Jose Rizal, a pivotal Ilustrado leader in late 19th-century Philippines, ignited nationalism after his legal victory against Dominican landlords was overturned, sparking Spanish retaliation that included burning homes and seizing land. His activism targeted oppressive systems like the polo and vandala forced labor and taxation regimes before his execution by the Spanish Empire. The episode highlights how Rizal is now worshipped as a messianic figure amidst the Philippines' complex history of land grabbing, suggesting his martyrdom remains a potent symbol of resistance against colonial and systemic oppression. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Spanish Colonization and Land Grabbing00:02:37
So, this allows for the development of kind of a middle class in the Philippines.
So, by the late 1800s, an influential group of Filipinos who had studied in Europe and learned about all these amazing liberal ideals come back to the Philippines and they tell everybody about this crazy concept they've heard of called nationalism and they try to start a revolution.
So, they were part of an educated middle and upper class called Ilustrados.
The most famous of these men organized into what was called the propaganda movement was Jose Rizal, a novelist, thinker, and reputed great romantic whose family actually leased farmland from a Dominican hacienda.
So, all right, it's a little too complicated to explain here, but in, and this is just a little aside about Jose Rizal's hacienda situation, but in 1887 to 1888, he was enrolled in a court dispute with the Dominicans.
When he led his fellow tenants against the landlords, they had this lawsuit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They won a case, but the Dominicans won the appeal of that case.
And then soldiers of the Spanish Empire came and burned down some of their houses and beat the shit out of some of their people and took the land.
This is a process that has essentially been going on since the beginning of Spanish colonization in the Philippines, continuing to the present day by one perpetrator or another that's called land grabbing.
Like, this is something that.
I guess we don't really have to think about maybe so much in the US.
Obviously, there is a great devotion to private property here.
But in the Philippines, it's really private property matters if you're rich, because you can kind of just take it from anybody who might already have it.
And this is a theme that comes up a lot.
So Jose Rizal, in his activism, calls his activism.
Sounds so corny to call it that.
But in his, In his agitation for independence from the Spanish Empire, calls for an end of the polo and the vandala systems.
Again, that's the system of forced labor and really heavy taxation in kind.
And then he was executed by the Spanish.
It's actually pictures of it.
And I've actually been in a museum and seen a piece of his spine.
And in fact, there's sort of cults.
The Philippines is filled with cults, but there's a cult of people who worship him who thought that he was kind of like a.
Rizal's Agitation Against Forced Labor00:00:21
A Jesus type figure who got killed before he could kind of usher in whatever Jesus was supposed to be ushering in.
And I, yeah, it's, it's, I gotta be honest, it seems a little, you know, it takes all kinds.
They're always getting them right before they usher it in.