December 30, 2013 marks the centennial of the Rizal Monument, which was built as the tomb and memorial to Jose P. Rizal and has since then served as the de facto symbol of our nationhood. This mall is reminiscent of the National Mall in Washington D.C. and is, in fact, roughly the same width and orientation. Thus, a marker would forever serve as a reminder of where the country’s National Hero had fallen, his bones made sacred to the budding Filipino nation. At Fort Santiago, a splintered piece of spine—remains on display in gilded and crystal-protected splendor, a kind of monstrance of the cult of nationhood.Thus whether in the trappings of Catholicism’s veneration of the saints, or transmogrified into Brown Christ, Filipinos were inclined—thought it only right—to give Rizal the honor that he was due. Act No. The Rizal Monument is a memorial monument in Rizal Park in Manila, Philippines built to commemorate the Filipino nationalist, Jose Rizal. When a typhoon demolished the Independence Flagpole in the 1970s, it was rebuilt; and it was here, as Ninoy Aquino’s funeral cortege slowly made its way escorted by millions, that what the dictatorship denied the Filipino people themselves undertook: the flag in front of the Rizal Monument lowered to half mast, in symbolic tribute from the Republic’s protomartyr to its new martyr of democracy.The Rizal Monument, too, is the silent party in the ritual obeisance that foreign leaders pay to the most bravo of the indios.
In the end, the Rizal Memorial Cultural Center was approved; Magsaysay himself laid the cornerstone of the only building that would be completed, the National Library.In the meantime, the park lay bare and unkempt; the Rizal Monument neglected, muddy in the rain and surrounded with tall cogon in the summer. According to the UAP, the steel revision to the Rizal Monument “was dismantled during Holy Week, reportedly to prevent any court injunction from restraining them as government offices were closed during holidays.”The removal of the pylon, however, only signalled a rush to employ beautification efforts. Hindi, hindi! The Americans certainly had no compunctions about assimilating the cult of Rizal renaming districts, cities, and provinces after Rizal—this, the Philippine Commission undertook. 5,000. The remodeling undertaken by the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission (JRNCC)—and designed by Juan Nakpil, who would later become the first National Artist for Architecture—was widely criticized. It is the Luneta—an annexed tract of land beyond the seat of the Spanish colonial government and religious authority; the centerpiece of the holistic overhauling of new Western conquerors, for both good and bad; and the machinations of politicians in the past half a century—that bears for the Rizal Monument the burdens of the historical narrative that it hosted—a historical narrative that is of all us Filipinos’.Layered maps of Luneta—particularly of the Rizal Park—trace the evolution of the area over time, to provide a greater context to the landscape cradling the Rizal Monument. All have the Rizal monument vignette on the banknote. Conforming to the shape of the river and the sea-edge that surrounded it, the walls of Manila—walls that had been built as fortification against foreign invasion and native rebellion—served as a sixty-six hectare reliquary of medieval dreams.At its historic core was Fort Santiago—the old palisaded settlement of Maynilad, turned into the Fort of St. James, named after the patron saint of the conquista of Castille, Leon, and Aragon invoked by the Catholic Monarchs as they wrested away the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors.