9422660 Schepple The objective of this project is to investigate important questions about the rights and basic meaning of citizenship through a case study of the people of Guam. This study views citizenship as a set of practices (juridical, political, economic, and cultural) that embody a wide range of modernizing processes in law, politics and culture. It views peoplehood, or indigenous identity, as a set of practices that resist, appropriate, and transform citixenship practices. The research draws together new theoretical and methodological approaches to narrative studies in law and in social science history with empirical studies in citizenship. This study involved the solicitation and collection of narratives through individual and focus group interviews and through document study in Guam and selected mainland sites. These narratives will be examined for what they reveal about how the people of Guam understand their political status and how they represent their identities in making rights claims. The study will focus on episodes of rights claim seeking that will enable a critical analysis of the applicability of T. H. Marshall's theoretical narrative of the evolution of civil, political and social rights. %%% This study will investigate how the people of Guam are seeking a change in their political status to achieve an enhancement of the benefits and constitutional protections of the citizenship status granted them in 1950. It will also analyze how the Chamoru people are working to achieve federal recognition of their status as the indigenous people of the island and of their right to self-determination, It will seek to explain why these two sets of possibly conflicting claims to rights are converging, what are the historical and institutional contexts in which these claims are made, how these contexts affect how the people of Guam understand their political identities, and what Guam's quest for commonwealth status signifies for the meaning of citizenship, membership, and sovere ignty in the United States and its territories. ***
