Emotional Wounds Carved in Space
The Impact of Spanish Colonization on CHamoru/Chamorro Spatiality By Yvonne Rocío Ramírez Corredor PhD Student, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Abstract: This paper explores the ways in which space was constructed, organized, and lived during the Spanish colonial period in the Mariana Islands. I will specifically focus on the ontological and emotional impact that the new colonial order had on the inhabitants of the archipelago during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this context, the purpose of my historical research is to highlight the importance of space in the colonization process at the material and relational level. I start from the premise that the colonial organization of space that we know as "La Reducción" implied a series of actions such as the forced relocation of the Indigenous population, both within the islands and between the islands themselves. This process of forced relocation caused a great ontological disorientation to the CHamoru/Chamorro communities, regarding their lifeways and social organization in their own territory. The wounds of uprooting, carved in the relationship between people and the natural and cultural landscape of the islands, as well as in their ways-of-being in the mountains and in the sea, also implied new forms of resilience and cultural resistance expressed in space, many of them enduring to this day in the spirit and identity of the CHamoru people.
Presentation Recording
Presentation slides on the following page.