UCLA

In 2006, the U.S. military announced transfer the Marine base in Okinawa to the island of Guåhan/Guam, a nearby U.S. territory that already holds an Air Force and Navy base. To make room for the Marines and their dependents, the Department of Defense has begun to construct additional firing ranges, barracks, and other forms of militarized infrastructure that would allow it to defend and maintain its interests in Asia and the Pacific. Rather than a homebase for U.S. militarized interventions, however, Guåhan’s Indigenous peoples- the Chamorros- have emphasized their collective genealogical ties to Guåhan’s lands and oceans. Thus, many Chamorro protectors have resisted the build-up, and critiqued the Chamorro politicians and Asian contractors who have worked with the military to further militarize the island. Much of the physical labor required by the U.S. military’s construction projects are performed by Filipino workers, because of their perceived historical connections and their earlier participation in Guåhan’s Cold War militarization. In this dissertation, I investigate the history of Filipino participation in colonial infrastructure projects that have dispossessed and dislocated Chamorros. Utilizing multi-lingual and multi-temporal archives and oral history interviews with Chamorro protectors and Filipino organizers, I trace the impacts of the Spanish empire’s nineteenth century practice of sending Filipino convict laborers and the U.S. military’s twentieth century recruitment of Filipino lawyers, surveyors, and construction workers, in identifying lands and waters for the military to build its bases. Through the framework of Indigenous feminist geography and queer of color critique, I question the extent to which carceral infrastructures and logics have contained Chamorro-Filipino relations. At the same time, I also point to possible moments when Chamorros and Filipinos found ways to resist the Spanish and U.S. empire’s control over their relationalities.