Negotiating Manhood: Chamorro Masculinities and US Military Colonialism in Guam, 1898-1941

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2015-08

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University of Hawaii at Manoa

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The 1898 ceding of Guam by Spain to the United States ushered in a markedly new posture for the indigenous Chamorro people of the island, not merely as subjects of yet another colonial administration, but wards of a military colonial administration in particular. The US Navy’s governance of the island instigated monumental cross-cultural encounters between Americans and Chamorros – encounters that remain largely underinterrogated and fundamentally misunderstood. In particular, Chamorro men and their historical agency in this colonial history remain intensely obscured. This ambiguity of indigenous men as historical agents is not unique to the history of US colonialism in Guam, and it reflects a larger problem of the historiographical canon across different colonialisms in which Chamorro men’s place is meager at best. These written histories have fashioned indigenous men as largely absent from the island’s past and as mere victims of successive colonialisms by Spain, Japan and the United States. Those Chamorro men who have survived this historical erasure are those who either mirror the foreign men who came to dominate them or who became complicit with colonial institutions and ideologies imported to Guam. This study offers a more careful and critical investigation of negotiations of US military colonialism in Guam by Chamorro men during the US Navy’s first administration of the island (1898-1941). In particular, this study examines the social construction of Chamorro masculinities through the sights of American education, economy, military, politics, and popular culture in Guam. Employing careful textual and discourse analysis, as well as ethnographic interactions, this study seeks to uplift Chamorro men out of historical obscurity and illuminate their masculinities as layered, complex, and largely hybridized manifestations of the interplay between native men and historic and ongoing US colonialism and militarism in Guam.

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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). History

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