lit a candle 5 Sept 2026One day after his birthday. There's something both cruel and fitting about that timing for someone who spent his whole life digging into the stories we almost lost. Cebu's memory keeper is gone.
Their story
Resil Buagas Mojares (1943-09-04 to 2026-09-05) was a Filipino historian, literary critic, essayist, fictionist and cultural historian who became, in 2018, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, the state's highest honour for artists. Writers and critics called him the Visayan Titan of Letters for the scale of his contribution…
Resil Buagas Mojares (1943-09-04 to 2026-09-05) was a Filipino historian, literary critic, essayist, fictionist and cultural historian who became, in 2018, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, the state's highest honour for artists. Writers and critics called him the Visayan Titan of Letters for the scale of his contribution to Visayan and national letters. He died in the early morning of Saturday, 5 September 2026, aged 83, one day after his birthday. His family said in a statement quoted by Cebu Daily News that they were grateful to have spent his final day honouring and celebrating his life, and that he was reunited with his wife Salvacion "Sally" Ouano Go, who died in 2022.
He was born in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte, to parents who were public school teachers. He studied in public schools in Mindanao, began higher education at Silliman University in Dumaguete, then took a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in Literature at the University of San Carlos (USC) in Cebu City, with further postgraduate work there. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1979. He began teaching at USC in 1965 and remained a Carolinian for the rest of his academic life, later Professor Emeritus.
Before the scholarly books that made his national name, Mojares was a short-story writer, Free Press and Carlos Palanca prizewinner, and a Cebu newspaper columnist. From 1970 to 1972 he wrote the "Sticks and Stones" column in The Freeman on the "years of protests." On 23 September 1972, the day Ferdinand Marcos's martial-law announcement took public effect, he was among the first Cebuanos arrested. He was detained at Camp Sergio Osmena with other early Cebu detainees. After detention he left behind much of that earlier journalistic and fiction career and turned, with lasting urgency, to cultural history and local archives.
In 1975 he founded and became first director of USC's Cebuano Studies Center, a pioneering local studies centre he led until 1996, when he moved to direct San Carlos Publications. The Center placed Cebu on the research map for language, literature, history and heritage. Mojares's own books moved between literary history, social history, biography and cultural essay: Cebuano Literature (1975); Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983; 2nd ed. 1998); Theater in Society, Society in Theater (1985); The Man Who Would Be President on Serging Osmena (1986); Vicente Sotto, The Maverick Senator (1992; 2nd ed. 2021); House of Memory (1997); The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906 (1999); Waiting for Mariang Makiling (2002); Brains of the Nation on Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera and Isabelo de los Reyes (2006); Isabelo's Archive (2013); The Feast of the Santo Nino (2017); Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History (2017); and Enigmatic Objects: Notes Towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (2023). He also wrote the history of Cebu Province for the Cebu Town History Project (published 2014). NCCA's National Artist citation, written when he already had seventeen published books and more in press, called him a leading figure in regional literature and history and in Cebuano and national identity formation.
He was a visiting professor or fellow at Kyoto University, the National University of Singapore, UCLA (lecturing on the Philippine novel and Philippine cultural history), and the universities of Wisconsin, Hawaii and Michigan, with fellowships from Ford, Toyota, Rockefeller, Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council. Awards included multiple National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle, the Grant Goodman Prize for History from the Association for Asian Studies, the Fok Ying Tung Southeast Asia Prize, the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Award for Cultural Research, Ateneo de Manila's Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi (2013), and recognition among The Freeman's Top 100 Cebuano Personalities (2019). On 24 October 2018 President Rodrigo Duterte conferred the Order of National Artists at Malacanang; Mojares was the first Cebuano so named for Literature.
He married Salvacion Ouano Go; they had four children, Kim Carmel, Mark Soren, Ressa Gail and Anna Leigh. He lived in Barangay Talamban, Cebu City. In essays such as "The Haunting of the Filipino Writer" (Ateneo keynote, February 2000) he argued that Filipino writing is driven by the spectral presence of what has been silenced or forgotten, and that locating a national literature means healing a soul distracted by colonial shock, seduction and exclusion. That insistence on regional depth without surrendering the nation is the thread that runs from the Cebuano Studies Center to Brains of the Nation and to the National Artist citation. As of the morning of his death, wake and funeral details were still being arranged; the cause of death was not made public.
Biography adapted from EN Wikipedia Resil B. Mojares; NCCA Order of National Artists; Cebuano Studies Center bio; Cebu Daily News / Jason Baguia 2026-09-05; ABS-CBN ANCX Alo Lantin 2018; Philippine Daily Inquirer Lato-Ruffo.
In their own words
“This haunting, this hauntedness is a problem of the soul, and it is not Gonzalez's alone. To be visited by a spirit, touched by the spectral presence of absence; to catch the miasmic whiff of the unburied dead, the traces of what has been silenced and forgotten; haunting is a metaphor for what drives the vocation of writers and the practice of writing.”
The Haunting of the Filipino Writer, Ateneo keynote, February 2000
“For one who writes about the Philippines, lives in the Philippines (and not having thought, even once, of actually leaving it), nationalism is not something abstract and intellectual; it is deeply existential.”
Response as 2013 Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi awardee, Ateneo de Manila
“Be watchful of changes that dilute discipline-based education.”
Remarks on liberal arts education, University of San Carlos, 2019-03-27
“I had to go to the backyard to release the emotion I felt about the book.”
On first reading The Catcher in the Rye; conversation with Ambeth Ocampo, NBDB Philippine Book Festival-Davao, 2023-08-19
“Papa Resil was a pillar of our family, and although we will miss him dearly every day, we find comfort in knowing that he is now reunited with our dear mother, Sally, who left us in 2022.”
Mojares family statement, 2026-09-05, quoted by Cebu Daily News
Photos
4Resil B. Mojares at the University of San Carlos, 2022
by People Forever
Resil B. Mojares at National Artist awarding, Malacanang, 2018
by People Forever
Resil Mojares, University of San Carlos
by People Forever
Dr. Resil Mojares, Cebuano Studies Center
by People Forever
