The following excerpt comes from the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Encyclopedia of the Arts, circa 1990's:
AGUILAR, MILA a.k.a. Clarita Roja b. Iloilo 1949.
Poet, essayist, filmmaker and Web designer. She is the daughter of Jose and Ramona Aguilar. She married Magtangol Roque with whom she has a son. At nine, she started writing poetry. She edited the school paper at the University of the Philippines (UP) High School. She was also active in theater and declamation contests. At 18, she was features editor of the Philippine Collegian and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at UP Diliman. The school year after graduation, Aguilar took her master's degree, taught English at UP, and became a regular staffer for Graphic magazine. A progressive writer, she was among those hunted when Martial Law was declared in 1972. The military failed to find her for twelve years despite several rebellion and subversion cases against her. In 1984, when she was assistant director of the extension service center of St. Joseph's College, she was finally arrested. In 1985, the Supreme Court ordered a stop to her prosecution in military court, but she was released from detention only when the Aquino administration took over in 1986.
In 1984 the Women Color Press, New York, published her poetry collection, A Comrade Is As Precious As a Rice Seedling, with an Introduction by Audre Lorde. Its second edition, l987, includes twelve from her collection of prison poems, Why Cage Pigeons?, 1984. Some of these poems were also published in Pintig (Life Pulse), 1985, an anthology of prose and poetry by political prisoners, as well as numerous other publications in the Philippines and abroad. In 1996, the University of the Philippines Press published her complete collection of poems under the title Journey: An Autobiography in Verse (1964-1995).
Aguilar's collection of 48 video documentary titles, produced, written or directed by her from 1989 to 1997, can be seen in her Web site entitled Pinoy Tok at http://www.sequel.net/~pinoytok. She has written over a hundred essays for a weekly column in the Manila Standard since 1995 to complement the underground tracts she wrote on the woman question, democratic centralism, the united front and revolutionary mass movements in the period when she was hunted. | M.l. Maniquis
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Carolyn Forché, currently a literary scholar at the Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wrote an extensive article about Aguilar in 1986 in an academic journal called the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
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More recently, the website of the Asia-Pacific Writers' Network reported:
Mila D. Aguilar is a poet, essayist, teacher, video documentarist and webweaver.
As a poet, she has written almost 240 poems in English, Pilipino and Ilonggo. About 125 of these are in her collection of poems, Journey: An Autobiography in Verse (1964-1995), published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1996. This collection, almost out of print, contains poems from six books printed in Manila, San Francisco and New York between the years 1974 and 1987, as well as poems written in the next years up to 1995. Her new collection of poems, entitled Chronicle of a Life Foretold: 110 Poems (1996-2004), is still looking for a publisher.
Aguilar has written more than a hundred essays, a handful of which were done underground – first as an ordinary member, later as the head of the Regional United Front Commission of Mindanao, and last as head of the National United Front Commission of the Communist Party of the Philippines, from which she resigned in 1984. She has produced, written, and directed almost 50 videos on subjects ranging from community organizations to regional cultures and good manners for government employees. As a webweaver, a term she invented, she has designed her own web pages as well as the website of a non-governmental organization. She has taught at the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines as well as St. Joseph's College in Quezon City.
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Update: Aguilar is currently at work on her eighth book of poems, tentatively entitled Poemes Suisse. She has temporarily postponed finishing her semi-autobiographical novel, One Woman's Testament, as she completes her long-delayed work on Tricksterism as a Filipino Survival Mechanism.
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