The Newberry Library essay “Rizal before ‘Rizal’: Lessons from His Notebook” written by Luis Castellvi Laukamp is a useful example of how access to a primary source does not, by itself, guarantee historical understanding. The article discusses an important manuscript: Rizal’s Clínica médica, a notebook of medical notes, sketches, language exercises, book lists, and draft letters from his student years in Manila, Madrid, and Berlin. As an object, the notebook is valuable. It shows Rizal’s medical training, his artistic ability, his reading habits, his linguistic formation, and his intellectual range. But the article moves too quickly from the existence of this archival object to large claims about Rizal’s politics.

You can have the primary source in front of you and still misread the historical figure if you do not understand the larger body of work, the historiography, and the arguments that have already been made.

The article claims that Rizal “always refused violence” and that he “did no such thing” as work for Philippine independence, using the December 15, 1896 manifesto and his application to serve as a physician in Cuba as evidence. It also suggests that his notebook “cracks” the image of Rizal as a pro-independence revolutionary because he expressed admiration for Madrid’s bourgeoisie. These claims are too blunt but are nothing new. They reduce a complicated political life to a few convenient pieces of evidence. They also repeat, without sufficient scrutiny, an older interpretation of Rizal as essentially reformist, moderate, and non-revolutionary.

The familiar image of Rizal as an anti-revolutionary derives largely from a historiographical tradition associated with Renato Constantino and Teodoro Agoncillo. Yet the genealogy of this interpretation deserves closer scrutiny. Their arguments ultimately rest on an earlier body of scholarship produced by Arsenio Manuel, Austin Craig, Charles Derbyshire, and above all Wenceslao Retana. Retana is particularly important. He was not simply Rizal’s biographer; he was also one of his most persistent critics, and his interpretations have exercised a remarkably long afterlife in Philippine historiography.

The evidentiary foundation of this tradition is less secure than is often assumed. Much of the argument depends on statements attributed to Rizal and Pío Valenzuela during the final weeks of Rizal’s imprisonment, when Rizal faced almost certain execution. Any historian should approach such documents with caution. Testimony produced under extreme pressure is notoriously difficult to evaluate, and Spanish colonial judicial procedure hardly inspires confidence. The problem is not whether these documents should be discarded altogether, but whether they should bear the extraordinary interpretive weight later historians placed upon them.

One might recall Antonio Luna’s statements under interrogation in Fort Santiago, including claims now regarded as highly questionable, such as the assertion that Rizal founded the Katipunan. No serious historian would treat such testimony as transparent evidence. Yet in Rizal’s case, documents produced under imprisonment, surveillance, and imminent death are often cited as though they settle the entire question of his politics.

Once these sources are accepted uncritically, later scholars merely reproduce the same conclusions. What appears to be a broad consensus often rests on a surprisingly narrow documentary base. The authority of the interpretation comes less from the abundance of evidence than from the repetition of earlier readings. This is why the Newberry essay matters as a symptom. It has a primary source, but it does not adequately situate that source within the long debate over Rizal’s political thought.

The difficulty becomes apparent when one turns to Rizal’s contemporaries. Figures who knew him personally, including associates in Spain such as Galicano Apacible, often described Rizal in terms that do not fit the image of a purely moderate reformist. To many of those who moved within the same political circles, Rizal’s ultimate aspirations were understood as fundamentally separatist. The contrast between these recollections and the later historiographical orthodoxy is striking.

Constantino’s reading, influential as it has been, also depended upon a selective use of Rizal’s correspondence. Certain texts—especially the famous letter of December 15, 1896—were elevated to privileged status because they seemed to confirm the image of Rizal as a reformist opposed to revolution. Yet Rizal’s correspondence is vast and often contradictory. Other letters reveal a far more complex political imagination. One of the most revealing is his letter to José Alejandrino, where he reflects on the characters of Elias and Ibarra:

“I regret having killed Elias instead of Ibarra… I would have preserved the life of Elias who was a noble character, patriotic, self-denying and disinterested—necessary qualities in a man who leads a revolution—whereas Crisóstomo Ibarra was an egoist who only decided to provoke rebellion when he was hurt.”

This passage does not by itself prove that Rizal advocated immediate insurrection. It does, however, complicate the familiar distinction between “reformist” Rizal and “revolutionary” Bonifacio. The categories are far less stable than Philippine textbooks often suggest.

The Newberry essay also misses the revolutionary reception of Rizal. Whatever Rizal’s precise position on armed struggle may have been in 1896, the Katipuneros themselves admired him. They attempted to rescue him. They made him honorary president of the Katipunan. His name functioned as a password. Bonifacio admired him. These facts do not prove that Rizal founded or directed the Revolution. They do show that the revolutionaries themselves did not regard him as irrelevant, timid, or simply opposed to their cause.

This is why the claim that Rizal was an American-created national hero is also historically misleading. It is true that American colonial officials preferred Rizal over more militant figures and helped institutionalize his commemoration. But they did not invent his prestige. They chose someone who was already the most admired nationalist of his generation. Rizal was not unknown before the Americans. His novels had circulated. His execution had transformed him into a martyr. His name already mattered to reformists and revolutionaries alike. The Americans appropriated an existing nationalist authority; they did not manufacture it from nothing.

The same applies to the claim that Rizal is not the national hero because no law declares him as such. This is only technically true. Rizal is not the national hero by statute. He is the national hero by convention. He is de facto, not de jure. Monuments, holidays, school curricula, currency, public rituals, scholarship, and popular memory all treat him as such. A law is unnecessary because the nation already behaves as if he occupies that role.

The problem with the Newberry essay, then is that it treats the notebook as though it can correct the nationalist image of Rizal without first understanding how that image was produced, contested, revised, and debated. It cites a primary source but misses the historiographical field. It sees the medical student, the artist, the polyglot, and the admirer of European culture, but it does not adequately account for the novelist, the separatist imagination, the revolutionary reception, the colonial trial, the unstable prison evidence, or the later scholarly debate.

This is the larger lesson: primary sources do not interpret themselves. A notebook can enrich our understanding of Rizal, but it cannot be used to flatten him. To say that Rizal studied medicine, admired aspects of Madrid, copied fortification diagrams, or wanted to serve as a doctor in Cuba does not prove that he lacked revolutionary imagination or nationalist commitment. It only proves that Rizal was what serious historians have always known him to be: complicated.

The debate over whether Rizal or Bonifacio better embodies the nation is legitimate. The claim that Rizal was simply a reformist, simply anti-revolutionary, or simply an American invention is not. Those claims survive because teachers, professors, and public commentators too often return to the same small cluster of documents while neglecting the larger archive from which a more complicated Rizal emerges. The result is not a more historical Rizal, but a smaller one. With Rizal, perhaps more than with any other Filipino figure, a little learning is a dangerous thing..