Basing the Militarized Pacific: Indigenous Chamoru People, Filipino Migrant Workers, and Settler Militarism in Guam, 1947–55

This presentation examines the relationship between United States settler colonialism and militarism in the Pacific island of Guam in the immediate post-World War II era (1947-1955). The United States military embarked on a process of rapid militarization of Guam in order to secure the Asia-Pacific region in what would become the Cold War. This caused the dispossession and displacement of the island’s Indigenous Chamoru people and facilitated a racialized labor regime of Filipino migrant workers from the newly independent Philippines to build strategic US military bases on the island. These racialized and gendered processes of empire were obscured by the granting of U.S. citizenship to Chamoru people and certain Filipino workers which further projected the image of an American multicultural and racially liberal island despite the island’s political status as an US unincorporated territory and a non-self-governing territory as designated by the United Nations. Both of these statues made Guam still a colony of the United States. Nevertheless, the Chamoru people continued to resist arbitrary military land annexation and advocate for more rights. This presentation argues that the United States embarked on a regime of settler militarism, in which the practices and rhetoric of US militarism justified the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous Chamoru people and relied on racialized Filipino migrant labor, in an ironic mission to spread democracy and to facilitate decolonization globally in the Cold War and the era of decolonization.