Convention Coverage
While reflecting on this year's convention and my own experience 8 years ago, I sifted through my digital files and came across this article this article that I written fro AAJA or the Asian American Journalists Association.
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2008 Democratic Primaries: Guam and the Banality of American
Colonialism
By Michael Lujan Bevacqua
Written for the Asian American Journalists Association
Written for the Asian American Journalists Association
The unincorporated United States territory of Guam, an
island accustomed to being left off the radar of the American media, has been
showered with press coverage over the past few months, due to its participation
in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential nominating process on May 3rd.
For a small island of 170,000 residents, which is located
4,000 miles west of Hawai’i on the edge of Asia in the Western Pacific, and is
often treated like a foreign country or a bastard stepchild of the United
States, this combination of participating in America’s great democracy and the huge
spike in national media recognition was exhilarating. This status of being an
unincorporated territory is often discussed metaphorically as Guam being
“foreign in a domestic sense,” or an ambiguous political appendage of the
United States, which in terms of the Federal Government, the US military, the
American media, and even everyday Americans, can casually be counted as
American in one moment, as something else, something foreign the next.
Despite this curious political status of Guam being central
to its relationship to the United States, this increased level of media coverage
was almost completely silent on what the island’s political status represents
in terms of providing a critique of America’s claims to be a bastion of
democracy.
**
During the run up to this primary season this year, the
American media fell hard for the myth that Senator Hillary Clinton’s nomination
was inevitable and that the nominating process would be over by the first week
of February. The primary schedule itself is helps create this sort of
expectation, since it is set up to ensure that by the time roughly half of the
contests have taken place, a nominee should already be chosen. By (the first) Super
Tuesday however, it was very clear that this race would not be over anytime
soon, and suddenly the United States, the legions of political pundits and
reporters, the Democratic party, found themselves overwhelmed with more than half
a dozen remaining primaries to contest. Suddenly, the votes of millions who
were not really supposed to count, could conceivably count. States and
primaries at the end of the calendar, which would usually be ignored if a
nominee was selected early, were receiving huge amounts of coverage and treated
as darlings by the campaigns of the two remaining candidates.
But amidst the counting of all these votes which were not
supposed to count, there was also new attention given to a set of votes which
were suddenly valuable, but were assumed to not count in a different, sort of
exceptional way, namely the votes of Democrats in the territories of Guam and
Puerto Rico. As the struggle over delegates and votes worn on, even the
delegates prizes of these two territories was battled over. In the case of
Puerto Rico this could be understood, as the delegate total there was 66, and
in the waning days of the race, this territorial prize outshined the totals of
states such as Montana and West Virginia. In the case of Guam, however the
delegate total was minute, with only 4 pledged delegates and 5 super-delegates
at stake.
With every delegate crucial at that stage of the race, Guam
was thrown onto the American political radar and received a flurry of newspaper
and cable news coverage, as well as attention from the candidates themselves,
who each conducted several interviews to Guam media over the phone or via
satellite. In the primary held on May 3rd, a little over 4,500 Guam
Democrats voted, and Senator Barack Obama won the contest by just seven votes.
**
Media both in Guam and in the United States focused on this
aspect of participation, this idea of Guam at last being included in the
glories of American democracy. On Guam, the media discussed this issue
primarily through expressions by island residents of gratitude for the
privilege of being included, of getting to vote, or getting to help make
history this year by nominating an African American or a woman for President. In
the national media, the creating of any story on Guam and its primary was
overshadowed by the fact that despite the island being a territory of the
United States for 110 years, it was still something which few Americans really
knew anything about. These news pieces became simplistic introductions to the
island, which provided small snippets of its history and its contemporary
existence, focusing primarily on its strategic military importance, today as
the “tip of America’s spear” in the Pacific and its role as an American
battleground against the Japanese during World War II.
Although these pieces were dedicated to informing the
American public about what Guam is, they were nonetheless rife with inaccurate
information. Most notably, a CNN news-piece created in the days prior to the
Guam primary featured video footage from the wrong island in their portrayal of
life on Guam.
**
Amidst all this new coverage dedicated to explaining the
“what” of Guam, there was a huge almost overwhelming silence over an even more
obvious question, the “why?” of Guam. Namely, since Guam is not a state, why
does America have it? Why is it attached to the United States? Why is it a
territory? What does being an unincorporated territory of the United States mean?
