Nuclear Lullabies
Nuclear Lullabies from a Militarized Pacific Marianas
University of Pennsylvania
April 2026
Introduction: Archives, Spirits, and Revelations
How do archives of colonial occupation, war, and death disclose Indigenous Chamorro spiritual forms? Scholars of oral tradition have long shown that songs, chants, and narrative forms carry memory across generations and preserve historical feeling in ways that exceed documentary record. This essay turns to an archival condition in which songs remain preserved in text while the memories, practices of listening, and interpretive sensibilities that once animated them have become difficult for descendants to access. I approach this condition through a spiritually attuned reading of the Chamorro wartime lullaby Maigu’ Neni (“Sleep Baby”), preserved in a collection of songs and memories from the Japanese occupation of the Mariana Islands (Michael and Mundo 2019). In their introduction to Chamorritas, a word that refers both to Chamorro women and to a flirtatious call-and-response song form associated with unmarried young men, Michael and Mundo describe a genre that moved through work, courtship, and everyday exchange:
“As an integral part of the fabric of daily life, Chamorritas were traditionally sung while working in the fields, weaving palm fronds, net fishing […]. It was a time for teasing, flirting or sending secret messages. It was a musical banter, back and forth, usually between a young man and a young woman. […] It incorporated layers of meanings or double meanings, figurative expressions and language, and slang expressions that only that generation understood, and during the Japanese occupation, secret messages that included meeting places” (Michael and Mundo 2019, 249).
In my conversations with relatives and other descendants, I didn’t encounter anyone who knew these songs or the memories which gathered around them. Michael and Mundo’s framing underscores this absence since their account presents these songs as layered forms of communication shaped by secrecy, flirtation, and the pressures of occupation. Their description also clarifies how meaning traveled in this genre: through figurative expression, generational intimacy, and wartime circumstances that gave song the capacity to shelter messages inside performance. While the archive preserves the textual trace of those forms, the practices of listening that once made them meaningful remain difficult to recover. A spiritually attuned reading thus becomes necessary as the song’s remaining life rests in its words and the conditions of presence through which it was sung, felt, and heard. I therefore read Maigu’ Neni through a spiritually attuned and situated practice of interpretation as a way of approaching the atmosphere, sensibility, and spiritual presence through which this lullaby once moved.
The method developed here draws from anthropological and adjacent work on archives, performance, and forms of life that persist through uneven transmission. Hurston’s Mules and Men offers an early foundation which takes the desire to know home seriously as an intimate ethnographic question while treating storytelling, ritual practice, and spiritual presence as intertwined forms of knowledge. Her work offers a model for approaching knowledge through scene, voice, and encounter that keeps attention close to textures through which meaning takes hold. Stoler’s writing on colonial archives further clarifies how archives organize legibility, feeling, and political judgment through the sensibilities of rule, showing how colonial records preserve the past through selective attention, classification, and administrative concern. Moreover, Taylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire gives language to a lullaby (like Maigu’ Neni) whose historical life moved through performance, shared occasions, and cultivated practices of listening before entering print in archival form. Finally, Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul encounters the charged space through which memory, spirit, suffering, and unfinished return give survival its form. Across her work, she offers a way to read disturbance, moral burden, and spiritual presence as co-present registers of experience and interpretation. Together, these authors have opened a way of reading Maigu’ Neni as a surviving trace of spiritual, moral, and historical life whose practices of listening and transmission have grown difficult to recover.
Following these thinkers, I offer a grounded, spirited reading of Maigu’ Neni, guided by Chamorro presences (known through names such as aniti, aina, and taotaomona) whose significance came to me gradually through encounters shaped by attention and moonlight. I argue that this lullaby carries the catastrophic and nuclear charge of its World War II context in a form that lulls devastation to sleep even as it redistributes intensity across bodies, kin, and land. What persists in the archive, then, is a jurisprudence of spiritual life forged in the midst of Japanese and American colonial warfare and carried forward through Chamorro understandings of body, family, ancestry, and environment. Put another way, this essay offers a spiritually situated reading of the lullaby, shaped by cosmological endangerment, Chamorro forms of presence, and apprenticeship in a world where spirits, weather, kinship, and moral consequence remain active in the interpretation of signs. Spiritual attunement names a situated practice of interpretation through which the lullaby’s surviving words, historical conditions, and ancestral force become legible through disciplined engagement.
