P.J. is my son’s friend. He comes to our house for band practice on a regular basis. I never really thought about his nationality until one day he showed up in a t-shirt that reads, “I don’t’ speak Spanish, I’m Chamorro.” Of course, I had to ask, “What’s Chamorro?” He explained it like this:

Chamorro is a nationality of people who live on Saipan. It is a mix of Chinese, German, Spanish and Japanese - of course, American too. My last name is Spanish but Chamorro is not Spanish only, it is all of the above. Chamorro is a language as well. The original Chamorro language was lost when the Spanish colonized the island – almost like another Mexico. We can’t get the original Chamorro back.

Chamorro is like complicated Spanish. We have more letters in the alphabet. The numbers are the same until you get past 10. A lot of the words are close to the same so I can talk with people who speak Spanish. For instance, in Spanish, table is mesa and in Chamorro it is la muesa. We speak Chamorro at home and with the younger kids so they will learn it. In Saipan, the first language that is taught in the schools is English, but we learn Chamorro at home. One of the strangest things I encountered when I came here was people’s accents. I am used to them now, but everyone sounded really strange when I first got here.