Envisioning Inafa’maolek Solidarity
The Importance of CHamoru-Filipino Mutual Relations for a Decolonized Guåhan
Kristin Oberiano and Josephine Faith Ong
On September 2, 2019, approximately two thousand people gathered for the Fanoghe March at Adelup Point, the largest march for CHamoru self-determination in Guåhan’s history. The march was held in response to an unfavorable court ruling in Davis v. Guam that denied the CHamoru right to hold a Native inhabitants plebiscite on the political status of Guåhan. It also took place in the context of a 10.3-billion-dollar US military buildup on federally controlled lands, approximately one-third of the island.1 The Fanohge March sought to unite a coalition of organizations, political leaders, and the general community to demonstrate the wide support for CHamoru self-determination and celebrate the resilience of the CHamoru people through speech, song, dance, and chant. Among the six maga’taotao (honored individuals) who led the Fanohge March were two Filipina women, Nerissa Bretania Underwood and Maria Teehan, who have worked in solidarity with CHamoru self-determination since the founding of the Organization of People for Indigenous Rights (OPI-R) in the 1980s.2 Following their example, a group of Filipino women from Guåhan also carried a sign that read “Filpin@s for CHamoru Self-Determination.”
The purposeful presence of Filipino activists and advocates in support for CHamoru self-determination upended the narrative proposed by the plaintiff of the Davis v. Guam case, Arnold “Dave” Davis, who labeled the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision a win “for all the folks in Guåhan who were locked out of this vote, especially those of Filipino ethnic origin.”3 Under the guise of White benevolence and racial equality, Davis, a White military veteran, spoke for the Filipino population of Guåhan to bolster his settler claim that the CHamoru quest for political self-determination was racist and discriminatory. He also capitalized on contemporary tensions between CHamorus and Filipinos, ignoring the role US militarism has played in framing their complex history.
Significantly, Davis’s comments also erased the existence of CHamoru-Filipino solidarities that we have witnessed as founders of Filipinos for Guåhan, a community organization that supports CHamoru self-determination.4 At first an informal group for two years, Filipinos for Guåhan was more formally organized in 2020 by six Filipina women who call Guåhan home, including Kristin Oberiano, Josephine Faith Ong, Jamela Santos, Ruzelle Almonds, Tabitha Espina, and Tressa Diaz. Seeking to strengthen Filipino solidarity for CHamoru self-determination, Filipinos for Guåhan hosts community meetings to discuss Filipino identity on Guåhan and strategize ways to support efforts by CHamoru activist groups around the island. As founding members, we recognize that Filipinos for Guåhan builds on the feminist genealogies of CHamoru-Filipino relations that began in the 1980s with the OPI-R to organize in solidarity with CHamoru protectors in our present moment. Filipinos for Guåhan centers the CHamoru ethos of inafa’maolek, or mutual relations, and the place-based context of Guåhan within our activism.5
In this essay, we argue that US militarization, especially through the imposition of US racial logics, disrupts practices of inafa’maolek between CHamorus and Filipinos. First, we begin this essay by discussing the CHamoru ethos of inafa’maolek, a practice of reciprocal relations that entails both contribution and retribution. Then, through inafa’maolek, we historicize the specific American imperial context of Guåhan, where US racial logics erased CHamoru genealogical ties to land and exploited Filipino labor. This erasure and exploitation led to tensions and conflict between CHamorus and Filipinos, demonstrating the retributive aspects of inafa’maolek. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of our work with Filipinos for Guåhan to show how inafa’maolek can guide Filipino solidarities with CHamoru self-determination and decolonization in the contemporary era. As mentioned in Nitasha Sharma and Jinah Kim’s introduction to this special issue, this essay joins others in decenter hegemonic sites to delve into the unique history of race, Indigeneity, and feminist solidarities on Guam in order to add complexity to the general narrative of the transpacific.
The CHamoru Ethos of Inafa’maolek
The ethos of inafa’maolek is often considered to be the foundation of CHamoru culture—the “soul” as described by anthropologist Lawrence Cunningham.6 CHamoru feminist Christine Taitano DeLisle describes inafa’maolek as “a tåhdong [deep] and age-old system upon which most other Chamorro values are built.”7 Literally translated, inafa’maolek means “to make good to each other,” signifying the central importance of harmony and responsibility a person has to one’s family and community. It emphasizes interdependence and privileges communal balance, rather than US narratives of individualism.8 Inafa’maolek, however, is also dualistic. Rather than seeing inafa’maolek as simply a positive ethos, CHamoru scholars like Michael Bevacqua, DeLisle, and Keith Camacho see inafa’maolek as a complex social relation that seeks balance through acts of contribution and retribution. In other words, an individual, group, or colonial institutions (e.g., the US military or federal government) that do not abide by the reciprocal relations of inafa’maolek should expect resistance.
Within CHamoru culture, inafa’maolek emphasizes respetu, mamahlao, and chenchule’ as core to the reciprocal relations that outline a person’s obligations and responsibilities to their entire community. A 1996 book published in Guam, Inafa’maolek: Chamorro Tradition and Values, describes inafa’maolek through a story in which a grandmother, Nånan Biha, speaks to her grandchildren about the core principles of inafa’maolek and how it is practiced every day.9 She spoke about how respetu (derived from the Spanish word for “respect”) was ingrained in the CHamoru people’s deference to elders, leaders, and the environment.10 In order to show respetu, Nånan Biha told her grandchildren to have gaimamåhlao (whose root word is mamåhlao, or “shame”) or “to have some shame or modesty, and not act greedy or like you want things for yourself.”11 The best way to practice gaimamåhlao was to partake in chenchule’—to give in times of need. Nånan Biha said “Chamorros believe that members of the familia have obligations and responsibilities to one another … in order to keep things running smooth.”12 Chenchule’, however, is not just about giving, but is also about receiving—“you have the obligation to give chenchule’ back some time in the future, when that person or family needs help.”13 Chenchule’ allows for interpersonal and family relations to remain strong through generations, ensuring communal balance and deepening inafa’maolek.
