Local Government Unit
The Local Government Unit comprises an Executive headed by the Mayor which has eleven (11) functional departments directly under it, and the Legislative, also called the Sangguniang Bayan (SB), which is presided over by the Vice Mayor. With eight regular members (Councilors), Barangay Federation President and Sangguniang Kabataan Federation President.
The Executive
The Executive Wing of the LGU is headed by the Mayor and is responsible for the general supervision and control of all programs, projects, activities and services provided by the Municipal Government. In addition to this, the Executive is responsible for enforcing all laws and ordinances relating to the municipality, initiating and maximizing the generation of resources and revenues, applying the same to the implementation of development plans, program objectives and priorities, particularly those resources and revenues programmed for agro-industrial development and country wide growth progress. Further, the Executive is also responsible for ensuring the delivery of basic services and the provision of adequate facilities.
The Legislative
Presided by the Vice Mayor, eight Regular Members (Councilors),ABC President and SK President and is concerned with the legislative agenda for the LGU and is responsible for approving ordinances , enacting legislation and passing resolutions necessary for an effective efficient running of the municipality. To help it in its task, the legislature has constituted a number of Standing committees internally to oversee specific areas of concern and frame legislative policies and guidelines particular to specific departments with in the LGU. The secretariat of the SB is responsible for preparing the agenda for SB Meetings and keeps a record of the legislative proceedings.
Municipal Government Officials:
Mayor: Rolen I. Urriquia
Vice-Mayor: Antonino A. Aurelio
Councilors:
Russel John V. Isles
Ferdinand O. Sumague
Earl John Isleta
Denis v. Virina
Nicanor U. Naguit
Lauro c. Sunega
Marlon Z. Solquia
Mario Sumague
Romelito Sumague(ABC President)
Raymart U. Alcos (Sk President)
Introductory
Brief History :
By Mr. Isagani Visey & Mr. Valentine Urrea
Formerly, the small town of
In 1912, after the liberation, Barrio Pauli obtained her municipal status with Pedro Urrea, Sr. as its Municipal President. She then became a
Because of the vehement desire of the people to maintain its municipal status, the residents led by Fortunato U. Arban and Agustin U. Vista then councilors of Nagcarlan, Laguna petitioned the Office of the Governor-General of the Philippine Islands praying that the former
On December 19, 1918, Acting Governor-General Charles E. Yeather issued an Executive Order No. 58 increasing the twenty seven municipalities of the Province of Laguna to twenty-eight by separating the former municipality of Rizal from the municipality of Nagcarlan and reorganizing the same into an independent municipality comprising eight barrios such as Antipolo, Entablado, Maiton, Laguan, Pauli, Talaga, Tuy and Pook that took effect in January 1, 1919.
After such creation, Fortunato U. Arban and Agustin Vista were appointed Municipal President and Municipal Vice President respectively, until they got elected in the same positions during the first local elections in 1919.
Historical Growth
At the heart of Laguna’s teeming coconut regions bordered by Mt. San Cristobal at the South, Mt. Banahaw at the east and Mt. Basilin at the northwest lies the municipality of Rizal, named after the greatest national hero fifty years ago. Approximately enough, a life-size statue of Dr. Jose P. Rizal stands at the center of the plaza.
Towards the end of the Spanish regime, Rizal was a barrio of Nagcarlan called “Pauli” from the Tagalog “pauli-uli”, or moving back and forth, after the meandering creek close by. During the American regime Pauli was given municipal status, with Pedro Urrea, Sr. as Municipal President. This lasted a brief two years, however, unable to maintain itself financially, the new town was returned to Nagcarlan as Barrio Rizal.
Between 1912 and 1918, the residents, led by Fortunato Arban, Agustin Vista and Felix Isleta then Municipal Councilors, led a renewed drive for municipal status of Rizal. They would have a town of Rizal that would take in the barrios of Antipolo, Entablado, Laguan, Maiton, Pauli, Pook, Talaga and Tuy. This was realized on December 18, 1918, when Governor-General Charles E. Yeater issued an Executive Order No. 58 creating the municipality of Rizal. Fortunato Arban was the first President.
