vicarious travel

The Not-Quite States of America, Doug Mack (Norton, 2017)

I've visited all 50 of the U.S. states. So, I would think, has Doug Mack. I don't think he says so specifically, but he prides himself on his knowledge of the states.

But I've never been to any non-state territory of the U.S. except the contiguous one, the District of Columbia. Neither had Doug Mack when the other five inhabited territories came to his attention when they showed up as appendices to the state quarters series.

So he decided to visit all of them. The two in the Caribbean - Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands - are common tourist destinations, but for two in the Pacific - Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands - the tourists are mostly Japanese, and hardly anyone visits American Samoa except expatriates and government bureaucrats on business.

This book is Mack's account of going to all these places. (He also visits the Marshall Islands, which is an "associated state" - he explains what that means - near the Northern Marianas.)

He has a colorful touristy time, and gets into friendly conversations with the locals of a kind that introverted me would not be able to handle. It gives the reader a good idea of what it would be like to go to these places, which is good because I have no intention of doing so myself.

But Mack has more of an agenda than that. These places all have strange and uncomfortable histories as U.S. colonial possessions, and even today are poised awkwardly between being parts of the U.S. and being foreign, where U.S. laws and rights don't apply. He goes into some detail on the history of this and what it means, with lots of references to the Spanish-American War and the Insular Cases, but the most striking example of this comes when he tells you that if you fly to the Virgin Islands from the mainland U.S. there's no customs station, you can just walk off the plane and out to the street, but when you come back you have to show your passport. I hope that airlines inform customers of this when they buy tickets.

He also asks the inhabitants whether they consider themself U.S.-Americans or people of their own territory. The usual answer is, "Both!" The number of U.S.-based chains he finds in places like Guam impresses him, as does the time he goes to what he expects will be a genuine native restaurant in American Samoa and discovers that, like a lot of Samoans, the chef has lived in L.A. and has really taken to Tex-Mex cuisine. So he eats tacos in Samoa. It's both.