by Doug Mack
My GOD, I thought. This is so crass and commercialized, so overbuilt and—
Aaaaah. And then it kicked in. The sweet, synthetic all-American high of Brand Overload. I hadn’t realized I missed it. It may not have stirred my soul in the same way as the natural wonders of American Samoa, but it felt . . . so good.
Maybe I needed to blow my rent money on some new shoes at the two-story Gucci store. Maybe I needed to see some artfully lit fish at UnderWater World. And hello, Häagen-Dazs. I definitely needed a triple-scoop to go with all the smoked meat I was about to consume.
A cluster of young, muscle-bound Americans laughed and shoveled barbecue into their mouths, military personnel from the island’s Navy and Air Force bases. Nearly everyone else in the crowd was a tourist from Korea, China, Russia, or Japan. Half the glowing signs around me seemed to be in at least one of these languages; near my hotel, I’d seen an Outback Steakhouse—the Australian-themed chain—with a large sign reading AMERICA’S FAVORITE STEAKHOUSE in Japanese. Nearly a million Japanese citizens visit Guam every year; it’s an easy three-hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from Tokyo, with daily service on multiple airlines. (It’s also a four-hour flight from Taipei, and if you’re so inclined, you can travel on an EVA Air jet called Hello Kitty Happy Music.)
I bought a plate of brisket and ribs and kept scanning my surroundings—Louis Vuitton! Hard Rock Café!—when suddenly there was a warp in the Luxury Tourist Zone template. Next to the Prada store was a shabbier three-story building. Here was a sex-toy shop. A massage parlor that sure looked like it offered more than sore-muscle relief. And Hollywood Shooting, which was advertised with a backlit sign of Japanese tourists dressed up as cowboys and holding pistols and rifles. It was jarring to see high and low culture cozying up like this, but also refreshing. They weren’t so different, really, in their appeal to base desires. Just different recipes for swagger. Choose Door A to drop a few grand on clothes and accessories that will make you feel powerful and sexy. Or strut through Door B, grab an M16, shoot shit, and get laid.
On the stage set up in the alley between these two versions of America, the DJ brought out a local dignitary. The mayor? The governor? I don’t know. I couldn’t take notes. I was too busy eating some of the best barbecue I’ve had in my life, the brisket fall-apart tender and served with a heady coconut-flecked sauce. But some guy in rimless glasses strode to the mic and announced the barbecue-contest winners with a sportscaster bellow: “And in first place . . . AAaaaassssuu!”
Asu was a local restaurant, run by indigenous Chamorros, who comprise the majority of the population of 165,000 here in the second-largest territory, a thirty-mile-long island shaped sort of like Florida, if the top half of the Sunshine State started to droop to the east. (Also, because Guam is the name of the island, not just the territory, the convention is to say that you’re “on Guam” not “in Guam.”) The runners-up were also from Guam.
The crowd cheered wildly. No one seemed to care that Team Vladivostok and Team Seoul got shut out, not even the Koreans and Russians, two rising tourism markets the visitors’ bureau was clearly trying to impress—Guam attracted some 208,000 Koreans in 2013 and 6,000 Russians (comparatively low, but they’re big spenders, dropping an average of $1,600 every day). But they hadn’t come here for a taste of Russia or South Korea. They’d come here to mainline the American Experience.
If you’re so inclined, in the course of a single afternoon, you can rent a canary-yellow Chevy Mustang or a Harley-Davidson, dress up like a cowboy and fire a machine gun at Wild West Frontier Village, eat a burger at the Route 66 Pub & Club, buy a bulk-sized bag of your favorite flavor of beef jerky from the dedicated section at the souvenir shop, and pose with the Statue of Liberty, with a baseball field in the background, before ending the day with a Las Vegas–style magic show replete with white tigers and dancing showgirls with feathery headdresses.
