NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

At this year's Regional Seminar for the Committee of 24 in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, attendees were treated to two presentations by experts on decolonization from the UN perspective. I'll discuss both presentations through my "Decolonization in the Caribbean" posts, but today I wanted to focus on the remarks from Dr. Carlyle Corbin, from the US Virgin Islands, who is a longtime ally with Guam and the Chamorro people in their struggle for self-determination. He offered a number of recommendations that the Committee could take up in terms of moving ahead with its mission of eradicating colonialism from the world and assisting the remaining non-self-governing territories. What is refreshing in terms of the seminar overall is the way it mixes scholars and experts with diplomats or government reps. The debate or discussions between country representatives and committee members tends to move in familiar and sometimes frustrating directions. Regardless of what is t

In the middle of this year's regional seminar of the UN C24, the proceedings stopped briefly in order to recognize the release of Oscar Lopez Rivera, a long-time Puerto Rican political prisoner. Rivera was part of the Puerto Rican independence group named FALN, which was involved in more than 100 bombings around the US during the 1970s. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy along with other crimes and spent 35 years in prison. Rivera has been mentioned each year I have attended the regional seminar, as some Latin American countries feel a strong sense of solidarity with Puerto Rico and its independence activists, and therefore consider his case to be that of a political prisoner or a prisoner of war, who should have been subject to international court proceedings, as he was fighting for the liberation of Puerto Rico from US colonial control. Vilma Reveron, who frequently attends the seminars to discuss the state of affairs in Puerto Rico made the announcement and held up her

For places like Guam that lack a formal place within the international system and to an extent the national system of the US, solidarity is of critical importance. Without a formal place, you are invisible or you direct power over the structure around you. There was ways that you can fight for power, that you can seize it, but solidarity is an important part of changing your invisibility or your lack of visibility and therefore lack of relevance of standing, into something different, something more strategic. As the movement for decolonization and independence grows in Guam, it is important that we find ways to connect it to other potentially similar movements, which can offer lessons or inspirations on the way forward. This was the case in the past, where members of Nasion Chamoru achieved a greater sense of their place in the world through interacting with people who were members of Black and Brown Power movements in the US, and also from postwar elite Chamorros who felt affinity w

Chamorros and others from Guam pushing for the island's decolonization first began visiting the United Nations in the early 1980s. This was after witnessing the United Nations and their role in assisting the other islands in Micronesia in their decolonization, and noticing that Guam and the Chamorro people were being left behind. A visiting mission from the United Nations to Guam in 1979 helped connect the local struggles to the larger international community, where such conversations about independence and self-governance were not taboo, but rather normal and more importantly, necessary.  Part of the postwar strategy of the United States was to develop the islands in Micronesia into a buffer zone, to put space between its potential enemies in Asia. This meant prioritizing for two decades the military interests of the US over the interests or desires of the people in the region. This manifested most clearly in the form of security clearance requirements for those coming in and

For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies dealt with sovereignty, most specifically Guam’s role in producing America’s sovereignty, or what role its invisibility or nothingness plays in producing America as sovereign. This may sound confusing, but what makes it difficult for most to wrap their heads around, is the simple fact of saying that something which has been for hundreds of years produced discursively as being “small” or “faraway” or “faint” or “owned by the US” as somehow creating something as great and grand and mighty as the United States of America. One frustrating aspect of writing my dissertation was the preparing of a literature review, which is a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless review of what others have written about your topic of choice and how you will either use and build on them or defy them. If you are familiar with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same thing nowadays, drawing mildly different c