Resil B. Mojares: The Cebuano Historian

Last week, on September 5, Resil B. Mojares, a beloved Cebuano author, historian, and educator, passed away just a day after turning 83. He had a remarkable career that spanned more than half a century and was called the “Visayan Titan of Letters” for elevating vernacular and regional scholarship and the “light of the South” by historian Manuel L. Quezon III. In 2018, he was conferred the Order of National Artists of the Philippines for Literature. Long before this honor, Resil had already built his enduring monument in the books he wrote, the archives he preserved, and the generations of Filipinos whom he taught to see the country whole.

For decades, Philippine letters and historiography seemed to obey an unstated law: to matter nationally, an idea had to be born in Manila and validated by the capital. The provinces were too often treated as peripheral to the national story. Then came Resil.

Resil dismantled that notion with the patience of an archivist and precision of a novelist. He demonstrated that Philippine history was also being written in Cebu and the Visayas, in provincial towns, vernacular newspapers, forgotten manuscripts, and lives rarely included in conventional national narratives. Born on September 4, 1943, in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte, Resil entered the world amid war. His mother, Lourdes Buagas, fled approaching Japanese patrols and gave birth to him in an evacuation hut. His childhood journeys to his mother’s ancestral Ginatilan in Cebu connected him early to the Visayan countryside that later figured prominently in his writing.

He earned Literature degrees from the University of San Carlos (USC) and became a journalist. During Martial Law in 1972, he was arrested and detained at Camp Sergio Osmeña, and as he was prevented afterward from returning to the newsroom, he turned toward the archives and the university. In 1975, he established the Cebuano Studies Center at USC, helping preserve periodicals, manuscripts, folk songs, oral literature, and other fragments of Cebuano memory.

His bibliography was formidable. “Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel”, “Theater in Society, Society in Theater”, “The War Against the Americans”, and his celebrated “Brains of the Nation” were among the works that established him as one of our foremost historians. But there was another Resil beyond the national artist and imposing bibliography --the Resil I was fortunate enough to know.

I first heard his name in college from my History 2 teacher, Professor Felisa U. Etemadi, who always spoke of him fondly. In 2004, when I began my MA in History at USC, I was thrilled that Resil was supposed to be one of my professors. Unfortunately, he was then on sabbatical. I finally met him in December 2007 as the writer of Argao’s history for the Cebu Provincial History Project. Resil served as general editor and one of its primary architects. But it was only in 2018 that we truly talked at length, after he asked a common friend for a copy of the Lucero genealogy I had written. We spent hours discussing genealogy and local history and discovered that his mother’s family was connected to a Buagas in our family tree.

In 2020, seeing one of my articles cited in his “The Book of Go” was a dream come true. He also helped when I led the Sergio Osmeña DNA Project in 2023, through his writings and guidance in presenting our final report. He was never my formal mentor, but he was always generous whenever I asked about history or needed help locating references.

Resil taught us that seemingly small things matter: a forgotten manuscript, a family history, a provincial newspaper, or the memory of an old community. Together they make the national story richer and more truthful. I once wrote that being a quarter as good as Resil Mojares would be good enough for me. I would still say the same today. He taught us where to look, how to read, and, most importantly, that no corner of the country was ever too small to matter to history.