Commemorating Our Past, Commandeering Our Future: Guam’s Rocky Road to Self-Governance

 Hafa Adai to our esteemed island leaders, and to all of you joining us here. Events like today’s prompt us to celebrate the important milestones in our history. And although I suspect that many people on Guam don’t know a whole lot about the Organic Act, it in fact affects each one of us on a daily basis. It created GovGuam! And we lean on GovGuam every day for our power, water, traffic lights, schools and university, etc, etc, etc.  

 And it’s the Organic Act that created this. After centuries of being ruled by colonial overlords, the Organic Act established a GovGuam with agencies that would be staffed and led primarily by the people of this island, truly a radical shift in local political participation.  

 When considering the significance of the Organic Act, appreciate this: for the first time since the days of Quipuha and Mata’pang, Chamorros en masse would hold positions of responsibility and leadership on the island.  

 So the Organic Act certainly deserves to be celebrated. But at the same time, we cannot overlook its deficiencies. We didn’t even get to elect our own governor until 20 years later. And the legislature did not have the power to override the governor’s veto. So while the basic structure of a democracy was there, there were inconsistencies.  

 And obviously, the Organic Act was never meant to give us true self-governance. It was a step forward, but a limited one, and that limitation was by design. To understand this, we need to understand Guam’s place within US history.  

 When the US took control of Guam, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 from Spain, it had recently emerged from two wars: the American Civil War and the American Indian wars, both of which highlighted huge problems in the states—particularly surrounding race, land, and power. The United States faced questions of what to do with those who had been formerly enslaved and what to do with Indigenous Americans, many of whom were at that time being displaced by the expansion of the American frontier to the West Coast. 

 The American Indian Wars, coupled with the end of the Civil War, remind us that when Guam was taken over, the United States was dealing with massive race problems. And so colonizing Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines was never going to be a simple matter of integrating so-called “alien races“ into some mythological melting pot.  

 When the US took over Guam, racism was a part of everyday life in the states. Segregation and discrimination were institutionalized aspects of American culture, as they would become on Guam under US Navy rule with separate schools, segregated playgrounds, segregated hospital wards, racially discriminatory pay scales, and so on.  

 Chamorros were being portrayed to the American public, at best, as dark-skinned children, and, at worst, as actual monkeys. In a wide array of print accounts, Chamorros are depicted as unsophisticated, immature, and primitive—as clearly incapable of self-government. After all, the premise of colonialism is that colonized people are not fit to rule and therefore need a parental figure, a colonizer, to intervene. From the start of US rule, the Navy held the attitude that they were our father figure who would guide us to maturity. In a revealing letter to the Secretary of the Navy, one of our leading political figures of the time, Baltazar J Bordallo complained of the “attitude of dominance and superiority-complex which [shows] in a marked degree” among the Officers connected with the Naval Government of Guam.  

 BJ Bordallo wrote this in 1937, but if you look back at the responses of Chamorros over time, you get a picture of people consistently denouncing this colonial mentality, this “superiority complex.”  

 In 1901, we see the first written evidence of Chamorros speaking out against Guam’s political situation under the US. In a petition to the US Congress, they described Naval rule as a “military government of occupation.” The petitioners pointed out that Guam now had “fewer permanent guarantees of [freedom] and property rights“ than when under Spanish rule. America, the land of the free, and yet Guam had more freedom under Spain? It is important to appreciate that even back in 1901, Chamorros possessed the political savvy to call the US on their hypocrisy. Yet this petition was ignored, as were petitions filed in 1917, 1925, 1929, 1933, 1936, 1947, and 1949. These petitions consistently raised the same issues: a desire for self-government, a desire for democracy. 

 It took a world war for the US to finally respond, and Guam’s war story is important. But today, I need to focus on events after the war. Liberation Day on Guam happened on July 21, 1944, but it wasn’t until a year later, in August 1945, that the US would drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

 During that one year interval between our liberation day and Japan’s surrender, the US stationed over 200,000 military on the island. To accommodate this massive presence, Chamorro lands were seized for military use. And yet, at the time, many landowners were generally happy to help in this way to defeat Japan. But they did so with the belief that their lands would be returned when the war was won.  

 Among the lands seized were 70% of Guam’s farms—70% of our ranches—taken at a time when Chamorros had been diagnosed as suffering from universal malnutrition due to the war. Sure, the United States military was handing out free cases of Spam and other canned goods, and people were grateful for the food and the medical services, but gratitude didn’t erase hunger. They wanted their farms. They wanted to be able to feed their families, just as they had been doing for centuries and centuries. The situation with the land takings was critical, and members of the Guam Congress banded together to address this urgent crisis.  

 The Guam Congress members eventually staged a walkout. The intricacies of the walkout are complicated, but its underlying point spotlighted the lack of democracy on Guam, a political crisis sharpened by the suffering that Chamorros had endured at the hands of Japan and the land abuses they now faced at the hands of the US military.  

 Guam Congress members expertly collaborated with allies on the mainland— including some of the US media and civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. Together, they pushed the Guam issue and eventually US Congress passed, and President Harry S. Truman signed the Organic Act. 75 years ago today.  

 But, make no mistake, the Organic Act was neither a benevolent gift from the United States nor was it a reward for our wartime suffering. Rather, it was a response to longstanding Chamorro protests against blatant violations of our civil and political rights.  

 This Organic Act was certainly better than anything the island had experienced for hundreds of years, again since the days of Mata’pang and Quipuha. But it was an imperfect document, like every political document,  including the US Constitution. Hello, when the US Constitution was ratified, slavery was still legal. Talk about a contradiction in the democratic system.  

 Similarly, the Organic Act is not a document to be admired as some inspired writing, and there have been many amendments in its 75 years. But there are still many things to do, places to go, people to talk to. Look, it took women in the US almost 150 years to gain the right to vote. Some changes that would seem to be obvious today in fact took many years of educational activism.  

 So events such as our 75th commemoration are not merely times to celebrate. These are also opportunities to look ahead and to ask ourselves, where to from here. We still aspire for full self-government, and we are still fighting for self-determination. But this is a marathon, not a sprint. And we are still so very far away from the finish line. Si Yu’us Ma’åse. 

By Anne Perez Hattori, PhD