Unincorporated Territory Research Articles

The state of knowledge of freshwater resources in the U.S. Virgin Islands: Data scarcity and implications

AbstractLike many small island communities, the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincorporated territory of the U.S., is naturally freshwater scarce. In recent decades, rapid land development in the USVI has increased water demand considerably, exerting extra pressure on freshwater resources. Freshwater quantity and quality data for the USVI are very scarce and scattered, which limits freshwater management capabilities. We draw attention to this information deficit and discuss its implications by reviewing the current state of knowledge of surface and groundwater quantity and quality for the USVI. Our review confirms that long‐term records of surface and groundwater quantity and quality are limited and unreliable. For example, streamflow was most recently monitored in 2006, and the most extensive surface water quality records are from the 1960s and 1980s. Since 2016, mean groundwater levels have been recorded daily, but only for three wells (one on each island of the USVI). Importantly, this lack of information threatens water security for the territory and limits our understanding of how development has impacted water quality and availability over time. This could be addressed using models, such as a groundwater recharge model, in combination with remote sensing and updated field data (i.e., streamflow, groundwater, and ecohydrological characterizations of land use change).

Coding and Capability-Building in Nonprofit Digital-Native News Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Latin America (LATAM)

Digital journalism scholars highlighted a gap in scholarly knowledge concerning data journalism in the Global South, emphasizing the importance of data literacy in newsrooms. This article investigates the coding capabilities within digital-native nonprofit news organizations amidst global digital inequalities, focusing on the MENA (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) and LATAM (Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, and the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico) regions. We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 15 organizations and analyzed emerging themes to understand coding capabilities in the context of sustaining available resources and mitigating existing constraints. This study concludes that the significance of adopting coding for nonprofit digital-native news organizations in MENA and LATAM is likely to increase, given the persistence of the existing political and economic conditions. Moreover, this study recognizes that certain news innovation trends related to coding, originally from the Global North, such as innovation labs, are gaining traction in the Global South. However, it also highlights variations among regions within the Global South regarding the adoption of coding in news organizations.

Waste Frontiers/War Enclosures: Decolonial Geosocial Analysis of Contaminated Military Land Conversions

Military-industrial practices have left widespread contamination affecting land, water, air, and human and nonhuman bodies. This article uses decolonial analysis to examine the racial-colonial foundations that underlie contemporary efforts to reuse former U.S. military land for development projects. Interrelating scholarship on security and development with that of militarization and political ecology, I use “geosocial spectacle” to probe the material and pedagogical governance, frontier logics, and colonial aesthetics that emerge through land remediation and redevelopment. Featuring two military sites within U.S. base closure and realignment—the U.S. Front Range area of Colorado and former U.S. unincorporated territory of the Panama Canal Zone—the article delineates and expounds on two types of U.S. military land conversions: brownfields and biodiversity recreation. The article interrelates the conversion of contaminated land in both cases as waste frontier that facilitates ongoing cycles of land repossession as a form of dispossession and containment or denial of war. The article concludes by advocating for decolonial studies of the global color line entrenched by the U.S. Pentagon’s ongoing climate colonialism, to subvert the compartmentalized harms of war and capitalist extraction, and to galvanize explicitly anticolonial, antiracist land reuse and governance.

Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

This article proposes a three-way reinflection among the categories of mobility, archipelagic thought, and translation. It draws on the work of several island-oriented thinkers, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Édouard Glissant, and Craig Santos Perez. Via Te Punga Somerville, I develop a conceptualization of archipelagic translation that is decolonizing, decontinentalizing, and reliant on interisland waters as places of being and meaning. Subsequently, via Glissant’s emphasis on translation as a crucial form of archipelagic thinking, I emphasize a translation less of betweenness (from one language to another) and more of amidness (a translation in the presence of every language of the world). Finally, and by recourse to Perez’s from unincorporated territory poetry series, I elaborate on a view of archipelagic translation as a renaming of the world in which translational equivalents break down and translation happens amid the push and pull of materiality and metaphoricity. Thus, Perez’s work offers both a conceptual template for and an example of archipelagic translation. As I navigate through the work of these three thinkers, the article’s three major preoccupations—mobility, archipelagic thinking, and translation—exist in a constant, reinflecting, and reconstituting dynamic in relation to one another. In the conclusion, I turn toward the potential for the mobilities of archipelagic translation to reroute recent work in Transnational American Studies that takes up questions of language, multilingualism, and translation. Further, the conclusion looks toward the archipelagic’s sense of amidness as key to a planetary restructuring of scholarly approaches to mobility, archipelagic spaces, and translation.

