NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

(Note this image is not of the 731st MP Unit I'm discussing in the text below).  The text below is for a project I am working on for Chamorro Studies. Documenting and telling the story of the 731st MP EPW, the only reserve component unit from the Pacific to go to fight in Desert Storm. As you'll read below, they performed very well while there: ******************* People often think of Guam as a small place, and therefore assume that those small places and those who come from those small places are not capable of great deeds. We see this to hardly be true in the work of the 731 st MP Company, started on July 31 st , 1981. Formed soon after the Guam National Guard was created, this company was trained specifically for EPW processing or Enemy Prisoners of War Processing. Their training was tested when they were activated and deployed during the First Gulf War. They were the only reserve component unit from the Asia-Pacific region to be dep

Biba Ha'anin Mannana! Happy Mother's Day! This Mother's Day I cannot help but think of my grandmother, Elizabeth Flores Lujan, who passed away last December. She exemplified for me so much of what is awesome about Chamorro culture and Chamorro women, even if at the same time she also endured under the problematic ways in which we conceive of women's power and women's roles in Guam within a Chamorro context. With each passing Mother's Day there are no doubt so many mentions and passing thoughts of our mothers and our grandmothers as maga'haga siha and empowered and women who kept their house and their family in line. Our memories are often filled with the moments of potent female power, where women who struggled much and put up with much, seemed to fill our family lives with quiet miracles. There are different ways in which these sorts of stories of minute female empowerment and the woman as the glue that holds families together emerges. The most comm