The Long Way Home
Voyages of Discovery through Pacific History
Anne Perez Hattori
Logarithms, tangents, derivatives, and integrals––at age twenty, I would have said that I was headed for a career in mathematics, perhaps in engineering or even the newly emerging field of computer science. “Pacific Islands history, ha! What would be the point in that?,” I would have responded through my early adult years.
Although I am a native Chamorro, born and raised in the Pacific, I did not grow up with a strong awareness of myself as an Islander. Instead, I was an exemplary product of American colonial indoctrination that had a near-stranglehold on Guam in the decades following World War II. Except for its geographic location, Guam did not imagine itself to be part of Micronesia, or even the Pacific, and that regrettable mentality persists today in some especially high-powered circles. Rather, we touted ourselves as “Where America’s Day Begins,” boasting not only our location so close to the international dateline, but more importantly our American heritage. More recent jingoists have introduced the slogan, “Guam: America in Asia,” yet another sign of our island’s slippery attempts to obfuscate its island status.
This mental construct resulted largely from World War II (referred to in Guam simply as “the War”) and its direct aftereffects. Guam escaped two and a half years of Japanese occupation, remembered even nearly eighty years later in terms of trauma, fear, and deprivation. To be sure, many, if not most, Chamorros on Guam endured varying forms of physical and psychological brutality, and universal malnutrition also
plagued the island when the US Marine Corps landed in 1944 co retake Guam. We celebrate that landing each July with the island’s biggest secular holiday, Liberation Day. And big it is in just about every possible way––not even simply one day of festivities, but an entire month of carnival activities and the island’s largest parade and fireworks display. For a whole month, television and radio stations, as well as the print media, inundate us with horrifying stories of Japanese brutality and Chamorro victimization that thankfully ended due to American military heroism. To be a war survivor was to be an unwaveringly loyal American patriot. I grew up in this period of rabid Americana, an era in which we preferred to call ourselves “Guamanian” because it sounded more modern than “Chamorro” and because it distanced us on Guam from our kin in the Northern Mariana Islands who were, for reasons seemingly beyond our comprehension, clinging to the native language and culture while Guam was jumping on the all-American bandwagon.
In the Guam of my childhood, we were taunted by other children and punished by our schoolteachers, mostly natives themselves, if Chamorro words slipped from our tongues. The social messaging was clear: since the 1950 passage by the US Congress of the Organic Act for Guam, we were now US citizens, and, therefore, we had to prove ourselves worthy of this new identity. So we ate hot dogs and apple pie, watched The Brady Bunch, wore blue jeans, and spoke English. In our minds, we were just as American as anyone living in San Diego or New York and took great pride in our shiny new passports.
This almost schizophrenic scenario became part of our everyday lives. My elders sat around in the outside kitchen speaking in the Chamorro language and would ask questions or gave instructions to us children in Chamorro, yet we always had to respond in English. It was for our benefit, we were taught. Chamorro was the language and culture of the past, while English signified future greatness. Like many children being indoctrinated, I was comfortable with these instructions, never questioning its wisdom. All around me, the messages resonatedAmerican movies, American TV, American fashion, and, above all, American dollars flooded the island.
Those dollars spoke perhaps most loudly. Since the US military had confiscated more than one-third of our farmland during its “liberation” of Guam, we were desperate for new ways to feed our families.
Conveniently for the United States, jobs abounded on military projects, even though wages for native Chamorros in the 1950s and 1960s were one-third that paid to whites for the same jobs. Overnight, the war’s end transformed an island of self-sufficient farmers and fishers into povertylevel wage-earners. Escaping a life of landlessness and poverty would be possible by obtaining a higher-paying job, but unless one had family “connections” to manipulate, securing one of these juicy positions required new fields of expertise, the most essential one being fluency in the English language.
My siblings, friends, and I were thus raised to learn those abilities that would land us the best possible jobs, preferably in the US mainland, since opportunities and salaries on Guam could not compare with the “motherland.” In the early 1990s, I heard esteemed Chamorro scholar Robert Underwood ask an audience, “If our entire island is preparing students to take on jobs in the States, then who is being trained for life on Guam? Kids in California?” This point has since stuck with me.