When the World War II broke out in 1941, the sons of Rizal were at the forefront, and the blood of some of them were spilled in Bataan. Those who survived in the Death March returned to continue their struggle against the invaders in the wilds of Mt. Banahaw and Sierra Madre Mountain. Pablo Urrea, elected Mayor at the outbreak of war, secretly helped the guerillas during the occupation until the danger to his personal safety became too great, then relinguished his post to Vice Mayor Ismael Sombilla joined the partisans in the mountains. Sombilla soon found himself in the same situation. Being a guerilla himself, he stayed as long as he could at his post, then transferred his post to Councilor Dionisio Limcuando.
On January 23, 1945, the guerillas ambushed Japanese convey at Barrio Pook. For this the Japanese burned the heart of the town.
The men who distinguished themselves as partisan leaders included Cayo Verador, Aquilino Carpena, Eriberto Sombilla, Isidro Urriquia and Vicente (Ganggay) Isleta.
After the liberation, guerilla leaders persuaded Captain Isidro Urriquia to run for Mayor. He ran unopposed and occupied the post for three terms, during which period he constructed a new municipal building and cemetery chapel, improved streets, the waterworks system and Puericulture Center.
At the height of the Huk campaign, Mayor Urriquia organized his former guerilla comrades into the Rizal Fighting Unit, which with the battle cry “we have no rice, but we have bullets” drove the dissidents out of the territorial jurisdiction of the municipality and restored peace and order. For his courageous deeds, he was awarded commendations from Secretary Ramon Magsaysay of National Defense, Brigadier General Claro Lizardo, Colonel Eulogio Balao and other ranking army officers.
In 1950, Urriquia relinguished the mayoralty to Vice Mayor Ismael Sombilla and ran for provincial Board Member under the Liberal Party banner and topped the victorious group.
Mayor Sombilla, meanwhile served his community well for two successive terms. He was instrumental in the construction of additional school buildings, the new Community and Health Center building, the annex to the Municipal Building, cemented roads and feeder roads.
As if fate had decreed it, the name of Arban rose again in the firmament, when Melecio A. Arban, grandson of the revered and beloved Fortunato Arban, founder of Rizal won the Mayoralty in the municipal elections of 1967 as the poor man’s candidate. After barely a year in office Mayor Arban had caused the opening of the Community High School, a long felt need of the municipality, In taxation, his administration has succeeded in including the citizens to pay their real estate taxes to the point that Rizal stood second in the province in realty tax collection.
Jose Rizal
José Rizal, son of a Filipino father and a Chinese mother, came from a wealthy family. Despite his family's wealth, they suffered discrimination because neither parent was born in the peninsula. Rizal studied at the Ateneo, a private high school, and then to the University of St. Thomas in Manila. He did his post graduate work at the University of Madrid in 1882. For the next five years, he wandered through Europe discussing politics wherever he went. In 1886, he studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and wrote his classic novel Noli me Tangere, which condemned the Catholic Church in the Philippines for its promotion of Spanish colonialism. Immediately upon its publication, he became a target for the police who even shadowed him when he returned to the Philippines in 1887. He left his country shortly thereafter to return to Spain where he wrote a second novel, El Filibusterismo (1891), and many articles in his support of Filipino nationalism and his crusade to include representatives from his homeland in the Spanish Cortes.
He returned to Manila in 1892 and created the Liga Filipina, a political group that called for peace change for the islands. Nevertheless, Spanish officials were displeased and exiled Rizal to the island of Mindanao. During his four years there, he practiced medicine, taught students, and collected local examples of flora and fauna while recording his discoveries. Even though he lost touched with others who were working for Filipino independence, he quickly denounced the movement when it became violent and revolutionary. After Andrés Bonifacio issued the Grito de Balintawak in 1896, Rizal was arrested, convicted of sedition, and executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896.
Following the revolution, Rizal was made a saint by many religious cults while the United States authorities seized on his non-violent stance and emphasized his views on Filipino nationalism rather than those of the more action-oriented Emilio Aguinaldo and Andrés Bonifacio.
José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896), the "Pride of the Malay Race" and "The Great Malayan," is the national hero of the Philippines.
As a polyglot, he mastered 22 languages including Catalan, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Malay, Sanskrit, Spanish, Tagalog, and other Philippine languages.
