The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  THE

  NOT-QUITE

  STATES

  OF AMERICA

  Dispatches from

  the Territories

  and Other

  Far-Flung Outposts

  of the USA

  Doug Mack

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Maren

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A Very Brief Note on the Territories and Their Various Designations

  Chapter 1

  THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES

  The Virgin Islands of the United States

  Chapter 2

  FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE

  American Samoa

  Chapter 3

  OFFSHORING THE

  AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

  Guam

  Chapter 4

  LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

  The Northern Mariana Islands

  Chapter 5

  BE TRUE TO YOUR HOME

  Puerto Rico

  Epilogue

  THE FUTURE OF EMPIRE

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading & Notes on Sources

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED THE DISORIENTING SENSE OF arrival in a new place to be one of the great joys of travel. This, however, was a whole new level of confusion.

  On a clear January evening, I had boarded an airplane in Miami and flown across the sea. As we descended from the clouds, well after dark, I gazed down at the capital city, a tight cluster of low buildings and palmy treetops surrounding a broad harbor full of sailboats, their mast lights a swaying constellation against the darkened waters. The urban grid, traced by streetlights, was compact and orderly at the waterfront before tangling into a jumble of narrow lanes marching up a steep wooded hillside. It was one part pastoral tropics, one part humming city; I was instantly smitten.

  We landed and taxied to the gate, and I turned on my cell phone to review my instructions from Verizon. All calls would incur international roaming charges, they said, but text messages, emails, and Internet use were all considered domestic. If I was talking, I was abroad; if I was typing, I was still in the United States—a neat, physics-defying party trick. I texted my wife, Maren, to confirm my safe arrival, then read the headlines on the New York Times website, which automatically redirected me to the international edition. When I clicked over to a local news site, the top stories were about dengue fever fears, the results of a regatta, and an area skier who was making final preparations for the Winter Olympics, where she would represent her tiny-but-proud national team.

  I disembarked and instinctively looked for the sign to customs, but there was no customs—not on the way in, though there would be on the way out: paperwork, passport check, the whole gauntlet.

  The owner of the guesthouse where I was staying met me at baggage claim, a burly guy named Ronnie Lockhart. He was grizzled and outwardly gruff but with a low-key kindness; think of your stereotype of a retired cop. As we headed into town, I noted that traffic drove on the left, like the British, but the cars were American, with steering wheels on the left. This was a combination I didn’t know existed anywhere in the world, and it was a perpetual struggle not to yell out to Ronnie that he was driving on the wrong side of the road.

  We wound past branches of Banco Popular and Scotiabank, past a U.S. National Guard recruiting storefront. The buildings were low-slung, with red-tile hipped roofs and large, louvered windows, and every surface fading and peeling in that inevitable tropical way. The streets were called Moravian Highway and Kronprindsens Gade and Espaniol and Rue de Saint-Barthélemy and Main Street. American flags twisted in the breeze outside all the official-looking buildings, but there were also quite a few Danish flags in places of prominence, and flashes of the green-gold-red stripes of Ethiopia on retaining-wall murals and café awnings. Outside the local cricket grounds, a billboard for a cell phone company showed a player in all-white regalia, with the tagline, “No drifters, no yips, no ducks. Basically, straight-up.” A couple of blocks later, a well-kept baseball stadium advertised upcoming appearances by Major League stars.

  Everywhere, there were signals that I was in my homeland.

  Everywhere, there were signals that I was not.

  The sign at the airport had read WELCOME TO SAINT THOMAS, US VIRGIN ISLANDS. I was still in the USA, but far from the states.

  FROM THIRTEEN original colonies, as every schoolkid knows, the USA has become a nation of fifty proud states. So pleasingly, conclusively round, that number. So tidily those rows of stars fit on the flag, as though geopolitical destiny were dictated by graphic-design convenience. But despite what we advertise on our flag, despite what it says right there in our name, the United States of America is not merely a nation of states but also—legally and officially—of those scattered shards of earth and populace that make up our outposts far from the North American continent: the territories of the Virgin Islands of the United States, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico, along with the uninhabited Minor Outlying Islands.

  They have U.S. national parks and American Legion posts and U.S. post offices—just a standard first-class stamp gets your mail there; it’s all the same country. Their millions of citizens earn American dollars and pay into Social Security and Medicare and serve in the U.S. military at impressively high rates. They participate in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee and receive Pell grants and play Little League baseball and have 4-H Clubs and serve as United States ambassadors. They pledge allegiance to the American flag, even if Old Glory hasn’t made room for them.

  Yet for the average resident of the states (lowercase s—because States would be the whole nation), the territories are all but forgotten. They’re extant but inconsequential, vestiges from another era whose ongoing existence is a cultural curiosity, like Tab soda or professional mini golf. They flicker into our consciousness here and there—an offbeat news story, a friend’s tropical-island vacation photos, a passing reference in the fine print of a governmental form—and for a moment we think, Oh, right . . . we have territories. Then, just as quickly, they disappear from our minds once more.

