Spain colonized the island for more than 300 years. While many historians say the colonial clock started ticking in 1565, when the navigator Miguel López de Legazpi claimed Guam as a Spanish possession, many of my people — the Chamorro people, who claim the island as our ancestral home — have a quarrel with that date. We say the clock started ticking 44 years earlier, in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan set foot on our shores. After being saved from certain death, a simple misunderstanding over a skiff returned Magellan to his true nature, and, in a matter of days, he renamed our island Isla de Ladrones (Island of Thieves), burned a village to the ground, murdered seven men, and proceeded to eat their entrails. Even if formal colonization had not by then occurred, the brutality that cleared the way for it certainly had.
To this day, 504 years and two additional colonizers later, the shenanigans continue.
We cannot vote for the U.S. President. We have no U.S. Senate representation. We can elect only one non-voting member, who is called a delegate, to the U.S. House of Representatives. These are the blunt inequities, but more sophisticated ones abound. In the House, for instance, our delegate is allowed to vote on floor amendments to bills, but only when convened in what is called the Committee of the Whole, and only if the delegate’s vote does not actually make a difference. Indeed, depending on the version of House rules in force at any given time, our delegate may vote on legislation before the Committee, but should the vote prove dispositive (that is, should it affect the outcome), then the vote is retaken as a matter of course. Our delegate may be present, but only as a body — and even that’s debatable, given the fact that they are not counted for quorum purposes either.
I was born with a hole in my heart.
The author’s mother in the family’s apartment in Tumon, Guam, 1970s.
The author and his sister Rhea with their uncle and grandfather, 1980s.
Technically, what I have is a heart murmur, but my sister says it’s why I’m so sensitive. That hole, she says, is how the outside world keeps getting in. She’s probably right. Still, to place all the blame for my broken heart on that hole would be a mistake. For brokenheartedness is a byproduct of having been born and raised in Guam, especially if you are Indigenous to this island, if you are Chamorro.
If you are Chamorro, you are always coming back from burying the dead.
After heart disease, cancer has put more of us in the ground than anything else. In Guam, an average of one person per day is diagnosed with cancer, while every other day, on average, one person dies of it. We die from common kinds — breast, liver, lung — and we die from rare kinds too. For example, the incidence of nasopharyngeal cancer (cancer of the top of the throat) is almost seven times higher here than in the United States in total. Controlling for ethnicity, the incidence rate for Chamorros is ten times higher, while the mortality rate is nineteen times higher. In the central village of Mongmong, this type of cancer is so common that it has claimed the lives of whole households. I know one woman, Inez Susuico Lujan, who lost all five of her siblings to this one cancer. She herself died of it last year.