Why Xuxu is Learning to Speak Chamoru

My daughter recently visited her great-grandmother, my grandma. Xuxu loves these visits. She loves asking questions, telling Nana about her day, and playing with the few toys that are still left at my grandma's house. And during this particular visit, Xuxu decided to try out some newly learned Chamoru words during an animated conversation. My grandmother, laughing, decided that Xuxu was talking gibberish.

That's when I interjected and explained that no, Xuxu is speaking a legit language. She's learning Chamoru along with her dad, who's learning from older native speakers and teaching himself. At this point she knows more Chamoru words and phrases than I can recognize.

My grandma, who grew up poor and white in a north Idaho mining town, couldn't make much sense of this. And a lot of other people can't seem to, either. Why would you teach a kid who talks white, who regularly passes for white, a language that is currently experiencing a cultural resurgence but that is largely only spoken on a handful of Pacific islands that Xuxu's never even been to?

I'm starting to feel more capable of explaining why we want Xuxu to learn her dad's native language. At first it was tough. Here I am, obviously white mama to a little girl with caramel colored hair, blue-green eyes and tan skin. One who's speaking English with no accent, but mixing it with unknown words in a foreign language. I understand why people squint at me, get a little perturbed. Am I one of those parents, trying to claim something that isn't mine? Or is my kid one of those overachievers who's learning multiple languages before preschool? Am I one of those multicultural appreciation parents, who's trying to inundate my kid with other's stories and languages just because I want her to grow up to be culturally sensitive? There's plenty of parents like this in liberal-leaning Washington State; I just don't quite fit the visual stereotype. Uff da, as my older Scandinavian relatives were known to say.

So, it's no, no, and no. Xuxu is learning Chamoru because Xuxu is Chamoru - more commonly spelled Chamorro, although this spelling is the Spanish interpretation of an indigenous word. Chamorro are the native peoples (in Chamoru, Taotao Haya) of the Marianas Islands, the most well-known of these being Saipan and Guam. My partner's family is from Guam, and although his immediate family has lived stateside for the last 20 years, they have not lost their connection to their islands.

It's a connection my partner hopes our daughter - and our soon-to-arrive second child - will feel. Culturally, Xuxu is Chamorro. She is learning and sharing in traditions, language and values. While I hope she also appreciates and shares in my cultural background, I wasn't raised with a distinct set of cultural ties. The closest thing I had was a strong relationship with my Swedish great-grandmother. Unlike me, Xuxu is part of a large extended family that is tied together by common culture, what one could term a sense of tribal unity. She's been included in that world since her very first day. If she hadn't been, I might hesitate to call her Chamorro, although that's certainly a large chunk of her genetic makeup. She's more Pacific Islander than I am Norwegian and Swedish, which I like to claim when I'm feeling weirdly nostalgic for something I don't have. Maybe it's my own response to feeling culturally void.

But Xuxu is growing up with strong cultural identifiers. She is learning more than words, more than food and fiestas. She is learning about ties to an ecosystem and a community, about values that connect her to her grandparents and great-grandparents and their experiences learning and growing on an island first brutally colonized by the Spanish, then governed as a colony by the United States. Connections not only to those grandparents, but to ancestors long deceased who spoke some of the same words, danced some of the same dances, heard and told some of the same stories. Xuxu is participating in a centuries-old cultural tradition that is currently being restored and reclaimed by Chamorro people across the Marianas and North America. And Xuxu's white mom is excited for her.