JUNE 19 this year was Jose Rizal's 160th birth anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, the New Era University (NEU) organized a two-day webinar using the YouTube platform. I was one of the invited speakers (by NEU's professor Zaldy Petorio) for the webinar's first day, June 21, together with fellow historians Dr. Vicente Villan of the University of the Philippines Diliman and Professor Ferdinand Victoria, currently of the Mentari Intercultural School in Jakarta, Indonesia. I spoke on Republic Act (RA) 1425 of 1956, the law that requires schools, colleges and universities in the Philippines to offer courses on the life, works and writings of Rizal, particularly the novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. To be more precise, I talked about the nationalist foundations of the law through the lens of the (political) historical particularities of its principal sponsors, Sen. (and President) Jose P. Laurel and Sen. Claro M. Recto.

Admittedly, a chapter of Reynaldo Ileto's book, Knowledge and Pacification: On the US Conquest and the Writing of Philippine History, published in 2017, had a huge influence on my presentation. Ileto looked at the Senate deliberations concerning RA 1425 in 1956 as a clash of histories, in particular, on the question of the 'foundational event' in Philippine history and the role of crucial personalities and institutions therein.