Marcos, Martial Law, and the Complexities of Memory in the Philippines

Chapter 1

Marcos-Era Memory as an Embattled Terrain in Contemporary Philippines

John Lee Candelaria, Kerby C. Alvarez, and Jamie Pring

Chapter 2

Lies Etched in Stone: The Marcos War Myth and Memorialization in Postwar Philippines

John Lee Candelaria

Chapter 3

Manipulated Memories, Controlled Spaces: Memorial Sites and the Complexities of Marcosian Historical Distortion

Kerby C. Alvarez

Chapter 4

Curating Contested Pasts: Museum Practices and the Marcos Dictatorship

Maria Sofia Amparo F. Santiago-Jimenez and Ana Victoria K. Tamula

Chapter 5

Textual Discrepancies, Historical Distortions: Martial Law Period Narratives in Philippine History Textbooks

Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang, Dondy Pepito G. Ramos II, and Aaron F. Viernes

Chapter 6

Beyond Tadhana: Filipino Historians During Martial Law

Luis Zuriel P. Domingo

Chapter 7

Juridification of Memory through Reparations and Recognition Legislation in Post-Dictatorship Philippines

Ruby Rosselle L. Tugade

Chapter 8

A Loyalist Mentality?: Political Support, Collective Memory, and Social Media Engagement with the Marcos Legacy

Athena Charanne Presto

Chapter 9

Memorializing Marcos-Era Massacres Against Filipino Muslims

Primitivo III C. Ragandang, Jay Rome O. de los Santos, and John Gieveson E. Iglupas

Chapter 10

Golden Age Nostalgia and the Marcos Martial Law Narratives on Social Media

Fernan Talamayan

Chapter 11

The Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Nostalgia of the Marcos Era in Facebook Groups

Joselito Ebro Jr.

 Chapter 12

Marcos Mixtape: Emerging Parallels Between the Programs and Policies of Marcos Sr. and Marcos Jr.

JC Punongbayan

 Chapter 13

The Role of Memory in the Present and Future of Philippine Politics

John Lee Candelaria, Jamie Pring, and Kerby C. Alvarez

Biography

John Lee Candelaria is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University.

Kerby C. Alvarez is Professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman.

Jamie Pring is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute, a lecturer at the University of Basel, and an Associate Research Fellow at the United Nations University - Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS).

“Democrats who puzzle over the resilience of a positive popular memory of the dark years of the Marcos regime and who struggle to get more Filipinos to move to their side of the barricades need to read this book. Not only is this volume the first comprehensive attempt to explain the power of political memory in shaping how we remember the recent past, but it is also a glimpse into the exceptional works of a younger generation of scholars who love and worry about where we are heading as a people.”

-- Patricio N. Abinales, co-editor, The Marcos Era Reader (2022) and author of Presidents and Pests, Cosmopolitans and Communists (2023).

“This remarkable collection of essays by a new generation of Philippine scholars underlines how the past is always alive as an arena of contention by analyzing one of the most amazing feats of historical reconstruction in recent memory: the rehabilitation of the Marcoses.”

-- Walden Bello, author of Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love (2025)

“I am happy to see how the volume testifies to the growth of Memory Studies in the Philippines ever since the field’s institutionalization as a course in 2012, and how memory concepts still provide theoretical tools to unpack Martial Law.”

-- Jocelyn S. Martin, Advisory Board, Memory Studies Association