Sleep, Death, and Ancestral Transitions in the Wartime Household
The song opens with a man addressing a child and its mother:
Sleep, sleep, sleep, baby
And lay yourself on the hammock
And when the baby is asleep
Just leave because (he/she) will not wake up.
The hammock is introduced as a place of care and rest, addressed to a child, before the voice turns sharply toward the mother with a jarring prophecy that her child will die. Within four lines, the lullaby draws nurture, birth, and death into the same gesture. The convergence of nurture and death in a single gesture belongs to the wartime world from which Maigu’ Neni originates. In 1944, battles between the United States and Japan brought bombardment and civilian displacement. Chamorro fled into caves and remained there for weeks, unable to attain food or fresh water amid imperial warfare waged beyond their control. According to Martin (2024), “After the battle, the U.S. Civil Affairs Unit moved all civilians into Camp Susupe. They were unprepared for the herculean task of feeding, sheltering, and caring for almost 18,000 civilians. They arrived sick, hungry, thirsty, wounded, and traumatized and were met with appalling conditions in the camp. Shelters were constructed of scraps and dirt floors, squeezing many families into tight spaces. The food consisted of military rations and malnutrition was rampant. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the camp, restricting the civilians’ movement” (Martin 2024).
Against this wartime scene, the child’s foretold death is starkly legible. The image remains lodged within the household arrangement of hammock, mother, and father which binds intimate care to the prospect of death. Sharpe’s reading of Morrison’s Beloved may offer one reading of this configuration. In In the Wake, Sharpe turns to Cilia, an infant left on a sinking slave ship after her mother, Garner, jumps overboard. Sharpe places this scene alongside Garner’s earlier attempt to kill the child in order to spare her re-enslavement (Sharpe 2016, 104). Here, maternal care and infant death occupy the same ethical horizon as death takes the form of protection from a future structured by capture, terror, and return. However, Pandolfo’s reading offers yet another dimension of the scene. In her discussions of spirit affliction, moral burden, and psychic disturbance, suffering is read through moments when pain exceeds ordinary explanation. In her call for a mode of attention attuned to presence, obligation, and unfinished injury, her work helps clarify why the child’s death in Maigu’ Neni belongs at once to wartime devastation and to a moral and spiritual field in which death marks passage, presence, and altered obligation.
Death in the Chamorro world marks a transformation from descendant to ancestor, known under various names such as taotaomona, aina, or aniti. During seventeenth-century Jesuit missionization, these presences were wrapped in terms such as defunto, or more specifically, las almas de los fieles difuntos (the souls of the faithful departed). As Jesuit and Spanish colonial forces overtook the Chamorro, the significance of los mártires (the martyrs) came to carry positive spiritual and political consequence across the islands as they strengthened the living through their catastrophic deaths (Driver 2000). In Maigu’ Neni, the child’s death, prophesied by the presumed father, thus carries the possibility of spiritual (ancestral) political force as a path toward familial and collective survival. Under this light, the infant stands in extreme vulnerability as a figure through whom a politically charged desire takes form and whose death would reorder the house, kin, and future. Catastrophe, then, is folded into the hammock as it absorbs war, violence, and historic forms of spiritual authority into the material forms of household care. The male voice leaves the song at this threshold, bringing the scene to the edge of an irreversible passage as both parents lay the child to rest.
Feminine Authorization and Matriarchal Jurisdiction
The female response follows:
Before you leave,
Please ask for permission.
If I’m happy you can leave/go.
And if I’m not happy, be patient.
On the surface, the woman speaks as a wife addressing a husband who wishes to slip away. Thus scene preserves a recognizable domestic exchange: male movement depends upon female approval, a form treated as ordinary under colonial eyes. However, a spiritually attuned reading gives the stanza a wider jurisdiction. The female voice speaks from the household, yet the authority carried in her words reaches beyond the couple and into the broader terms under which movement becomes possible in Chamorro worlds. Passage through forest or ocean depends upon ancestral powers whose authority exceeds private desire (Russell 1998). Moreover, women and maternal lines have long anchored household authority, care, and continuity (Souder 1992; Thompson 1947). The speaker’s “I” therefore carries maternal and ancestral authority within the same voice where permission belongs (1) to the mother/matriarch addressing the household and (2) to the ancestral presences aligned with that jurisdiction, including taotaomona, aina, and aniti. Likewise, the “you” extends beyond the husband to include descendants and others whose requests for ancestral support remain subject to ancestral permission. The child’s possible death in the first stanza had already opened the question of passage into ancestral force. The woman’s response answers that question by insisting that movement across the threshold of life and death remains subject to matriarchal and ancestral authorization. Desperation alone cannot turn the infant into a martyr. The threshold between life and death remains governed, morally charged, and held within feminine jurisdiction. In other words, her authority is as much juridical as it is maternal, since permission, patience, and feeling all become media through which movement is judged and ordered.
