NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Since 2010 I have traveled to Okinawa just about every year. Usually I have gone with my friend Ed Alvarez. We first travelled to Okinawa together in 2012 to present at a number of conferences focusing on issues of demilitarization, indigenous rights and also decolonization. Ed was the Executive Director of the Guam Commission on Decolonization and had made some important connections to academics and protest groups. One of my goals at some point is to write an academic article about the ever-evolving conversation in Okinawa about decolonization and political status. It is fascinating and often goes far beneath the radar, as most focus on the demilitarization and anti US base protests. But since I have been traveling there, I have regularly heard the makings of a decolonization conversation. When I say this, I don't mean it looks the same or sounds the same, or takes the same shape as Guam's. I mean that for Okinawa, which faces a number of fundamental and structural issues ab

Rlene Santos Steffy published the article below during the summer as part of her iTintaotao Marianas feature series in The Guam Daily Post. I was honored to be included amongst so many other older and more esteemed activist and scholars. I conducted several long interviews with Rlene, some focusing on history and others on political status. I was surprised by her chosen route for this article, focusing on my learning the Chamorro language and my relationship to my grandparents. I was surprised, but not disappointed. The quote that she used at the start of the article is very much what I continue to feel about my Chamorro identity. Namely that if not for my grandparents, I wouldn't have much of a Chamorro identity and probably wouldn't speak Chamorro or care as much about the fate of the Chamorro people. Reading this article made me sen mahålang for my grandparents. I miss them every day, everytime I use the Chamorro language. Kada fumino' Chamorro nina'siente yu'

This article about my grandfather, the Chamorro Master Blacksmith Joaquin Flores Lujan or "Tun Jack" was first published in the Pacific Daily News on October 14 and October 21, 2016. I have been missing my grandparents like crazy since they passed away in 2013 and 2015, and sometimes only writing about them can help me overcome the sadness I feel.  December is always difficult, as this is the month that grandma, Elizabeth Flores Lujan, passed away three years ago. This is also a difficult month emotionally because of all the family emphasis and for Chamorros, the fact that December 8th represents when our elders, i mamparientes-ta, i manamko'-ta, were swallowed into the beast of a great war.  I keep writing about my grandparents because I find myself remembering things that I struggle with at other times. It don't know why that is the case, perhaps it is because I feel more secure in the fact that as I am writing/typing, I am keeping their stories live. Kee

This is the painting of the saddest person I know.  She lives in delusions and fantasies about herself and paints herself up everyday as if she is perfect and beautiful. Many people accept that surface of her not because they believe it to be true, but because they instinctive find that she offers to little to the world, that there isn't really any reason to consider her further.  I tried to paint that surface that she words so hard to pretend is real, to duplicate the sometimes comforting but also draining and taunting shell that she wishes others would accept as real.  But each time I would try to paint her, the sadness,  the loneliness, the insecurity, the self-hate, the pathetic inability to accept the truth of who she is, would come to the surface of the painting.  It is one thing when someone does not realize that they wear masks and live in fantasies, but she knows the truth, but still stubbornly and fearfully clings to lies. As a result she

A friend of mine Jesse is planning on creating a blog for collecting Chamorro song lyrics. I fully support her in this endeavor. Creating something like this would be a huge public service for the Chamorro community, not just on Guam, but everywhere. One of the main reasons that brings people to my blog is the presence of lyrics for some Chamorro songs here. There aren't many and they have been posted in scattered ways over the years. Everyday a Chamorro somewhere in the world searches for the lyrics to one of the most famous contemporary Chamorro songs "Apo Magi" by J.D. Crutch. As a result they tend to end up somewhere on this blog. I have some Johnny Sablan lyrics here as well. Music is the key way the Chamorro language has survived, even if it has started to die out in so many other facets of Guam life. It is something that even those don't speak the language enjoy and appreciate. It has helped keep the language as something you hear around the island. You c

Happy Valentine's Day!!!! *************  "You Is All I Want" Michael Lujan Bevacqua 2011 The waitress at Coco’s is happy I am not. She sashays to my table as if she has just stolen the sunshine of everyone in the room and beams at me with her conquest I am not in the mood for anything. I miss you, and it is the kind of missing that makes you feel like something is pushing your heart through your chest, giving it the sense of being released and set free as it is being choked to death by the bars of your rib cage. As the song says, there ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone, and every sunny soul makes me wish I was some cartoonish DC universe villain, with a ray-gun that would suck out your happy soul and then stab you in the eye with a spork afterwards. The waitress leans over and asks me, smile stuck between her teeth, “What do you want today?” I look at her wishing I was the protagonist of a movie and so when I glare, extras jump, cameras zoom, the soundt

One thing that I truly miss about graduate school is that I don't get to read as many books as I used to. At various points in graduate school I was reading several books a week. At least 3 or 4 for classes, one or two more for my own research and interests, and then usually another one or two for just fun. I was processing information constantly and my brain brimming with ideas, and so my blog posts in those days were longer and sometimes crazier, deeper, more convoluted to say the least. Since I started teaching my amount of reading as diminished. I still read for research and to prepare for classes, but the amount of reading that I do for simply fun dropped so much in 2009 and 2010. Last year I tried my best to start up reading a little bit here and there just for fun, but still failed miserably. I did read a few books here and there, and some of them really made an impact on me. A case in point is the book a far country by Daniel Mason, which was given to me as a birthday p