YOUTH VOICES
Three young writers reflect on home, identity, belonging, and the Northern Mariana Islands’ relationship with the United States.
Earlier this year, CNMI high school students were invited to consider a question that reaches into both history and lived experience: What does it mean to be part of—and apart from—America?
Through the A250 My Marianas Writing Contest, students reflected on CNMI identity, the islands’ relationship with the United States, and what they hope that relationship might become over the next fifty years. Their essays approach these questions not simply through politics or history, but through the experiences of everyday life—food and family, language and culture, community, citizenship, and the meaning of home.
The three winning essays offer distinct perspectives on belonging in a place whose relationship with America cannot always be described simply as either within or apart from it.
1st Place – A Mixed Plate of Home
Alleena Villaluz
For Alleena Villaluz, one way of understanding the CNMI’s complex identity begins at a familiar place: the fiesta table.
In A Mixed Plate of Home, Villaluz finds history in a plate filled with red rice, titiyas, fried chicken, potato salad, and Spam. Foods with different origins sit comfortably beside one another, much as centuries of Indigenous tradition, colonial encounter, American influence, migration, and cultural exchange coexist in contemporary life in the Marianas.
But the mixed plate becomes something more personal as Villaluz considers her own experience of having been born and spending much of her early life in the continental United States before making a home in the CNMI. The familiar and unfamiliar meet at the fiesta table, where she finds a different emphasis on community, respect, and interconnectedness.
“Each time I stand in line at a fiesta, plate in hand, I am reminded that identity is not singular. It is layered, shaped by history, and lived through everyday experiences.”
– Alleena Villaluz, “A Mixed Plate of Home”
2nd Place – Small Island, Big Story
Jillian Nicdao
Jillian Nicdao begins with a deceptively simple question she encountered while traveling to the mainland United States for the first time: “What are the Northern Mariana Islands?” She describes the difficulty of explaining Saipan by comparing it to places others already know—and the realization that each comparison seemed to make her home smaller simply so that it could be understood. The experience leads her to consider the unusual in-between space of being a U.S. citizen while coming from a part of America that many other Americans do not recognize.
Over time, however, Jillian begins to see those encounters differently. Instead of treating unfamiliarity with the Marianas as something frustrating, she sees each question as an opportunity to bring her home into view. Photographs, family gatherings, food, landscapes, and stories become ways of introducing others to a place that does not need to be compared with somewhere else in order to matter. Her hope for the next fifty years is that future generations will no longer have to explain their existence before they can simply say where they are from with pride.
“The Northern Mariana Islands did not need to be compared to somewhere else to matter. They stood on their own.”
– Jillian Nicdao, “Small Island, Big Story”
3rd Place – Beneath the Surface of Home
Youna Li
Youna Li begins beneath the waters surrounding Saipan, recalling her first dive with her father at age eleven. What had always seemed part of the background of island life suddenly became another way of seeing home—one in which ocean, family, work, and responsibility are inseparable. As she moves between experiences underwater and on land, Youna finds similar layers in community gatherings, food, languages, stories, and the ways people care for one another.
Beneath the surface, she also encounters the physical remains of World War II, reminders that history in the Marianas is not confined to museums or the past. That experience becomes a way of thinking about the CNMI’s place within the American story: connected to it, but experienced from islands shaped by ocean, memory, distance, and their own histories. Looking toward the next fifty years, Youna hopes Pacific communities will be understood not as distant edges of the nation, but through the knowledge and voices of the people who live there.
“Because here, identity is not fixed. It moves like water.”
– Youna Li, “Beneath the Surface of Home”