The male voice seeks release through decisive passage, while the female response imposes delay as a temporal discipline placed against catastrophic desire. Her call for patience suspends urgency and places action within another order of time: a latent movement waiting upon permission and judgment. The male prophecy gave way to regulation as the child’s possible death comes under feminine authority, whose judgment alters the spiritual and political force of the child’s passage. If martyrial transformation carries the promise of strengthening the living and producing collective change, feminine rule determines the terms under which such a transformation may occur. The final distinction between happiness and patience deepens this claim by making feeling a medium of governance. “I’m happy” and “ I’m not happy” organize the conditions under which movement may proceed, turning the household into a site where emotion, law, and spiritual rule converge. The female response articulates a jurisdictional world in which catastrophe moves under permission and in which the desire to transform suffering into ancestral force passes through feminine judgment. In sum, this stanza leaves the lullaby in a different key. What follows is therefore a question of authorization: who may move suffering toward transformation, and what future might such authorization allow?
Masculine Yearning, Delay, and Catastrophic Desire
After the woman places departure under permission, the male returns in the register of waiting:
And when you are about to leave,
Just go, but don’t take long.
Consider about the person.
It hurts deeply to yearn.
Here, he accepts that movement must pass through her authorization, but he speaks from the strain which her very authorization creates. In binding departure to urgency, he gives voice to the pain of delay (“Just go, but don’t take long”) and offers yearning within the interval of separation. A register of dependence is further notable through his frustrated waiting within the pain he cannot control. As his yearning takes shape within a field of authority, delay and loss that exceed his command, his strained relation drives his plea toward urgency. His plea therefore leans toward those who leave him (the feminine, both matriarch and the ancestral spirits bound to her) whose response remains in suspension. Yearning intensifies here as his context is once again remembered.Under occupation bloodshed, and the felt distance of ancestral spirits, the husband/patriarch calls for haste and the judgement of those who have caused Chamorro suffering. His ache, then, contains the yearning for political and spiritual retribution.
While this structure of desire might recall the martyrial horizon traced earlier in the essay (in which suffering could strengthen the living through witness, efficacy, and collective consequence), this structure also resonates with more contemporary formations of catastrophic desire. Bhatt’s (2021) account of white facism explores how violence acquires a revelatory and redemptive promise when fantasies of contamination, decline and extinction orient collective desire toward purification and restored order. Further, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) describe a structure of desire that attaches itself to the limit of an existing order, so that crisis comes to feel like the event through which rupture promises another condition of life. Maigu’ Neni moves with these desires as the patriarchal yearning carries a destructive wish for otherwise within the strains under occupation.
In Chamorro cosmology, ancestral forces become manifest through alterations of physical form, either at the level of the human flesh (as in health and sickness) or at the level of environmental flesh (as in meteorological and ecological shifts) (Manglona 2024.). The patriarch’s wish, within this context, seeks a judgement capable of answering colonial violence on its own scale– he wishes for the condemnation of colonial forces by both environmental and health-related catastrophe.
Nursing, Survival, Descendance, Inheritance
Even with his persistence for an alternate force, the matriarch returns the lullaby to the child:
Nurse baby, nurse baby,
Nurse baby, because it is your breast.
Don’t shy away from nursing,
Because I already gave you permission.
