Jose Rizal Traversing the United States of America

What is the historic context surrounding Rizal’s tour of the U.S. in 1886? A historic violent railroad strike had already occurred in 1877; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred the Chinese from entry, a move which did not prevent twenty-eight Chinese from being massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885.

Meanwhile, in the post-bellum South, the basis for segregation was being laid by Ku Klux Klan raids throughout the 1860s and 1870s following the Compromise of 1877 and severe economic depression. In 1886, two years before Rizal’s travels, the Haymarket riot in Chicago led to the prosecution of eight anarchists and the execution of four of them innocent of the crimes they were charged with. It was the era of robber barons, workers’ strikes, immigrant rebellions, and ferocious class wars (as detailed by Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States). In 1890, the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee marked the culmination of the genocidal campaign against the original inhabitants and the closing of the internal or Western frontier.

Rizal seemed not to have followed U.S. history along these tracks, isolating only the puritan revolt against religious persecution and the colonial, quasi-feudal imposition by the British monarchy. So this tradition of struggling for liberty, for separation from European feudalism and the authoritarian English monarchy, was what Rizal associated with the U.S. as an emerging nation-state when he was preoccupied with demanding Filipino representation in the Cortes in 1889-90. The United States stood for Rizal as an example of a country or people that demanded representation—“no taxation without representation” was a slogan that must have appealed to the ilustrado assimilationists, not an Anglo state whose “Manifest Destiny” was already nascent from the time of the massacre of the Pequot Indians in 1636, through the institutionalized slavery of Africans, to the savage subjugation of Mexican territory in 1848. White supremacy acquired its slogan of “Manifest Destiny” in the U.S. victory over Mexico and its annexation of substantial territory once owned by Spain.

IV.

To recapitulate the logic of our rehearsing this narrative: Rizal traveled through the United States from April 28 to May 16, 1888, a quite hectic flight through the continent of the “New World.” Although he experienced briefly if intensely the violence of white supremacy in transit, he clearly manifested no understanding of the plight of the American Indians then. Rizal was sensitive to the discrimination shown to African Americans, but not to the indigenous folk that he would soon notice a year after, this time as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the Paris Universal Exposition of May1889. When he and other propagandistas watched some Indians riding their agile horses, elegantly sporting war feathers and other colorful regalia, they were—judging from the tone of their praise–enchanted at the proud and dignified bearing of these performers.

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