I thought I'd share my learnings as I read this treasure, something I've picked up again on this day dedicated to national heroes (primarily for my own memory! Hehe, as I'd like Facebook to remind me of these posts in the future).
The book is divided into 14 chapters, featuring the different men (alas, no heroines are featured!) whose actions shaped our nation today.
Joaquin reminds us that the term "Filipino" originally referred to the Spanish mestizo (he uses the term "Creole"), but that this changed with the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, and that this united Filipinos of different ethnic backgrounds versus the Spanish oppressor. Two such Creoles were Padre Gomez and Burgos themselves.
A peace-loving man, one who "sought reform within the law, disliked violent upheaval, concerned with liberating the masses through education," is wrongfully accused of inciting bloody revolution.
And no, Joaquin is referring not to Jose Rizal nor his literary creation, Ibarra, but Padre Jose Burgos.
Textbooks often treat the 3 martyr priests as one entity: "Gomburza," but it was fascinating to read of how Zamora was arrested by accident (the warrant was for JOSE Zamora, not Padre Jacinto whose only misfortune was to be the co-curate of the REAL hero, Burgos), of Gomez's activism in his youth but how he was only punished for it when he was already 85 and had accepted the status quo, and of the glorious promise of Burgos whose dizzying rise to power threatened the foreign friars to the point that they invented an excuse to have him killed.
Joaquin writes of the accidental nature of heroism, and how society changes in its treatment of heroes depending on the times ("Even Aguinaldo, from the 1900's to the 1950's, was regarded as more villain than patriot.").
When we celebrate our heroes today, we would do well to reflect whether we have always seen them as thus. Or has their memory been sanitized and purged of past wrong doing, and towards what end?
(Picture of the execution borrowed off the Internet)
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