With this stanza, the song turns back toward life as the child is addressed as living, presence, and entitled to sustenance. While permission has earlier governed departure and movement between life and death, permission now governs nurturance in the drawing toward the body and the work of being kept alive. In granting authorization to feed, the matriarch secures both an immediate nourishment and longer forms of continuity through descendance, inheritance, and tradition. Through this return, she shifts the lullaby from catastrophic yearning toward the disciplined work of survival. The repetition of “nurse baby” across two lines also provides a prosaic reassurance and sustenance. This is particularly paramount in consideration of war and famine: continuity is literally secured through the productions of the breast, while the wider field of Chamorro continuity takes place through the ancestrally blessed survival of her lineage. In other words, if they were not blessed, then the mother’s breast would not produce sustenance, or she and the child would both suffer (physical or environmental) ailments without resolution.
The contrast between the husband’s yearning and the matriarch’s stance finally becomes clear: he insists on destructive intervention while she insists on sustaining what already exists. The child remains at the center of the song, though its futures are differently prophesied. While it may be tempting to see the child as specifically characterizing Chamorro descendants, the “baby” referred to in this song reaches beyond such ethnic or racial boundaries. This is an especially crucial point when considering the Pacific more broadly, as Chamorro care through nurturance (e.g., providing food, shelter, clean water, and medical aid) has been historically accessible for all foreigners who might reach the Islands. To be clear, the blessings provided by the matriarch in this lullaby are not limited solely to the Chamorro. She instead authorizes a future for all those whom the patriarch seeks to destroy/transform/martyr. As the colonial world surrounds her, through occupation, deprivation, and fear, she offers small acts of authorization, nurturance, and closeness that reach toward another otherwise.
Wind, Reciprocity, and Environmental Mediation
The patriarch then stands his ground, insisting on his knowledge of the ancestral through atmospheric force:
The wind took you,
Then the wind will return you.
And wherever it took you from,
That is where it will put you again.
His declaration of the wind becomes the medium through which distance is traveled and return is imaginable. Here, the lullaby widens from the household to the atmosphere. Though domestic life still frames the scene, the environment now participates directly in the work of relation. Atmospheric force, then, is declared the patriarch’s preferred medium for ancestral response.
This stanza also gives the Pacific structure of reciprocity an environmental form. In Chamorro, this is termed inafa’maolek (translation: harmony, or literally: ina (prefix for reciprocal action), fa’ (to make), maolek (good)), which assumes that “there was once a state or condition that was somehow altered, perhaps by an act of commission or omission, that muse be restored to its original state or condition,” (Perez-Iyechad, n.d., 2001; Cunningham, 1984). In this verse, reciprocity is shaped by patterned, forceful return. Translations of “wind” are also not insignificant as Michael and Mundo specifically transcribe it as manglu’ (wind) instead of manglo’ (wind). The difference between the u’ and o’ is often overlooked in contemporary orthographies, but is nonetheless significant as a marker of opposition (the stressed ‘u’ as in ‘tool’ as opposed to the unstressed 'o’ as in ‘put’) (Topping 1975). The phoneme U is also typically used as a future marker in the third person, whereas O is a verb tied to both future and past. Specifically meaning “searching for something”, O implies that “something” is an object already known and therefore imbued with certain memories, inheritances, or traditions to be carried as the subject looks for it in the future. The significance of the wind thus lies in the form of its arrival (and return) as a future that disregards the past.
Moreover, time takes on a new circulatory form in contrast to earlier sections where yearning gave time the shape of delay and nursing gave the shape of continuity. In declaring an ancestral form of reciprocity, the patriarch insists that the matriarch’s bond of nourishment extends through the movement of departure/death/martyrdom. According to this rendering, return unfolds within a wider moral and environmental order in which the mother’s care is returned through salvation of the patriarch. More specifically, in its martyrdom, the child is “given” power by the patriarch and must therefore pay him back through some ancestral means (which must also be in a form he considers the “blessing”). Across all these cases, the patriarch is determined toward a specific frame of the future that negates and refuses the matriarch’s version of continuity.
Nuclear Criticality & Detonation
In her frustration, she returns the patriarch’s insistence with a sharp rebuke:
Old lady tie your pet pig
Because it finished my taro.
I don’t care for the begetter.
The seedling is what I care about.
The mother-in-law enters this scene through direct address, and the pig is named as the immediate agent of destruction. As the pig and the begetter are joined together, the matriarch moves the verse from damaged sustenance (taro) to damaged futurity (seedling). This stanza sorts, through a tightly compressed scene, the difference between destructive consumption and vulnerable life. Furthermore, the patriarch’s disregard for the child is matched with her disregard for him. Instead, the seedling carries concentrated value because it places futurity in a small, fragile form still capable of growth. It stands beside the child, descendant life, and the continuities that wartime pressures endanger. Care, here, turns into discernment: care is the authority that sorts what should be sustained from what has already turned destructive.
