It asked, “Should political status issues be more strongly incorporated into high school Guam history classes?” I remember thinking this to be a silly question since it is like asking people their thoughts on whether or not “reality” should be taught in schools.
As one of the few remaining official colonies in the world, the fact that this question can be asked in this way indicates how completely detached the island is from its own reality. How our relationship to the United States is something all can discuss openly and point to as affecting who and what this island is, yet still somehow see these issues as insignificant and something only vocal minorities or activists care about.
So much of the discussion of political status change or decolonization is overshadowed by the specter of decolonization leading Guam to join “the third world.” I find this interesting, because even without the looming threat of decolonization the idea of Guam being “third world” is already present, when people discuss everything from government inefficiency/corruption to poor economic possibilities and even littering.
But this is where understanding Guam’s political status and how it is a central concern is crucial. From the day we are born onto this island we are socially instructed to imagine everything about the world from an inferior, but nonetheless connected relationship to the United States. It is the greatest nation in the world, the only real First World power out there, the possibility that we might be Third World in some way, seems to require a self-loathing because of the way we are letting down our “Mother Country.” Things on Guam being potentially “Third World” is never a simple neutral contrast or articulation, but is always made in relation to that which we tend to conceive of as being the apex of possibility, the United States. It is never just that being like a Third World country is bad, because of supposed “poor economics” or “backwards thinking,” but always because we are colonized to consider ourselves as somewhat American, and so when confronted with something that is not that idealized image of America where tax returns arrive the moment after you file and schools are fully funded and not falling apart, we react strongly and harshly against ourselves.
It is as if, because we have not lived up to the mythical levels of American awesomeness, we must therefore rend our own faces in patriotic, devotional shame. Weighed by some always absent balance and found wanting in civility or reason, we must humiliate ourselves. We are an island always in self-immolation, carving ourselves up into hopelessly dependent pieces, slitting our own bellies to reveal an endlessly metastasizing dependency on the United States for survival. This dependency is very real, but it is sad to see an island convince itself that such dependency is eternal or terminal and therefore we do not strive to improve ourselves and become either a full part of the U.S. or on equal footing through independence.
In the midst of all this the “Chamorro” suffers, becoming the bone in the throat of Americanization. The Chamorro with their demands for “special rights” or for war reparations, decolonization or their addiction to hiring their relatives all get in the way of Guam becoming properly American. This Chamorro is “ungrateful” and takes the form of Angel Santos in his early days of infamy, where he was a troublesome presence, allegedly preventing harmony and spitting in the face of the beautiful future only America can offer.
The bone in the throat metaphor is apt since we tend to understand political status problems through blaming or hating the messengers, loathing them for daring to claim that there is something wrong with the current states of things, leaving the foundation of the problem, our relationship to the U.S., unanalyzed or unchanged. We see political status as an errant, irritating thing. It emerges when the island feels disrespected or when people want to blame things on activists, but none of this leads us anywhere close to understanding either the issue or how central our unequal status is to the character of Guam life today.
The final problem here is that despite claims that people know or care little about political status, most everyone is already adept at speaking it’s language, sadly in just one particular dialect: status quo and nothing else. The problem with this dialect is that of all the possible ways of speaking about the issue, this is the one which wants nothing to change and as such we remain an island that would rather run from its reality than face it.
MICHAEL LUJAN BEVACQUA
Mangilao, Guam
