Andrés Bonifacio

Andrés Bonifacio

Andrés Bonifacio y de Castro was a Filipino revolutionary leader and the president of the Tagalog Republic. He was one of the founders and later Supremo of the Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan. He is often called ‘The Father of the Philippine Revolution’

About Andrés Bonifacio in brief

Summary Andrés BonifacioAndrés Bonifacio y de Castro was a Filipino revolutionary leader and the president of the Tagalog Republic. He was one of the founders and later Supremo of the Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan. He is often called \”The Father of the Philippine Revolution\”. He was born on November 30, 1863, in Tondo, Manila, and was the first of six children of Catalina de Castro, a Spanish Mestiza, and Santiago Bon ifacio, an Alkalde of Tondo. He learned English while employed as a clerk-messenger by a British firm. He would become the chief propagandist of the revived La Liga Filipina. He died on May 10, 1897, in Dapitan, Samar, after being arrested and deported for meeting for Rizal’s meeting for Spain’s colonial government in the Western Mindanao region in 1892. His son, born in early 1896, who died of smallpox in infancy, was the only member of his family to survive the Spanish invasion of the Philippines in 1879. He had a daughter, Gregoria de Jesús, who was the daughter of a prominent citizen and landowner from Caloocan. Her parents did not agree at first to their relationship as Andrés was a freemason and freemasons were then considered enemies of the Catholic church.

But her parents eventually gave in and the couple were married through a Catholic ceremony in Binondo Church in March 1893 or 1894. The couple also were married in a friend’s house in Santa Cruz, Manila on the same day of their church wedding. In his late teens, he worked as a mandatario for the British trading firm Fleming and Company, where he rose to become a corredor of tar, rattan and other goods. He was also a theater actor and often played the role of Bernardo Carpio, a fictional character in Tagalog folklore. In 1892, he became chief chief of the Kagalangs-galangs-Katipunans Movement of Propaganda Movement of the Filipino reformists in Spain. After the death of J.R. Rizala in 1894, he was officially named chief of Kagalans-galans-KatIPunan, or Kagalas-gaang-gaan, in full. He later became chief of Katipas-Taasang and later the chief of Kagalang na Kagalinsa-gaansang, or KATATASTAASANG, or more commonly known as the ‘Katipasang’ movement, in which he led the fight against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. In 1897, he would become chief of the ‘KATAS-TAasang-KAGALINSA-KATIPUNAN Movement, or ‘Kataras-na Kagalainsa-Kataasang’, in full, in Manila.