Potts Junction
My first forty years were spent primarily in the same house at Potts Junction, the sliver of land at the northernmost tip of the island sitting between two military bases: one navy and one air force.1 This little parcel is owned by the US Department of Interior for the operation of its US Geological Survey office. At Potts Junction were three buildings, uniformly painted white with blue roof trimming. The largest building was my father’s office where earthquakes and the island’s magnetic field were continuously monitored. The other two buildings housed the employees who responded 24/7 to a loud alarm that would go off when an earthquake occurred, and many a night’s sleep was interrupted by its shrieking blare. These homes were standard three-bedroom units that seemed large, unless there happened to be nine children in the family, as mine had.
Mine was an idyllic and insulated childhood in many respects. My dad, Paul, would walk next door for work, coming home for lunch and breaks, and, especially after my mom, Fermina, took on employment outside the home, we could simply run next door if we needed any help. In the meantime, the nine of us would roam around outside without any worries except for the occasional wild pigs in the surrounding jungle that
we sometimes encountered, albeit as much of a fright to them as us. Our sole neighbor had no children until some years after I was born, so my siblings and I formed our own social circle. For our entire lives, we have been each other’s best friends and closest confidantes, no doubt because of this tight bubble in which we were born and raised. We rode our bikes on nearby jungle trails, lazed around on the grass on breezy days, sat side by side on the dinner table doing our homework assignments each day, and read as many books as we could get our hands on.
My parents were organizational wizards, my mom especially being able to keep track of all nine of us at the same time. This was not necessarily difficult when we were at home, but as we grew older and developed our different interests, family management grew increasingly complicated. After my youngest sibling began attending school, Mom started working full time at the Guam Economic Development Authority. After work hours and on weekends, she often drove the family van that picked us up from our divergent extracurricular activities, whether Girls Scouts, softball, volleyball, cheerleading (not me), or another of the various clubs, and we still remark that she amazingly could recite each of our daily schedules and never lose track of any of us.
We attended the closest Catholic school, eleven kilometers from home, benefiting from a generous “family plan” that maxed out the family’s tuition bill after three or four children, making it a bargain for the nine of us. At Santa Barbara School (SBS), we received an excellent start in mastering the universe of American education’s so-called three “Rs”––reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic––all in an atmosphere of decorum and order. Annual standardized tests reassured us that we were keeping pace with Americans of our grade level, and we took pride in this.
SBS was, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, a school very much in its own provincial bubble, up north in then-quiet Dededo, far from the busyness of central Guam villages like Tamuning and Hagatña. By comparison, kids from the central schools were more worldly and sophisticated, having much more exposure to movie theaters and restaurants, and the latest trends in fashion, film, and music. My SBS teachers cautioned us chat we’d soon have to contend with these centrally located kids, especially those from Saint Anthony School in Tamuning, insinuating that high school was going to be a rat race, very different from the protective and nurturing world created at SBS by our
principal, Sister Mary McAuley Paulino, and her tight band of Mercy nuns.2
In 1978, at the age of fourteen, I completed eighth grade and advanced to secondary school at the all-female Academy of Our Lady of Guam, another of the island’s Catholic schools run by the Sisters of Mercy. I entered “The Academy” with considerable self-doubt, wondering if my country bumpkin education and upbringing could match that of these city-slicker girls. Here I had classmates from throughout the island, rather than strictly from the northern villages, and some of them were from the island’s most wealthy and powerful families. In my classes were the daughters of governors and senators, business leaders and military commanders. Although my mother’s side has roots in the large and locally powerful Perez family, our specific subclan, Titang, is landless (due to the military’s post war land takings), hence her selfdefinition as being one of the “poor Perezes.” And I got no cachet from my father’s lineage; there was no social benefit to being the daughter of a Japanese born in Hawai`i who had migrated to Guam in the 1950s. One advocate at Academy––my personal cheerleader, I could say––was Sister Mary Peter Uncangco, an aunt teaching there who took pride in my accomplishments. She knew that the sometimes-catty secondary school atmosphere could be daunting and continually encouraged me to disregard the pressures of the social cliques and instead focus on my coursework.