“Guam, USA,” it says on postcards, on T-shirts, on boxes of dolphin-shaped chocolates, on the seven varieties of souvenir ashtrays I counted at a sprawling gift shop. There are two other common postcard slogans: “Hafa adai” (the Chamorro term for “Hello”) and “Where America’s Day Begins.” The latter is a sly way of turning its distance from the mainland USA into a selling point—Guam’s so far away that it’s literally a different day, on the other side of the International Dateline, thirteen hours ahead of New York. It offers easy access for Asian tourists who want a taste of the states in an affordable weekend trip. Nowhere have I been surrounded by so many people yearning, desperately, to feel American. As I squeezed through the crowd, I could usually tell, even before hearing languages, who lived here and who didn’t: the more red, white, and blue, the less likely to be from the United States.
“IT’S LIKE the samurai in America—we like the samurai, they like the cowboy,” one Chamorro man explained to me. Fair enough. Stereotypes sell. In contrast with the Packaged Polynesia and its hula girls, though, the cowboy isn’t just a stereotype but an archetype wholeheartedly embraced by the people it ostensibly embodies. The cowboy is the quintessential American icon.
“Tales of Wild West men and women, from Kit Carson to Wild Bill Hickok, to Calamity Jane, to Annie Oakley, are woven into the dreams of our youth and the standards we aim to live by in our adult lives,” then-President Ronald Reagan—himself a onetime Hollywood cowboy—said in 1983. “Ideals of courageous and self-reliant heroes, both men and women, are the stuff of Western lore.”
Alexis de Tocqueville thought that mythology of this sort was the stuff of the musty Old World, of monarchies, and that the United States, as a newer, purer sort of place, was above such frippery. “Among a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legends or the memorials of old traditions,” he wrote in Democracy in America. But it turns out that we do nationalistic hagiography as well as anyone. It came as a package deal with Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism and the fervor for expansion and a growing role in the world. If the United States was going to become a global power, it had to follow its predecessors in methodology—control ports to control the seas—as well as in mythology, forming a collective identity and a face to the world. To rise quickly requires not only a belief in legends but a confidence that you yourself are legendary.
In the post–Imperial Moment era, perhaps no single figure looms larger in the nation’s mythology than Teddy Roosevelt—Rough Rider, national park booster, and progressive leader, a Founding Father of the American Century. Here was a man who, like no one else, paired rugged individualism with coalition-building Washington refinement. Count me among his fans. “There were all kinds of things I was afraid of at first,” he writes in his autobiography, “ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” I read that—as someone known to bolt in fright when he disturbs a garter snake in his backyard, as someone who has only been camping for two nights, at his wife’s insistence—and I think, Badass. I start dreaming of saddling up a horse and heading out to the open range with a rifle and a bedroll, come what may. The real key to my admiration, though, is the fact that Teddy wasn’t all empty-headed bluster; he was also someone who, after his wife and his mother died on the same day in 1884, moved to the South Dakota badlands and contemplated the landscape and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. We are, famously, a nation of guileless cockiness, leaving the rumination to those espresso-drinking Old Worlders, but in Mr. Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick we get dashes of all of the above.
After brooding and playing cowboy for a couple of years—there’s a remarkable photo of him wearing a leather jacket and pants edged with a prairie of fringe—Teddy moved back East, serving as New York City’s police commissioner and then, in 1897, being appointed by President William McKinley as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was a key voice in McKinley’s chorus of expansionism-enablers, with a particular itch to go after Spain’s colonies, a goal he endorsed “on the grounds both of humanity and [national] se
lf-interest.”
The cowboy-statesman was relishing his—and his nation’s—next moves, preparing for Manifest Destiny’s biggest leaps away from the North American continent.
EACH DAY in Tumon, I delighted in taking an inventory of the amped-up America on display: the tommy-gun-shaped vodka bottles at the gift shop, the American-style diner where I sat next to a young Korean couple who studied the six-inch mound of whipped cream on their waffle as though it were an endangered-species specimen. At Hollywood Shooting, surrounded by Tombstone and Die Hard movie posters, the sixty-something Japanese man behind the counter tried to talk me into the Rambo Package (M16, machine gun, shotgun, $150); what he lacked in English vocabulary he got across with pantomiming, gesturing to show just how big and powerful these weapons were. A chic Japanese couple—she in a green sundress, he in a white linen shirt and a fedora—took selfies with a wooden drugstore Indian in the corner as they awaited their turn to shoot.
When my appetite for Americana was finally sated, I went to a Japanese restaurant, and was delighted to see the temple-like interior and the table of Japanese retirees next to me. The server came over to take their order, and though she shared their ancestry, she was American through and through, startling the tourists when she told them she only spoke English.
I looked up an old college friend named Mars, who had grown up on Guam and now lived there, working as a lawyer. It’s the ideal place to pursue a legal career, he said, because territorial law so rarely matches up cleanly with stateside precedent, so “everything’s a new, crazy challenge,” and even some nationally applicable laws disproportionately affect Guam. (He mentioned as an example the 1920 Jones Act, which regulates shipping between American ports and, long story short, significantly increases the cost of many goods and commodities, including gas, on Guam, as well as Hawaii and Puerto Rico.) I was hoping he’d help me get out of the tourist bubble, which he did, sort of—he took me to a place called Jamaican Grill, a Chamorro-Jamaican barbecue spot, where we feasted on jerk ribs and chicken kelaguen, the latter a bit like chicken salad, the meat finely chopped and marinated in lemon juice and soy sauce and with a hot-pepper kick. We washed it down with bottles of Guam1 Beer, which turns out to be made in Wisconsin.
Guam has long been a whirl of cultures, mixing in all kinds of ways, by choice, by circumstance, by force. It was a Spanish colony long before the United States arrived on the scene.
“The Chamorro tradition is a design for life, which was constructed with and under the influence of Spaniards, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Americans,” Guam’s then-Congressman Dr. Robert Underwood noted at the Centennial Conference in 1998. “But it is a unique tradition, which many will find a familiar thread in, but in which no one can claim ownership except Chamorros.”
Mars and I met up again the next evening, for more feasting at the Chamorro Village, a marketplace with a scattering of permanent buildings clustered around a pavilion, along with tents set up in the open spaces just for the night. We bought some barbecue from Asu—the street-party winner, and deserving of the title—and stood on a staircase landing overlooking the market, perching our black Styrofoam clamshells on the ledge and enjoying the view as crowds milled about and daylight faded and a barbecue haze hung in the air. In the pavilion, families danced the Electric Slide.
When the Chamorro Village opened in 1990, “there was more of a focus on local crafts and culture,” Mars said. “Now it’s a lot of mass-produced stuff for tourists. Plenty of locals still come here, but it’s not really a snapshot of the traditional ways.” But, he added, “there’s also a debate among Chamorros about what’s authentic culture. Is it pre-war? Pre-USA? Pre-Spanish?”
He pointed to one of the compartments of food in my Styrofoam container. By now there wasn’t much left. “That red rice is the traditional side dish for Chamorro barbecue. It’s from Spain,” the distinctive color derived from the achiote plant. Another compartment held coleslaw—America! And then there was the star of the Styrofoam: the pork ribs. Barbecue on Guam goes back thousands of years—Chamorros first cooked turtles and fruit bats, expanding the menu when the Spanish brought pork and chicken and beef. But present-day Chamorro barbecue also has its roots in more recent history, the ribs and other packaged meats coming from the American military influence, and the marinade that gives the barbecue its distinct flavor and fall-apart texture has a base of vinegar, introduced by the Americans, and soy sauce, from the considerable Japanese population that has made its way here.
