NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The issue of wall funding in the United States for President Trump is another point at which we can see ideological lines become distorted and distinct when moving from the community of the colonizer to the community of the colonized. Left and right, liberal and conservative have particular meanings within a community and within groups within a community. Part of the colonizing process is not solely those things which the colonizer does to forcibly integrate the colonized peoples, but also the ways in which the colonized peoples may accept a particular framework for understanding themselves and their issues. This is a key point people often miss. Colonialism isn't inherently conservative and therefore decolonization is liberal. Colonialism can be both faces and many more. There can be liberal forms of colonization and conservative ones. Movements or conversations that are liberal or progressive in the US can still be colonial.  We are reminded about this every once in a whil

My two columns from earlier this year published in the Pacific Daily News on the ban of cockfighting in the US territories. I've been slowly working towards an article on this topic, targeting two main aspects.  First, the debate over whether or not we can consider cockfighting to be part of Chamoru culture or whether it is really Chamoru or not. This is deployed in very interesting ways in this debate, as people seem to feel that if it isn't really Chamoru then it is ok and right to ban it. Whereas others tie to a strong, grounded sense of authenticity in contrast to perceived sort of softness of Americanized life.  Very interesting sort of discursive dancing around authenticity.  Second, the role that Guam's political status plays in the cockfighting ban. Some people argue that we don't necessarily see Guam's colonial status at play here, since this is just another way that big government in Washington, the elites impose things on the little man. This way of

-->   My addiction to news about the 2016 election for President in the United States reached previously inexperienced levels for me, when a few months ago I did the unthinkable, I signed up for a paid subscription for the digital version of a newspaper. I've had magazine subscriptions before, The Nation, The Smithsonian, Mother Jones, Z Mag, even Guahan back in the day. But newspapers were always something that I either purchased regular physical copies of, or I simply read articles online if they had been reposted into paywall-free forms. This election was different in so many ways for me, primarily because of the type of candidate that Donald Trump represented, whereby he followed very few established conventions for candidates and seemed to relish in energizing some of the grossest aspects of the American present and past. One thing that struck me early on was not his willingness to attack the media, as every candidate claims that they are not being treated fairly

In the United States and its territories, it is common to look at other places, in particular Europe and lament the way racist and xenophobic political parties have emerged, which sometimes achieve a relatively significant amount of power and legitimacy. When viewing them from a distance, it is easy to critique them as being out of touch in a world with nice things such as tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism. But such positioning too often allows the exact same problems, the same contradictions, the same nasty hatred and evil to go unanalyzed or unexamined. In Chamorro there are a variety of ways of calling this out and challenging such simple forgetfulness. Cha'-mu tumoto'la hulo'. Saosao i mata-mu antes di un sangan put i inaplacha' i otro. Trump's presidential primary insurgency has kicked things that have been developing for decades into hyper-drive. The Republican party has been feeding off of white anger and loathing for quite a while now, Fox News , wi