Decolonial subjectivities in participatory action research: Resident researcher experiences in the 2021 Guåhan Survey

Scholarship on participatory action research (PAR) has come a long way since its foundations in Paulo Freire. However, it leaves much room to understand the personal transformations at stake in everyday residents’ participation in PAR—a key mechanism through which PAR contributes to long-term social change in local communities. This literature gap is particularly salient for decolonial PAR, which incorporates Indigenous communities at every stage of the research process, and which is explicitly committed to the political goal of decolonization (i.e. the repatriation of Indigenous lands and oceans). Borrowing heavily from feminist geographical PAR scholarship, we articulate the concept of “decolonial subjectivities” to capture the dynamic, embodied ways in which resident researchers in decolonial PAR connect their own knowledge, experiences, and relationships with ongoing local struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. We then elaborate on this concept through a qualitative analysis of four waves of weekly reflections from five resident researchers in a decolonial PAR project in Guåhan—a modern-day colony, unincorporated territory of the United States, and the southernmost island of Låguas yan Gåni (or the Mariånas archipelago). We find two distinct shifts in resident researchers’ decolonial subjectivities over time: (1) deepening embodied connection to decolonization through situating one’s role in decolonization within a broader set of familial and community relationships; and (2) deepening embodiment of role as decolonial researchers through affirming one’s expertise and power to effectuate change as a researcher supporting and facilitating the continued, ongoing struggle for Indigenous sovereignty.

Archipelagic aesthetics in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory

Scholars have often noted a poetics of fragmentation in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory and have interpreted it in terms of an adaption of modernist aesthetic. Building on this work, this article argues that, while Perez’s poetry may be adapting familiar modernist poetics, more significantly it presents an aesthetic that is rooted in the relationship between landscape and colonization and therefore in the historical and material reality of what Epeli Hau‘ofa called ‘the sea of islands’: an archipelagic aesthetic. This article further proposes to understand this archipelagic aesthetic, first, as the combined affordances of two forms, the bounded whole and the network. In from unincorporated territory, this archipelagic aesthetic allows Perez to explore interdependence on different temporal and spatial scales because, second, the archipelago is also more than the form of the network and the whole: it is a landscape that has been shaped by colonialism as well as by geology, and it therefore affords a temporal scale that reaches beyond human record into deep time. Furthermore, as a chain of islands, the archipelago affords a relationality that goes beyond continental and territorial categories into the submerged realities of planetary ocean flows.

Abstract A025: Tailoring a culturally relevant and age-specific colorectal cancer screening education intervention for CHamoru and Filipinos in guam

Abstract Background. Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the 2nd leading cause of cancer death in Guam, a U.S. unincorporated territory where CHamoru (Chamorro) and Filipinos comprise over 60% of the population. CHamoru have higher age-adjusted mortality rates (23.2) than the U.S. (14.2) and the overall population in Guam (17.3). Only 53.9% of persons aged 50 and above have met USPSTF screening standards compared to 74.3% in the U.S. In addition, CRC diagnoses occur in the late stages; 75.0% at Stage 3, while 18.0% occur at Stage 1. Research on early CRC onset among Pacific Island peoples are limited; data from the Guam Tumor Registry indicates 10% of colorectal cancer cases from 2013 – 2017 were diagnosed before age 50. Specific aims of this pre-pilot study are to examine cognitive and cultural beliefs associated with CRC and screening, recommendations for culturally relevant prevention, and age-specific education interventions. Methods: Qualitative methods were employed via focus groups (FG) and in-depth key informant interviews (KII) to allow for participant perspectives and facilitate storytelling, a practice in the Pacific that creates a familiar and safe space for expression. A 3-member community council comprised of a CRC surgeon, community-based organization representative, and CRC survivor advised on recruitment, data analysis, and reporting. Purposive and snowball sampling was utilized due to stigma/sensitivity related to screening. Focus groups were age and gender specific, e.g., men in their 40s, women aged 50+, etc. KII were conducted with cultural experts and cancer survivors. Data on knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs and screening education recommendations was collected. Three levels of qualitative coding for thematic codes were performed and included input from community council and KIs. Translations from CHamoru to English were applied as necessary. Results: Five FGs and four KIIs (N=29) were conducted with persons aged 40 and above. Focus group participants were CHamoru (60%), Filipino (32%), mixed ethnicity (8%), female (56%), male (44%), and had a primary care provider (84%). Mean age was 55.0. Overall, 24.0% reported ever having had a FIT/FOBT test and 56.0% ever having had a colonoscopy. Data analysis for FGs and KIIs will be finalized in September. Initial reviews indicate mixed methods of delivery for community health educator interventions, e.g., use of a culturally relevant video, storytelling from CRC survivors, and efforts to educate families as a whole, as opposed to limiting education to screening-age adults. Conclusion: This study explores culturally relevant components of an education intervention providing a pre-emptive look at screening education for persons aged 40 and above. Findings may give insight toward age-specific and culturally-tailored CRC screening education with use of community health educators as a novel intervention for CHamoru and Filipino families and to create a pilot education intervention to improve CRC screening participation in these underserved minority populations. Citation Format: Tressa P. Diaz, Angela Sy, Elizabeth Elmore, Santino Camacho, Marc Rollon. Tailoring a culturally relevant and age-specific colorectal cancer screening education intervention for CHamoru and Filipinos in guam [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Colorectal Cancer; 2022 Oct 1-4; Portland, OR. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(23 Suppl_1):Abstract nr A025.

