Steffy's Sunday Variety Column - Identity And Integration Of CHamoru: A Cultural Belonging - April 26, 2015

This column is about cultural identity and integration, the key to belonging. It was motivated by an article that Sandy Uslander wrote about how she and others in the Mainland United States, although born and raise on Guam, are CHamoru despite looking and sounding different from those of us here in the Marianas. It reminded me of an incident concerning our daughter MaileAna's need to belong at an early age, demonstrating that belonging is strongly related to cultural identity. 

Migai Na Si Yu’os Ma’åsi
"Life is a crude inventor; fiction will only be convincing if it is more artful than life." Carmel Bird
Rlene Santos  Steffy
MARC Research Associate
Ethnographer/Oral Historian
University of Guam
210 Archbishop Flores St. 
Hagåtña, Guam 96910
http://www.rlenelive.com
rlene@rlenelive.com
voice: (671) 888-1010

To read the entire document in PDF, you can access it through the FB page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/875152805876695/.