It sported a menacing armadillo, with a sign behind him that read: “Don’t Mess With Texas!” At the time, I didn’t know much about Texas, except that it was a place you did not mess with. It was this unknown part of the United States that you had to take seriously!
Every part of the United States no doubt considers itself unique and different, not your average garden-variety state or fragment of the Union. But with Texas, this uniqueness seems to not only have its own sense of pride, but also an industry, economy and political ideology behind it. This uniqueness of Texas has made my teaching at the University of Guam, on the subjects of the importance of history, colonization and decolonization, very interesting lately.
When I lecture about how Guam experiences its particular brand of colonialism today, the recent example of a Chamorro woman in Texas who was rejected for a federal childcare program on the basis that her children being from Guam did not make them U.S. citizens is instructive. When the woman confronted a supervisor with the mistake that had been made, the following conversation ensued:
“He laughed about it and said the [rejection] letter is true and he actually had gone to college and he has never been taught or never had heard anything about Guam existing or being a territory of the U.S.”
What we learn from this example and countless others that take place all the time, is that since Guam is not a state of the union, its Americaness, its inclusion, is always something extra. It is something that has to be checked on Wikipedia, something that lawmakers in D.C. have to add to a bill. Unlike that of a state, it is something which can be taken away literally by ignorance. It can always be corrected later, but what a pathetic form of second class citizenship, where you and the place you call home live and die at the mercy of how much people in the U.S. know about a tiny island in the Western Pacific.
The rhetoric of Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the first year of Obama’s presidency was very interesting. At a time when every conservative and Republican were making insane claims about Obama and his policies, and making all sorts of threats or comments on behalf of the “real” people of the United States, Perry’s comment went the furthest away from the norm of American political rhetoric. Whereas most people talked about being furious at losing their country to Obama and Democrats mutilating the country with their socialism, Perry stood out, claiming if the U.S. moved too far in one direction, Texas might simply leave. One of his comments:
“There’s a lot of different scenarios. … We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”
Texas may toy around with the rhetoric of being independent from the United States, but Guam is a place where it not only can play with such ideas, but has the right to seek independence from the U.S. as well.
Finally, what makes Texas a great place to use in my classes is the two-year-long scandal over the whitewashing of their public school history curriculum. In the spring of 2010, the Texas State School Board started a national controversy when they proposed, and approved, radical changes to the way students learn about history. More emphasis is now being placed on the conservative political and religious movements (Moral Majority, NRA and the Heritage Institute) in the U.S. and how they have contributed to making that great union. Mentions of progressive movements and leaders who have challenged the U.S. and made it more inclusive and more equal have been reduced or taken out completely. The changes seem determined to take out as many mentions as possible of the sins of America’s past, even to the point of teaching children that the era of McCarthyism was justified, and that instances of American imperialism were actually just “American expansionism.”
The biggest problem with this type of whitewashing is not just the lying or skewing of truth. This is bad enough since it gives an image of the U.S. and its history which loathes to acknowledge terrible mistakes or the problems the country has had or continues to have. History is chaos. It is a frustrating mix of things both inspiring and horrifying. The real problem lies in the fact that if you end up teaching history as if it is simple and problem free, people end up without the ability to accept the truth even when they learn it. You have given them an idea of the world which is attractive because it is hopelessly positive and flawless. So when they learn that such is not the case, people have difficulty growing and accepting the truth, but instead react angrily to it and find so many ways of rejecting it and loathing it because of the way it denied them their historical fantasies.
MICHAEL LUJAN BEVACQUA
Mangilao, Guam