  “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America!” goes a line in West Side Story, the musical that may be the primary entry point for many Americans’ knowledge of the territories. But in the classic patriotic songbook, they get no mention—America the beautiful stretches from sea to shining sea, not across the seas—just as they’re absent from the maps in television weather forecasts and magazine infographics and classroom walls, even though Alaska and Hawaii typically sneak in with their “not to scale” boxes.

  The territories are not part of our conception of ourselves. Picture the archetypal Americans across the eras—indigenous peoples and bewigged Founding Fathers and wilderness homesteaders and slaves and miners and cowboys and world-war-winning soldiers and factory workers and opportunity-seeking immigrants and outer-ring-suburb dwellers—and you are almost certainly imagining their natural habitat to be, implicitly, the states. Search the classic tales of the American Road Trip, that keystone of the country’s literary canon, and you’ll find, among others, Alexis de Tocqueville on the trail of Democracy in America, from Boston to Green Bay (which was then part of the Northwest Territory) to the Gulf of Mexico; Mark Twain traipsing across the West and to the then–Kingdom of Hawaii in Roughing It; and Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty bopping from coast to coast and into Mexico in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But none of the most famous journeys “in search of America,” as they are inevitably framed, have included the present-day territories, the not-quite s
tates.

  For that matter, no sitting American president has visited all five inhabited territories. Lyndon B. Johnson holds the lead, with three; he was also the last president to visit American Samoa, in 1967. No sitting president has ever been to the Northern Mariana Islands.

  UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, I couldn’t even list the territories, let alone tell you anything about them. And if there’s anyone with no excuse for this, it’s me, a travel writer with a college degree in—ahem—American studies.

  My obsession with Americana runs deep, pulsing through my childhood in Minneapolis, when my parents read me Travels with Charley and How Many Miles to Galena? at bedtime (two more American Road Trip books with no love for the territories). For my fifth birthday, I asked Mom and Dad to take me to Mickey’s Diner, a Saint Paul institution of neon and chrome and short-order cooks. I’d never been before but thought it looked like my kind of place. I ate French toast and a crusty biker gave me a dollar. It’s one of my earliest memories, and a scene I’ve long thought embodies the United States at its egalitarian finest: the wide-eyed preschooler and the burly Harley-rider, bonding over greasy food.

  Years later, at Carleton College, amid the prairies and cornfields of southern Minnesota, I channeled this fascination into actual academics. I could rattle off esoteric facts (about the states) and hold forth for hours on history and culture (of the states) and tell you the name of just about every capital (of the states). I graduated with the self-satisfied confidence of the newly diplomaed: I am a Credentialed Expert on All Things American.

  When I started out as a writer, my gaze turned overseas. I filed stories from Rome, from Ecuador, from a tiny Icelandic island. I was ever on the lookout for Americana and how it translated abroad—I can recommend the diner in Paris, but must warn you away from Tex-Mex in Berlin—but also prided myself as someone with a certain worldliness, a better-than-average understanding of how the European Union functioned, the politics of Costa Rica, the rising role of Chinese industry on the African continent.

  Yet in all this time, it never occurred to me, Mr. American Studies Guy, Mr. Globally Aware Travel Writer, that there was more of my very own country to consider. Parts of the USA about which I was not just fairly ignorant but almost wholly unaware. Places I could not reliably find on a map, within a thousand miles or even, in some cases, within the correct hemisphere.

  And then one day I encountered what I now think of as the Quarters of Destiny.

  Zoom in on a three-story, slightly shabby brick apartment building in south Minneapolis, on a blustery Saturday morning in November. In a basement unit, Maren and I stand by our kitchen table with a glass jar full of pocket change. It’s laundry day, and our attire shows it: she in yoga pants, I in tattered soccer shorts. Her shoulder-grazing chestnut hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her blue-green eyes are alight as we prepare to crank through our to-do list, beginning with sorting out the quarters from the jar. Most were destined for the washers and dryers down the hall, but if we were lucky, we’d find one or two state quarters to add to Maren’s collection, which by now filled most of a cardboard portfolio with a cover awash in a collage featuring George Washington and the Statue of Liberty. On this day, we found one—Montana from the Philadelphia Mint—and after Maren placed it in the proper spot, we took a moment to admire the rest of the nearly complete lineup of silvery disks, arranged in chronological order of admission, from Delaware (1787) to Hawaii (1959).

  Past Hawaii, I noticed, there were more quarters. I’m sure I’d seen them before, but they never registered. I pointed them out to Maren.

  “Yeah!” She grinned. “The territories.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “We have territories.”

  I plucked the coins from the portfolio. The designs bore mottoes in wholly unfamiliar languages and objects that I couldn’t identify—briefly interesting, but we had laundry to do, so I put the quarters back and promptly forgot about them.

