Michael Lujan Bevacqua didn’t always feel like he understood what it was to be CHamoru. Although Bevacqua was born on Guam, he spent most of his life in California, Hawai’i, Oregon, and Swaziland.  

CHamoru, or Chamorro, is used to identify the people of the western Pacific Mariana Islands, including Guam and the Northern Marianas. According to Guampedia, a fact-checked resource about the island, the term CHamoru was replaced by “Guamanian” to distinguish the people of Guam from their northern counterparts, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas.

“Most of my family, friends, school, and media focused me on looking to the United States for the future and not on my roots, culture, language, or heritage,” Bevacqua said in an email.

Today, Bevacqua has become an advocate for the CHamoru language and culture. As curator of the Guam Museum and a former professor, he has become a key figure in Guam’s cultural renaissance. His journey back to his roots reflects an enduring resolve held by many CHamorus to preserve their culture and an endangered language that the U.S. once outlawed.

The U.S. Navy colonial administration was the first to begin using the term Guamanian to identify the CHamorus from Guam. This reshaped the identity of Guam’s Indigenous people. Instead of signaling a distinct identity tied to Guam, the term evolved to mean, for many, being Americanized. In other words, it has become a symbol of patriotism, allowing modern U.S. citizens to demonstrate loyalty to the country and differentiate themselves from other Pacific Islander and Asian identities.

Many CHamorus believe that being Guamanian represents a lack of pride and ancestral identity. The term glossed over centuries of history, language, and cultural resilience in favor of a sanitized, American-friendly version of who they were supposed to be. Even the CHamoru language was forbidden by the U.S. Naval Government in 1947 under the Executive General Order No. 243 under the Naval Gov. Campbell Smith. Smith designated English as the only official language of Guam and ordered that CHamoru “must not be spoken except official interpreting.” The result has been that fewer and fewer people speak the language today; according to the 2020 Census, only 21,390 people in Guam spoke Chamorro, compared with 34,598 in 1990. 

Bevacqua found his way to the language in his final year at the University of Guam, when he was required to study a foreign language to graduate. He wanted to take Spanish, but said his aunt teased, “Mike, you aren’t Spanish; you’re CHamoru, so you should take a CHamoru class instead!”

Bevacqua decided to heed the advice. Little did he know that taking the CHamoru language classes would completely change his life. Bevacqua spoke no CHamoru, so he turned to his grandmother—Elizabeth Flores Lujan, who was a fluent speaker—for help. Not only did she become his informal tutor, but she also became his mentor in language and life, Bevacqua said.

Even after his classes were completed, Bevacqua did not stop learning CHamoru. He asked his grandmother, in broken CHamoru, to continue to speak the language with him. “She excitedly agreed,” he told Prism.

His grandmother would take him to outings, such as visits with friends or to funerals, where Bevacqua continued to practice CHamoru until he was able to speak it fluently.

These experiences sparked a renaissance that Bevacqua felt that Guam needed. Known as the “CHamoru Renaissance,” he began documenting memories of his grandparents. Eventually, Bevacqua returned to school and attended the University of California, San Diego, where he earned his Ph.D. in ethnic studies, before returning to Guam to dedicate himself to helping the Indigenous CHamoru reconnect with their culture.

“When I first started learning CHamoru back in 2000, I did not think that it would become something central to my life, but it has,” Bevacqua said.

Thousands of CHamorus still do not speak the language, so Bevacqua teaches free classes. In 2014, he began to teach CHamoru formally at the University of Guam. Along with his brother, Jack Lujan Bevacqua, he co-founded The Guam Bus, a company that creates CHamoru language resources, from flashcards and children’s books to videos and bingo games. Since the pandemic began, Bevacqua said his free Zoom classes have reached hundreds of CHamorus off-island.

One of them is Michael Van Lyon. As a teenager, Van Lyon sought out resources and joined the Guam Communications Network, based in Long Beach, California, producing newsletters and health videos for the diaspora and even performing in a dance troupe. Later, after becoming a father, the responsibility to carry the language for his daughter deepened. “I felt like she should be learning more about her people,” Van Lyon said, “but I needed to learn CHamoru in order to teach her.” 

That journey led him to online classes through the Kotturan CHamoru Foundation and Bevacqua’s Prugråman Sinipok CHamoru language immersion program. “This began my serious commitment,” Van Lyon said, and it hasn’t let up since.

Van Lyon now helps lead adult CHamoru language immersion classes in San Diego. Though still learning, he embraces his role with purpose. “I enjoy being part of a system that creates safe spaces for people to learn CHamoru,” Van Lyon said. “We all carry a lot of trauma and baggage as we learn,” he said, but teaching others helps him cement the language and build the community he wants to speak with.

His voice trembled when speaking of his late grandparents. “Most of my CHamoru mañaina [elders] have passed,” Van Lyon said. “But learning this language helps me feel like I’m continuing the conversation with them. When I work on how I speak, I hear the sounds of their voices in my head. It’s like they live in the CHamoru thoughts and words.”

For Van Lyon and many others in the diaspora, learning the language is an act of resistance, reconnection, and love. 

If we do not do what it takes to take up the mantle, our language and then soon our cultural identity will only be found in books and museums.

Michael Van Lyon, CHamoru speaker Living in California

He said their motto is “Yanggen ti hita, pues håyi?”—if not us, then who? “We’re running out of time. Our native-speaking elders are passing,” he said. “If we do not do what it takes to take up the mantle, our language and then soon our cultural identity will only be found in books and museums.”

The CHamoru language is facing extinction. However, Bevacqua holds hope that it will survive, the same way CHamoru culture survived through colonization by Spain, the U.S., and even Japan.

CHamoru attitudes on what it looks like to preserve the culture are also shifting.

“In the past, I feel like CHamorus had a stronger emphasis on stereotypically looking CHamoru, sounding CHamoru, etc.,” Bevacqua said.

But today, CHamorus are becoming more diverse as a people by spreading out and living completely different lives from each other, Bevacqua said. “As we go through a cultural renaissance which makes us feel greater possibility as a people, those perceptions do diminish slightly,” he said. 

There are still CHamorus who might criticize someone for sounding white, or being “po’asu,” when they speak or do not look stereotypically CHamoru, “but more often than not, there seems to be an openness about the culture and identity, which is a positive thing,” Bevacqua said.

His life today is deeply grounded in CHamoru customs and values. Bevacqua finds profound meaning in traditions such as the bendision, the ceremonial blessing at public events. Although it was chanted and used during CHamoru cultural dancing, it has become a significant part of the CHamoru custom. This was something largely absent during Bevacqua’s childhood but is now revived as part of the ongoing CHamoru cultural renaissance.

Bevacqua said there are many ways to express the culture. “But if you really want to do something lasting, learn our language,” he said in a phone interview. In every word passed down, every story remembered, and every sentence spoken in CHamoru, a people reclaims itself, not as Guamanians, but as CHamorus. “Speak it, live it. It will change you.”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor