Covering Guam in the 2008 Democratic Primaries

By Michael Lujan Bevacqua

June 10, 2008

Because of a primary battle where every delegate was fought over, the unincorporated United States territory of Guam, an island accustomed to being left off the radar of the American media, has been showered with press coverage in recent months, due to its May 3 participation in the 2008 Democratic primary. This island of 170,000 people, located 4,000 miles west of Hawai’i in the Western Pacific, is a strategically important U.S. military base, but also something often treated by the American media and the Federal government as a foreign country.

Media both in Guam and in the United States focused almost single-mindedly on the simple matter of Guam “being counted.” In Guam, media reports focused primarily on the gratitude voters felt for the privilege of being included and getting to help make history this year. In the national media, Guam primary stories were dominated by the fact that, although Guam has been “American territory” for 110 years, few Americans know anything about it. Most news stories were simplistic introductions to the island, which focused primarily on the island’s strategic importance today as the “tip of America’s spear” in the Pacific and its role as an American battleground during World War II.

As is common with news pieces about Guam, although they were designed to inform the public about the island, they were nonetheless rife with inaccuracies. Most notably a CNN news piece in early May featured video of the wrong island when discussing Guam.

In addition to these inaccuracies, media efforts to highlight Guam’s participation as another instance of the grandness of American democracy, led to almost no substantive discussion on what sort of votes Guam is getting and what “unincorporated territory” means.

First, for all the celebration of how these votes from Guam were being counted, there was little discussion about what kind of votes Guam gets the privilege of having. The delegates from Guam, along with American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and the Democrats Abroad receive half votes. To put this in perspective, the penalty which was eventually levied against the Democrats of Michigan and Florida, is the normal “privilege” for the eight pledged delegates Guam gets.

Second, these news reports ignored or stayed silent on the most fundamental aspect of Guam’s relationship with the United States, namely that “unincorporated status” is just a euphemism for “colony.” Although Guam and its voice are counted at this stage of the election, they won’t count in November. Residents of Guam are U.S. citizens, but so long as they remain on Guam, their rights as citizens are restricted, especially in terms of political representation at the Federal level. They have no popular votes or electoral college votes for President, and furthermore, they also have no voting power in the U.S. Congress, save for a sole non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives.

This lack of political representation however is only one example in a long colonial history, which the island’s indigenous people the Chamorros have felt most of all, as over the past century their island has been largely taken from them and transformed into a U.S. Naval colony prior to World War II, and following the war into the tip of America’s spear it is today, with 33 percent of its 212 square miles belonging to the military.

This year, history has indeed been made with the nomination of Senator Obama. But the media coverage of the participation of Guam has been skewed to celebrate the greatness and the promise of American democracy, while refusing to acknowledge what Guam also represents in terms of limits of that same promise.

Michael Lujan Bevacqua is a graduate student in Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego, the editor of the Chamorro zine Minagahet and will be the official blogger from Guam at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. For the full article on this issue, download the PDF. [Eddie: Link as a PDF the attachment, which is below.

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