This stanza offers the clearest resonances of nuclearity when read within the song's ancestral and moral field as opposed to a narrow documentary model of fixed historical encoding. The greedy pig, the spent begetter, and the threatened seedling place patriarchal appetite and endangered futurity within the same scene as nuclearity takes hold in domestic form (within the nuclear household). Roy’s (2016) formulation of “radioactive masculinity” is especially useful for this reading because it describes a militarized masculinity whose authority depends on the bomb’s symbolic and material power that converges virility, sovereign ambition, and destructive capacity into one figure. In his account, nuclear power does more than masculinize the state: it produces anxious, hypermasculine performances that seek legitimacy through overwhelming force. The begetter/patriarch/pig stands close to such consumptive masculinities that expends itself and leaves damage behind. The matriarch’s voice thus reads this field with irritation and precision, deciding that care will no longer serve him after his destruction has passed through.
The context of the Marianas intensifies these readings as the two nuclear bombs, launched from the islands toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, moved through a symbolic economy that joined destructive capacity to masculine command and vulnerable life to child-form. The names of the bombs, the Fat Man and Little Boy, resonate strongly as they compress similar virilities and infancies within the language of annihilation. To be clear, I am not arguing that the lullaby names the atomic bombs in a documentary sense. I am arguing that its figures of masculine appetite and vulnerable child-life become uncannily legible alongside the atomic iconography of Fat Man and Little Boy, especially within a Mariana Islands history that would come to anchor U.S. militarized power in the Pacific. This nuclear reference becomes most audible through feminine frustration as she calls toward the ancestral (“Old lady tie your pet pig”) to inflict penalty on his destructive decision. Read through the Pacific more broadly, Teaiwa (1994) clarifies how nuclear violence becomes hidden in the transformation of the feminized form. The bikini swimsuit took its name from the Bikini Atoll, where the United States began nuclear testing in 1946 after displacing the atoll’s inhabitants for Operation Crossroads (U.S. Department of Energy, 2000). Over 23 nuclear tests and 67 nuclear devices, the Bikini Atoll sustained destruction over 1000 times more powerful than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Rowberry, 2014). Thus, the sharp rebuke of the feminine, the matriarch, and the ancestral presences beside them hold the truths of nuclear fallout.
In this stanza, nuclear force is received in domestic form and is subjected to feminine and spiritual judgment. The bomb sounds within a Chamorro acoustic world where appetite, damage, and futurity coalesce in the field of care.
Moonlight, Moral Exposure, and Containment
The lullaby draws to a close through his last words, still enraged:
And the moon rises,
All the land is shined upon.
It is from you all the sin came from.
Now you won’t spread it.
As the moon rises, its light extends across the land and gives the ending a territorial scale larger than the household. The intimate drama of permission, yearning, nursing, wind, and judgment now lies under a light cast across the island. Under this light, the masculine voice turns toward a “you” charged as the source of sin and, ironically, the point of which harm spreads. Their closing movement therefore turns toward containment: what has originally moved through the song as desire, nourishment, and futurity is recast as something whose circulation must be terminated. The force of this accusation lies further in the uncertainty of its addressee. The “you” may point to the child, the matriarch, the future she (or ancestors) authorizes, or the wider line of continuity this song has kept near the center of its moral world. The masculine voice seeks, in this final moment, to recover authority by naming the source of disorder and fixing responsibility in the figure who carries a specific kind of futurity forward. In other words, the accusation works to contain what the female voice had preserved, especially as he escapes to explode/detonate/destroy elsewhere.
Rumination on the moonlight may offer further resonances in multiple directions. In one direction, the moon carries its wartime inflection through its proximity to Japan, known otherwise as the Land of the Rising sun. In still another direction, the moonlight carries a distinctly Chamorro force as the crescent shape of the archipelago and the linguistic texture of the “moon” provide symbolism that exceeds its geopolitical allegory. Here again, contrastive translations become critical as the term for moon is originally transcribed as “pilan” instead of “pulan”. In the transition from u (future marker) to i (focus marker), time becomes contained alongside the addressee “you”, almost as if the lullaby was cursed to sit in the archive for (her spiritually-attuned) truths to be contained/suppressed. Regarding the geographical shape of the Marianas and its trench, both resemble the waxing phase of the crescent moon, or the first sliver of light after the darkness of the new moon. The hinge becomes, again, whichform of that moon is allowed to exist.
