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Michael Lujan Bevacqua comes from the Bittot and Kabesa clans and is the father to the mas ñangñang na nene giya Guahan Sumåhi, who is notorious on island for ruining numerous R-rated movies for childless adults. He has way too many websites and is involved in too many different activist projects, that all keep him from finishing his Ethnic Studies dissertation. Michael has many dreams some of them possible, others needing lots of work in order to become possible. He dreams of an independent Guam, and a Guam where the Chamorro language is more pervasive than yellow-ribbon-car-magnets, watching a Test Cricket series between India and Pakistan in India, and becoming the front-man for a Chamorro language Ska Band.

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The Pacific is Not Complete Without Guam…

April 12th, 2010 • Related • Filed Under

There’s a great website out there for those who are colonialism and political status geeks such as myself called Overseas Territories Review. It features regular updates on different currently existing colonies out there in the world (most of which are small islands like Guam) and some commentary on what sort of challenges they might face as they try to change their colonial status.

It is interesting when I periodically check up on other territories and colonies to see how their state of affairs are going. Sometimes it is an experience akin to looking in the mirror and discovering that the reflection, which looks so much like you is in truth somebody else! Other times it feels like reading a book which everyone around you tells you that you will love, that is totally everything you look for in a book, which will truly connect with you, but which ends up feeling like a gross invasion, a horrid misrepresentation when you reach the end.

Stalking other colonies can sometimes create in me, feelings of jealousy and envy at how much better they have it, how much stronger they seem to be, about how much less strategically important they are, or how much more together they are about their issues. And of course, in the cases of some colonies, which are now states, although their indigenous people might claim otherwise, I have to look at them and emit a sigh of relief that I am not in their position, that although there may be a mountain of racist, exceptionalist and self-serving American legal garbage which keeps Guam as a possession and something owned by the United States, at least I have that shred, that small sliver of possibility that its unincorporated status gives, where Guam might be free again.
The title of this post comes from an article named “Outrageous Fortuno” from the magazine The Nation. That article gives an update to people in the United States about what the state of affairs of Puerto Rico are like today, and what prospects the island has in terms of its own struggle for decolonization. The author ends his article with this passage:
For many Puerto Ricans, the current problems stem from a deeper, much more long-term malaise: the island’s unsettled political status. Yet another plebiscite proposal, which critics say is stacked toward getting Puerto Ricans to vote for statehood, is creeping through the House in Washington. Now more than ever, it’s time for a strong coalition of Puerto Ricans on the island and the US mainland to come up with an alternative–a people’s movement, perhaps seeking stronger economic ties to the Caribbean and Latin America, to demand social justice for 4 million effectively second-class US citizens.

As Residente [a Puerto Rican rapper] said on MTV, “Latin America is not complete without Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico is not free.”

The same notion of an island being trapped between worlds, fitting into neither and pulled between two forms of impossible belonging, applies to Guam. This island was the first in the Pacific to be colonized by Europe, and there is a very good chance that it will be the last to ever be decolonized. Whatever direction the Pacific as a region, with its diversity of islands and peoples, decides to take, it will depend a lot on what happens to the remaining colonies like Guam.

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