To its credit, Academy treated its academic high performers with the same respect that it gave to its athletes and-beauty queens. Successes such as scholarships awarded or victories in various academic competitions would be publicly announced and applauded. Being a “nerd” did not subject one to bullying, unlike wearing the “wrong” brand of jeans, so at Academy, my mathematical and other academic skills were honed to an admirable level of excellence, again measured annually through US standardized tests. I received outstanding instruction in my math classes from Sister Angela Perez and then-Sister Mary Helene Torres. Other instructors likewise instilled in me an awe for learning and education, and, for example, although I could barely decipher any of the Shakespearean dramas assigned Sister Francis Jerome Cruz, I nonetheless admired her ability to recite soliloquies with such reverence for the written word. Over the course of four years there, my self-confidence slowly blossomed
with substantial encouragement from my parents, teachers, and small of band of similarly nerdy friends.
I graduated near the top of my class and had plans to pursue a degree in mathematics at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. But the US economy in 1982 was not sympathetic to my plans. I was unable to receive financial aid, as the US was in the middle of a sharp economic downturn, a recession unparalleled since the Great Depression. With so many siblings at home, I could not fathom burdening my parents with the cost of a tuition that would far exceed what they were paying for my eight siblings combined. I opted instead to attend the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa (UHM), where tuition was amazingly inexpensive, in part because it allowed Guam residents to pay resident rates of about $350 per semester. This fateful decision, made under financial duress and after numerous sleepless nights, serendipitously inched me closer to my Pacific present.
University of Hawai`i at Mānoa: My Undergraduate Years (1982-1987)
I had never before been to Hawai`i, but I felt like I knew it, not only from watching every episode of Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum, P.I., but from seeing my own island try to mimic it in any way possible. We had “aloha attire” in the workforce, and my mom brandished her best muumuus every Friday. Hula lessons became popular, especially if one fie the tourist trinket profile of long hair and shapely hips. Yes, Guam had a case of “Hawai`i envy” in the 1970s and 1980s, with our tourism industry just starting to take off and hopeful to emulate the success of Waikiki. Ironically, my supposed knowledge of Hawai`i had little connection with my father’s birth and early childhood in Honolulu. He had lived as a poor child in Kalihi, but in the 1950s, his father’s carpentry skills transported the family to Guam for a job with the US military. While his siblings eventually married and relocated to the US, my dad planted his roots here after meeting my mother when both were students at the College of Guam. Only after deciding to go to UHM did I learn that my paternal great-grandmother was still alive. As far as my father was concerned, Guam was his world, with a wife and nine children amply occupying his attention.
I pursued my interest in mathematics, but by my sophomore year I had somehow lost the ability to visualize what the many equations represented. It was a most disconcerting realization but told me that I had to find a new major. Having been a math enthusiast since childhood, I did not consider straying too far from the field. I spent a year or two taking all kinds of aptitude exams from the UHM counseling office and exploring different major fields, from math to engineering to computers and finally, to accounting. There I would at least keep close to numbers and equations, and it seemed to be a natural shift.
Working in a series of part-time campus jobs also marked my Mānoa years. While at UHM, I found that I had excessive free time on my hands, no longer busied up with an ever-full calendar of family activities. I dropped into the Student Employment Office in my second semester and landed a typist position in the Agronomy and Soil Sciences Department. The next year, I moved to a position in the Population Genetics Laboratory, but the facility shut down shortly thereafter when its lead scientist moved to a job in the mainland. UH reassigned the program secretary, Cherlyn Young, to another office, and she invited me to move along with her. She would now become the secretary at the Pacific Islands Studies Program,3 so in 1984, I began working there as a generic “student help,” as we were called. I did a lot of typing, transferring hard-copy manuscripts into word-processing documents, since the technology was still new to many Pacific scholars.
Here I sat at a desk facing an enormous map of the Pacific chat filled the entire wall at the office entrance. This desk sat across the hall from the large desk of the larger-than-life director of the program, Dr. Robert Kiste, and up the hall from another esteemed faculty member, at that time a graduate student, Terence Wesley-Smith. At this point, I was still fairly disconnected from any self-identification as an Islander. I knew little of my island’s history and had little awareness of what culture oven meant, aside from dances I did not know how to perform. Yet many mornings Dr. Kiste would ask me for updates on Guam, and he would share anecdotes about his conversations with important personalities on the island. He continually engaged me, despite my immense ignorance, in police and gentle banter about islands and Islanders. I found the office to be an exciting place with a steady stream of faculty, students, and visitors from throughout the region, constantly and proudly talking
about their islands, villages, and cultures. For the first time in my life, I was starting co chink of myself as a Pacific Islander.
By my junior year, I was happy at work, but less so with my academic program. I was a now full-time student in the College of Business yet came to realize that I had no passion for accounting. I was, however, quite tired of school and desperately wanted co graduate, so I looked around the college to find the quickest way out. Thus, I fumbled my way into a brand-new field called “International Business.” This program had not yet developed its own curriculum, and so it allowed students to take just about any course dealing with nonwhite peoples and apply it toward the degree. I was able to enroll in a few history and anthropology classes, including one that later came to influence my path in life––HI 288: Survey of Pacific Islands History, taught by the young David Hanlon, a newly hired professor who had recently completed his doctorate. Although intended to be a simple introductory course, anyone who has worked with Dr. Hanlon knows that all of his courses provoke students to see the world in different ways, and for a displaced Islander who was still clinging to a Guamanian rather than Chamorro identity, he created a nagging tension that took me a good decade to process.
Before graduating with my bachelor’s in Business Administration: International Business, I had applied to and was accepted into the UHMānoa Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program. At that stage in my life, I was now intent on returning to live on Guam and thought, as might be typical of a newly graduated college student, that a MURP would be the tool with which I could conquer the universe. At the least, I believed it would empower me to influence Guam’s social and economic development to be more efficient and systematic. Despite my idealism and enthusiasm, I was both burnt out and homesick, and thus requested a one-year deferment in order to rejuvenate. That oneyear break would stretch to almost six years. And urban planning was a path I abandoned.
Becoming a Teacher
I had made no plans for my year off, aside from many hours at the beach and lots of catch-up sleep. And teaching had never been on my short-list, or even long-list, of career options. But soon after returning home, I unexpectedly got hired to teach algebra at a local secondary
school, the all-boys Father Dueñas Memorial High School (FD). On this particular day in 1987, I was simply heading out to the beach with my friend, Arlene Pangelinan. She asked if we could stop at FD first so that she could pick up her materials, since she would soon stare teaching there. I do not know why I even got down from the car, but there I was, standing with her in the principal’s office. As we were exiting, Brother Pius casually asked Arlene if she knew anyone who could teach math, and she immediately and enthusiastically turned and pointed at me. Thus, on the spot, I was hired to teach Algebra I and II. I had obviously not given it much thought, although it did later occur to me that teaching would be a practical way to spend my year of deferment. This job would enable me to work for ten months, then pack up my bags and return to Honolulu for graduate school. That was the plan, and it seemed to be a very tidy one.
My year at FD was hellish in many respects, perhaps predictably so since I had no training to teach and had a difficult time maintaining order in classes that were as large as forty students––and energetic, often unruly boys, at that. But in its better moments, I started to develop an enthusiasm for teaching––helping students learn to meet and overcome challenges and obstacles, motivating them to exceed their expectations, and seeing them gain confidence in the process. I was ready now to abandon the MURP and continue teaching. Yet at the end of the academic year, the school was going through a change of religious administration, and the new principal offered to extend my contract into the following school year, but as a typing teacher––telling me that an all-boy school really ought to have all-male teachers in the math and science classrooms in order to provide proper role-modeling. I was stunned speechless. Suddenly, my career as a teacher seemed in doubt.
