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Updated: April 30, 2025
The Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to it, as the genuine sons of the country, not to mention the historical precedent, but the friar, who was looking after his own interests, did not yield. W. E. Retana, who was a journalist in Manila at the time, in a note to this chapter.
Just before Christmas of 1890, this Hispano-Filipino Association gave a largely attended banquet at which there were many prominent speakers. Rizal stayed away, not because of growing pessimism, as Retana suggests, but because one of the speakers was the same Becerra who had feared to act when the outrage against the body of Rizal's brother-in-law had been reported to him.
Retana ought to know of what he is writing, for he was in the employ of the friars for several years and later in Spain wrote extensively for the journal supported by them to defend their position in the Philippines. He has also been charged with having strongly urged Rizal's execution in 1896.
During the Kalamba discussion in Spain, Retana, until 1899 always scurrilously anti-Filipino, made the mistake of his life, for he charged Rizal's family with not paying their rent, which was not true. While Rizal believed that duelling was murder, to judge from a pair of pictures preserved in his album, he evidently considered that homicide of one like Retana was justifiable.
The Spaniards, of course, soon discovered their existence, the first mention of them being made by De Morga, in his "Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas" . He speaks of them as inhabiting the interior of a rough mountainous country, where are "many natives who are not pacified, nor has anyone gone into their country, who call themselves Ygolotes," Here we have the first form, the classic form according to Retana, of the word now universally written Igorrote, or in English Igorot.
The invention of Padre Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity on Rizal's part, in conceding that there could have existed any friar capable of talking frankly with an Indian." W. E. Retana, in note to this chapter in the edition published by him at Barcelona in 1908.
After the Spanish custom, his seconds immediately called upon the author of the libel. Retana notes in his "Vida del Dr. Rizal" that the incident closed in a way honorable to both Rizal and himself he, Retana, published an explicit retraction and abject apology in the Madrid papers.
Their charges were easily disproved, but they had enough cunning to invent new charges continually, and prejudice gave ready credence to them. Finally an unreasoning fury broke out and in blind passion innocent persons were struck down; the taste for blood once aroused, irresponsible writers like that Retana who has now become Rizal's biographer, whetted the savage appetite for fresh victims.
Finally, when Weyler left the Islands an investigation was ordered into his administration, owing to rumors of extensive and systematic frauds on the government, but nothing more came of the case than that Retana, later Rizal's biographer, wrote a book in the General's defense, "extensively documented," and also abusively anti-Filipino.
Twenty or more families were made homeless and the other tenants were forbidden to shelter them under pain of their own eviction. This is the proceeding in which Retana suggests that the governor-general and the landlords were legally within their rights. If so, Spanish law was a disgrace to the nation.
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