The southern part of Guam is an undeniably beautiful place. As a child, my family and I often drove to the southern village of Humåtak to visit relatives on weekends. The fond memories from these drives—sun shining through the tinted car windows and views of the rolling hilltops—evoke a nostalgia like no other. Yet there was something along this drive that stuck out like a thorn: Naval Base Guam, with its sprawling barbed wire fence surrounding the sentry-guarded entrance. As a child, I asked my parents about these fences. They would simply respond, “That’s the base.” I would shrug it off and move on. Little did I know that these barbed wire fences and the systems they represent play a large role in crafting what “home” means to the people of Guam.
The barbed wire fence surrounding Naval Base Guam, located on the southern half of the island
Part of the Mariana Islands archipelago, the island of Guam lies in Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean. It is home to the Indigenous CHamoru people and to competing nomenclatures and narratives. Guam is known as “Guåhan” in the CHamoru language. Translating to “we have,” these two syllables encapsulate the CHamoru view of Guam as an island of abundance. Throughout their history, CHamorus sustained themselves through an interdependence with the land, the ocean, and one another. They felt secure at home. They felt provided for. This interdependence necessitated a respect for the environment and stewardship of it for future generations. Yet “Guåhan” is not the island’s only name. There are competing ideologies whose accompanying material and physical consequences complicate Guam as a place of “we have” and disrupt the very notion of “home.”
In opposition to “we have” is the phrase “where America’s day begins,” which refers to the island’s location west of the International Date Line. Guam is currently an unincorporated territory of the United States. This means that it has only a non-voting representative in the House of Representatives, no representation whatsoever in the Senate, and no Electoral College votes. Furthermore, unincorporated territories such as Guam are under the plenary power of the US Congress. Perhaps most illustrative of Guam’s relationship with the United States is the Supreme Court ruling (via the controversial Insular Cases) that unincorporated territories belong to but are not an integral part of the US.(1)
The result is a vibrantly clear democratic deficiency. The island’s residents often express the feeling of being “second-class” US citizens.
NOTES
(1) Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
View of sunset in Guam; Photo by Jared Suba
See related authors
Kenneth Gofigan Kuper