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| Supreme Court Justice Ramon Garrido Villagomez, my dad. |
Here's the short intro I wrote for the book. I decided to keep it short:
My dad died way too young. For everything that he accomplished in his 50 years, that’s the story of his life. I was only 21 when he had the heart attack. He never fully recovered, never spoke again, and eventually passed five years later. I wish he was the one sharing these letters with you. In fact, I wish he was still writing them. The next best thing is for me to share them with you.
Dad was a prolific writer. Later in life, when he was a Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands Supreme Court Justice and Chair of the Board of Regents of the Northern Mariana Islands College, his words carried heft. They were deliberate. The whole community read them and heeded his words. Early in his career? Not so much.
He wrote his first letter to the editor in September, 1972, about 2 weeks shy of his 23rd birthday. He was already a young father at the time, supporting a small family. He was about to head to law school in Washington, DC.
His early letters intrigue me. It is not common in our culture for people in their twenties to put their opinions out into the public realm so freely. Nobody cares what you have to say until you are in your forties. There are a few young folk who follow in his footsteps today, myself included, but back then this was unheard of. Despite his age, his writings fell on fertile ears. Family members still talk to me today about the letters they remember reading in the 1970s. As of this writing, that was forty years ago. It is not a stretch to suggest that his letters have had an impact on life in the Commonwealth today, just as they did back then. Amazingly enough, many of the issues he ponders still persist in the community.
In this book I’ve compiled most of his letters from the 1970s, starting with his first letter in 1972 as a young man about to head off to law school, to letters in 1979 when he is a practicing attorney, raising his second family (that’s where I come into the story).
I present his letters in somewhat of a jumble, but there is an order to my madness. His early letters are written from the point of view of a law student, so I offer those first. To be honest, they aren’t very good. You can tell that his writing improves as you read each successive lettr. Many of his writings are political, and from my reading, often petty. Like, really petty. I try to put those into one section to separate them from what I consider the historically important ones. The last three sections deal with the Covenant, the Constitution, and finally the Commonwealth, issues he inserted himself right into the middle of.
Dad was vehemently against approving the Covenant. He saw himself as a Micronesian, and wanted to remain a citizen of the nascent Micronesian nation. He did not want to give up his identify and the sovereignty of his people to become a powerless minority within the much larger American family.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Marianas knows he lost that battle. So as not to be excluded from the forming of the new government, he ran as a delegate to the first Northern Mariana Islands Constitutional Convention and won. He would later run for a seat in the Senate and lose.
My mother tells me that many of his letters were written while sitting at his desk in his law office, crafting his arguments on endless reams of yellow legal pads. In these letters he writes about historical events from the founding of the Commonwealth from a perspective that is increasingly forgotten in the Marianas today.
He made a lot of predictions in his writings. Some of what he wrote has come true, some has not. One important insight I gleamed from his letters is that our people have forgotten that we are culturally and geographically part of Micronesia, even if we are temporarily controlled by the United States. The decolonize movement has barely reached the shores of the Northern Marianas, but it is growing. There are American citizens living in our islands who think it is un-American for America to have colonies in the 21st Century. I hope that these letters will speak to those people, and provide historical context for how the unique relationship between the Commonwealth and the United States developed.
I wish my Dad were around today to talk to us about these things, but he’s not. These letters are the next best thing.
Angelo O’Connor Villagomez
May 10, 2018