NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The Chamorro language is heard less and less around Guam nowadays. I couldn’t speak Chamorro for most of my life and so the Chamorro I heard around me was generally like noise to my ears. My grandmother speaking Chamorro to her friends when I was young was nothing but old people chatter. Sometime it was fun to just watch, but for the most part, I'm sure none of that had anything to do with me. My grandfather speaking Chamorro to other men his age at the barber shop was an irritating soundtrack. There was Chamorro everywhere, but when I was younger I couldn’t understand it and so I didn’t really care. But nowadays it is becoming scarcer. You can still hear it on the radio and sometimes in businesses that play KISH or Isla 630 on the weekends. You can still hear it in church sometimes. You can hear it when older people gather. The last politician who would regularly speak Chamorro in their speeches or on the floor of the Legislature passed away last year. There is even a month o

I've had a Youtube account for many years now, I think 8 or 9, lao ti siguru yu'. I didn't post many videos for a while, and I'm not sure why, perhaps because I got a better camera a few years ago and with the not that great internet in the various apartments I've lived in, it takes several hours to post videos nowadays. I recently started publishing videos again, after starting a number of video projects and being inspired to engage in this media form. My Youtube videos are frequently shaking and suffer from very bad audio and never edited in anyway. But still they can provide an interesting view into certain events on island and elsewhere. Every once in a while I get a message from someone who couldn't be at an event or who was looking for information on something that has happened in Guam and they thank me for my shaky almost avant garde looking movie. Here are some recent videos that I've posted. A video from the 2011 Inachaigen Fino' CHamor

Hegel once said that every great thing, whether it be a person, event or thing, will appear not just once, but twice. Karl Marx later added on to this notion, that every potentially revolution moment or figure, must emerge and then be exorcised, by agreeing with Hegel’s thesis, but augmenting it as follows: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” As Guam winds down to the end of the second term of Felix Camacho as governor, this philosophical notion has for some reason been heavily on my mind. In the United States last year, when George W. Bush was officially no longer the President of the United States, it signified the end of an era, since for close to an entire decade, the great ship of the American state, had him at its helm. You would have to be a fool not to look back at such a length of time, and either blur things to where they wer

The first full draft of my dissertation was completed almost a month ago and in the time since I've been editing and fixing up my chapters in preparation for my defense in June. As I've done with my previous chapters, I'm pasting in this post, all the tetehnan or leftovers from my writing of the fourth chapter of my dissertation. To read the tetehnan of my other chapters, click the links below: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 In this chapter I was discussing sovereignty and decolonization from a more local perspective, writing about and sometimes critiquing the ideas of sovereignty that Chamorros, activists or not, everyday use to articulate their existences, and how a lot of times they set themselves up for failure, dependency, non-existence or eternal colonization through their ideas. You might recognize some of the names in this chapter, and in fact, there might even be a chance that you might be mentioned in this chapter. Read through if you dare, its all over the plac