As a polymath, he was also an architect, artist, educator, economist, ethnologist, scientific farmer, historian, inventor, journalist, linguist, musician, mythologist, nationalist, naturalist, novelist, ophthalmologist, physician, poet, propagandist, sculptor, and sociologist.
A famous patriot, the anniversary of Rizal's death, December 30, is now celebrated as a holiday in the Philippines, called Rizal Day.
Family
The seventh of the eleven children of Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. Dominican friars granted the family the privilege of the lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm, but contentious litigation followed; later, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau had the buildings destroyed.
Rizal is the descendant of Domingo Lam-co, a Chinese immigrant who sailed to the Philippines from Amoy, China in the mid 17th century (see Chinese Filipino). Lam-co married Inez de la Rosa, a Sangley native of Luzon. To free his descendants from the racist anti-Chinese policies of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname "Mercado" (market) so that they would not forget their Chinese merchant roots.
As José became more embroiled in controversy, his elder brother and mentor Paciano advised him to change his name to protect the Mercados from Spanish authority. José changed his surname from Mercado to his middle name, "Rizal." The name is derived from Spanish "rizal" or "ricial," meaning "verdant" or "green" (as ricestalk), the main agricultural crop of their family industry.
Aside from his indigenous Malay and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that José had traces of Spanish, Japanese and Negrito ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather (Teodora's great-grandfather) is Eugenio Ursua, a descendant of Japanese settlers, who married a Filipina named Benigna (surname unknown). These two gave birth to Regina Ursua who married a Sangley mestizo from Pangasinán named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora's grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a mestizo (half-caste Spaniard) named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, the father of Teodora.
Education
He first studied under Justiniano Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He went to Manila to study at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila (now Ateneo de Manila University) where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877. He continued his education in the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a degree in land surveying and assessor, and at the same time in the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he then decided to study medicine (ophthalmology) in the University of Santo Tomas, but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who operated the University.
Against his father's wishes, he traveled to Madrid and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate.
Writings
José Rizal was known for two novels, Noli Me Tangere (1887) published in Berlin and El Filibusterismo (1891) published in Ghent, which are social commentaries of the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. These books, inspired by Cervantes' Don Quixotes' ideals are responsible for the development of a unified Filipino consciousness and identity, which led to the Philippine Revolution of 1896.
Legacy
Rizal was a reformer for an open society rather than a revolutionary for political independence. As a leader of the Propaganda Movement of Filipino students in Spain, he contributed newspaper articles to La Solidaridad in Barcelona with the following agenda:
* That the Philippines be a province of Spain
* Representation in the Cortes (Parliament)
* Filipino priests rather than the Spanish Augustinians, Dominicans, or Franciscans
* Freedom of assembly and speech
* Equal rights before the law (for both Filipino and Spanish plaintiffs)
The authorities in the Philippines could not accept these reforms, as the social reforms threatened the status quo; thus upon his return to Manila in 1892 he was exiled, being accused of subversion for forming a civic movement called La Liga Filipina. While exiled in Dapitan, Mindanao, he established a school and a hospital.
Last days
In 1896, the Katipunan, a patriotic secret society, launched a revolution. Rizal had been given leave by the colonial government to serve in Cuba as a volunteer to minister to victims of yellow fever. He was arrested en route, imprisoned in Barcelona, and returned to stand trial. He was implicated by association with members of the Katipunan and tried before a court-martial for rebellion, sedition, and establishing an illegal association. Rizal was convicted of all three and sentenced to death.
With his execution nearing, he wrote his last poem, "Mi Último Adiós" (My Last Farewell), which played a role in later events. In the early morning, he assisted in two Masses and was finally allowed to marry his fiancée and lover, Josephine Bracken at 5:30 am, after having been denied a marriage license the year before. He was executed by firing squad in Bagumbayan Field (now Rizal Park) in Manila) some two hours later. His body was buried in a secret grave in Paco Cemetery, registered as a suicide.
A statue is present now at the place where he fell, designed by Richard Kissling of the famed "William Tell" sculpture, with the inscription- I want to show to those who deprive people the right to love of country, that when we know how to sacrifice ourselves for our rights and convictions, death does not matter if one dies for those one loves- for his country and for others dear to him
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