  A few days later, Maren saw a news article about a vast tropical paradise of a U.S. national park, all primeval jungles and comely beaches and sapphire waters. The photos conjured escapist daydreams as the winds of early onset winter bent the trees outside our window. It was the second-least-visited of all national parks (even fewer people visit a park in remote Alaska, which is much less appealing to a Minnesotan in November), and it was called the National Park of American Samoa.

  Oh, yeah, I thought. American Samoa. That’s one of those mysterious places on the quarters.

  “I want to go there,” Maren said, adding, “What’s the deal with the territories, anyway?”

  I laughed but then realized I couldn’t answer the question. I had no idea why or how the United States controlled them, why they weren’t states, who lived there, what life was like there. I couldn’t name the first thing about local cultural traditions, attire, public transportation, what the billboards advertised, what the air smelled like . . . none of that.

  And it suddenly bugged me that I didn’t know. This was supposed to be my area of expertise. I looked at the quarters again and read the vital stats listed on a small flap in the portfolio. Here was the primer I’d never gotten in college:

  Puerto Rico

  Status designation: Commonwealth.

  Year it officially became part of the United States: 1898.

  Capital: San Juan.

  Population: About 3.5 million.

  Quarter at first glance: A lovely view of the turret of a stone fort overlooking the sea, with a tropical-looking flower hovering off to the side, and the words “Isla del Encanto” embossed in the sky.

  Guam

  Status designation: Organized, unincorporated territory.

  Year it officially became part of the United States: 1898.

  Capital: Hagåtña.

  Population: About 165,000.

  Quarter at first glance: An outline of the island, with a spray of bumps representing what I assumed were mountains, plus an outrigger sailboat and mushroom-looking thing that might have been a drum. Inscription on the coin: “Guahan I Tanó ManChamorro.”

  U.S. Virgin Islands

  Status designation: Organized, unincorporated territory.

  Year it officially became part of the United States: 1917.

  Capital: Charlotte Amalie

  Population: About 105,000.

  Quarter at first glance: Three small islands, a cluster of shaggy-headed palm trees, and a smallish bird perched on a branch blooming with largish flowers that are surely colorful and enchantingly tropical in real life. Motto: “United in Pride and Hope.”

  American Samoa

  Status designation: Unorganized, unincorporated territory.

  Year it officially became part of the United States: 1900.

  Capital: Pago Pago.

  Population: About 55,000.

  Quarter at first glance: A beach with palm trees and, hmm . . . maybe an aerial view of the Roman Colosseum, or a traditional bowl of some kind? Also, something that looked a bit like a broom and some kind of traditional staff-type thing. Above the bowl, there was text reading, “Samoa Muamua Le Atua.”

  Northern Mariana Islands

  Status designation: Commonwealth.

  Year it officially became part of the United States: 1976.

  Capital: Saipan.

  Population: About 54,000.

  Quarter at first glance: A seaside tableau featuring a beach, another of those mushroom-drum things like on Guam’s quarter, another outrigger sailboat, three small palm trees, two soaring birds, and a lei-like garland forming a half wreath along the bottom. No words.

  I started to do a bit more research and learned that in addition to the quarter-worthy territories, there are eleven puny bits of earth—islands, atolls, banks, rocky outcroppings—that are part of the United States’ “insular areas,” which is to say the places that aren’t states or federal districts (like the District of Columbia) but still fall under American sovereignty (though some are also claimed by other nations). These far
-flung specks of unpeopled land are grouped together as the Minor Outlying Islands. There are three in the Caribbean: Navassa Island, Serranilla Bank, and Bajo Nuevo Bank; and eight in the Pacific: Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Wake Island, and Palmyra Atoll. All have an official population of zero, although some have nonpermanent populations at military installations or scientific research stations.

  If your head is already spinning a bit, well, so was mine.

  MY MENTAL PICTURE of those quarter-enshrined places was a hybrid of my own broad-brush stereotypes of both American culture and tropical locales. Marching bands on surfboards. Roadside diners whose blue plate specials were served in hollowed-out pineapples. Baseball fields in rain-forest clearings. Highways lined with palm trees and strip malls of the Swiss Family Robinson school of design, with monkeys drolly swinging from the ceiling at Foot Locker and dolphins frolicking in the food-court fountain and mall cops wearing leis. Norman Rockwell in a bikini.

  Obviously, that wasn’t right. Obviously, I had no clue.

  I trekked to the bookstore in search of a history of the territories, or anything related to the subject, and found nothing at all. I searched Amazon, and the first page of results for “U.S. territories” was filled with coin-collecting portfolios like Maren’s, plus sheets of stickers. I went to the Minneapolis Central Library, the main repository of information in a city routinely ranked among the nation’s most well-read places, and found only obscure congressional bills. Nothing about the territories collectively, and the handful of books about the individual territories were difficult to track down because they were split up in different parts of the library, categorized not with United States history but with their surrounding region of the world. The U.S. Virgin Islands, for example, were grouped with the rest of the Caribbean, though aside from travel guides, there were only two books about the territory. On the same shelf, there were more volumes about the infamous Captain Morgan.