Inafa’maolek can also be a form of retribution and vengeance. CHamoru scholars point out the dangers of misunderstanding inafa’maolek as a practice based solely on generosity and harmony, rather than a process of recognizing inequality and injustice.14 Because the retributive aspects of inafa’maolek are ignored, they argue that US militarized and tourist narratives of inafa’maolek tend to emphasize CHamorus’ generosity, often reinforcing gendered ideas of CHamoru subservience to US colonization in the process.15 Likewise, we draw on CHamoru scholarship that traces how inafa’maolek evolved with US militarization to include “the carceral and security logics of the state.”16 Rather than retribution as a way to remind an individual of their obligations and restore communal balance, US militarization has emphasized the punitive side of inafa’maolek as the ends itself. In other words, the US military’s violent presence on Guåhan both altered and broke inafa’maolek obligations and thus CHamoru resistance to US militarization is a form of inafa’maolek as retribution.
Since the 1970s, inafa’maolek has gained traction as a political concept, harkening to an Indigenous set of relations that operate alongside and in resistance to other forms of colonial relations. At the start of the CHamoru self-determination movement, CHamoru intellectual and activist Robert A. Underwood employed inafa’maolek to remind CHamorus and non-Indigenous migrants and settlers about their responsibility to each other and the island. Tiara Na’puti and Michael L. Bevacqua argue that in the twenty-first century “Inafa’maolek is also a reciprocal network and provides a strong challenge to the imbalance imposed by the US nation-state” in their analysis of previous CHamoru community organizations We Are Guåhan and Famoksaiyan.17 Today, CHamoru protectors such as Prutehi Litekyan, Para Todus Hit, Independent Guåhan, Micronesian Climate Change Alliance, and I Hagan Famalåo’an Guåhan frame US militarization as extractive, destructive, and unjust, and instead call for the island’s community to practice inafa’maolek and rebuild mutual relations with each other and the environment.
Following CHamoru scholars’ and protectors’ calls to recognize the importance of inafa’maolek, Filipinos for Guåhan builds coalitions with organizers across all sites of US empire, and is motivated by our relationships with other Asian solidarity organizers across the Pacific, including activist-scholar Candace Fujikane and critical theorist Dean I. Saranillio. Specifically, Fujikane’s definition of a settler ally—a person in “opposition to all forms of oppression mobilized by the occupying or settler state”—is similar to how Filipinos for Guåhan addresses historical Filipino participation in the militarization of Guåhan.18 While Fujikane relates her practice of settler allyship to the Kānaka Maoli practice of aloha ‘āina and kuleana, Filipinos for Guåhan grounds our work in the CHamoru epistemology of inafa’maolek.19 In conversation with Saranillio’s critiques of the Philippines’ historical and postcolonial reliance on the United States, which led to ongoing tensions between Kānaka Maoli and Filipino settlers in Hawaiʻi, we also unpack how Filipino colonial miseducation and trauma influenced some Filipino settlers’ discomfort with CHamoru decolonization efforts in Guåhan.20 For example, Filipinos for Guåhan works with CHamoru organizations such as Independent Guåhan to conduct teach-ins, podcasts, and workshops that trace interconnected CHamoru-Filipino colonial histories. Our collaborations with CHamoru activists and Filipinos for Guåhan motivate our analysis of CHamoru-Filipino historical relations and contemporary solidarities.21 In the next section, we trace how CHamoru-Filipino relations were influenced by genealogical connections, post–World War II militarization, and US racial logics. Furthermore, we show how inafa’maolek works in CHamoru-Filipino relations.
CHamoru-Filipino Relational Histories
The shared colonial history of Guåhan and the Philippines, the rapid militarization of Guåhan in the post–World War II period, and the island’s current political status as an organized unincorporated territory and a United Nations non-self-governing territory all set the parameters for how CHamoru self-determination and decolonization are understood. They also influence how Filipinos can participate in these decolonization processes. By acknowledging Guåhan’s specific colonial context, we analyze a history of militarization that counters pro-American narratives of liberation that pervade historical knowledge of Guåhan. Secondly, we underscore the tenuous course of CHamoru-Filipino relations that informs how CHamoru-Filipino coalitions are formed. We center CHamoru genealogies and the ethos of inafa’maolek that complicate the ongoing destructive effects of US militarized violence.
Indigenous Genealogies and Relations
Historical connections and tensions have characterized CHamoru-Filipino historical relations.22 Both the Philippines and Guåhan were colonized by the Spanish empire for several centuries before the United States annexed the archipelago and island as spoils of the Spanish-American War in 1898.23 Under the Spanish empire, CHamorus were converted to Catholicism, fought in wars and conflicts against Spanish colonists, were exposed to diseases and epidemics, engaged in global trade through the Spanish galleons, and adopted agriculture, along with a host of other imperial changes. Significantly, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, CHamorus intermarried with other Spanish colonials who were government officials, soldiers, convicts, and deportados—exiled criminals of the Spanish empire. As a result, CHamoru culture has evolved to include elements of Spanish and Filipino cultures.24
Despite the influx of settlers, CHamorus retained their Indigenous language, abided by kustumbren CHamoru (CHamoru culture), and maintained genealogical ties to the island. DeLisle emphasizes the importance of genealogical ties to place and inafa’maolek, noting that they are “rooted in Indigenous conceptions of self in relation to land and community.”25 In particular, many Spanish era and pre–World War II Filipino families integrated into CHamoru society and “were for the most part accepted as ‘Chamorro.’”26 As the anthropologist Laurel Monnig writes, “there is no hesitation with accepting these non-Chamorro ancestors as Chamorro familia, as part of themselves, as being Chamorro.”27 CHamoru belonging is expansive and inclusive, in which inafa’maolek is the foundation of familial obligations, genealogical connections, and community relations. Because CHamoru women also defined terms of belonging through blood and culture, the Spanish colonial policy of bringing Filipino men to Guåhan to intermarry with CHamoru women led to their incorporation into the CHamoru social and clan structures.28 While many CHamorus may have a Filipino ancestor, the continuity of CHamoru genealogy and culture in the Marianas defines CHamoru indigeneity.
