BEN ZAFRA

Once a Big Name, Now All but Forgotten

There are some people who had a place in Guam history who have gone and are all but forgotten.

One of these is Ben Zafra. Government worker. Forester for the Naval Government. Chief Commissioner of Guam from 1941 to 1960. Even during the Japanese Occupation.

But if you ask people if they ever heard of Ben Zafra, only the older people will say they have.

Ancestry

Ben was born Vicente Ulloa Zafra, the son of Román Zafra, the son of Dominga Zafra. Román's father is unknown. But we do know that Román was Filipino. He moved to Guam and was military health officer in the Spanish colonial government. He had some bad luck, though, being accused in the 1880s of having abandoned his post and fleeing from arrest. But, he was still living on Guam in 1897 and appears in the census, a free man.

Román's first wife was Chamorro, María Eustaquio. Together, they had a daughter named Angustia. María then passed away and Román married another Chamorro woman, Dolores Rivera Ulloa, the daughter of Manuel Ulloa and Vicenta Rivera. Román and Dolores' one and only child was Vicente.

Both Román and Dolores must have passed away before 1920 (perhaps in the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic) because Ben and Angustia are found in 1920 living with Eulogio de la Cruz. Cruz was a man of some means, and a Filipino married to a Chamorro. Perhaps Eulogio and his countryman Román Zafra were friends, and when Román died, Eulogio became the guardian of Román's children. Next door to Eulogio, in their own dwelling, were Eulogio's two sons, Francisco and José. It seems certain that Eulogio made sure that Ben learned English and to read and write. He was identified as a messenger at the age of 17 in the 1920 Census.

Early Years

Zafra began working for the Naval Government in 1917 as a messenger boy, then in 1922 as a clerk. Sometime before 1930, Ben was married to Oliva Castro. Their wedding, said one elderly lady who heard it from her mother, was a big event. Their wedding cake was so tall that they couldn't decorate it inside the house. They had to take the cake outside for that. Sadly, after just a few months, Ben and Oliva separated. In Chamorro, "ma na' na'lo si Oliva." "They returned Oliva to her family." In the 1930 Guam Census, Oliva is listed as divorced, living alone except for a ten-month old baby girl whose last name was Castro, Oliva's maiden name. Apparently the baby was born out of wedlock.

Around 1925, he went to Hong Kong to work for the U.S. Public Health Service. He served one year as a Merchant Marine, then worked for the Texas Oil Company (China), Ltd. In 1934 he moved to Saigon to work for a construction company.

He returned to Guam in 1935 and worked as deputy land judge and assistant chief forester for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Chief Commissioner - Even under the Japanese

In 1941, just months before war, Ben was made Chief Commissioner, succeeding Antonio Crisóstomo Suárez who decided to retire. The commissioners were the village mayors, as we call them today. The Chief Commissioner was a liaison between the Naval Government and the village commissioners, but he could also, apparently, make some judicial decisions on minor issues.

When the Japanese occupied Guam, they asked him what his job was under the Americans. "Chief Commissioner," he replied. The Japanese then told him he was still Chief Commissioner whether he liked it or not. He was placed in the Japanese Navy Civilian Administration, called the Minseibu. Its offices were located in the Saint Vincent de Paul Hall adjacent the Hagåtña Cathedral.

The St Vincent de Paul Hall was turned into the headquarters of the Japanese Minseibu

His main job was clerical; a "glorified messenger boy" Zafra called himself. Juan "Buko" Castro, a Saipanese interpreter, would write or speak instructions from the Japanese in Chamorro to Ben, who would then type them out as written notices in Chamorro for the public. They were duplicated on a mimeograph machine. Ben passed out numerous copies to all the district commissioners and posted them on Hagåtña's eight public bulletin boards. 

He was also responsible for putting out a daily mimeographed news bulletin called the Omiya Nippō (Guam Daily Report). "Nippō" means "daily report" and "Omiya" literally means "great shrine" but it was the Japanese name for Guam during the war.

The Omiya Nippō was written in English by a Japanese named Ogawa. Ogawa's English was bad at times, turning his sentence into gibberish, but Zafra was not allowed to change a word. The "news" was also pure propaganda; lies in many cases. One time Zafra and his assistant José Roberto counted all the American ships the Japanese news said had sunk, and the amount was more than the number of ships in the world. "It became a joke," Zafra said.

Ben was paid 90 yen a month at first, till his pay was reduced to 75 yen a month. When the Americans started bombing Guam in 1944 and the Minseibu office caught on fire, Ben left Hagåtña and his job at the Minseibu. War's end was only a matter of time.

After the War

After the war, Ben continued as Chief Commissioner of Guam till 1960. He also sat on several government boards (Parole Board, Alcohol Beverage Control Board, Election Commission, etc) and was associate judge of the Court of Appeals before 1950.

Eventually, Ben found himself a second wife, Isabel (Beck) Perez, the daughter of Atanacio Taitano Perez, a prominent Chamorro government official in various capacities almost the entire first decades of the Naval Government period. They raised Beck's nephew, David Taitano Perez, Sr, the son of her sister Maria. The couple moved to California, according to one family member, to be closer to their nephew Daniel Perez Ploke, who was studying there. In 1964, Ben died in Alameda, CA.

Besides all this, Ben was well-known in the Guam community at the time as a sportsman. He was a good baseball player and a boxer. He was a tall man, easily 6 feet or more. He had huge hands. He was also a member of the Young Men's League of Guam, the first Chamorro civic organization.

Hawaii Church Chronicle, November 1959

Ben joined the Episcopalian Church in the 1950s, at Saint John the Divine Church, located at the time in Hagåtña. He is pictured above (left, holding flag) presenting the Guam flag to the church.

As Ben and Beck did not have any children, that family line is no more.

Angustia

Ben's older sister, Angustia, better known as Nenita, who was single most of her life, finally married a Filipino man named Valentin A. Baltazar after the war in her senior years. They lived in Agaña Heights at her house. According to a family member, she could not speak much English and her Filipino husband could not speak Chamorro. So they used a lot of sign language. She died before him, and after her death he brought some family members from the Philippines to Guam. Angustia never had children.