© 2013 by Jensen DG. Mañebog
[Editor's update: April 2020]
BORN ON November 30, 1863, Andres Bonifacio y de Castro, founder and later the ‘Supremo’ (supreme leader) of the Katipunan, was two-year younger than Jose Rizal.
Bonifacio was the eldest of five children of Santiago Bonifacio, a tailor who served as a teniente mayor of Tondo, Manila, and Catalina de Castro, a mestiza born of a Spanish father and a Filipino-Chinese mother. When his parents died of sickness, Andres stopped attending school to support his siblings. He made and sold canes and paper fans, crafted posters for commercial firms, worked in the British trading firm ‘Fleming and Company’, later transferred as storehouse worker to the German trading firm ‘Fressell and Company’, and even moonlighted as an actor in moro-moro plays.
