CHAMORROS IN RABAUL

AQUININGOC FAMILY IN RABAUL, PAPUA NEW GUINEA IN 1959

In 1959, four Chamorro political leaders, two from Guam (Richard F. Taitano and Vicente B. Bamba) and two from Saipan (Olimpio T. Borja and Elias P. Sablan), went to Rabaul, a city on the island of New Britain in the country of Papua New Guinea, to attend a meeting of the South Pacific Commission. 

There they met Chamorros who had been living in Rabaul for sixty years or so. In the group photo, Bamba, Borja and Sablan are identified. The rest are Chamorros, their non-Chamorro spouses and their mixed-blood children.

Rabaul had been a German colony and the Northern Marianas and the rest of Micronesia, excluding Guam, had also been German from 1899 until 1914. So some Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Marianas moved to Rabaul, often after first spending time in Yap. Most stayed there and married Germans, Chinese and people from other places. Their children grew up speaking English, since the Australians took over Rabaul in 1914. They spoke English, with an Australian accent that is.

One elderly Chamorro woman, Dolores Borja (familian Catalino) was still alive when the Guam and Northern Marianas politicians met her in Rabaul.  She had been in New Guinea since 1913, but still could speak Chamorro in 1959.  Other Chamorro families in New Guinea were from the Aquiningoc, Cruz, Charfauros and Guerrero clans. But another Chamorro, born in Rabaul, did not know what race he was or where Guam was.   He even wrote to the Philippines government asking where Guam was.

In a World War II diary, a store owner named Leo Aquiningoc in Karlai, south of  Rabaul, is described as being Filipino.  Since the Marianas were unknown to many people in those days, Chamorros could easily be mistaken for Filipinos, and many are up to today!  But Leo was the son of Juan Aquiningoc from Hågat and his wife Juana Cruz who moved the whole family to New Britain after living in Saipan for a while. Leo did well for himself in business because the store he owned in World War II became, by 1959, a 50 hectare plantation employing 80 workers. That's his clan pictured above.

Some Chamorros in Rabaul and that whole area of Papua New Guinea returned to Guam or the Marianas. 

* You can search online for the Leo Aquiningoc citation in "New Britain Anabasis" by JCH Gill.