Genealogies of Chamorro-Filipino Resistance: (Re)mapping Chamorro-Filipino Stories of Place in Guåhan

Josephine Ong
Gender Studies
UC Los Angeles

My dissertation, “Genealogies of Chamoru-Filipino Resistance: (Re)mapping Chamorro-Filipino Stories of Place in Guåhan” investigates the Spanish and US colonial governments’ nineteenth and twentieth century archival observations and descriptions of Native Chamorros, Filipino revolutionaries and temporary workers, and the former Spanish prison colony and contemporary US unincorporated territory of Guåhan or Guam. From the position of a feminist scholar and Filipino activist that grew up in Guåhan, I question how the Spanish and US empires’ carceral archives describe Chamorro and Filipino forms of deviance and interrogate to what extent they have impacted Chamorro-Filipino relations. My archives are multi-spatial, multi-temporal, and multilingual. Utilizing my training in feminist archival analysis and community-based oral history interviews, I weave nineteenth-century anti-colonial writings of Filipino revolutionaries, Chamorros’ stories about Guåhan and petitions for both Spanish and US colonial government reform, and oral history interviews with twenty contemporary Chamorro and Filipino organizers throughout my dissertation. Motivated by Indigenous feminist framings of land and relationality and abolition feminist theorizations of carcerality and the problem of innocence, I lean into the constructions of Chamorro and Filipino deviance as potential genealogies of protest that may operate throughout colonially produced archives and Chamorro-Filipino oral histories and intergenerational memories.