Targeting Kwajalein: U.S. Empire, Militarization and Suburbanization and the Marshall Islands, 1944-1986.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of how the Marshallese island of Kwajalein came to be naturalized as part of suburban U.S.A. amidst a Cold War context of unprecedented U.S. military imperial expansion. Since the early 1960s the U.S. army began layering Kwajalein's coral foundation with a domesticating and familiarizing suburban landscape to help recruit and retain American workers on the island. This workforce comprised the nation's top scientists and engineers and their families who came to operate the army's missile testing program on Kwajalein. The island's predominately civilian contractor personnel have monitored incoming ballistic missiles launched at Kwajalein's lagoon from 5,000 miles away at California's Vandenberg Airforce base for more than five decades. These Americans arriving to Kwajalein settled on an island cleared of indigenous inhabitants by the U.S. military. They came to a place in the middle of the Pacific narrated as a safe, secure and segregated American suburb. My project examines how Kwajalein's suburban transformation historically emerged alongside the urbanization of Ebeye, the nearby island housing those Marshallese displaced by the military to enable missile testing, and others migrating in search of employment on Kwajalein. I explore the relational spatial and cultural histories of Kwajalein and Ebeye as Ebeye's growing Marshallese population came to constitute a segregated, racialized labor force serving Kwajalein's American families. This project analyzes Kwajalein's suburban transformation as a local manifestation of American disavowal of empire in Micronesia historically obscured under U.N. sanction through the 1947 Trusteeship Agreement. The agreement offered a legitimating discursive terrain framing U.S. entitlement to use Micronesia to expand military power following World War II marking the rise of a U.S. military imperial industrial complex. While U.N. sanction obscured U.S. Empire on a global level, Kwajalein's transformation localized that erasure by naturalizing the island as an American space. This dissertation examines how Marshallese political leaders, landowners and workers negotiated this U.S. colonial presence and the alternative discourses they offered in framing Kwajalein and Ebeye's histories. These narratives challenged U.S. colonial land acquisition and segregation on Kwajalein through protest, testimonies and petitions during the 1960s and through Marshallese decolonization in 1986.