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CENTER FOR THE AMERICAS
 
Center for the Americas
American Studies Program
Latin American Studies Program



Faculty
Americas Forum
Mellon Postdoctoral Program
 
 

AMERICAS FORUM

The Center for the Americas sponsors a yearly Americas Forum. The theme of the forum reflects the Center's commitment to interdisciplinary and hemispheric studies.

Center for the Americas
Americas Forum 2006

Center for the Americas
 
Americas Forum 2006
 
Politics of Sovereignty: Colonial Legacies in Oceania
 
 
Mapping Native Chamorro Resistance to Spanish and American Imperialism in the Mariana Islands
Vicente M. Diaz, Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan
 
Lessons from the Puerto Rican and Hawaiian Sovereignty Struggles
José Luis Morín, Puerto Rican/Latin American Studies Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
 
Self-determination or integration? The uneasy relationship between Rapa Nui and Chile
Riet Delsing, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz
 
Moderator, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University
 
 

2:30 PM, September 29
Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies
Reception to follow

Please contact Joanne Palmer, jpalmer@wesleyan.edu, or at 806/685-3112 if you have any questions about this event.

With the "discovery" of the "New" World in the late fifteenth century, Spanish imperialist expansion and colonialism swept over the Americas and into the Pacific.  From Magellan's voyage into the Pacific, including Guam and the Philippines, in the 1520s to Peruvian slave traders kidnapping Polynesians from various islands, including Tuvalu and Tokelau, in the 1860s, Spaniards and Latin Americans treated the Pacific as an extension of their “New” World.  Much later, after the Spanish-American War at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States asserted dominion throughout the Pacific Basin and the Caribbean.  In 1898, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain through the Treaty of Paris, as well as Hawai`i by Congressional resolution. In 1899, the United States also annexed what is now known as American Samoa.  The 2006 Americas Forum proposes to explore the overlapping histories of “New” World encroachments in the Pacific in a symposium on the politics of sovereignty in Oceania that examines Spanish and U.S. colonialism in Guam, the Chilean annexation and colonization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the ongoing struggles over political status in both Hawai`i and Puerto Rico where there are thriving nationalist movements.  The Forum symposium features scholars whose work maps cultural and legal interventions related to questions of sovereignty, self-governance, nationhood, and identity that are the legacy of multiple colonialisms in these islands.