Financial Oversight Boards in the U.S. Federal System: Insights from the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis

AbstractRecent fiscal crises in Detroit and Puerto Rico have brought Financial Oversight Boards (FOBs) to the forefront. In spite of these developments, there is a notable gap in the literature as social scientists have barely studied this type of oversight organization and its implications. This article highlights intergovernmental and political dynamics that arise with the imposition of FOBs in localities facing fiscal distress by studying the case of the Puerto Rican FOB, commonly known as la junta. By focusing on the governance of the largest debt restructuring in the history of the U.S. bond market, in the context of a newly established territorial bankruptcy regime, this article explores how the presence of the Puerto Rican FOB has been linked to contentious dynamics that challenge local autonomy and democratic principles. By analyzing a variety of legal cases, this article shows how the creation of the Puerto Rican FOB has also put into question the foundations of the unincorporated territory’s self-governance status.

Reckoning With the Oceanic Territoriality of "Uncle SPAM": Processed Meats and Resurgent Seeds in Craig Santos Perez's Poetics of the Militarized Pacific

The Pacific history of the food product SPAM is driven by what CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez characterizes as its invasive and imperial entanglements, which facilitate U.S. territoriality. A literary analysis shows how Perez uses the politics of foodways in his ongoing from unincorporated territory series (2008–2017) to make visible the United States' vast Pacific military reach and its impact on Indigenous peoples across Oceania, especially those from Guåhan (Guam). Perez maps out the ecologies of SPAM and other processed meats—ecologies characterized by occupation, erasure, and a monopoly within foodways for Indigenous peoples—showing how those meats distort, obliterate, and exploit the norms of consumption in the same ways that militarization and capitalism exploit environmental norms. Perez also portrays transoceanic ecologies and foodways that call for and enact Indigenous kinships, materialized through the ways that seeds spread and grow. Perez highlights daily acts of living and consumption through his poetics, demonstrating how U.S. territoriality limits opportunities for flourishing Indigenous lives. Simultaneously, his poetics foreground possibilities for Indigenous transoceanic abundance that offer resurgent frameworks for resisting U.S. empire and its capitalist logics.

Community Satisfaction With Policing on Guam

Guam is a Pacific Island in Micronesia with a complex colonial history. Strategically located, Guam is an unincorporated territory of the United States and critical military asset. Policing on Guam is influenced by external stakeholders and budgetary limitations. Recently, a community policing model was introduced to better meet community needs and expectations. This study explored the relevance of predictors of satisfaction with police service provision in the Guamanian context. Residents of Guam ( n = 701) participated in a survey that included demographic characteristics, community context, and police–citizen interactions. Satisfaction with police service provision was predicted by age and perceptions of procedural justice, police performance, and police legitimacy. Higher income predicted lower satisfaction. The findings highlight the importance of police legitimacy and related constructs for satisfaction with police service provision on Guam. Initiatives that focus on police performance and procedural justice may help improve satisfaction with police service provision on Guam.