These particular ribs had a perfect pink-brown hue, imbued with wood smoke, finished with a subtle dry rub, and with a buttery, porky sublimity. I’ve eaten my share of barbecue around the USA—including a pilgrimage to Kansas City for that express purpose—and this was as good as it gets; if there were any justice, Guam would be lauded as one of the nation’s great culinary regions, with foodies flocking here by the planeful.
It was clear that this seemingly all-American dish had a more complicated story to tell.
UNLIKE THE USVI and American Samoa, where the early European influences were many, Guam’s story is a bit more straightforward, starting with Ferdinand Magellan’s stop here in 1521. As the Spanish galleons neared the shore, they were surrounded by Chamorros in outriggers called proas. The Chamorros climbed on board the ships and, Robert F. Rogers details in Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (1995), “carr[ied] away anything loose,” not out of hostility but per the local custom “whereby new arrivals on an island present gifts to their hosts, who can take whatever they wish from the newcomers.” The Spanish, though, saw only theft and aggression, and responded with crossbows, killing several Chamorros and burning down more than forty huts. They named Guam and its surrounding islands Islas de Ladrones, the Islands of the Thieves. A bloody theme was set.
In 1565, Spain officially decreed the Ladrones—which we now call the Mariana Islands—a Spanish colony, not that they’d cleared that with the Chamorros. Today, the Chamorro language—seldom used in everyday life—bears a striking resemblance to Spanish in vocabulary, though not in grammar. (Drawing on my college Spanish, I kept thinking, I know this phrase . . . wait, no, I don’t.) The last three governors were Eddie Calvo, Felix Camacho, and Carl Gutierrez; and the Catholic Church is still front and center, with regular community fiestas in honor of local patron saints. (One day, driving around Tumon, I saw a large banner advertising the Fiesta of Saint Rita, featuring a cockfight—another Spanish legacy.) Jesuit missionaries first arrived on Guam in the 1660s; as Rogers notes, this was “not just a minor evangelical effort but a commitment by church and state to a modest but strategically significant expansion of the Spanish empire into the Pacific Ocean.”
The fact that the Spanish and the British Empires had grown in large part because of their domination of the sea was much-discussed among early American leaders, but got even more attention in 1890, when the president of the Naval War College, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, published a book called The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. If the United States was serious in its own ambition, this was the template to follow: the path to empire led across the ocean. It was arguably the decade’s defining policy treatise, one that formed the views of American leaders including McKinley and Roosevelt, its influence growing as the emboldened nation annexed Hawaii and continued looking for places to expand overseas.
The same year as Thayer’s book, the United States surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s largest industrial economy. The national press was strengthening in reach, most famously through the newspapers of rivals William Randolph Hearst (the New York Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer (the New York World). The USA had a strut in its step and the megaphones to announce it.
One way to mimic the empire-building of others: take it from them. The Spanish Empire was faltering and their holdings seemed easy pickings, particularly Cuba. The United States had long coveted the island. John Quincy Adams, among other early leaders, presumed that Cuba would eventually become part of the United St
ates, and the Americans unsuccessfully tried to buy it after the Mexican-American War in the late 1840s. American business interests were deeply invested in the Cuban economy, to the tune of some $100 million by the 1890s, at which point the U.S. government was eager to try again to claim the island or at least a larger stake in it. Cubans had fought a long war of independence, from 1868 to 1878, and a shorter one from 1879 to 1880, both of which had failed. But in 1895 revolution was brewing again, and the United States saw an opportunity to insert itself into the conflict.
In the American conception, the Spanish were “primitive Iberian savagery”; taking them on wasn’t just a matter of expansion but of liberating oppressed peoples. Pulitzer and Hearst led the way in decrying the Spanish, and their sensational headlines and blustering articles—crafted to stir up outrage and sell more newspapers than the other guy—famously gave rise to the term “yellow journalism.” “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” Hearst reputedly told one of his reporters, a tale historians believe is apocryphal but accurately conveys his (and Pulitzer’s) general sentiment.