The accommodation of non-CHamorus into CHamoru society, however, complicated the US empire’s racial and ethnic lines when it colonized Guåhan in the twentieth century. CHamoru people with mixed ancestry did not fit into US logics of “racial purity,” which, Laurel Monnig historicized, rendered CHamorus “‘inauthentically indigenous.”29 This implementation of US racial logics onto Indigenous peoples who have claimed mixed race as integral to their identity has forced CHamorus to “prove CHamoru” by strategically navigating both CHamoru relationalities and imperial racial logics. For example, in the early twentieth century US colonial officials and even Filipinos believed that the mixedness of CHamoru culture was evidence that CHamorus had disappeared, giving them the right to deny CHamoru claims to land, political rights, and, indeed, Indigenousness.30 This denial was the first of many US colonial policies that replaced inafa’maolek as a form community belonging.31
The Racial Logics of US Militarization of Guåhan
Through the militarization of Guåhan the US empire imposed racial logics upon CHamorus and Filipinos in Guåhan that hindered possibilities of inafa’maolek. With regards to the racialization of CHamorus, CHamoru scholars have shown how the US military consistently performs and reinforces its conquest of CHamorus through the replacement of Indigenous names, the displacement of CHamoru people from their land, and the destruction of sacred sites.32 After World War II, the US military annexed two-thirds of Guåhan to increase its military base footprint in the Pacific for the Cold War. This dispossession included moving entire villages and cordoning off pieces of land on which CHamoru people depended for subsistence.33 As CHamoru historian Tony Palomo recounted in Island in Agony, “Farmlands were converted into airfields and the villages which had escaped destruction during the actual fighting were moved elsewhere.”34 CHamoru land displacement shifted CHamoru kinship networks and delayed tangible possibilities for economic development beyond the US military.
Meanwhile, US militarism and neocolonialism in the Philippines after World War II drove Filipino migration across oceans to other labor markets including the military bases in Guåhan.35 To make the US military’s transformation of Guåhan possible, the US military recruited Filipino migrant workers to build the infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and airfields as well as to staff commissaries, restaurants, auto mechanic shops, and other services.36 CHamoru historian Alfred P. Flores reveals that the US military presence in postwar Guåhan “was predicated on a hierarchical labor system that exploited Filipinos based on their race and nationality while marginalizing Chamorros and privileging white Americans.”37 As a result, postwar Filipino immigrants have become imbricated within US militarized history and narratives. Bolstered by diplomatic agreements between the United States and the Philippines, US military contractors recruited thousands of Filipino workers to Guåhan, paying them lower wages than CHamorus and White Americans. Military contract companies housed Filipino workers in company labor camps throughout the island, named not after CHamoru villages but after Philippine political leaders like Quezon and Roxas or US military acronyms like MARBO (Marianas-Bonin Command). The contractors further restricted Filipino workers’ movements, effectively limiting possibilities for cross-cultural, CHamoru-Filipino relations and, indeed, inafa’maolek, kinship, and community building in the post–World War II period.
Pushed out by saturated job markets, the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, and dreams for better lives beyond the archipelago, thousands of Filipinos traveled around the world to find some semblance of economic security in the second half of the twentieth century.38 With migration routes facilitated by US militarism, many Filipinos sought jobs in Guåhan. Some Filipino workers settled in Guåhan after their employment with military contractors ended. While some were able to build business conglomerates, many Filipinos remained in the working class employed by the military, the civilian government, or the tourism industry.39 Furthermore, Filipinos’ ability to receive permanent residency and then US citizenship allowed them to establish families and sponsor relatives for further migration into the United States through Guåhan. According to Vicente M. Diaz, “Filipinos led a procession of other non-Chamorro residents to Guåhan who have taken up previously Chamorro-owned plots of land.”40 As an unincorporated territory of the United States, Guåhan represented the possibilities of fulfilling the American dream for Filipino migrants, but at the expense of CHamoru dispossession.
The rapid militarization and demographic change of Guåhan resulted in the rise of racial tensions between CHamorus and the newly migrated Filipinos. By 1980, CHamorus comprised 45.1 percent of the population, while Filipinos were 21.2 percent.41 These tensions manifested in schoolyards, in professional and social settings, and even in the political arena.42 The antagonism was mutual. CHamorus feared that the growth of the Filipino community would affect CHamoru politics, society, and culture. Furthermore, Filipinos represented an obstacle to CHamoru postwar development, as military contractors preferred the cheaper wages and disposability of labor that Filipino workers provided.43 This influx of migrants put a strain on the CHamoru community, who witnessed both a large loss of land and the inability to obtain stable jobs that fulfilled their families’ needs. On the other hand, Diaz observed that “Filipinos look down on Chamorros as not as culturally rich as people in their mother country,” and frequently justified their place and belonging in Guåhan because of their role in rebuilding the island after World War II.44 As Diaz argued, “what has been spoken about and never analyzed properly in the discussion of relations between Chamorros and non-Chamorros, however, is an ongoing American colonial history that has orchestrated relations and growth in Guam.”45 Rather than recognizing how US militarization reinforced racial power hierarchies, CHamoru-Filipino tensions often replicated the US empire’s racial logics that disrupted the potential for inafa’maolek between them.