But serendipitously, just days after this soul-crushing meeting, I received a call from the principal at my alma mater. Sister Angela Perez had been my Algebra I and II teacher at Academy, and I greatly admired her as a woman of intelligence and integrity. She told me that if I genuinely wanted to teach, then this school would be a more suitable choice. After my calamitous meeting with the incoming FD principal, I accepted her invitation and ended up teaching there for four and a half years, most of it in sheer bliss. Despite the persistence of cliques that are perhaps part and parcel of the secondary school experience, my job
at Academy fulfilled my love for mathematics, nurtured my growing passion for teaching, and provided me with a respectful and caring community of faculty, students, and parents. By the end of my time there, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher for the remainder of my working days.
A direction away from algebra began my third year there, when one of the other teachers, thankfully, asked me to enroll with her in an evening History of Guam class at the University of Guam (UOG). Kirsten Seaquist had recently moved from Iowa and used her time on Guam to become versed in the island’s history and culture, in fact eventually marrying a Chamorro, Ben Pangelinan. I had no real interest in enrolling in the course since my workload kept me quite busy, but inevitably relented. I, indeed, ended up being a terrible student, often missing class and submitting mostly mediocre work, but my professor took it all with great humor and patience, himself having once been a secondary school teacher. Two years later, Robert Underwood would call and invite me to help him in his campaign for the position of Guam’s delegate to the US Congress. I have yet to apologize to him for my embarrassing performance as a student in his class, HI 211: History of Guam, the course that is today my bread and butter.
Dr. Underwood’s campaign would bring me into contact with virtually all the island’s indigenous rights activists, as well as eminent advocates of Chamorro culture and language. Besides Robert himself, other notable figures like Ron Rivera, Hope Cristobal, Ed Benavente, Mike Philipps, and Chris Perez Howard regularly frequented our meetings or simply popped into the campaign office to hang out. Their trips to the UN and other international forums, as well as their interactions with other indigenous activists became regular topics of conversation. I knew of these individuals only from their frequent appearances in the local media where they were typically being vilified as anti-American “radicals” for their “activist” stances in favor of Chamorro language use, Chamorro land rights, and decolonization for Guam. With cups of coffee, and sometimes cigarettes, in their hands, they could talk for hours about political theory, global politics, and indigenous rights, and I would sit at the back of the room during these discussions, attentively soaking up every morsel they would drop. These informal gatherings inspired me to learn more about Guam history and colonialism. They
also provoked me to think critically about the red-white-and-blue brand of Guam history that I had grown up ingesting.
While in the thick of Dr. Underwood’s congressional campaign, Sister Angela called me into her office with a request to teach a new elective course, Guam and Pacific Studies. Since I had completed the History of Guam class at the university, as well as Dr. Hanlon’s Pacific History survey course at UHM, I was thought to be qualified. I was certainly the only teacher at the school who had taken anything more than the basic History of Guam course at UOG. This new course would be an uncomfortable stretch after my years in algebra classes, but twelve years of Catholic school education had trained me to reply, “Yes, sister,” on demand. I threw myself into it and enjoyed it tremendously but also realized that I essentially knew very little about either Guam or the Pacific, barely enough to satisfy a room of seventeen-year-olds. Thus, I made the decision to go to graduate school, not to the Urban Planning program, but to return to Dr. Kiste and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS). At that time, my goal was to complete the MA and return to Academy, where I could teach this course with increased knowledge and confidence.
Dr. Underwood’s electioneering kept me busy when I was not teaching, and he would eventually ask me to assist the campaign as his treasurer. I delayed the start of my master’s program by one semester, not wanting to leave Guam until after the election (which he won). Come January 1993, Robert Underwood left for Washington, DC, and I packed my bags for Mānoa. What began as a two-year plan to attain my MA and return to teach secondary school became a seven-year journey toward my doctorate in Pacific history.
