‘Melting pot or salad bowl not an issue’

Economic activities, said Dr. Robert Underwood, brought all the different groups of people in the Marianas together, so talks of whether cultural diversity in the Marianas is a melting pot or salad bowl should not be an issue.

Underwood, a former member of Congress and professor emeritus at the University of Guam, was the guest speaker at a forum on this topic on Dec. 11 at the American Memorial Park Auditorium, which was presented by the NMI Council for the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Underwood said the melting pot or salad bowl metaphor does not capture the essence of the struggles of human beings; rather, it trivializes it.

“It seems as if something as simple as a salad can explain the complexity of human experience. Human experience is very complex,” he said.

He said human beings are the only living things that can remember a time before they were born and they can imagine the future long after they’re dead.

He said it is the interplay of the sense of memory and sense of perspective and that constant dialoguing between the past, the present and the future makes people unique creatures.

In this context, he urges abandoning this salad bowl and melting pot analogies.

Underwood noted that a melting pot has been used to explain American society for a couple of hundred years and it has already fallen out of favor.

“It’s like everybody gets together and gets kind of stirred up, and eventually something unique comes up that is uniquely American, like speaking English, eating pizza, dancing the salsa, introducing new words into the English language, but even then it does not capture the essence of it,” Underwood said.

Underwood believes that this is really a theory of cultural time and space.

“Everyone of us here has a sense of place. We occupy space somewhere and where we occupy space is in reference to everyone who occupies the same space, like through church, government, work, school or governmental system, we all have a sense of place.”

He said place and space occupy a sense of time.

He said the Carolinians have a different sense of time and space than the Chamorros.

“Time and space offers issues of identity. You watch these young people talk about culture and identity as things that they own, but in the complexity of the 21st century world, there are dozens of cultural identity that we all carry around,” he said.

Before the forum started, a video was shown to the audience, featuring reactions and views from the youth of different cultural backgrounds on Saipan.

Officials from three agencies of the government also served as guest commentaries, including Department of Community and Cultural Affairs Deputy Secretary Melvin O. Faisao, Director Dave O. Omar of the Chamorro Carolinian Language Policy Commission, and Gonzalo Santos of the Indigenous Affairs Office.

Underwood says there are women, men, Chamorros, Carolinians, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, fans of Desperate Housewives and L.A. Dodgers, all interspersing and creating different identities in our lives.

“Being a member of a group is very challenging in this context because conflicts of time, space and identity grab people’s attention.

“Sometimes they are arguing about the same thing without knowing why they are arguing.”

He said he was always fascinated throughout the years about the relationship between Carolinians and Chamorros because the Carolinians who are here predated the Chamorros here, but the Chamorros here think that they predated the Carolinians here, although physically none of them can trace their ancestry. Through the power of the imagination, though, the Marianas belongs to the Carolinians in general, he added.