CHamoru Critiques of US Racial Logics
The legacies of militarized CHamoru land annexation and Filipino labor were increasingly felt in the 1950s through the 1980s, even after the Organic Act of Guam in 1950. Although the Organic Act of Guam gave the CHamoru people on Guåhan US citizenship and established a civilian government for the island, there were still limitations to how much the local government of Guåhan could govern the island in the following decades. For instance, the governor of Guåhan was appointed by the president of the United States until 1970, and federal regulations on immigration and trade posed problems that were exacerbated by the island’s geographical distance from the US continent. In terms of immigration, some CHamoru government and economic leaders started to believe that the increased presence of Filipino temporary workers created a job competition in which CHamorus were losing. In 1970, CHamoru Senator J. T. Sablan passed a resolution in the Guam legislature to limit or completely eliminate temporary alien workers in Guåhan because he believed businesses would rather pay migrant workers low wages than hire CHamoru people. He was referencing how US military contractors often used racialized pay scales that paid White workers the highest, CHamoru workers second highest, and Filipinos the lowest. As historian Alfred Flores notes, “Filipinos were usually still paid below the US minimum wage, which was $0.75 per hour in 1950.”46 Among other consequences, Sablan also argued that it contributed to a brain drain of potential CHamoru workers and professionals who would rather move to the States than return to the island.47 It also led to increased CHamoru participation in the US military.48 These issues came to a head in the 1970s when CHamorus were presented with the opportunity to revise their political status with the United States.
With these problems at hand, CHamoru leaders started to question whether or not they could improve federal-territorial relations, and thus they commenced the Guam Constitution and Guam Commonwealth movements in the 1970s through the 1990s.49 These movements sought to revise the federal-territorial relationship by negotiating for specific legislation that would better cater to Guåhan’s unique situation. In the midst of the debates to secure a renewed political status with the United States, however, CHamoru activists started to articulate formulations of Indigenous CHamoru rights that they believed should be an integral part of any political status change.
One of the most influential groups was the OPI-R, which was founded by CHamoru intellectuals, students, and community members. One of OPI-R’s main criticisms about Guåhan’s relationship with the federal government revolved around Guåhan’s inability to control local immigration and the possible effects it had on CHamoru political power, Indigenous rights, and, most importantly, self-determination. In 1987, OPI-R member Robert Underwood argued in an essay entitled “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” that the “debilitating effects of rapid demographic change,” including the rise of Filipino labor migration for the US military buildup in the 1950 and 1960s, contributed to the decline of CHamorus’ social, political, and economic control in Guåhan.50 As a result, he wrote that “the future of the Chamorro people as a permanent underclass in the next century seems plausible.”51 Thus, Underwood also suggested that local control over immigration would ensure “the integrity of the Chamorro people would be promoted and the negative effects of rapid demographic change avoided.”52
Furthermore, the members of OPI-R believed that the rise of a Filipino voting population could dilute CHamoru political power. OPI-R advocated for a restricted self-determination plebiscite, in which only those who were “native inhabitants”—only CHamorus—could vote for Guåhan’s renewed political status. As OPI-R’s chairperson Hope Cristobal wrote in a 1987 article, OPI-R “believes that the concept of ‘self-determination’ belongs to the people who have a special historical relationship to a given area. It is crucial for the powers that be to recognize that people have the right to self-determination, not pieces of land.”53 In other words, OPI-R challenged the argument that self-determination belonged to a territory—or an unincorporated territory—and instead argued that self-determination belonged to the Indigenous people.
The proposal for a limited plebiscite was highly controversial as it challenged accepted notions of the United States as a country of immigrants, the perceived benefits of multiculturalism, and the foundation of civil rights.54 Underwood believed this immigrant narrative was detrimental to Indigenous peoples. Underwood wrote in his essay, “There is simply no conceivable reason why Indigenous people should adopt the vision and values of an immigrant society. To do so would be not merely self-effacing, but damaging and illogical.”55 The immigrant narrative, Underwood argued, was potentially “a tool of social destruction and dislocation.”56 Underwood concluded that CHamorus must delve deep into CHamoru culture, center their perspectives as Guåhan’s Indigenous peoples, and advocate for self-determination and self-governance to ensure their presence on Guåhan. He wrote, “Guam too has an inspiring history and that history must provide the dream which inspire [sic] the island’s society. For CHamorus to accept the immigrant dream is to deny their own history as a source of inspiration and the basis upon which to construct a social vision.”57 In other words, Underwood also called for Filipinos to untangle their focus on Guåhan as part of the United States’ immigrant society, and instead center inafa’maolek and CHamoru genealogical ties to place.
The staunchly pro-CHamoru stance of OPI-R was criticized by many non-CHamorus who believed that OPI-R was racist, especially against Filipinos. Hence, racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s in schools, job sites, and other community spaces seemed to filter into the politics of the 1980s.58 OPI-R had the difficult task of persuading the overwhelmingly pro-American Guåhan community about the differences between civil rights and Indigenous rights. For example, in Hope Cristobal’s 1987 essay, she qualifies her assertion of CHamoru self-determination by stating that “Many of the newcomers have made fine contributions to the island and have lived in peace and harmony with the Chamorro people. They are to be accorded the respect and dignity which people all over the world deserve by being a fellow human being.”59 Agreeing with Cristobal, Underwood pointed out that the Filipino population’s impact on CHamoru self-determination was “merely the fact of numbers, the capacity of a society to absorb those numbers and the desirability of a society being able to plan its future.”60 To allay critiques of anti-Filipino prejudice, both Cristobal and Underwood connected the substantial rise of Filipino immigration into Guåhan to the US military’s desire to maintain its presence. Because Filipinos were associated with the US military, they argue that Filipinos also became imbricated in the US military’s failed inafa’maolek obligations.
