A facsimile for a forgotten El Fili

By Noel Galon de Leon

Seeing El Filibusterismo in Hiligaynon inside the UP Visayas Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage did not feel like a neutral encounter with a rare artifact. It felt like an interruption in the usual way we tell Philippine literary history. The exhibition Lapnag: Cultivating Knowledge Through Print already tries to frame printing as a civilizational force, something that spreads knowledge, builds publics, and connects generations. But then you stand in front of a single object, a 1933 Hiligaynon translation of Rizal’s most politically explosive novel, and that neat narrative suddenly becomes unstable. The glass case does not just protect the book. It also isolates it from the very function that justified its existence in the first place, which is to be read.

There is something deeply ironic about that. Printing was never meant to produce silence. It was meant to produce circulation. The entire history of print culture, from woodblock printing in China to Gutenberg’s press in Europe, is the history of breaking exclusivity. Knowledge stops being locked inside monasteries and elite circles and starts entering public life. Yet here is a book that represents exactly that democratic promise, now locked inside a museum display where its pages cannot be turned. It feels like we have reversed the logic of print itself. We have turned circulation into containment.

El Filibusterismo is not an ordinary novel. It is Rizal at his most disillusioned, most confrontational, and most structurally critical of colonial society. If Noli Me Tangere still carried traces of reformist hope, El Fili already moves toward collapse, toward radical impatience with institutions that refuse to change. It is a text about poison, conspiracy, violence, betrayal, and the moral exhaustion of a society trapped under colonial power. That kind of text was never meant to remain linguistically distant from the people it describes. And yet for decades, it circulated primarily in Spanish and later in English, languages tied to elite education and colonial administration.

The 1933 Hiligaynon translation by Rosendo Mejica and Ulpiano C. Vergara disrupts that history in a way that has not been fully appreciated. Translation here is not secondary. It is not a simplified version for provincial readers. It is an act of intellectual relocation. Rizal is moved from the language of colonial elites into the language of Western Visayas. That shift matters more than we usually admit. Because when El Fili is rendered in Hiligaynon, it stops being only a national text mediated by Manila centered education systems. It becomes part of Iloilo’s intellectual life, part of a regional imagination that is often erased in mainstream accounts of Philippine nationalism.

This is where the discomfort begins. Philippine history tends to narrate nationalism as something that flows outward from the center, from Rizal in Manila, from the ilustrado class, from Spanish and English texts filtered through national institutions. But the existence of a 1933 Hiligaynon El Filibusterismo breaks that model. It suggests that nationalism was also being reconstructed in the provinces, in local presses, in regional languages that carried their own political and cultural weight. The question is no longer whether Rizal reached the regions. The question is how the regions reinterpreted Rizal.

Rosendo Mejica becomes crucial in this story. He was not simply a translator sitting between languages. He was part of a larger intellectual ecosystem in Iloilo that treated Hiligaynon as a serious language of journalism, politics, and literature. Through Makinaugalingon, he helped build a print culture where local language was not decorative but functional, not sentimental but analytical. That is important because it contradicts the lazy assumption that regional languages were only used for informal communication. In reality, they were already carrying complex political ideas long before contemporary language policies tried to “recognize” them.

The Makinaugalingon Press itself represents something we still have not fully reckoned with. It was not just a publishing outlet. It was an intellectual infrastructure. It produced newspapers, translations, and political commentary that shaped public opinion in Western Visayas. When it published El Filibusterismo in Hiligaynon in 1933, it was not performing a cultural favor. It was asserting that Rizal belongs in the same linguistic space where ordinary Ilonggos debated governance, morality, and social life.

And yet today, this object sits behind glass.

That is the part that troubles me. Not the preservation itself, but the transformation of a living text into a static relic. A book like El Filibusterismo was never meant to be observed at a distance. It was meant to be argued with, translated, annotated, challenged, and reinterpreted across generations. When it becomes untouchable, it risks losing its political charge. It becomes heritage without friction, memory without debate.

There is also a deeper issue here about what we value in cultural institutions. We often equate preservation with success. If a book survives, we assume it has been saved. But survival is not enough if access is restricted to the point of invisibility. A book that cannot be read by students, researchers, or even interested readers is only partially alive. It becomes an object of reverence rather than a source of knowledge. And that shift matters, especially for a novel that was written precisely to expose the dangers of passive reverence toward institutions.

This is why the idea of a facsimile is not just technical. It is ethical. A facsimile would restore the book’s material presence in a way that allows it to circulate again without endangering the original. It would allow scholars to study its typography, layout, translation choices, and historical context. It would return the book to intellectual life without removing it from preservation. In many major libraries around the world, this is standard practice for rare and fragile texts. The question is why we still treat such practices as optional rather than necessary in the Philippine context.

Digitization adds another layer to this responsibility. A high quality digital archive would break the physical limitations that currently define who can access the book. It would allow students from Iloilo, Cebu, Manila, or even overseas Filipino communities to engage with the text directly. It would also open space for comparative studies between the Spanish original, English translations, and this Hiligaynon version. Without digitization, we are essentially restricting a major cultural artifact to physical presence alone, which is an increasingly outdated model of knowledge preservation.

But even beyond preservation, there is a more provocative question that needs to be asked. Why is there no widely used contemporary Hiligaynon translation of El Filibusterismo? Languages evolve. The Hiligaynon of 1933 is not identical to the Hiligaynon spoken by younger generations today. If we are serious about accessibility, then we cannot treat translation as a one time historical event. It must be an ongoing process. Otherwise we trap Rizal in linguistic forms that slowly become inaccessible to the very communities he is supposed to belong to.

A modern Hiligaynon translation would not replace the 1933 version. It would extend it. It would allow Rizal to continue speaking across time, not just across space. It would also force us to confront a difficult truth. National literature is only as alive as the languages it can still be read in. Without continuous translation, even canonical texts begin to fossilize.

There is a deeper provocation here that we often avoid. We call Rizal the national hero, but we rarely ask what it actually means for a hero to exist in multiple Philippine languages. If Rizal can only be fully accessed through Spanish or English or standardized Filipino, then his “nationality” is linguistically narrowed. But if Rizal exists in Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Waray, Ilokano, and other Philippine languages, then his ideas become genuinely distributed across the archipelago. That is when nationalism becomes real in a practical sense rather than just symbolic rhetoric.

The existence of El Filibusterismo in Hiligaynon already proves that this distribution was happening nearly a century ago. The tragedy is that we have not built on it with the seriousness it deserves. We preserve the book, but we do not activate it. We protect it, but we do not circulate it. We display it, but we do not fully read it.

The most uncomfortable realization is this. The book behind glass is not just a historical object. It is a test. It asks whether we are willing to treat regional intellectual production as central rather than peripheral. It asks whether we are willing to read Rizal not only as a national symbol but as a multilingual text that belongs to many linguistic communities at once. And it asks whether preservation without access is enough for a country that claims to value its own literary history.

Right now, the book is preserved. The real question is whether it is still alive.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.