place in history rests on collective recognition, not legal mandate.

Perhaps that is fitting. Rizal does not need an official proclamation to matter. His legacy endures not because he stands alone, but because he stands among many: Burgos, Bonifacio, Jacinto, Mabini, and countless unnamed Filipinos whose lives made nationalism possible. To understand Rizal, then, is not to worship him, but to situate him. Not as the nation’s solitary savior, but as one voice, brilliant, flawed, and human, within a much larger historical chorus.