Here, we find Cristobal and Underwood to be in conversation with the Kānaka Maoli scholar Haunani-Kay Trask and Japanese settler ally Candace Fujikane’s theorizations about Asian settler colonialism. Specifically, they define Asian settler colonialism as a system in which Asian migrants to Indigenous land become complicit in settler colonialism’s attempts to erase and replace Indigenous people.61 Like Trask and Fujikane, Cristobal and Underwood trace US militarization’s ties with Asian settler migration.62 At the same time, Guåhan’s political context differs from Hawaiʻi, as the CHamoru elite still control the island’s local government. Furthermore, Filipino settlers on Guåhan continue to be racialized as a source of “expendable yet indispensable” labor today.63 Flores identifies this racialization as coming into being through post–World War II narratives of Filipinos as a subservient and cheap source of labor, and CHamorus as unskilled in comparison.64
Despite their racialization, Filipinos were not monolithic in their stance toward CHamoru self-determination. In fact, OPI-R members included Filipino activists Nerissa Bretania, Maria Teehan, and William Hernandez, who helped dispel the perception of CHamoru racism toward Filipinos. Furthermore, Bretania and Teehan’s role in OPI-R’s community outreach provided a counterbalance to the CHamoru men who staunchly and vocally advocated for CHamoru self-determination.65 Importantly, Bretania, Teehan, and Hernandez were second-generation Filipinos who had long called Guåhan their home and learned its Indigenous people’s histories through their own critical education. Consequently, they understood the genealogical connections of CHamoru people to Guåhan in a way that recognized inafa’maolek, while many post–World War II Filipino migrants did not know its significance.
Nonetheless, both CHamorus and Filipinos constantly questioned the belonging and identity of Filipinos who stood in solidarity with CHamoru self-determination. As another solidarity activist Vivian Dames wrote in her dissertation, “I am not Chamorro but I am of Guam.”66 She continued, “I lack the deep connection to the island that the Chamorro language and the familia, or extended family system, provide. Yet the people of Guam have claimed me as one of theirs in many ways over the years, for which I am grateful.”67 Dames acknowledged CHamorus’ genealogical connections to Guåhan and recognized her acceptance into Guåhan’s society as a privilege. Yet, she also describes how Filipinos have been seen as a racialized threat in Guåhan. She wrote, “At the same time I am aware that, as a Filipina—even one considered ‘local’ who speaks American English sadly devoid of a Pinoy accent—I represent the Other viewed by some as a growing political threat. I have been publicly challenged for speaking out on certain issues and told that I have no ‘right’ to speak because I am not Chamorro.”68 Dames’s observations reveal how the ongoing racialization of the Filipino as an alien, laboring body disrupts inafa’maolek between CHamorus and Filipinos. Specifically, the US military’s racialized constructions influence how Filipinos are seen as a foreign and yet reliable contributor to Guåhan’s militarization, thereby shaping CHamoru organizers’ perspectives about Filipinos’ role in Guåhan’s decolonization. In this way, Underwood’s and Cristobal’s previous arguments about Filipino immigration only reiterated militarized logics about Filipino labor.
Today, US militarization’s ongoing presence in Guåhan has led to persistent tensions between CHamorus and Filipinos. Robert Underwood’s thoughts about Filipino immigrants, however, have shifted to instead emphasize inafa’maolek, as he shared in an interview with coauthor Josephine Faith Ong in December 2018.69 Throughout this interview, Underwood traced his growing awareness of Filipino colonial struggles since marrying his partner Nerissa Bretania Underwood, whose family came to Guåhan through the post–World War II Filipino labor migration.70 Rather than focus on colonial narratives as he did in 1987, Underwood now points out a missed “opportunity to build connectedness” between CHamoru and Filipino struggles against US militarization. Underwood’s increased interactions with Filipino migrants have led to a more nuanced understanding of their connected struggles and shows how CHamorus and Filipinos can build mutual respect.
The differences in how US racial logics defined CHamorus and Filipinos amplify the retributive aspects of inafa’maolek between the two communities.71 Both CHamorus and Filipinos had to contend with a US empire that sought to displace them from their homelands—whether it be through land or labor—in order to assert greater global military and political power. By acknowledging the context of the contentious history of CHamoru-Filipino relations, we, as cofounders of Filipinos for Guåhan, attempt to increase mutual understanding of how US empire has created unequal systems of power. In doing so, we hope to shift the animosity between CHamorus and Filipinos as defined by the racial logics of US empire, and instead fuel CHamoru-Filipino solidarities for demilitarization and decolonization.
Filipinos for Guåhan
Filipinos for Guåhan is a Filipino women-led organization that engages in public education and political actions about CHamoru and Filipino colonial histories and solidarities. With members from different Philippine provinces, class positions, immigrant histories, and professions, Filipinos for Guåhan also represents the diversity of the Philippine archipelago itself. While racial constructions of the alien, laboring Filipino body gloss over these differences, Filipinos for Guåhan recognizes that our group’s diverse social and class positionalities stem from persisting economic and political inequalities that have impacted our members in different ways.72 By remembering how our own colonial inheritances influence our perspectives and lived experiences in Guåhan today, we complicate the US military’s racial logics that construct Filipino bodies as a massive, foreign labor force that can reliably enact CHamoru dispossession. In working with CHamoru-led organizations like the Fanohge Coalition, we further inafa’maolek and mutual recognition of CHamoru-Filipino struggles under US empire in Guåhan.
However, Filipino solidarity work itself predates the relatively recent formation of Filipinos for Guåhan. As we previously mentioned, Filipino women like the Organization of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights OPI-R members Maria Teehan and Dr. Nerissa Bretania Underwood and Fuetsan Famalåo’an member Dr. Vivian Dames have previously connected with CHamoru protectors, reaching out to Filipino community organizations about supporting CHamoru self-determination, and mentoring the current members of Filipinos for Guåhan. Our experiences working with Dames and Underwood have shown us how their historical actions of solidarity create new feminist genealogies, rather than center US militarized violence. By framing their solidarity work in critical education, community outreach, and feminist mentorship, Teehan, Dames, and Underwood demonstrate how to participate in inafa’maolek as a recognition of historical wrongs and a way to envision solidarities that work toward Guåhan’s decolonization.