Read further alongside nuclear references, the ending takes on other intensities as nuclear force necessarily moves through spread: blast, fallout, atmospheric contamination, and geopolitical reach. The patriarch’s final turn toward accusation and containment echoes that larger field by linking harm to expansion across land. His expansion and his light, in particular, while her light is contained and frozen in time. As the moonlight illuminates, the field is left morally unresolved. The masculine voice closes the song, while the feminine continues to organize its moral weight through spiritual resonance. The lullaby ends with an effort at containment, yet it survives as a form that might keep continuity open. The final verse therefore offers one last revelation: force seeks closure, while the archive might carry forward what closure cannot contain.
Lullabies & Inheritance, or “This Could Only Be Written Under Moonlight”
I come to Maigu’ Neni as a Chamorro scholar and Chamorro healer formed within a world in which songs, spirits, weather, kinship, and care continue to carry moral force across uneven histories of transmission. In this position, the lullaby has reached me as an intimate archive of pressure which has carried occupation, hunger, gendered strain, ancestral jurisprudence, and nuclear force into the sensory life of the household. Throughout this paper, I have read the lullaby as a site of catastrophic revelation, where its nuclear force has become perceptible through a reading of a domestic conversation under a specific form of wind and moonlight. These revelations have unfolded within a Chamorro field in which spirits remain active in the ordering of movement, care, and consequence. More than memory as content, it has preserved the spirit of matriarchally bound ancestors that have pursued a future beyond such contaminant, through a spiritually attuned reading disclosed by a Chamorro healer and offered as a gift to readers willing to sit with a mode of interpretation shaped by Chamorro presence, inheritance, and uneven archival transmission.To inherit Maigu’ Neni is to inherit acoustics that exceed full mastery of explanation while still demanding disciplined forms of listening, discernment, and response. By moving through a spirited rocking back and forth between the future-present and the past, the lullaby authorizes continuity simply through the nearness of ancestral forces, whether Chamorro or otherwise. Put another way, the child in the lullaby stands first within a Chamorro moral and ancestral world, but the song’s form of blessing also reaches outward toward those who enter that world through care, listening, and obligation.
The contemporary afterlife of the lullaby carries equal importance because the pressures held within it have not receded into a closed past. Militarization, ecological instability, uneven infrastructures of health and constrained political sovereignty continue to shape life in the Marianas. Ancestral jurisdiction remains active in the present, as shown through this paper, moving through latency, environmental disturbance.recovery, health/illess, and other modes of alteration that structure how force is interpreted and how action becomes possible. Within this ongoing field, Maigu’ Neni has offered an intimate theory of how catastrophe settles into ordinary life and how survival depends on reading the spirited pressures moving through the body, land, weather, and kin. The lullaby is therefore one medium through which historical violence, environmental force, and ancestral presence all remain near to the living.
I have argued that this lullaby becomes newly audible through a spiritually mediated and catastrophic form of legibility in which later atomic histories in the Marianas intensify the song’s figures of destructive masculinity, endangered futurity, feminine judgment, and territorial spread. Further, the song carries catastrophic force through masculine appetite and the effort to contain what spreads across land and lineage. In the militarized Marianas, such elements become newly resonant with the nuclear histories that have come to define the region. These references have moved through ancestral forms and layered temporalities that allow such catastrophic forces to gather in advance, linger, and to become newly audible for future children. The song maintains this pressure by continuing to reveal truths that extend beyond the historical moment of its performance. Inheritance, in this sense, carries revelation forward. This lullaby has placed me under an obligation to carry forward what has remained active within it, without reducing ancestral force to metaphor or history to inert record. Maigu’ Neni teaches that survival depends greatly on discernment, that futurity requires a sincere effort to engage the past, and that archives may continue to act through the ancestral worlds that press upon (the) present/presence. In this sense, this lullaby has and continues to endure as a song, inheritance, and a living lesson in how Chamorro spiritual life continues to survive within a militarized, Pacific Marianas.
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