Chamorro Soil, Chamorro Soul
Chamorro Soil, Chamorro Soul
by Michael Lujan Bevacqua
May 4, 2016
The Guam Daily Post
Last week’s University of Guam Film Festival or UOGFF was very
exciting for me personally. In three of the films featured, I had a role in
creating, whether as an actor, producer or consultant. I had a minor speaking
role in the film “You’re Not Going Anywhere…Kid” directed by my former student
Kyle Twardowsky, who shot the entire film on his iPhone. The documentary “War
For Guam” which was premiered last year on PBS stations around the United
States was also shown. It was directed by Frances Negron-Muntaner, a prominent
Puerto Rican scholar who teaches at Columbia University. I worked for a several
years as a co-producer (along with local filmmaker Baltazar Aguon and others)
on this film that shows the Chamorro experience in World War II, primarily
through the re-telling of the stories of American holdout George Tweed and
Chamorro priest Jesus Baza Duenas.
The final film, which was premiering at the UOGFF and will
also be screened during FESTPAC later this month is “American Soil, Chamorro Soul”
directed by Jessica Peterson of “The Guam Guide.” In this film, I was featured
as a historian and cultural expert, who tied the different themes together. After
the screening was finished, members of the cast and crew gathered on stage to
take questions from the audience. As I listened to the discussion, I couldn’t
help but reflect back on how the film had come together, and why for me, it
represented a very important and different representation of Chamorro culture
today.
When the director, Jessica had first released a teaser for
her project, which would be a travel film of the same name, she received some
criticism through social media. The initial teaser seemed very focused on the
director and her experiences on Guam interacting with Chamorros, rather than
allowing the people themselves to drive the narrative. Jessica took this
feedback seriously and decided to reimagine the film. She met with myself and
others to talk about the concerns people had expressed and what would be the best
way to approach a portrayal of contemporary Chamorro culture.
The resulting film uses the voices of a group of
practitioners in the realm of dance, traditional medicine and navigation to
talk about how Chamorros are working to preserve and revive their culture. Through
suruhåna Bernice Nelson and a young woman named Audrey Meno, we visit Åmot
Taotao Tåno’ farm and talk about how our traditional medicine has contemporary
value. Through Master of Chamorro Culture Frank Rabon and his dance students,
we see how Chamorros are joining cultural dance groups to empower themselves.
And finally through Ron Acfalle and his sons, we watch as they work to carve
and sail traditional Chamorro canoes, seeking ways to connect to the spirits of
our ancestors.
It is a very different portrayal of Chamorros, when compared
to some previous documentaries and also representations in travel media or the
work of scholars. In those representations, Chamorro culture is described as
being dead and gone, something long lost and buried beneath centuries of
colonization and cultural change. But this documentary challenges that notion.
Human perceptions of culture are so intriguingly
paradoxical. Cultures always change, but humans feel at the same time, like cultures
exist to always stay the same and are “lost” when they do. This is the
contradiction of human social existence. Our cultures live and breathe and
change just as we do, but we all wish that they could be reduced to static
objects that we could fit in our hands, buy from vendors at fairs or would fit
nicely onto tattoos or t-shirts. Each culture is as complicated as the human
that claim it, but also subject to their desires that it be reduced to static
simplicity.
Chamorros and other colonized peoples feel this more than most.
People look at us and say that we have no culture, we’ve lost it all over the
years, but when they look at another culture, they say that they haven’t lost
anything, but just changed due to modernization and evolved or innovated. Even
Chamorros themselves will generally subscribe to this notion, and perpetuate
the terrible idea that nothing that we have is our own, our culture is an
exotic mishmash of everyone else that has made Guam their military base, parish
or home.
It is important that Chamorros not simply accept these ways
of seeing ourselves. They have roots in the writings of explorers, missionaries
and anthropologists, who see indigenous people as either being exotic, pure
natives or else impure, pathetic victims of history. It is important that,
regardless of the tragic history that we might have had, where parts of our
culture were prohibited or forgotten, we do not accept that the actions of
colonizers forever shape who we are and what we can be. In my interview for the
film, I note that even if the dances of Chamorros from the 17th
century were eventually lost, does this mean that Chamorros as a people cannot
ever dance “authentically” again? No, because cultures live and breath. They
lose things, they gain things. It is not something you just plop into a museum
exhibit, it is as complicated and abundant in potentiality as life itself.
For the film “American Soil, Chamorro Soul” what I felt was
most powerful in terms of its narrative, was the way it exemplified this idea,
that Chamorro culture, regardless of whether you want to bring in labels or
authentic or inauthentic, is nonetheless alive. It is a living culture, where
we find those who are fighting to preserve, to revitalize, to keep imagining
the world, even as it changes within what could be called a Chamorro
perspective.
Si Yu’us Ma’åse to Jessica, the cast and the crew for their
beautiful film. If you want to learn more about “American Soil, Chamorro Soul”
please head to its website Chamorro Film
where it is available for purchase or renting.
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