Motivated by Teehan’s, Dames’s, and Underwood’s activist work, Ruzelle Almonds, Tressa Diaz, Kristin Oberiano, Josephine Faith Ong, Jamela Santos, and Tabitha Espina formalized Filipinos for Guåhan in the summer of 2020. In our vision statement, Filipinos for Guåhan outlined our intention to create spaces for Filipinos to reflect on our identities and histories, support the multiple parts and aspects of Guåhan’s decolonization, and “acknowledge that inafa’maolek is a critical component of how we see ourselves in and contribute to the wellbeing of Guåhan’s community.”73 Following inafa’maolek and the CHamoru practice of respetu and mamahlao, we first ask CHamoru protectors what are the best ways for Filipino settlers to support them. In this way, Filipinos for Guåhan recognizes the importance of contributing (chenchule’) to Guåhan’s decolonization by following CHamorus’ political strategies and concerns. Based on Filipinos for Guåhan’s relationships with CHamoru community organizations such as the Independent Guåhan and Prutehi Litekyan, members of Filipinos for Guåhan have also been able to talk with CHamoru protectors about their Filipino ancestors and ongoing struggles that Filipino workers face in Guåhan.
Filipinos for Guåhan focuses on supporting CHamoru protectors, creating educational workshops for Filipinos to unpack our histories in Guåhan, and building connections with other Filipino solidarity organizers across the Pacific. We envision that our organization’s contribution to Guåhan’s decolonization includes advocating for CHamorus’ political right to self-determination and new political status, CHamoru- and Filipino-produced art, sustainable and culturally relevant food, equitable access to health care and mental health care, and workers’ rights.74 The following subsections describe Filipinos for Guåhan’s organized actions and events with our vision for solidarity in mind.
Solidarity with CHamoru Self-Determination
Filipinos for Guåhan has participated in CHamoru-led marches and demonstrations such as the Fanoghe March, signed petitions and provided comments to demilitarize and decolonize Guåhan, written letters to newspaper editors, given oral testimonies at the Guam legislature, and joined CHamoru-led coalitions. Significantly, we responded to an increase in CHamoru-Filipino tensions from the aforementioned Davis v. Guam case. To complicate Davis’s claims that emphasize racial and imperial logics, our solidarity group published a statement:
As Filipinos that call Guam home, we declare our support for CHamorus’ right to hold a plebiscite to decide their own political status. We feel that this ruling continues the oppressive legacy of colonialism, rather than provides opportunities for better community relations, as Davis’s argument would suggest. We do not disregard our family’s own histories of migration and displacement to Guam, but instead acknowledge their connection to supporting CHamorus’ right to self-determination. Consequently, centuries of historical injustices can be addressed.75
Instead of upholding US racial logics and militarized violence, Filipinos for Guåhan focused on our position as Filipino settlers that want to build “better community relations” with CHamorus.76 In other words, we participate in inafa’maolek through acts of chenchule’.
Critical Education
In addition to our vocal support of CHamoru self-determination, the organization also recognizes the importance of community outreach. Belonging and identity continue to be major concerns of many second- or third-generation Filipinos who call Guåhan home. With this in mind, we host monthly workshops and meetings called Mabuhay Meriendas to discuss various community issues, including CHamoru-Filipino historical relations, talk story as healing from historical traumas, intergenerational experiences of Filipina women, and the importance of film and art for the Guåhan Filipino community. Mabuhay Meriendas provide space to ask difficult questions about Filipinos’ positionality in Guåhan and Filipinos’ role in Guåhan’s decolonization. Participants in Mabuhay Meriendas are often grateful to meet others who are grappling with Filipino identity on Guåhan, as they neither feel true belonging in the Philippines nor identify with the larger continental Filipino American population. These meetings curb feelings of isolation by building a supportive community that provides a stable foundation on which Guåhan Filipinos can contribute to Guåhan’s decolonization.
Decolonization Beyond Guåhan’s Political Status
Filipinos for Guåhan also recognizes that the ongoing question of Guåhan’s political status is a conversation that should be led by CHamoru people. We have also argued that Filipinos without CHamoru ancestry should not have the right to vote in any plebiscite, a form of respetu and mamahlao. In particular, Filipinos for Guåhan sees food sovereignty as a way for Filipinos to form ecological relationalities to Guåhan grounded in Filipino culture. Quite often, Filipinos who move to Guåhan begin gardening as a way to cook Filipino meals for their families, supplement their wages, and build community through exchanging local fruits, vegetables, and even plants. Significantly, Filipino farms and backyard gardens contribute to increased food sovereignty in Guåhan, relying less on imported foods.77 In tandem with the CHamoru tradition of lanchos (ranches) and farming, the cultural significance of land and food to both CHamoru and Filipino people provides a point of CHamoru-Filipino convergence for envisioning alternative futures beyond US colonialism and militarism. By participating in practices such as these, Filipinos for Guåhan emphasizes the multiple ways in which Filipinos can contribute to the decolonization of Guåhan without decentering CHamoru self-determination narratives.
Conclusion
This essay traced how US racial and imperial logics are implemented in Guåhan. Positioning our theorization alongside CHamoru studies scholars, we illustrate how US militarization relies on the ongoing reduction of Guåhan as an unincorporated territory of the United States, rather than CHamoru land. Filipinos have been imbricated within this system, but there are potentials for solidarities rooted in inafa’maolek, as our work establishing Filipinos for Guåhan has shown. Additionally, the critical mentorship of Nerissa Bretania Underwood, Vivian Dames, William Hernandez, and Maria Techan helps to continue the CHamoru-Filipino genealogies of solidarity and resistance. Through political solidarity work, critical community education, and participation in various decolonial practices, Filipinos for Guåhan rebuilds CHamoru-Filipino relations by practicing solidarity rooted in inafa’maolek.
Kristin Oberiano is an assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University. Kristin’s research examines the evolution of the political, social, and cultural relations between Indigenous CHamoru people and Filipino migrants and immigrants under the US military empire on Guåhan in the twentieth century. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program in the Philippines, the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard Center for American Political Studies, among others. She earned her doctorate in history from Harvard University. Kristin is a board member of Guåhan Sustainable Culture, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to food sovereignty on Guåhan.