Moving to Hawai`i to Learn More about Guam: Grad School (1993-1999)
I left for Hawai`i with every expectation of returning to Guam, and the years away only hardened my resolve to return home. The more I learned about Guam’s history, the more I realized that the island’s youth deserved to have access to a body of knowledge that had been withheld from me and my generation. So I never seriously entertained living and working elsewhere, and even when fellow graduate students hectically searched for employment opportunities around the world
and prepared for interviews and job talks, I never bothered to look at the job announcements. The Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS) fueled this flame in me, as the coursework there engaged me in discussions and debates about identity, representation, culture, and history. Courses taught by the likes of professors David Hanlon, Karen Peacock, David Chappell, Terence Wesley Smith, Geoffrey White, and Bob Kiste provoked me to question and contemplate the so-called truths about myself and about Guam chat had been fed to me in schoolbooks, church sermons, newspapers, television programs, and other media. Coincidentally, another Chamorro from Guam enrolled in the program at the same time, and although we were mere acquaintances prior to UH, Cecilia “Lee” Perez and I became close classmates and dear friends. Also coincidentally, we both ended up living in Hale Kuahine, one of the East-West dormitories on campus. Lee and I would return from our seminars and talk for hours about readings, lectures, and discussions, usually while eating dinner in the Kuahine courtyard or else accompanied by our precious friend and fellow CPIS classmate, the late Joakim “Jojo” Peter. With Jojo, I spent countless hours at Mānoa Gardens, UH’s oncampus pub that was frequented by graduate students, as well as the occasional faculty members who would generously treat us to a pitcher of beer.
After completing my first semester in the master’s program, I received a call informing me chat my maternal grandfather had died. Although he fashioned himself a carpenter, Joaquin Cruz Perez had also been Chief Judge of the Superior Court on Guam, and consequently a “state funeral” was to be held. The funeral documents included biographies of him, and through these I learned that he had served as a member of the Guam Congress in 1949. Moreover, I learned that this Congress had protested the US Navy for governing over the island in dictatorial fashion. I had never heard of this protest, and few Guam history textbooks even mentioned it. Although I was much chagrined to be learning of this only after his death, the Guam Congress Walkout of 1949 inspired me to pursue more aggressively an academic agenda of archival research. Beginning as a seminar paper under the keen counsel of David Chappell, “Righting Civil Wrongs: The Guam Congress Walkout of 1949” became the topic of my master’s degree research and was my first published paper. In the intersections between Academy’s
classrooms and Underwood’s congressional campaign, and between the Pacific Studies program and my grandfather’s passing, I would begin to appreciate Guam as a place rich in history, as a place with many stories still untold.
During my summers back home, Lee would bring me along to socialize with a childhood friend of hers who would become influential in my academic career, the freshly minted PhD Vicente “Vince” Diaz. In addition to many late-night discussions and his constant encouragement to push the bounds of conventional Guam history, Vince also encouraged us to travel with him to attend the 1994 Pacific History Association (PHA) Conference in Kiribati. That small but star-studded conference was a humbling and inspiring experience that significantly affected my future. It reinforced my interest in Oceania, in Guam, and in history. It grew my interest in academia and engaging with scholars in the field. And it got me thinking seriously about continuing after the MA to pursue a PhD. Decades later, in 2016, I would be so proud to convene the PHA Conference in Guam and, following that, serve as its president.
Amid the broad array of MA program courses in Pacific Studies, the history ones taught by David Hanlon and David Chappell most appealed to me, and so although I had initially planned to finish quickly and return to life as a secondary school teacher, plans changed. After completing the MA in 1995, I was admitted to the History doctoral program and selected for a teaching assistantship, an important position not only because it paid for tuition and provided a monthly salary, but also because it enabled me to work closely with esteemed members of the History faculty and form friendships with other graduate students. Dr. Hanlon’s mentorship has been instrumental in my career, not only because he gently but firmly pressed us all to high levels of academic performance but also because he provided me with the ultimate model of professionalism and scholarship. I continue to admire his quiet charisma and profound modesty.