For instance, it was peculiar that in the middle of all this
discussion about how the votes and delegates from Guam will be counted, and how
similar the island is with other states that were voting, there was little to
no substantive discussion about what types of votes and delegates Guam actually
has, namely it along with American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and the Democrats
abroad have half delegate votes. Guam in its primary actually selected eight
pledged delegates, but each only counts as half a vote. To put this in
perspective, the penalty which was eventually levied against the Democrats of
Michigan and Florida, whereby their delegate votes were reduced to half votes,
is the normal arrangement for how Guam gets to participate.
**
But even as these half votes were being celebrated for being
counted, there was also a persistent strain in media reports around Guam and
Puerto Rico, that in actuality their votes don’t really count and shouldn’t
count because of the political status of these islands and their residents.
Residents of Guam and Puerto Rico are US citizens, but so long as they remain
in their islands, their rights and privileges as citizens are limited to
non-existent, especially in terms of political representation at the Federal
level. Although the territories of the United States each hold Democratic
primaries, they have no formal role in the general election, their votes are
not counted and they have no electoral college votes. Just as they have no vote
for President of the United States, they also have no voting power in the
United States Congress, save for a sole non-voting delegate from each territory
in the House of Representatives.
When Hillary Clinton added her anticipated primary victory
in Puerto Rico to the slate of reasons why she should remain in the race, there
were slight murmurs of disapproval and uncertainty in the press. Chris Matthews
on his show Hardball made repeated
statements calling into question the legitimacy of Puerto Rico participating in
the primary process since they can’t participate in the vote that really
counts. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas from the website Dailykos made similar statements, questioning whether or not it was
appropriate to count these votes, for these people to have their say, since they
and their voices cannot actually be counted.
These concerns over counting votes that don’t really count,
and the issue of Guam receiving only half votes for its delegates is directly
related to the issue which media in the United States almost completely
ignored, save for the invoking of banal phrases such as “unincorporated
territory,” namely Guam’s subordinate status in relation to the United States.
This term “unincorporated territory” is in reality a euphemism for harsher
labels such as “colony,” and notwithstanding the ignorance of the American
people, the past century of Guam and United States relations can provide a
model was modern colonialism. The lack of attention to the question of “why the
US has Guam?” is due to the inability of the media in the United States, as
well as most Americans and nearly all politicians, to recognize the United
States as a colonial power.
The lack of current political representations and rights is
only the most recent example of this colonial relationship. Guam’s history is
rich with other examples, most notably is 43 period prior to World War II,
where it was literally run as a military colony by the United States Navy and
the massive legal and illegal takings of land from the island’s indigenous
people the Chamorros, after World War II in order to militarize the island. The
impacts of this history can still be found on the island today, whether in
terms of record breaking recruitment statistics amongst the island’s youth for
military service, the drastic poisoning of the island’s environment, or the
fact that in an island which is roughly 200 squares miles in size, 33 percent
of it belongs to the United States Navy and Air Force.
Today, despite the silence on this matter, Guam remains one
of the more than a dozen territories remaining in the world which are
officially recognized as colonies or “non-self-governing territories” by the
United Nations. Under the United Nation’s resolution 1541, the United States is
mandated to assist the island in undergoing a process of decolonization which
will at minimum, provide a self-determination plebiscite for the island’s
indigenous people. The three options which can be considered for this vote are statehood,
free association and independence. The Federal Government however has rejected
this mandate and decried any attempt to resolve the issue of Guam’s political
status through the international community and the United Nations as
interference and an infringement upon its domestic affairs.
While the majority of the island’s residents are uncertain
about what the next political status for their island should be, and divided
over whether any status change is possible or even desirable, the island has
slowly over time developed a strong and determined decolonization movement. As
part of this movement, for the past two decades Chamorros have made annual pilgrimages
to the United Nations in New York to testify as to the state of affairs on
Guam, and also call upon the United States to recognize and see through its
obligation to decolonize the island. During the testimonies given to the Fourth
Committee at the United Nations in 2006, one speaker noted that the
representative of the United States who was present in the room while they
testified, would not even look at them, not even acknowledge that they were
there.
**
This metaphor of refusing to acknowledge the obvious,
refusing to admit to a presence which is right beside you in the room, is also
apt in describing the media coverage, or lack there of on the issue of Guam’s
political status and its potential decolonization.
During the 2008 primary season, where history has indeed
been made with the nomination of Senator Obama for President, there is an
exuberant willingness amongst the American media to celebrate all the wonders
of American democracy and the promise of American greatness that was being
actualized. Yet, at the same time there is an almost banal refusal to admit to
or even report on, in the cases of Guam and Puerto Rico and the other
territories of the American Insular Empire, what these islands attest to in
terms of the limits of that democracy and gaps in that “glorious” promise.
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