The Politics of a Language Not Being the Language of Politics
My own motivation for taking on this project was tied to the 2002 Guam gubernatorial campaign. I was a young Chamoru grad student, who had started learning speaking Chamoru the year prior and was functionally, albeit awkwardly fluent in Chamoru. I was spending most of my free time in MARC doing research and interviewing older Chamorus with my grandmother. For the first time in my life I had a sense of being Chamoru and was excited about what it meant. At the time I even wrote a poem called "Loincloth Envy" which was about my gratitude for older Chamoru activists accepting me and allowing me to sit down with them and talk to them and learn from them.
In 2002, Felix Camacho and Robert Underwood were competing to be the next Governor of Guam. I wasn't active in the campaign at all, but I was very much an Underwood supporter, as was most of my family. I had read lots and lots of articles and speeches by Underwood and already considered him to be the Godfather of Chamorro Studies, for his work in articulating the critical turn in the self-examination of Chamorus.
That for me also represented a shift in the community around me and one that threw me off. As I was becoming more and more Chamoru in my own consciousness, Felix Camacho defeated Robert Underwood and became the first elected governor of Guam who could not speak Chamoru. I was a student in Rosa Palomo's intermediate Chamoru class at the time and helped organize a Chamoru language forum between the candidates, where Felix Camacho read a statement in Chamoru, but largely answered in English. I felt insulted that Felix Camacho wanted to represent the island but couldn't take the time to learn to speak his own language. I thought others would feel the same way, but more people felt threatened or felt intimidated by Underwood's ability to speak Chamoru.
When Felix Camacho won, I realized that for the first time in Guam's gubernatorial politics, a candidate had been elected because they were less outwardly Chamoru and that the ability for Underwood to speak Chamoru and speak intelligently about Chamoru history and culture, actually hurt him at the polls. Other factors were an issue of course, but as we can see in the time since, Eddie Calvo was elected who also can't speak Chamoru, and unless Carl Gutierrez or Frank Aguon wins this year, the next governor won't be fluent in Chamoru either (several of the gubernatorial and lt. governor candidates can understand Chamoru, but couldn't give a speech in Chamoru for example).
Because of my experiences watching that campaign, I decided to conduct my thesis research on Chamoru campaigning. I interviewed a long list of people who had long been involved in campaigns on Guam. I sat down with former Governors Ada and Calvo. I sat down with newly elected Congresswoman Bordallo and former Lt. Governor Frank Blas Jr. I sat down with the late Speakers Tony Unpingco and Ben Pangelinan. I only made it halfway through my list before I eventually decided to change topics for my thesis.
One reason I decided to change topics is because of a massive disconnect that I began to experience in my interviews and in my archival research. For people long involved in campaigns on Guam going back to the Popular and Territorial Party days, they painted their memories and their descriptions of campaigns with a heavy dose of Chamoru nostalgia. For them, these pocket meetings and rally were like Chamoru rallies. Everyone spoke in Chamoru, best speakers were always the Chamoru speakers. They had the best jokes and since they were speaking in Chamoru, people gave them more leeway to say mean things about the opposing party. People also said that the Chamoru culture and the clan (for better or worse) was the backbone of the party machine in those days.
But the disconnect for me was that in the campaign materials, the ads and the pamphlets that they produced, the Chamoru language was usually not used at all. The language would appear in snippets or friendly and unoffending fragments like "bota" or "håfa adai" or "Si Yuus Maase" but rarely anything more than that. Candidates would rarely have road signs or yard signs in Chamoru. They wouldn't have newspaper ads in Chamoru. Eventually some candidates would start to have parts of their platform translated into Chamoru, but this was also accompanied with them translating parts into Tagalog as well.
This was depressing because it represented yet another example of what I later called (with my former student and now colleague Ken Kuper) un gefpågo na dinagi, a beautiful lie. One of those comforting narratives that in a way covers over a massive gap, in this instance, the fact that while political players talked about how amazing the deck chairs were on this Chamoru såkman, they weren't paying attention as it was clearly sinking. And worst of all, they weren't seeing the role that they were playing in ensuring that politics would be an increasingly English game on the island, and that Chamoru would be increasingly minimized and tokenized.
I've collected as many ads as I can over the years that use the Chamoru language. Most of them appear around Mes Chamoru or Chamoru month. Other than that, few candidates every really use or engage with the Chamoru language. It is my hope that through my own work and advocacy, we can start to change that.
In the meantime, below is the text from the ad that is featured in the image in this post. It is from Robert Underwood when he was running for the US Congress in the 1990s.
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Para I Taotåo Guåhan
I ETMÅS GUAGUAN NA BOTU
Tåya’ mås empottånte yan guaguan na direcho gi sesteman i
pulitikåt i tano’ kini i uputunidåt para ta ayek håyi para u giha mo’na i
tano’-ta.
Kon dångkolo na respetu, para i minaolek i taotåo-ta, para i
adilånton i ikunumiha, Para u ma abånsa i idukasion i famagu’on-ta, Para i
pruteksion i lina’lå’-ta yan kotturå-ta.
Hu gågagåo ta’lo i boton-miyu gi mamaila na ileksion. I
konfehånsan-miyu yan i respeton-miyu mås takhelo’ para guåhu.
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