3. The Exceptional Life And Death Of A Chamorro Soldier

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the invisibility of Guam historically and contemporaneously is representative of what it describes as the “banal coloniality” of its official “organized unincorporated” status as a territory of the United States. On an island where the U.S. military controls one third of the territory and has a century of militarization and colonialism in support of its occupation, the effects of militarizing impulses and inconsistencies on the bodies, the gazes, and the desiring of Chamorros, its indigenous people, can be seen. This chapter examines the high levels of Chamorro military participation and patriotism by elaborating a genealogy that connects the production of Chamorro desire to join the military to the century-long legacy of colonization. It considers the normalization of the U.S. military presence that occupies more than one third of the landmass of Guam, along with the uncanny and haunting residues of the intermingling of deaths of Chamorro soldiers and the desire for subjecthood for those who live and die in the immediacy of the U.S. colonial militarized presence.

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