Family
José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. His parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. He was the seventh of their eleven children.
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 on the farm torn down.
Upon enrolling at the Ateneo, Rizal changed his surname to “Rizal” to escape the infamy of the name “Mercado”–his brother, Paciano, had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora who had been declared subversives.
Along one lineage, Rizal was descended from 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 anti-Chinese animosity of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname “Mercado” (market) to indicate their Chinese merchant roots.
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) was 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.
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