Militant Struggles and Anti-Imperialism in Resil Mojares’s The Freeman Columns during the Early 1970s

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Resil Mojares wrote a newspaper column in the Cebu-based daily The Freeman on what he dubbed the “years of protests.” Through a close reading of surviving copies of Mojares’s columns, this article explores his interest in the militant struggles and anti-imperialist nationalism of the time up until 23 September 1972, when his last column appeared on the very same day he was arrested upon the imposition of martial law. Mojares’s early journalistic writings had nurtured an interest in popular and local histories and cultures and exuded overtly militant articulations, which military rule and postdictatorship developments emasculated.

KEYWORDS: RESIL MOJARES • JOURNALISM • POLITICAL MILITANCY • NATIONALISM • ANTI-IMPERIALISM • MARXISM