NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Guam gets its 15 mins of national or international media fame refreshed every few years, sometimes because of a typhoon or earthquake. Sometimes because of snake epidemics. Over the past few years, North Korea has had alot to do with Guam getting a little extra attention. Usually these periods are frustrating to analyze in media terms because Guam, even if it is mentioned as the focus of a story, still remains at the periphery of it. But this most recent North Korea scare led to a series of well-written and insightful articles that didn't shy away from Guam's colonial status, but engaged with it. Here below is probably my favorite piece to come out from all the drama. ************************* "Guam: A colonized island nation where 160,000 American lives are not only at risk but often forgotten" by Gene Park Washington Post August 11, 2017 “Total Americans affected: 3,831.” Fox News ran a video explainer  this week on the affect of North Korea’s missiles o

A few years ago two of my poems were featured in a creative/scholarly anthology titled The Space Between edited by Marata Tamaira. It was one of my first academic publications and I was honored to be included in it. I recently came across this interview that noted Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez did with Marata following the release of the anthology. Craig recently asked me if I'd be willing to have one of the poems that was featured in the anthology, "My Island is One Big American Footnote" to be included in a new Micronesian anthology that he is co-editing. In many ways, this poem fit the theme for the overall anthology, as that concept of the space between can be used to understand the liminal place of something, the marginal and confused positionality. Yet it also can evoke an intimacy, as close of connectedness and love. ***************************** Anthology Spotlight: The Space Between Interview with Marata Tamaira By Craig Santos Perez The Poe

It has been quite a white since my last installment of Fun With Footnotes, where I post on my blog some of my more excessive or informative footnotes from my academic work. I wrote a poem several years ago which described Guam as one "Big American Footnote," and that was in one way the first seed which later became my dissertation, various articles, some of my favorite talking points and numerous posts on this blog. The metaphor of the footnote was something I felt could help me explain Guam and its colonial predicament, and how it exists, it means something, it matters, it reveals something crucial or important, but like most footnotes it is assumed to matter in a way that doesn't matter. I remember when I was in grad school at UCSD and in one class, another student who had read a draft of my Masters Thesis noted that my long footnotes were irrelevant and pointless since she, like everyone else in the world didn't read them anyways, and to make them any longer than

Below are some random photos and slices of life from my recent trip to South Korea: As if a sign of fate, my hotel in Seoul was just a block away from the South Korean consulate from Swaziland. For those who don't know I spent almost two years living there as a child. At a conference celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the agreement made by both governments of North and South Korea to pursue a path towards their reunification, there were apparently some very famous people there. As you can see from the sea of cameramen on stage shooting a row of VIPs. Although I was sitting in the front row, only one guy took a picture of me. He might of thought I was a Korean soap star. A university student, stands alone amongst a flow of constant traffic. I was told that his sign is protesting the involvement of the South Korean military in the war in Afghanistan. This is an ad for a cemetary (Pine'lo-ku). Mampos ambivalent yu' nu este. I first took a picture of it because it l

I haven't posted anything for quite a while and there's some very good reasons for that. One, which I'll have more info on soon is that I spent the weekend helping my grandfather sell and display his tools at the Micronesian Island Fair at Ipao Beach. The other reason is that I finished up my first full draft of my second chapter for my dissertation. This chapter focuses on answering two obvious questions for a dissertation tentatively titled "Guam: Where the Production of America's Sovereignty Begins!", and those are, "Why Guam?" and "Why Sovereignty?" This chapter also is meant to discuss my methods for my dissertation, and how I will use Catherine Lutz's article "Empire is in the Details" as a frame for using jokes, off-hand remarks, mistakes, blog comments and anecdotes as evidence for my points on sovereignty. Two weeks ago I posted the extra, unused, and edited out sections from my first chapter under the post Tiempon

The almost week long break from this blog has been an unfortunate side effect of the shifting of priorities since I came back to Guam. I put alot into this blog over the past two months mainly because of the Democratic National Convention and also my own close following of issues of race and gender in the campaign and the pick of Sarah Palin for VP by John McCain. I'm scaling things back now in order to spend more time trying to be a good father to my 17 month old nene Sumåhi, and also working on finishing up my dissertation as soon as possible. Both activities require lots of attention and plenty of focus, and so sadly I might be posting less than usual for the next few months. This doesn't mean that I don't have plenty floating around in my head to post about, in fact sigi ha' machuchuda' i hinasso-ku desde matto yu' para Guahan! I have way too many things to write about now that I'm back, Guam is far from boring there is plenty happening that I'm

A few years back, I have a section on my blog called Fun With Footnotes, where I would share some of the footnotes from some of my recent papers. The reason for this (for those who have never read one of my thesises or papers), is due to the fact that I often times have a tendency to choke a paper with footnotes, huge sprawling out of control ones. The reason I most often give for this frustrating habit, is that I come from an "American footnote." The idea of a footnote is an apt one for thinking about Guam's relationship to the United States. As a footnote, we are tiny, riding the margins, basically unimportant for the most part, but once in a while, we hold the key, or carry a secret of something. When I flood the text with footnotes, which can sometimes end up colonizing half of a page, I am doing so to upset the prevailing order of things, which says that the text is the center, the footnotes are the periphery. This is of course the same logis which governs Guam and

There's a possibility next year, that my master's thesis which I did in Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam a few years ago will be published into a book. With this in mind I've been reading over parts of it throughout the summer and both marvelling at how much work I did to complete that thesis, but also how stupid and lazy I could be at times. I think that the thesis will be an important contribution to the general community, even if the theoretical parts people have trouble understanding. The title itself however might intrigue, confuse and upset people, These May or May Not Be Americans: The Patriotic Myth and the Hijacking of Chamorro History in Guam. The basic question which my thesis was written around is, how did Chamorros who were for the most part indifferent to being Americans prior to World War II, become after World War II the super-patriots that we all know today? Through an analysis of pre-war education systems and a description about how the ways i