NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

We're here to nominate a President, and I've got one in mind. I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for President to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive. I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside. A man who believes we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and cooperation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama. I want Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standa

The Honorable Xavier Becerra Democratic Caucus Vice Chair and Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, California 2012 Democratic National Convention Thursday, September 6, 2012 The American dream—it’s built not with words or speeches but from sweat and tears. Its heart and soul reside not in the boardrooms on Wall Street, but in the shops and factories on Main Street. Its promise is simple: work hard, play by the rules and you can make it in America. That’s Barack and Michelle Obama’s story. Like so many of you, that’s my parents’ story, too. My father was a construction worker who dug the ditches and laid the pipe and concrete to build our highways. My mother arrived in this country as a newlywed with no money, no English and no family of her own. Together, they realized their dream of sending their four children where no man or woman in our family in America had ever gone before: college. El sueño Americano! The American dream! In any language, that’s wha

I've been reading a lot of 9/11 retrospectives lately, primarily because of the fact that for a week it seemed like that was all anyone could write or talk about. I even ended up writing one of my own for my Marianas Variety column this week, which I will post later about Guam's own 9/11, which is not 9.11.2001, and not even 12.8.1941, but rather 9.11.1671, the day of the first large scale open battle between Chamorros and recently arrived Spanish missionaries. It was a profoundly important day in Chamorro history, and the key moment in the story of Guam's third most famous Maga'lahi, Maga'lahi Hurao. In case you're wondering the two most famous are Kepuha and Mata'pang. By far though  my favorite restrospective had to be from The Command Post . This blog disappeared for a while, but several years back it had some very insightful commentary on militarism, imperialism, and even made some very interesting connections between Guam and Iraq . I was happy to

For years while I was living in San Diego, I became accustomed to having "the border" or the border between the United States, California, San Diego and Mexico be a central part of my life and its conversations. Although I was never the most knowledgeable person on border issues, during my time in Ethnic Studies, I read a few books, got to hear from faculty who do the research, heard plenty of stories. As the border represented one of those gaping wounds, that a nation attempts to cover over, by putting police, military units, fences, drones, it was also an ideal intellectual site for talking about issues of violence, the issues of race, citizenship, trade, transnationalism, health. But at the same time, living in San Diego, so many of these issues were not academic, because the communities were literally right there. As I went to different activist meetings or social justice events, I would hear even more stories and meet more people, who live in the "shadow of the bor

I gave a joint presentation last week on Chamorro sovereignty. at a Pacific Educational Conference at UOG along with fellow island intelligentsia and all around intellectual radicals, Victoria Leon Guerrero, Dr. Lisa Natividad and former Guam Senator Hope Cristobal. The room was packed full of teachers from Guam and around Micronesia who wanted to know more about what the presenters meant by Chamorro sovereignty. Ya-niha i fina'nu'in-mami. In na'hassuyi siha put este na asunto siha. In my part of the presentation I talked something I often discuss on this blog, the cultural vs. the political, or the way in which colonized people or minorities tend to be reduced to exotic, flavorful cultural practices in their communities, while another superior culture, generally the colonizer or as Pat Buchanan likes to say " white folks " get to be in charge of The Culture, or the political culture. This Culture is the gatekeeper culture, the one which gets to decide where ev

Just thought I'd share a discussion thread that went through recently on the listserv for my department. It started with a student sending out the announcement below regarding a protest in support of the people of Gaza and calling for an end to the invasion. I should note that my department, Ethnic Studies at UCSD is currently in the process of coming up with an official statement regarding the crisis in Gaza. ************************************************** The Massacre is Continuing and So Should Our Response! The energy and scale of these recent protests have been fruitful internationally. Please come and show you support again at this Emergency Mobilization Event! For 16 days Israel has been committing massacres and war crimes against the Palestinian People in the Gaza Strip. The death toll so far exceeds 900 killed and more than 4300 injured, many very seriously. With many bodies still buried under the rubble of schools, mosques, hospitals, markets, police stations, apar

The mainstream media in San Diego, in California as well as at the national level, "celebrated" the fires that hit California several weeks ago, as a sort of "anti-Katrina." The comparision is stupid and self-serving, but ultimately boils down to simply, where so many things went wrong in New Orleans, so many things went right in San Diego. The rosy image of the fires down here, can in large part be attributed to the complicity of the news media in portraying only the good parts of the story of the fighting of the fires, and not delve into the racism that many communities experienced in terms of not receiving warnings, not receiving supplies, or even being cracked down upon while fleeing the fires. For those interested in learning this other story of the San Diego fires, which was less than stellar for Native Americans, working class and migrant worker communities and large number of Latinos, please check out the links below. By the way, I'm pasting below my la

I'm pasting below the statement of my department on the media coverage and government response to the fires that have been going on down here in San Diego for the past few weeks. Although there were definitely many successes in dealing with the fires to San Diego, in terms of saving lives and preventing property loss, and personally I am grateful that I wasn't evacuated or seriously threatened, there are a number of issues that emerged which we cannot be silent on and cannot dismiss as incidental towards an overall great efforts on behalf of San Diego to protect and save itself. First of all, the the constant comparisions of both media and regular people to this "not being another Katrina" was just far to revealing and defensive to miss. When Governor Arnold went around to evacuation centers speaking to displaced peoples who had lost or might lose homes, he constantly said, "no bad news, just good news." Although one could say that the joy at which media peo