Lessons from Rizal and Mojares in ‘Rizal Reading Pigafetta’

I returned to Resil B. Mojares’s Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History this morning, and I found myself reading the essay “Rizal Reading Pigafetta” with a different kind of uneasiness. I was not simply reading about Rizal reading Pigafetta. I was watching one reader confront another reader across more than a century, and somewhere between them, I became aware of my own habits as a reader, researcher, teacher, and writer. What struck me most was not Rizal’s intelligence, which we have been taught to admire since childhood, but his hunger. He read as if something had been taken from him. He read as if the past had been deliberately misplaced and he had to search through the libraries of Europe to recover it. He read European accounts of the Philippines not because he believed Europe possessed the final truth about us, but because those accounts contained traces that could be questioned, rearranged, contradicted, and sometimes turned against the very system that produced them.

This is where Mojares becomes particularly important. His essay does not allow us to turn Rizal into the familiar monument of the national hero who simply loved the Philippines and wrote beautiful things about the nation. Mojares gives us a more complicated Rizal, one who understood that knowledge itself could become a site of struggle. Rizal entered the libraries of Europe and encountered a Philippines that had already been described by others. Pigafetta, Morga, missionaries, travelers, ethnographers, historians, and Orientalists had produced texts about a people who had rarely been given the authority to describe themselves. Rizal therefore did something deceptively simple and intellectually radical. He read them back. He entered their texts, examined their claims, searched their silences, questioned their assumptions, and wrote from the margins of their authority. Reading was no longer merely an act of receiving information. It became an act of interrogation.

That realization made me think about how we read today. We have more books, more archives, more databases, more photographs, more videos, more journals, more newspapers, more platforms, and more information than Rizal could have imagined. Yet having access to information does not necessarily make us better readers. We can search almost anything in seconds and still fail to ask the most important question, which is who produced the information and why we have accepted it as truth. We can have thousands of references and still reproduce the same old assumptions. We can quote extensively and think we are being scholarly while simply repeating the vocabulary of institutions that have always had the power to define us. The problem today is no longer only the absence of information. It is the abundance of information without sufficient suspicion.

Rizal’s reading of Pigafetta therefore offers an unsettling lesson. We should not read merely to confirm what we already believe about ourselves. We should read precisely where the text makes us uncomfortable. We should read the colonial archive not only for what it says but also for what it cannot see. We should read government reports, official histories, newspapers, development plans, institutional statements, tourism materials, academic studies, and even our own favorite writers with the same intellectual restlessness. Every text has a position. Every archive has a structure. Every supposedly neutral description contains decisions about what deserves attention and what can be forgotten.

What I found especially provocative in Mojares’s account is Rizal’s realization that the Filipino past had to be recovered from sources produced by people who did not necessarily understand it in Filipino terms. This does not mean that European sources are useless. Rizal himself depended heavily on them. The lesson is more uncomfortable than that. We sometimes need to enter the archive of the powerful in order to expose its limitations. We need to know the language of the institution before we can effectively challenge its version of reality. We need to understand the archive before we can identify what the archive has excluded. Rizal did not escape the intellectual structures of Europe by ignoring them. He studied them intensely enough to argue with them.

This has consequences for the way we think about Philippine scholarship today. We continue to inherit categories that were not necessarily designed by us. We continue to explain our regions through frameworks developed elsewhere. We continue to make our local cultures legible by translating them into institutional language that often privileges what can be measured, classified, funded, exhibited, or cited. Even our desire to make Philippine culture visible can sometimes reproduce the old problem of allowing someone else to determine what counts as culture in the first place. We celebrate our food, festivals, crafts, literature, heritage sites, indigenous knowledge, and local languages, but we must also ask who gets to interpret them, who gets to profit from them, who gets to archive them, and whose version becomes official.