Professor Hanlon’s coursework and mentorship shaped my doctoral research in many ways, even indirectly. One prominent example deserves mention. During my last semester as a full-time student, I was studying for the comprehensive exams, “the comps,” a series of four all-day exams spread out over two weeks. I intended to dedicate the entire semester to studying for them and had not planned to enroll
in any history classes. But one day, Dr. Hanlon called me in with a special request––to enroll in a course that would be taught by a visiting professor, Dr. Margaret Jolly. I was, of course, familiar with her name, but had not read her work. My interest at that point was political history with an ethnographic, postcolonial sensitivity, along the lines of the Guam Congress research that I had earlier done. He assured me that this would be an incomparable opportunity to interact with one of the world’s leading gender scholars, and I reluctantly agreed. As Dr. Hanlon undoubtedly anticipated, it ended up being an influential seminar. Indeed, one assignment to write a short research paper led me to the topic of health and gender under US naval rule on Guam that formed the backbone of my eventual dissertation.
Surprising moments of discovery such as this peppered my UHM years. Until my graduation in 1999, I had a comfortable office in Sakamaki Hall where I spent many hours reading and writing; one of my poems likened it to a womb in which I was intellectually nurtured. Although I found graduate school to be challenging and exhausting, it was also filled with treasured memories: seemingly endless hours of research and reading in the shiveringly cold Pacific Collection, warmed by the sounds of Karen Peacock’s laughter; cooking, eating, studying, and philosophizing with Lee at Hale Kuahine; and hanging out with Jojo and other friends at UH volleyball and basketball games or at the weekly History Department beer social. Indeed, UHM provided me with excellent opportunities to grow intellectually and socially, but, more importantly, it provided me with outstanding mentorship by Pacific scholars––stars named Hanlon, Chappell, Kiste, and Peacock––complemented by the brilliant world historian Jerry Bentley, and the magnificent US historians Mimi Henriksen and Robert McGlone. My doctoral dissertation went on to be published by University of Hawai`i Press as Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941.
Returning Home: University of Guam (1999 On)
By January 1999, I had completed my coursework, comprehensive exams, and research in Washington, DC, and Honolulu. I then returned home to conduct interviews and mop up the relevant archival sources in Guam’s libraries, before writing my dissertation chapters. I also began
teaching history of Guam classes on a part-time basis at the University of Guam (UOG) in the village of Mangilao, and within a few months, learned from Vince Diaz that a new tenure-track position in Pacific history had been approved. By August 1999, I had been hired to my dream job. But my contract contained a threatening clause––that unless I had my PhD in hand by December 1999, my contract would be terminated without further notice. This UOG administration had hired me rather begrudgingly and obviously thought they could get rid of me swiftly but surely. Detractors told me to my face that most ABDs never finish and that this timeline was a virtual impossibility. It did certainly seem bleak. This chapter of my life was filled with drama and tension, best shared over a beer at the next PHA conference, but the overriding point is that I did indeed meet the deadline.
At that point in time, however, I had written only a couple of the projected seven chapters. But immediately upon learning of my predicament, my doctoral committee members jumped on board to offer their assistance. Fortunately, this was now the internet era, so I could email them my chapters rather than send them by post. Professors Hanlon, Bentley, and Chappell would receive a chapter, and within just a day (or two, at the most) I would receive their comments and revisions. Professors Henriksen, McGlone, Peacock, and Kiste had requested to read the dissertation in halves, and they too were extraordinarily prompt with their feedback. At the home front, meanwhile, my mother became my chief of staff, guarding my room so that if the door was closed, no one even knocked. She took phone messages, left food in the fridge for whatever odd hour I might stop to eat, and proofread each chapter before I emailed it to my faculty. By October, I had completed the writing and first round of revisions and arrived in Honolulu in time to make the graduation deadline for defenses and submission of the final draft. Professor Hanlon generously made room in his department office so that I would have space to complete the final revisions. The defense went smoothly, and I returned in December, almost my entire family in tow, for a memorable graduation ceremony.