News Media Complicity in the Reproduction of Settler Colonial Ideology in Guåhan

Over the span of one month, Guåhan (Guam) has seen a dire upswing in COVID-19 infections from travelers coming from the continental United States (many of them being military personnel). The island, being an “unincorporated territory” of the U.S., did not have the legal authority to close its borders and could only mitigate the impacts of the second spike in COVID-19. Often referred to as “the Tip of America’s Spear,” the pandemic has laid bare the implications of Guåhan’s colonial status, and is one of the numerous manifestations of American colonial ideology and policy at the nexus of global militarism and imperialism. In this essay, I examine mainstream news media in Guåhan to draw out the presence of pro-American ideologies which operate through modes of unification, dissimulation, and legitimation to reproduce American colonial hegemony in what can be described as an extant colonial mainstream mediascape. By looking at particular discursive events which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, I elucidate how such media environments perpetuate the dominant order of American militarization and imperialism overseas, calling to mind how the country’s transgressions abroad are inseparable from the systems of oppression in the continent.

Which has Higher Real Effects on an US Unincorporated Territory, The Price of Crude Oil or the Monetary Policy?

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States of America. As part of the political-economic arrangement between both political entities, Puerto Rico does not control the local price of oil because it does not have domestic sources of oil, and it does not control its monetary policy, as that is a right reserved by the U.S. Federal Reserve System. This paper investigates the impacts of exogenous shocks of oil price and monetary policy on the Economic Activity Index, Puerto Rico Consumer Price Index, total non-farm employment, electricity consumption, gasoline consumption, and cement sales. Impulse response functions are used to study the oil price and monetary policy shocks. The oil price shock had a more significant effect on gasoline consumption than on electricity consumption. Monetary policy shocks had a higher magnitude on electricity consumption than on gasoline consumption. The monetary policy and oil price shock had minimal effect on the aggregated endogenous variables, Economic Activity Index, and Puerto Rico Consumer Price Index. This study suggests that individuals in Puerto Rico are vulnerable to a volatile oil market. Also, both exogenous variable shocks had minimal impact on employment. As for future steps, it would be prudent to investigate the effect of both exogenous variables on individual employment sectors, not aggregated. Besides, the government of Puerto Rico should develop policies to minimize the effect of oil price shocks.

Internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification: The case of Puerto Rico

AbstractSince the U.S. military invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, the Caribbean island has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States. Today, the island faces the worst economic, political, and humanitarian crisis in its modern history. Despite major disadvantages associated with the present situation, many Puerto Ricans continue to support U.S. hegemonic rule by either maintaining the territorial status quo or calling for a full annexation of Puerto Rico as a U.S. state. To better understand these attitudes, we synthesized insights from decolonial theory and system justification perspectives and administered surveys to 344 adults in San Juan, P.R. from 2017 to 2019. Results revealed that, as hypothesized, internalization of inferiority (outgroup favoritism) and epistemic motivation (need for cognitive closure) were associated with Puerto Ricans’ justification of the colonial system. Furthermore, colonial system justification was a significant mediator of the effects of internalization of inferiority and epistemic motivation on support for the territorial status quo and U.S. statehood—as well as rejection of national independence. Implications of these findings and the relevance of the overarching theoretical framework for the study of cultural and political psychology in other colonial and “post‐colonial” contexts are discussed.

Extraterritoriality at the end of life: disregard and the exceptional in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

ABSTRACT This article approaches the theorisation of extraterritoriality through an ethnographic examination of the shaping of end-of-life experiences and trajectories through federal healthcare governance in St. Croix, an island in the unincorporated territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Drawing on critical phenomenological approaches to the organisation of attention, I advance disregard as a central dynamic shaping how the end of life unfolds on St. Croix through the constitution of the U.S. Virgin Islands as exceptional. I demonstrate the workings of disregard and the reproduction of exceptionality through analyses of the everyday workings of Medicare, the universal health coverage programme for American citizens 65 years old and over. Specifically, the case study examines how the bureaucratic disregard within Medicare worked to create and then maintain a situation in which the medical equipment that can support and extend the capacities of older adults’ bodies in the territory was unavailable. I suggest that this points to the broader import of disregard and the reproduction of exceptionality in constituting the extraterritoriality of the U.S.’s insular areas, and to the importance of the body as a locus of extraterritoriality.

Introduction

Abstract The essays translated in this cluster explore the work of debt, blame, and responsibility in the continuation of and resistance to colonial life in contemporary Puerto Rico. In the colony of Puerto Rico, debt represents the continuation of the colonial condition—Puerto Rico's status as an unincorporated territory of the United States. Ariadna Michelle Godreau-Aubert, Vanesa Contreras Capó, Anayra Santory Jorge, and Eva Prados Rodríguez show furthermore how debt actualizes a racial and gender order that exceeds colonialism as a juridical-political predicament. Their essays track forms of resistance to the work of debt.