Josephine Faith Ong is a PhD student in gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Motivated by her experiences living and organizing under US military occupation of Guåhan, Josephine’s research interrogates settler colonial strategies of containment while also centering CHamorro-Filipino feminists’ collective resistance. She has previously received the UCLA Institute of American Cultures research grant, UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship, and honorable mention for the Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship. With regards to her community work, Josephine is a founding member of the community organization Guåhan-based Filipinos for Guåhan, and serves as its representative to the Fanoghe Coalition.
Notes
The Commission on the CHamoru Language and the Teaching of the History and Culture of the Indigenous People of Guam recommends the spelling “CHamoru,” but there are multiple spellings such as “Chamoru” and “Chamorro” that are also still being used. We chose to use the spelling “CHamoru” to acknowledge CHamoru efforts to decolonize the CHamoru language in Guåhan. For this same reason, we also chose to use the spelling “Guåhan” rather than “Guam”; Jerick Sablan, “Hundreds March for CHamoru Self-Determination,” Pacific Daily News, September 2, 2019, https://www
.guampdn .com/story/news/2019/09/02/hundreds -march -chamoru -self -determination/2189704001/; US Department of Defense Inspector General and US Department of Interior Inspector General, “Interagency Coordination Group of Inspectors General for Guam Realignment Annual Report: Section 2835 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010,” January 29, 2011, https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/oig-reports/DoD/Interagency-Coordination-Group-Inspectors-General-Guam-Realignment-Annual-Report-2021.pdf; Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “The Davis Decision and Updates on Guam’s Quest for Decolonization,” speech, Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, May 18, 2017, United Nations, https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/sites/www.un.org.dppa.decolonization/files/2017_6_dp_michael_lujan_bevacqua.pdf. Michael L. Bevacqua, “Fanoghe March Was a Beautiful Day,” Pacific Daily News, September 5, 2019, https://www.guampdn.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/09/05/bevacqua-fanohge-march-beautiful-day/2216518001/.
Kevin Kerrigan, “Neither Side Surprised by Appeals Court Decision on Plebiscite,” The Guam Daily Post, July 31, 2019, https://www
.postguam .com/news/local/neither -side -surprised -by -appeals -court -decision -on -plebiscite/article _0e5eed1c -b2aa -11e9 -affa -5f2fff362078 .html. “Letter: CHamorus’ Have a Right to Self-Determination,” Pacific Daily News, August 22, 2019, https://www.guampdn.com/story/opinion/readers/2019/08/22/letter-chamorus-have-right-self-determination/2079612001/.
Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, “Introduction,” Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, eds. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv. Ginoza’s arguments about gendered violence in Okinawa and Hogue’s analysis of nuclear testing across the Pacific bring up similar questions about gendered militarized narratives and environmental extraction. With regards to Okinawa, Marines’ gendered violence has subsequent resulted in their transfer to in Guåhan. The militarized currents (Shigematsu and Camacho, 2010) therefore necessitate a transnational and comparative analysis of militarization and colonialism.
Tiara R. Na’puti and Michael L. Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guam,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 848; Lawrence Cunningham, Ancient Chamorro Society (Honolulu: Bess Press, 1992), 86.
Christine Taitano DeLisle, “A History of Chamorro Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (2015): 6.
Na’puti and Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guam,” 848.
Political Status Education Coordinating Commission, Hale’ta Inafamaolek: Chamorro Tradition and Values (Agana, Guam: Political Status Education Coordinating Commission, 1996). Hereafter cited as Hale’ta Inafa’moalek.
Hale’ta Inafa’moalek, 28.
Hale’ta Inafa’moalek, 24.
Hale’ta Inafa’moalek, 27.
Hale’ta Inafa’moalek, 25; Anne P. Hattori, “A Take on Taking: Unwrapping Complexities of Oceanic Gifting in the Chamorro Context,” President’s Address at the Pacific Historical Association Conference 2018, 8.
Michael L. Bevacqua, “There Are Certain Limits to inafa’maolek,” The Pacific Daily News, November 19, 2020, https://www.guampdn.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/11/19/bevacqua-there-certain-limits-inafamaolek/3773967001/.
Christine T. DeLisle, “Destination Chamorro Culture: Notes on Realignment, Rebranding, and Post-9/11 Militourism in Guam,” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 21, 2016): 564–65. For other examples of US militarization’s gendered implications, see Ayana Ginoza, “Archipelagic Feminisms: Critical Interventions into the Gendered Coloniality of Okinawa,” Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies Association 7, no. 2 (February 2022).
Keith L. Camacho, Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 23.
Na’puti and Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guam,” 849.
Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Geographies in Hawaiʻi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 14.
Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, 14–15.
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Colonial Amnesia: Rethinking Filipino ‘American’ Settler Empowerment in the US Colony of Hawai’i,” in Asian Settler Colonialism, ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 259–60.
As Nitasha Sharma and Jinah Kim discuss in the introduction to this special issue, Hawaiʻi-based scholars theorized Asian settler colonialism in response to Asian settlers’ economic, political, and legal dispossession of Kanaka Maoli. In our article, we build on this scholarship to consider the specific context of Guåhan, where CHamoru have more political power within the local government.
DeLisle, “A History of CHamoru Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism,” 1–2.
The Spanish empire also politically separated the island from the Northern Marianas at this time.
In Sharma and Kim’s introduction, they discuss the CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez and his family’s intergenerational knowledge of CHamoru and Filipino ties. Importantly, Santos Perez and his mother’s mapping of Guåhan locates its invisibility in relation to the Philippines. In this way, Santos Perez’s 2011 article seems to reflect the complex historical and familial ties and tensions between Chamorros and Filipinos.
DeLisle, “A History of CHamoru Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism,” 12.
Laurel Monnig, “Proving Chamorro’: Indigenous Narratives of Race, Identity, and Decolonization on Guam,” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2007), 362.
Monnig, “Proving Charmorro,’” 362.
Vicente M. Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie: The Historical Relations Between Chamorros and Filipinos and the American Dream,” ISLA: A Journal of Micronesian Studies 3, no. 1, Rainy Season (1995): 151.
