After traveling to Guam for this series,
I’ve learned a lot about the indigenous Chamorro people who live there.
But I still have one more question …
“It’s honor.”
“Respetu.”
“Food and family is the #1 priority.”
“The homeland.”
“Honoring my ancestors.”
“Being Chamorro is everything.”
"Which is the Chamorro word for dream.”
“Every time someone asks me, like, what am I?
I say Chamorro.
I like saying that, because
most of the time they don’t even know what Chamorro is.
And so that’s like a good conversation starter.
Like, ‘Hey, I’m from a little island on Guam.’
‘Oh, what’s Guam?’
‘It’s a United States territory.’”
“Most people in the United States
have no idea what Guam is.
You say, ‘I'm from Guam,’ and people say,
‘Wow, you don't look African,’
or people say,
‘Oh, Guam,
that's right next to Honduras,
I went there once on a mission trip or something like that.’”
“Being a territory for people on Guam
is very complicated,
especially for Chamorros.
I mean, you know, there’s just kind of a
love–hate relationship with the U.S. for many of us.”
“I don't identify as American.
I wasn’t raised to. My parents
always made it very clear to me
that this is not America. This is Guam.”
“Although I am a U.S. citizen by birth,
I always identify myself first as a Chamorro.
I’m a born, raised Chamorro.”
“For me, you know, Chamorro is what I am.”
“So basically if you’re from Guam, you’re technically Guamanian.
But I know people who say they're born here but they
don't want to be called 'Guamanian.'
They want to be American, because that's their culture.”
“Technically I'm living in America,
but the world that I grew up in
is the Chamorro world.”
“I identify as Chamorro,
because even though I speak English and that is my primary language,
I am Chamorro from my blood to my soul.”
“I think there's a colonized mentality that,
you know, ‘We will die if the U.S. leaves Guam.’
For hundreds of years of constantly being told,
like, ‘You cannot take care of yourselves.
You are not smart enough. You don't have enough resources.
You need us. Without us, you will starve.’”
“The name that Chamorros always used to fear when they spoke out is ‘anti-America,’
because America for so long represented these great ideals of
freedom and democracy.”
“Growing up as a child, learning U.S. history and all of this,
you know, Guam’s not in there,
you know. We had these little puzzles with the maps of the U.S.
and there's no Guam in there.”
“Being a Chamorro woman, being a young Chamorro woman,
we're told all the time that you need to be good at school,
good at English.
I even tried to hide an accent when I was younger,
and now I don't have one because I went out of my way to not sound ‘chåd,’
which is like a derogatory term
for a native Chamorro person.”
“I think people on Guam grow up in this kind of –
these mixed messages.
It can create some identity
issues for people.”
“Am I an American or am I Chamorro?”
“As a U.S. citizen,
I should be able to express my liberties and my constitutional rights.”
“My grandfather was born in 1920,
my grandmother in 1922.
They grew up in a Guam which was segregated,
where they couldn't go to the movie theater on certain days
because that was when whites went to the movie theater.
There was restaurants that only whites could go to.”
“There were also a lot of racist ideas going on.
I mean, the documents just flat-out saying,
‘By speaking English, you will learn honesty and morality.’
You could be punished at schools for speaking Chamorro.
So schools, hospitals,
anything run by the government
were English-only zones.”
“I remember the first time
I saw someone who I knew was not Chamorro laugh,
and I freaked out because I thought laughing
was part of our language only,
you know.
The first time I ever saw someone else laugh, I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, you speak Chamorro?’
And my dad was like, ‘No, son, he’s just laughing.
Everyone laughs.’”
“It's important to me now, because growing up,
it wasn't important.
It wasn't important to speak Chamorro,
even though that was all my grandmother spoke.
It wasn't important for me to learn
how to communicate with her,
and there's a lot of regret that I carry because I
wasn’t able to communicate with her.”
“I don't know
what the value is in pledging yourself to your colonizer.
If everybody here decided to get an American flag
tattoo on your a**,
it wouldn't have an impact on if Guam gets more funding.”
“It's our reclaiming of our identity
and our celebration of who we are.”
“How many Chamorros have to die in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Vietnam and World War II?
How many American flag stickers do you have to put on your cars?
How many do you have to fly in front of your houses?
No matter what America promises us,
they're always going to treat us like we're different
and we're less than they are.”
“Hey, guys. I’m Marisa, and I animated this series.
I love being Chamorro, and it’s definitely part of my identity that I embrace.
Don’t forget to watch the rest of this series, and please share with your friends
and don’t forget to subscribe to Untold America.”