This is where Rizal becomes useful to me now, not as an idol but as a method. His lesson is not that we should become another Rizal. His lesson is that we should become more demanding readers. We should learn to distrust the convenience of inherited narratives. We should be willing to investigate the footnotes, the missing names, the untranslated words, the discarded manuscripts, the local memories, and the stories that never entered the archive. We should be suspicious whenever a complicated history is presented as a simple story. We should become uncomfortable when a single institution, scholar, government, corporation, or cultural authority claims to possess the definitive interpretation of a people.

Mojares also reminds us that Rizal was not merely collecting evidence for patriotic decoration. He was constructing a counterhistory. He wanted to show that the Philippines did not begin when Europeans arrived. This seems obvious now, almost embarrassingly obvious, yet the persistence of colonial habits of thought suggests that we have not fully absorbed its implications. The question is not simply whether we know that precolonial societies existed. The deeper question is whether we still unconsciously organize our understanding of the Philippines around the moment when Europeans began writing about us. We may have rejected the old colonial narrative intellectually while continuing to reproduce its chronology, its categories, and its hierarchy of sources.

Reading “Rizal Reading Pigafetta” also made me think about my own work with regional literature and languages. The more I read writers from outside the established centers of Philippine cultural production, the more I become convinced that the problem is not that the regions have no stories. The problem is that many of those stories have not yet been granted the same intellectual status as the stories produced in Manila or in institutions already recognized by the center. A poem in Hiligaynon does not become more significant because it is translated into English. A Kinaray-a story does not become more intelligent because a metropolitan publisher accepts it. A regional archive does not become legitimate only when a national institution discovers it. The challenge is to build systems of reading in which regional knowledge does not constantly have to ask permission from the center before it can become knowledge.

This is why Rizal’s reading feels strangely contemporary to me. He was surrounded by information but understood that information was never innocent. He knew that the archive could illuminate and conceal at the same time. He knew that reading another person’s account of your own country required both gratitude and suspicion. He knew that European scholarship could provide tools for understanding the Philippines while also carrying the assumptions of the world that produced it. That tension remains with us. We still need the archive, but we must learn how to argue with it. We still need scholarship, but we must ask whose questions that scholarship is answering. We still need institutions, but we must ask whose knowledge those institutions recognize.

The most important lesson I take from Mojares’s Rizal is therefore not about nationalism alone. It is about intellectual independence. Intellectual independence does not mean refusing foreign ideas, rejecting Western scholarship, or pretending that knowledge can exist without exchange. It means entering every system of knowledge with enough confidence to question it. It means reading widely without surrendering our capacity to disagree. It means learning from sources without allowing those sources to dictate the limits of our imagination. It means understanding that a citation is not an act of obedience. A citation can also be the beginning of an argument.

And this is what reading should do to us. A good book should not merely give us more information about the past. It should make the present harder to accept uncritically. After reading Mojares on Rizal reading Pigafetta, I find myself looking differently at the texts surrounding me. I want to know who wrote them, who was absent from them, what language they were written in, what assumptions they carry, and what kinds of lives become invisible when their categories become dominant. I want to read not only for answers but for the places where the answers become unstable.

Rizal went to European libraries looking for the Philippines. What he found was not a single recovered truth but a complicated archive filled with fragments, contradictions, errors, silences, and possibilities. That may be the more difficult lesson for us today. The Philippines is still being written, and many of the people writing it are still not being read. Our task is not simply to produce more texts. It is to develop better ways of reading them. We must read against the archive when necessary, across languages when possible, beyond the center whenever we can, and always with the humility to recognize that the truth about a country cannot belong permanently to one reader, one institution, one discipline, or one version of history.

Rizal read Pigafetta to understand what had been said about the Philippines. He annotated Morga to change how that history was understood. We read Rizal and Mojares today because we also need to question how our history and culture are being told. The question is no longer simply, “What happened to the Philippines?” but “Who is still telling us what the Philippines means?” Rizal reminds us that reading is not only about finding answers but also about asking who wrote them, what they left out, and why we accepted them. We do not have to accept every answer simply because it has been repeated for a long time. We can read again, question what we find, and tell our own stories.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.