Citizenship in Empire: The Legal History of U.S. Citizenship in American Samoa, 1899-1960

Abstract This article analyzes the legal history of U.S. citizenship for American Samoa and examines why American Samoa remains the only U.S. unincorporated territory that U.S. citizenship has not been extended to by Congress. The article examines legislation from the 1930s that would have extended U.S. citizenship to Samoans, but failed to pass in Congress due to opposition from the U.S. Navy, the effects of the Great Depression, and the racism of some U.S. lawmakers. The last parts of the article explore hearings that were held in the immediate years after World War II in which naval leaders and U.S. lawmakers expressed a willingness to extend citizenship to American Samoa for Cold War propaganda imperatives. These hearings ultimately did not lead to the extension of U.S. citizenship. By the early years of the Cold War some Samoan leaders had petitioned Congress against the extension of citizenship to American Samoa for fear that citizenship would lead to the destruction of Samoan cultural autonomy. The legal history of U.S. citizenship for American Samoa from 1899 to 1960 illuminates the various meanings citizenship can have and the disparate ways citizenship can be used by different people in the context of empire. In American Samoa, citizenship was a powerful concept that colonized people used to make claims for equal inclusion and full membership within a political community; it was a tool that the U.S. government used in strategic ways to legitimate imperialism; and it was a status with the power to destroy cultural autonomy.

No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico and Constitutional Obligation

The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.

"On the Perpetual Motion of Search": The Transpacific Networked Poetics of Craig Santos Perez and Theresa H.K. Cha

This essay examines Craig Santos Perez's poetic series from unincorporated territory on Guam alongside Theresa Cha's Dictee on the modern Korean diaspora. Thinking through a minor encounter between these two texts, this essay articulates a "transpacific networked poetics" that connects Pacific Island and Asian American literatures in a collective decolonial vision. At their core, both experimental texts use fragmentation as an aesthetic strategy for remapping literary geographies across the Pacific. Rather than only signaling poetic resistance or reflexivity, the fragment operates as a relational and networked form. The essay first explores how the fragment captures the island ontology of a "tiny dot," exposing the cartographic imaginary of empire. Second, it theorizes the submerged life of the fragment that extends beyond textual borders in order to illuminate new decolonial expressions. The fragment aestheticizes relational epistemologies and is a key formal element in transpacific poetics, as disparate Pacific sites have been networked due to overlapping histories of imperialism.

Thresholds of Empire: Women, Biosecurity, and the Zika Chemical Vector Program in Puerto Rico

The recent emergence of a new strand of the Zika virus evinces the global entwinement of viral, human, and animal ecologies on a dynamic planet. Capable of shaping physiological development in utero and transmittable by both mosquitoes and sex, Zika ignited fears about the plasticity of the human form in the face of infectious disease, the permeability of nation-state borders to infectious disease, and the lifetime health care costs of infectious disease. In the United States, these fears were mapped onto the “unincorporated territory” of Puerto Rico, where one fifth of the population was predicted to contract the virus. This article examines U.S. government chemical intervention in Puerto Rico, which I argue was underpinned by a contradictory mapping of the island as inside the United States in terms of risk and outside the United States in terms of rights. Puerto Rican women were spatialized as the threshold between the agency of the virus and the future of the U.S. population. When they were perceived to fail in properly managing their bodies and homes, aerial chemical fumigation was threatened in an aggressive display of U.S. sovereign power. This article offers careful and critical geographic analysis of how imperial state power is extended in the name of health and how women in different places are made into biosecurity objects. It also notes a broader destructive logic that positions the reproductive capacities of poor women outside of Northern states as the pivot between an increasingly unruly nonhuman world and the future. Key Words: biosecurity, chemical geographies, empire (Puerto Rico), gender, Zika.

Remaking, reweaving and indigenizing curriculum: Lessons from an American Samoa Head Start program

Abstract In this paper, we focus on how indigenous Head Start teachers in American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US located in the South Pacific negotiated imported policy and curricular models that were not always congruent with local, indigenous approaches to educating young children. Here we place our focus on the negotiation of curriculum within these spaces and in doing so, show that through the reweaving of curriculum, western discourses and influences from the US were altered. We conclude with implications for US territories and other contested spaces across the globe.