Since that time, my career at UOG has been not completely devoid of drama, but certainly far less intense than that first semester. It truly has been my dream job. Teaching classes on topics in Guam, Micronesian, and Pacific history in this so-called postcolonial era has
allowed me to engage students in discussions that were unheard of when I was their age. We can be unapologetically critical of colonialism, the American military, and Guam’s historiography. We can philosophize about culture and change, about the past and the future. Whereas I grew up almost ashamed to show evidence of “Chamorro-ness,” my students wear it on their sleeves, some literally on their bodies with conspicuous tattoos proclaiming their ethnicity and philosophy in highly artful ways. Chamorro language classes have become popular, as have cultural dance and chant groups and other forms of cultural expression. A Chamorro Studies degree program has emerged, initially when Dr. Underwood, now returned to UOG as its president after a decade in the US House of Representatives, called together a small group of faculty to create a BA Minor program. Its quick popularity enabled us to upgrade it to a full BA degree program, and we are proud to have graduated a healthy number of students committed, to the continued vitality of the Chamorro language and culture. It has been my great fortune to have taught in fertile times and on fertile grounds, and I only hope that I have properly nourished this terrain.
I appreciate how privileged I am to hold my position at the University of Guam (UOG). Not only have jobs in academia gotten scarcer by the day, but it would also be hard to find one that allows me to teach my pick of Pacific history and research courses. Furthermore, at UOG I have been privileged for more than two decades now to be surrounded by a student body grateful for an education that reflects their villages and viewpoints. UOG has given me the honor of reaching and mentoring many exceptional students. Some, including Sharleen Santos-Bamba, James Viernes, Mike Clement, and Miget Bevacqua, have gone on to complete their doctoral degrees, and so many others have been brilliant and dedicated enough to conquer whatever path they choose in life. My position at UOG provided me with flexibility to pursue my research interests and enabled me to serve as editor of the Journal of the Pacific History, alongside Adrian Muckle of Victoria University of Wellington and a colorful cohort of dedicated scholars. And through UOG I met my husband, Naushadalli K. Suleman, a Tanzania-born Indian who came to Guam in 1994 to fill a position as a professor of chemistry. Together we will sail this last chapter of my life, hopeful to meet more of the colorful characters who are the life of Pacific history.
As I look to the future, my history stares me in the face. I simply cannot look forward without acknowledging and accommodating my past, including countless moments of serendipity that have guided me to my current place. This idea aligns precisely with the Chamorro concept of mo’na, defined literally as “front” or “forward,” while also connoting an understanding of history as the time in from of today. Looking ahead, mo’na, prompts me to see a history in which I was, at certain times, not proud to be Chamorro, much less a Micronesian or Pacific Islander. Mo’na reminds me that my voyage to Pacific history emailed a trans-Pacific crossing from Potts Junction to Mānoa to Mangilao, as well as an intellectual journey from math to business to Pacific history. My route to Pacific history brought me to my roots, home to Guam and to my identity as a Chamorro, along the way enriching my life far beyond what I could have imagined as a young girl fixated on her multiplication tables.
References
Hattori, Anne Perez. Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941. Pacific Islands Monograph Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2004. ––– . “Righting Civil Wrongs: The Guam Congress Walkout of 1949.” Isla: A Journal of Micronesian Studies 3, no. 1 (1995): 1–27.
Notes
1 In graduate school, I would learn that “Potts” referred to US Naval Governor Templin Potts, who ruled over Guam from 1906 to 1907. In that short time, he made his mark by opposing interracial marriages between native Chamorros and Americans, describing these as “degenerating to the whites” and threatening to discharge noncompliant service members (Hattori, Colonial Dis-Ease, 22).
2 SBS continues to be managed by the Religious Sisters of Mercy, an order of nuns within the Roman Catholic Church that operates several of Guam’s Catholic schools.
3 The Pacific Islands Studies Program (PISP) would later become the Center for Pacific Islands Studies.
