Dr. Jose Rizal Park

This guide to Dr. Jose Rizal Park in Seattle opens with the Filipino Alumni Association's fifteen-year campaign to have this Seattle hillside named for their hero, and sculptor Anastacio Caedo's decision to cast his bust smaller than life-size, a choice that drove organizer Trinidad Rojo to resign from the preservation society in protest. It traces Rizal's life as a physician, novelist, and reformer who challenged Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines through his writing, and the 1896 military trial that used his own books as evidence against him. His assigned defense counsel, notably, was a Spanish artillery lieutenant with no legal training.