Umatac

Umåtac — spelled Humåtak in CHamoru — was one of the substantial villages of pre-contact Guam, set where a river runs into a bay that gave canoes shelter and fresh water. Tradition and the earliest chronicles place the landfall of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition here in March 1521, after the first crossing of the Pacific, although historians have argued for other points on the island; a monument by the shore records the claim and the village has built a holiday around it.

Under Spanish rule the bay mattered out of proportion to the size of the place. Manila galleons crossing between Mexico and the Philippines called for water and provisions, and to guard that anchorage the colonial government fortified the entrance, building small batteries on the headlands and, early in the nineteenth century, Fort Nuestra Señora de la Soledad on the southern cliff. Umatac was for a time the island's second town, with a church, a plaza and a Spanish garrison.

The galleon trade ended, the United States took Guam in 1898, and the village settled back into fishing and farming. Japanese occupation from 1941 fell hard on the southern villages, with forced labour and, in the last weeks before the American recapture in July 1944, killings of civilians from nearby Merizo that are commemorated at village memorials. Post-war rebuilding in concrete replaced most of the old houses, and young people left for the centre and north of the island or for the mainland. What remains is a small, strongly CHamoru community that keeps the fort, the monument and the March festival.

Umatac is known across Guam for Discovery Day, held each March, when the shore below the monument fills with dancing, food stalls and a fair. The event carries a double edge that islanders discuss openly: it marks the moment the outside world arrived, and the beginning of colonisation, and the tone of the commemoration has shifted over the years towards CHamoru performance and history rather than celebration of the explorers.

Village life is Catholic and organised around the church of San Dionisio. The patron's fiesta brings mass, a procession and open houses where families cook for days and feed anyone who comes; contributions of food, money or labour flow through the chenchule' system that binds relatives and neighbours. Funerals draw nine nights of rosary, and the whole village turns out.

The south is also where CHamoru cultural revival is strongest: language use is higher than in the north, canoe-building, weaving and chant groups are active in the southern villages, and traditional fishing rights over particular reef flats are still respected. Visitors are received with courtesy and curiosity, and the expectations are simple — greet people, ask before photographing, drive slowly past houses, and do not treat the village as a stage set.

Umatac is home to a few hundred people, which makes it the least populated of Guam's nineteen villages. Housing is mostly single-storey concrete built or rebuilt after typhoons, strung between the coast road and the hillside, with the mayor's office, an elementary school, the church and a community centre forming the public heart of the place.

There is little paid work in the village. Most households depend on jobs in the centre and north of the island — government offices, hospitals, hotels, construction, the military bases — which means a daily commute of forty minutes or more each way on Route 2, and many families also run a boat or a garden. Fishing on the reef and in the deeper water offshore supplements what the shops sell, and pigs and chickens are kept behind houses for fiestas.

The day starts early because of the commute and the heat, and quietens by mid-evening. Weekends belong to church, family gatherings, barbecues, sport at the village court and fishing. The pressures are those of a rural community at the edge of a US territory: the cost of shipped-in food and fuel, young people leaving for Hawaii and the mainland, thin health and transport services, and the seasonal work of preparing for typhoons, with shutters, generators and stocked larders. Coastal erosion and flooding at the river mouth are a growing worry.

Food in the south is home cooking rather than restaurant cooking, and it is at its fullest at fiestas. The table is built on grilled meat and rice: short ribs and chicken cooked over wood, hineksa' aga'ga' (red rice coloured with achote seed), and kelaguen, in which chicken, beef, reef fish or shrimp is chopped fine and cured in lemon juice with grated coconut, onion and hot donne' peppers. Finadene', the dipping sauce of soy, lemon or vinegar, onion and chilli, is on every table.

Reef and ocean fish are central here in a way they are not on the hotel strip — parrotfish, rabbitfish, tuna and mahi-mahi, grilled whole, salted, or served raw with coconut and lime. Kå'du, a light soup of fish or chicken with greens and coconut milk, and estufao, a Spanish-derived stew of meat with vinegar and onions, are everyday village dishes. Taro, breadfruit, yams and green bananas come out of household gardens.

Southern sweets are worth looking out for at fiestas and roadside stalls: apigigi, grated coconut wrapped in a banana leaf and roasted; guyuria, hard coconut cookies; latiya, custard over sponge cake with cinnamon; and coconut candy boiled down until it sets. Fresh coconuts are opened to drink, and tuba, fermented coconut toddy, is still made in the villages.