Diaspora: Reconnecting with cultural roots
By Johanna Salinas
Michael Mendiola Garcia, born to CHamoru parents, grew up in California, distant from his cultural roots and a stranger to his family’s native tongue. “Unfortunately, none of my immediate family members are CHamoru speakers,” he said.
When his grandfather, Gregorio Toves Mendiola, relocated to San Diego with his family, he stopped speaking CHamoru to his children. “My mother used to speak CHamoru as a child, but it was not reinforced as she grew up in San Diego,” Garcia said. “Now my grandfather passed away this year, and I can’t help but feel learning our language also helps preserve his memory within our family.”
Garcia has participated in the CHamoru language immersion camp for adults hosted by Michael Bevacqua, a CHamoru scholar, activist and author. The success of the first two camps in Guam encouraged Bevacqua to bring the course to San Diego, where 9,000 CHamorus are domiciled. The program drew a healthy crowd of diaspora wanting to connect with the language.
“I felt it was crucial to participate in the immersion program as it provided an opportunity for me to further connect with my culture through language,” Garcia said.
Garcia has familiarized himself with the CHamoru culture, Guam history and the decolonization movement, but he felt something was still lacking. “I realized that I needed to engage more actively in CHamoru culture beyond just learning about it or wearing a CHamoru shirt and having a Guam sticker on my car like so many of us do in the states,” he said. “This led me to start cooking traditional dishes and taking online classes to further immerse myself in my cultural heritage.”
For others growing up outside their parents’ home island, cultural disorientation is common. Diaspora communities often grapple with questions of identity as they straddle between their ancestral roots and adopted homelands.
“I grew up always feeling confused about our culture and comparing it to Polynesian culture or other islander cultures that are more intact,” said Brittany Cruz Fejeran, who also lives in San Diego.
She joined the language immersion summer camp to better understand the CHamoru culture. “Things will always be lost. Traditions will always change. Colonialism played a huge part in our cultural shift, but the fact that we are CHamoru will always ring true,” she said. “We decide what we want our culture to be. No one else gets to decide that for us.”
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Living in California, Fejeran does not have many opportunityes to practice the language. When she heard about the immersion program, she was sure to sign up. “I've always wanted to learn CHamoru, but I told myself that it'd be too hard for me being older," she said. “I also saw so many people in the community who are adults trying to learn, and it really inspired me to learn it too. Just knowing that something like this existed ignited some hope in me that our culture is still alive.”
Despite growing up on Guam, Fejeran did not have a leg up on other members of the diaspora when it came to the language. “There were only three people in the program who were born and raised in the Marianas, including me, and the rest of them had never been or had only been once or twice to visit,” she said.
Speaking the language brings them home. “Creating that little experience was something so unique that only the program could've created it for us,” Fejeran said. “We didn't come out of it being fluent in CHamoru, but we do have a better understanding of the language and we also have our own community of people who want to learn, even though the program is over. We're still meeting up. We're still planning practice sessions to keep the ball rolling.”
For those in the program, the language immersion camp has offered more than technical knowledge or mechanical experience.
“While there were language lessons, there was also much more to it,” Garcia said. “The lessons were infused with love, joy, sadness, and a deep respect for our language, our people, our families, and our ancestors. It was impossible to learn the CHamoru language without learning the culture and attitudes tied to it. This brought meaning to the lessons we learned. The experience of doing this program alongside others who are also on their own journey made this program so beautiful.”
"There are so many nuances to learning CHamoru. It's not just learning the language. It's also learning the history, why it's mixed with Spanish, why our relatives don't want to teach us and what obstacles to learning persist to this day,” said Fejeran.
The program’s participants also learned that the mother tongue is the pipeline
“The program was also healing the wounds that we never thought we had,” Fejeran said. “You don't know how amazing it feels until you experience it.”
Fejeran also noted the joy that comes with learning the language. “We made jokes in CHamoru and created our own slang. There were so many laughs,” she said.
While aware that the CHamoru language has incorporated loan words from Spanish, Fejeran acknowledged its uniqueness. “It's still ours, and being able to accept what is my own has been more fulfilling than I ever thought it would be. It feels like I found something I never knew was actually missing, but I don't know how I could have lived so long without it.”
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