NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

As Guam is making international headlines once again, it is imperative that we use this moment in order to try to change the minute media frame that is used to give Guam meaning in moments like this. Guam is more than a military base and more than an island with a snake crisis. It is a contemporary colony in need of assistance in decolonizing and encouraging the United States to fulfill its obligation as a UN member to help make decolonization a reality. My last two columns for The Pacific Daily News focused on a letter that Governor Calvo, as the head of the Guam Commission on Decolonization sent recently to the Committee of 24 at the United Nations. The letter provided some small details on the situation in Guam, in particular impediments that have been put in place by the United States and its courts. But more than anything it represented a request for the UN to send a visiting mission to Guam to help bring attention to our quest for decolonization. It remains to be seen if th

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

Being from a colony and engaging with the United Nations can be a surreal experience. It can be intoxicating in terms of experiencing new possibilities, but also feel so grinding and draining when confronted with the networks of power around you, from which you still remain excluded. I base these notions on my own experiences, but also discussions with others and just a general analysis of what it is like to be a contemporary colony. In 2007 I testified before the 4 th Committee at the UN and I have testified at the Committee of 24 regional seminars on four occasions. In my dissertation in Ethnic Studies from UCSD, I incorporated an anecdote from my experience before the 4 th Committee that helped inform greatly my analysis of sovereignty and Guam’s colonial status. It dealt with a broken microphone during my testimony. Perhaps I will share it another time. The surreal nature of this experience derives from loving, representing and fighting for a place that isn’t supposed

When I talk about the United States, I often times end up having to qualify even the simple usage of the term because of Guam's political status. Guam is an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States. That means that it is both "a part of the United States" and also exists "apart from the United States." Its status, like those of other US colonies, has sometimes been referred to as "foreign in a domestic sense." Because of this status, when the United States as a nation, a country, a political entity is invoked in any forum, whether it be on the floors of Congress, the creation of a flag, the writing of a comedy bit or movie, Guam may or may not be included. Take for instance when the movie Pixels, directed by Chris Columbus and staring Adam Sandler was being created. The issue of Guam's inclusion and exclusion into the United States played a role in the fact that it was included as a location in the film. I wrote about th

I may have only been in Japan for a little less than a month, but it seems to me that Japan enjoys a heavy emphasis on instructions, signs and communicating properly. Perhaps because I can't read most of these signs as they are in Japanese and so because of that they are more visible and noticeable to me, whereas for others they simply fade into the background like visual cicadas. When walking by a construction site, signs are everywhere warning people to be safe, to not enter and even to apologize profusely for the inconvenience. Everywhere you go helpful and usually colorful mascots offer everything from advice, advertising and even just cheery, "hang in there!" messages. I'm used to walking into stores where I exchange less than ten words with a clerk, but here each employee is their own tenderu techa and every purchase offers their their own rosary or two about what I am buying, the money I am giving them and the importance of having a good day as I leave. Even

I've been lost in Power Point presentations for the past few days. I'll be teaching for the next month at Kobe University in Japan. My course is an accelerated one and so I'm teaching a month-long course in just a week. I don't normally prepare Power Points for any of my lectures in Guam, but since my students here in Japan will be primarily those who did not learn English as a first language, the visuals and potential outline skeleton it provides will help keep them engaged. My course focuses on US militarization in the Asia-Pacific Region, and it will link together US strategic interests from Okinawa, to the Philippines, to Guam, to the Marshall Islands and Hawai'i, while also linking together the popular movements for demilitarization or decolonization against those bases. For me, este kalang un guinife-hu mumagahet. I am been working on this issue as an activist and an academic for many years. In 2011 I published my article "The Gift of Imagination: Sol

I wrote an entire dissertation about some of the blind spots and forms of hypervisibility that Guam is cloaked in. I based my theoretical framework on the idea that Guam is something that is largely invisible to the world, but also at the same time fairly secure in its identity as something military belonging to the United States. Guam is often regarded as a place that affords the United States strategic flexibility. I built off this to argue that the island's political status, it being a place that flickers in and out of existence on the one hand, but is rarely questioned as being something the US clearly has the right to militarize and control, gave the United States far more than just strategic possibilities, it gave them larger political abilities. Strategic labiality was a phrase I sometimes used, where the ambiguity of the island provides the US with far more than just a small island, a sliver of real estate in the Pacific. My dissertation was easy to write, because of the

Guam Mentions are always interesting. The random places that Guam will appear in the speech of military planners, world leaders, comedians and filmmakers is always so intriguing to me. Taking serious these mentions are sort of traces of the structure of American imperialism and colonialism was the main theoretical intervention of my dissertation. Moving away from seeing the random way that Guam gets mentioned sometimes whether it be by Bob Hope or David Letterman as actually possessing serious meaning and truth and not just being an accidental or random mention. For most the flexibility and labiality of meaning attached to Guam, the occasional invisibility that it is shouldered with or assumed is just a misrecognition, is something people say just because they don't know better or something you can just attribute to ignorance. But for me there is far more that just that. The colonial status of Guam and the ability to shift and produce meaning for it, the ability to

I have been working for the past week on answering some questions for an antibase group in Italy. Through David Vine, best known for his book Islands of Shame about Diego Garcia, they held a virtual meeting amongst demilitarization activists from around the Pacific and Europe. A physical gathering of antibase activists in Italy coordinated virtual presentations from speakers representing struggles in Guam, Okinawa, South Korea, Hawai'i, Diego Garcia and elsewhere. It was an inspiring and invigorating moment even though because of time differences I was hunched over my computer at 2 in the morning. The group found the exchange of information so interesting they decided to produce a book that would give a road map to the struggles that are happening around the world, to help us better see how we are connected. Here is the text for the short presentation that I made during last year's demilitarization network solidarity meeting.  ***************** --> I apolog