Won't You Please Come Back to Guam? Media Discourse, Military Buildup, and Chamorro in the Space Between

Abstract

In October 2005, Guam’s major daily newspaper, the Pacific Daily News (PDN), reported on the United States Department of Defense decision to relocate over 7,000 US Marines and their dependents from Okinawa, Japan, to Guam. Politicians and businessmen lauded the decision as a potential boon to the island’s economy. Over the next few years, the Pacific Daily News served as the primary print medium through which a dominant discourse was promulgated in support of military expansion. In this paper, I provide an historic framework for understanding the kinds of discourses that have emerged in Guam in relation to US military presence on the island. This paper also considers the various modes of indigenous resistance that have been enacted on Guam—in both the past andthe present—as means of disrupting the prevailing assumption that Chamorros wholeheartedly accept the US colonial agenda. This analysis is also revealing of ways in which Chamorros navigate the space between their indigenous identity and the experience of living under US colonialism in the twenty-first century.