Resil B. Mojares died on September 5, 2026, a day after his eighty-third birthday. His passing is a profound loss to Philippine letters and scholarship, but for those who knew his work closely, and especially for those in Cebu, it is also a deeply personal one. He was more than a distinguished scholar and National Artist. He was a patient reader of history, a careful keeper of memory, and one of the rare thinkers who taught generations of Filipinos to look more closely at the places, people, languages, and stories that the nation too often overlooked.
Mojares wrote from Cebu, and Cebu remained central to his intellectual life. He never treated the region as something peripheral to the nation. On the contrary, he showed that one could understand the Philippines more fully by looking outward from Cebu rather than always looking toward it from Manila. In his hands, a local newspaper, a forgotten writer, an old political tract, or a neglected archive could become an opening into larger questions about how a nation remembers itself and how easily some voices are allowed to disappear.
His scholarship ranged widely across literature, history, biography, political thought, journalism, and popular culture. In books such as Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, The War Against the Americans, Brains of the Nation, House of Memory, Isabelo’s Archive, and Enigmatic Objects, he returned time and again to fragments left by history. He understood that archives: what survives, what is preserved, what is translated, and what is forgotten, are all shaped by power. His work gave renewed life to people and texts that had been pushed to the edges of the national story, reminding us that those edges were usually where some of the most important histories could be found.
That commitment was also reflected in the institutions he helped build. At the University of San Carlos, where he became Professor Emeritus, and through the Cebuano Studies Center, which he helped establish in 1975, Mojares helped create a lasting home for the study of Cebuano and Visayan history, language, literature, and culture. Generations of writers, historians, teachers, and students were shaped by that work. His influence was not only in the books he wrote, but in the questions he encouraged others to ask and in the confidence he gave to scholars who believed that regional histories deserved to be studied on their own terms.
When he was proclaimed National Artist for Literature in 2018, the honor recognized a lifetime of extraordinary scholarship. This was fitting in the recognition of a man who had spent most of his career unsettling ideas of nationhood. Mojares showed that Philippine identity was not singular or easily contained but was formed through many languages, regions, encounters, conflicts and memories.
His absence will be felt deeply, particularly in Cebu, where his presence quietly endured across generations. His legacy will remain in more than institutions or bookshelves. It will remain in a way of seeing: in the impulse to return to the archive, to listen for voices that have been overlooked, to look beyond the capital, and to take seriously the stories that history has placed at the edge of the page. Resil Mojares taught us that the margin was full of memory, argument, and life, waiting for someone patient enough to read it. That lesson, like his work, will endure.
Hope Sabanpan-Yu
Director, Cebuano Studies Center