José Rizal spearheaded an anticolonial literary movement that aimed to deepen the understanding of Filipinos’ emerging identity through critical engagement with colonial archives. Through his writings in Spanish, the Filipino anticolonial leader gathers and constructs his people’s prehistory in order to promote and comprehend the identity-political transformation his writings describe and prescribe, the consolidation of a “Filipino” identity different from the term’s previous definition of “Spaniards born in the Philippines.” Through analysis of his annotations to Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas and his novel Noli me tangere, I argue that Rizal serves as a useful prototype for Colonial Latinx studies, as both model and cautionary tale. I eventually conclude that Rizal’s literary and historiographical contributions must be understood as on the one hand, a register of colonial maladies – frustrations with powerful Spanish friars and inept and naïve colonized peoples alike – and on the other hand, a rehearsal space for future liberties, including the freedom to define one’s own identity in dialogue with and against colonial expectations and discourses.