Inscribing empire: Guam and the War in the Pacific National Historical Park

Abstract

National parks form an archipelago of government-run, on-site "museums," geographic sites of territorial and rhetorical nation-building. The War in the Pacific National Historical Park, which occupies seven parcels of land on the small island of Guam, celebrates the "freedom" that the U.S. brought to the region in World War II. But in fact, this landscape sits at the nexus of several contested territories. Guam was seized in the 1898 Spanish-American War--the final wave of American territorial expansion--and experienced 50 years of dictatorship under the U.S. Navy, despite vigorous efforts by islanders to gain citizenship and basic rights. The post-war transformation of the island by the military came at the further expense of local land rights, and the park itself later got caught up in the struggle over federal land ownership. Disagreements within the park service and between the park service and the local people added to the contests. Finally and most importantly, the park-as-text presents a discourse of American military heroism against the Japanese, at the expense of recognition of Chamorro suffering, or of any historical marker tying the indigenous history of Guam into U.S. historical memory. The contradiction between U.S. expansionism and U.S. ideals is apparent in the way the park serves as a colonial tool in this remnant of the American empire. This paper examines the park as a narrative landscape within the fields of contestation that characterize U.S. rule on Guam.