Roger Felix V. Salditos and Agrarian Class Struggles in Panay Island, Philippines

Abstract

Roger Felix V. Salditos was among seven Filipino revolutionaries who were summarily executed by police and military forces in San Jose town, Antique, in the central Philippine island of Panay in 2018. Better known by the pen names Mayamor and Maya Daniel, which he used to sign his paintings and poetry, Salditos was a revolutionary intellectual who spent the better part of his life as a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) since he left the seminary in 1979. This article examines the underground literary and political writings of Salditos to help illuminate the long history of agrarian class struggles of peasants and Tumandok indigenous peoples in one of the Philippines’ top food-producing regions. His narratives highlight the role of Panay as the only place where the Huk peasant rebellion took root outside Luzon in the 1950s, recalling important episodes of revolutionary contestations in the island amid changing conditions under the Marcos dictatorship and the class offensive of neoliberalism. Despite their partisan character and focus on the local and the superstructural, Salditos’s writings provide an important perspective on the persistence of one of the world’s longest-running rural-based insurgencies, notwithstanding the end of the classical era of peasant wars of the twentieth century and shifting spaces for agrarian contestations in the new century.