Monnig, “‘Proving Chamorro,’” 11.
C. L. Poor, “The Natives of Guam,” Harper’s Weekly, December 16, 1899; “Guam Congress Special Session, 25 September 1926,” MSS 870 Box 1 Folder 22, Guam Naval Government Records, 1899–1950, Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC), University of Guam.
While our article focuses on Filipinos migrating to Guåhan for a better life, CHamorus also leave Guåhan for similar reasons. Just as notions of racial purity feed into settler colonial erasure, colonial definitions of Indigeneity may also use an increasing pattern of CHamoru out-migration to further erase their ties to and presence in Guåhan. In this sense, narrow definitions of Indigeneity rely on Micronesian “rootedness and rootedness,” rather than their fluid, cultural practices that traditionally included seafaring and migration; see Vicente M. Diaz, “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking, and the Re-mapping of Indigeneity," Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (2011): 21. As Anesi, Flores, Reilly, Sasaki, Vaughn, and Warren show in their article (“(Re)centering Pacific Islanders in Trans-Pacific Studies: Transdisciplinary Dialogue, Critique, and Reflections from the Diaspora,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 2021), talanoa and other forms of storytelling nevertheless maintain diasporic Pacific Islanders’ genealogical ties to their homelands.
Na’puti and Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guam,” 848–49.
James Viernes, “Fanhasso i Taotao Sumay: Displacement, Dispossession, and Survival in Guam,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2008); Anne Perez Hattori, “Guardians of Our Soil: Indigenous Responses to Post-World War II Military Land Appropriation on Guam,” In Farms, Firms, and Runways: Perspectives on U.S. Military Bases in the Western Pacific, edited by L. Eve Armetrout Ma, (Imprint Publications, 2001), 186–202.
Tony Palomo, Island in Agony (Self-Published, 1984), 242.
Robyn M. Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 17–18.
Alfred Peredo Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park’: US Empire and the Racialization of Civilian Military Labor in Guam, 1944–1962,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 814.
Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park,’” 831.
Colleen Woods, “Building Empire’s Archipelago: The Imperial Politics of Filipino Labor in the Pacific,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 13, no. 3–4 (2016): 131–52.
Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park,’” 831.
Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie,” 154.
Guam’s People: A Continuing Heritage Statistical Profile of the Territory of Guam 1920–1980 (Guam: Interagency Committee on Population, 1988), 134.
Joe S. Dizon, “Filipinos in Guam’s 1970 Elections,” Guam Recorder 2, no. 1 (January–March 1972): 56–59; Kristin Oberiano, "Territorial Discontent: Chamorros, Filipinos, and the Making of the United States Empire on Guam," (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2021), 266.
Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park,’” 824.
Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie,” 155; Robert A. Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” 61–62.
Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie,” 155.
Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park,’” 823.
“Resolution No. 352,” Working Papers #66, Box 107, Folder 3, Papers of Congressman Antonio B. Won Pat, Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam; Robert A. Underwood, “Excursions into Inauthenticity: The Chamorros of Guam,” Pacific Viewpoint 26, no. 1 (1985).
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, “Indigenous Soldiering during the Trans-Pacific Vietnam War,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (2022).
Joseph F. Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth The Quest for Change,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro: Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective, The Hale’ta Series (Hagatña, Guam: Political Status Education Coordinating Commission, 2002).
Robert Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” Chamorro Self-Determination, ed. Laura Souder and Robert A. Underwood (Mangilao, Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center, 1987), 62.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” 60.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future.”
Hope A. Cristobal, “The Organization of People for Indigenous Rights,” in Chamorro Self-Determination, ed. Laura Torres Souder and Robert A. Underwood (Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam, 1987), 82
Oberiano, “Territorial Discontent,” 320.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” 62.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future.”
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future.”
Oberiano, “Territorial Discontent,” 267–68.
Cristobal, “The Organization of People for Indigenous Rights,” 82.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” 63; Cristobal, “The Organization of People for Indigenous Rights,” 82.
Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawaiʻi,” Amerasia 26, no. 2 (2000): 4; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 5–7.
Underwood, “Immigration and Guam’s Future,” 63.
Keith L. Camacho, “After 9/11: Militarized Borders and Social Movements in the Mariana Islands,” American Quarterly 64, no.4 (2012): 699.
Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park,’” 815.
Oberiano, “Territorial Discontent,” 362.
Vivian Dames, “Rethinking the Circle of Belonging: American Citizenship and the Chamorros of Guam” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000), xix.
Dames, “Rethinking the Circle of Belonging,” xx.
Dames, “Rethinking the Circle of Belonging,” xxi.
Robert A. Underwood, interview with Josephine Faith Ong, December 18, 2018.
Underwood, interview with Ong. By 1980, 24.4 percent of the Filipino population in Guam was Native-born; 76.6 percent was foreign-born. Guam’s People, 138.
Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie,” 156.
Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, xviii.
Filipinos for Guåhan, “Filipinos for Guåhan Vision Statement,” Facebook, June 15, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/notes/filipinos-for-gu%C3%A5han/filipinos-for-gu%C3%A5han-vision-statement/100520125047121/.
Filipinos for Guåhan, “Filipinos for Guåhan Vision Statement.”
“Letter: CHamorus’ have a right to self-determination,” Pacific Daily News, August 22, 2019.
Tabitha Espina, “Ali’e’ and Asi’i: Unsettling the Rhetorics of Filipinos on Guåhan,” College English 84, no. 1 (September 2021): 100–120; Kristin Oberiano, “Letter to the Editor: What It Means to Identify as a Settler,” Guam Post, October 7, 2017, https://www.postguam.com/forum/letter_to_the_editor/what-it-means-to-identify-as-a-settler/article_0bc225e6-a998-11e7-aacf-e7bc0e57e7cc.html.
Kristin Oberiano, “The Shared Histories of Filipinos and Chamorros,” Presentation, Humanities Guåhan, Dededo Community Center, Guam, September 30, 2019.