With the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1850s, trading wealth in Manila and Cebu grew sharply with the increasing activities of exchange with Europe. This increased wealth enabled a new class of creoles and mestizo families to gain some local political and economic power.
At this stage in history, a group of young Filipinos created what the called "La Propaganda" movement. The propagandistas called for a national project and they desired to create through their writings and projects a new identity for others in the land of their birth. Later, Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. Pilar, and Graeceano Lopez Jaena were to become the most famous of these sort of writers and thinkers. However, initially, there attention was mostly on the court of opinion in Madrid--rather than focusing on organizing a full radical or revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, emotional fires had already been burning in the countryside throughout the island of Luzon due to growing religious campaigns amongst the local populist leadership. For example, there was a strong millennialist movement. Thee was also a movement which eventually led in 1901 to the founding of the Filipino Independent Catholic Church, i.e. a national church movement where the church said its sermons, prayers, & stations of the cross in tagalong--the major language of the Luzon region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Independent_Church
Manila was a city run by the Spaniards. Apolinario de la Cruz was just one of many of the local Tagalog preachers who threatened Manila's hierarchy of church and state. By their radical interpretations of Catholicism and their ability to organize the poor and repressed rural peoples of Luzon, Cruz and others populists were seen as demagogues and threat to the Spanish control of the Philippines. Cruz was eventually executed by the Spanish crown, which had seen its first duties to protecting the Catholic church from indigenous rebellion.
http://www.slideshare.net/corpuz/filipino-early-revolts-by-mr-herbert-saquing-corpuz-presentation
Other church movements took form in the early 1870s. These movements, centered around Cavite, demand that more duties and control at the country's many local parishes be turned over to laity control--as there were not enough priests in most of the rural regions by then. Again this so-called revolt was put down and the local leaders executed.
Finally, in 1892, Jose Rizal returned back to the Philippines. By the time, he and others had realized that the Propagandista movement had not succeed in convincing the Madrid courts to share more control locally.
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