FAIRVIEW — About 800. Maybe 1,000. Best case, 2,000.

That’s how many people the Marianas Alliance for Growth of Islanders thought it would get at its first-ever Marianas Festival last August in Fairview’s Blue Lake Regional Park. After all, “nobody really knows about” the Mariana Islands, said Melissa Cayton, the nonprofit’s program director.

Instead, thousands of people showed up from Oregon and beyond. Park officials estimated attendance at 8,000. 

“It completely blew us away,” said Bertina Balajadia Grajo, the nonprofit’s founder and president.  

The festival “wasn’t just wanted, it was needed,” Grajo said. “People were craving a space to celebrate who we are, to reconnect, to feel seen.”

The huge turnout had a downside: The food vendors sold out quickly, Grajo said. Given this and other challenges, the nonprofit’s leaders issued a public statement in which they vowed to make improvements for the 2025 festival.  

Most notably, this year’s festival has been expanded from two to three days: Friday, Aug. 22, through Sunday, Aug. 24. On Friday, Heritage High School in Vancouver will host afternoon and evening workshops on the culture and heritage of the Mariana Islands, which consist of the U.S. territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. On Saturday and Sunday, Blue Lake park will again host performers, vendors, exhibits, and resource booths. Admission is free (parking is $5), as are many of the workshops.

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

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“We tripled the amount of food we have this year,” Grajo said. The overall number of vendors has nearly doubled, from 57 last year to more than 100 this year. 

Everyone is welcome at the festival. “I want the people of Oregon and Washington and all over to come and join us,” Grajo said. “This is a community event where we would like people to come and learn about us and learn about our culture and our people.”

ON THE EDGE OF MICRONESIA

In a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, there’s a region called Micronesia that encompasses about 2,000 islands (not to be confused with the country of Micronesia, which has about 600 islands and is part of the greater region). Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands sit at the northwest edge of this region, roughly 1,600 miles east of the Philippines. 

About half of Guam residents are Indigenous Chamorro, also spelled CHamoru. About 35 percent to 40 percent of the Northern Mariana Islands’ residents are Chamorro or Refaluwasch (Carolinian), another Indigenous group. Filipino, other Asian, and other Pacific Islander ethnicities also are represented on the islands. 

Together, they make for a unique culture shaped by the Pacific. The Marianas Festival’s theme is “Divided by the Land, Connected by the Ocean / Man Apattáo gi Tano’, lao Man Chetton gi Tasi.”

Increasingly, that culture is at risk as residents emigrate. The Washington Post reported in 2022 that between 2010 and 2020, Guam’s population dropped by 3.5 percent, while the Northern Mariana Islands’ population fell by 12.2 percent. 

“Many of us in the diaspora moved away from home for school, work, military service, or simply to create more opportunities for our families,” Grajo said. “Life on the islands is beautiful, but it’s also incredibly expensive.” And once people have resettled on the U.S. mainland, it’s costly to fly back across the Pacific for visits with family and friends. 

That’s led to a sharp cultural disconnect for the next generation, one that the Marianas Alliance for Growth of Islanders seeks to address. The nonprofit’s acronym, MÅGI, comes from the Chamorro word “Mågi,” which means “to come.” As in “come join us,” Cayton said.

FROM FOOD TRUCK TO FESTIVAL

Grajo met her husband, Tommy Grajo, through Oregon’s Chamorro community. In 2015, the couple opened a Beaverton food truck, Marianas Food Cart. They sold barbecued chicken and ribs, empanadas, lumpia, shrimp patties, corn soup, and more. So many customers flocked to the bright red cart that it would sometimes sell out within three hours of opening. 

“The one thing that brings everybody together, and how we celebrate, is through food,” Bertina Grajo said. “You can’t go wrong with that.”

The Grajos closed their cart in 2019. “Fast forward, even three years after, we were still getting messages from people saying please reopen,” Bertina Grajo said. Meanwhile, she was working on her doctoral thesis about socioeconomic disparities in the Mariana Islands. “What I’m finding is that our Chamorro people are coming here, especially to the Pacific Northwest, and they’re starting from scratch, and there’s no resources.” 

The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in 2024 that 20 percent of Pacific Islander families in Oregon fell below the federal poverty threshold between 2018 and 2022. During the coronavirus pandemic, “Pacific Islander families saw their average income plunge by an estimated 20 percent as of 2022 — five times more than any other group in Oregon,” The Oregonian wrote.

The Grajos decided they wanted to do something for the Marianas community. “So that was a big part of why we wanted to have this festival. But then it blew up into something even more.”

“A PIECE OF ME THAT WAS MISSING”

Cayton, the festival’s program director, is an American Sign Language teacher at Vancouver’s Heritage High School, where she also works with the Pacific Island Club. It and other local Pacific Islander student clubs were among the throngs at last year’s festival.

Heritage student Joey Castro Jr. volunteered at the Friday workshops. “Being a part of the Marianas Festival made me reflect on who I truly am. Growing up, I wasn’t really raised culturally and so the Marianas Festival helped me find that part of me and I enjoyed every part of it,” Castro said.

“My favorite part was seeing the dancers perform,” Castro added. “That really gave me chills. Growing up, I never got to see any of that, so seeing the performances definitely filled a piece of me that was missing.”

Tyce Cabrera, who’s from the island of Saipan, is an incoming sophomore at Heritage. Cabrera described the festival as “a space where our people can all come together even if we are far from home, and where others can learn about who we are and what we value the most.” 

“Our culture is something to be proud of, and the more we show up for things like the Marianas Festival, the stronger our connection becomes for us and for the generations after us,” Cabrera said.  

Camarin Cruz, a 2024 graduate of Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, attended dance and carving workshops with her sister, Cayleah Cruz, a student at Gaiser Middle School in Vancouver.  

“By experiencing dance, we’re not only learning steps — we’re carrying forward stories, values, and ways of expressing community that have been shared for generations,” Camarin Cruz said. “Carving teaches more than just a skill; it connects us to the land, the resources, and the craftsmanship that our ancestors relied on.” 

Taking the workshops “made me want to learn more about my culture and more about the history behind it,” Cayleah Cruz said. She and her sister are now taking dance classes, and she feels closer to Chamorro culture.

“YOU HAVE TO COME AND SEE THIS”

When Grajo’s boss heard about last year’s festival, he decided he’d attend to support her. As he recorded a video of her speech during the opening ceremony, someone walked up to him, asked, “How are you?” and introduced themselves. He’d never felt so welcomed before, he told Grajo. As he browsed the vendors, more people introduced themselves. 

Then he left. 

“He left, and he came back with five more people,” Grajo said. “He’s like, you have to come and see this. That really moved me, because that’s exactly what we wanted. That was the point of it, is to not only celebrate our people, but to bring others there to celebrate alongside us.”

There will be plenty of ways to celebrate at this year’s festival.

There’ll be the workshops. Cayton is leading one on Chamorro Sign Language. Bernard Punzalan of Spanaway, Wash., will do one on Chamorro genealogy, including hands-on engagement with his Chamorro Roots database of more than 400,000 names. Tony Mantanona, a weaving master, will teach weaving with natural fibers as a representative of Guam’s Valley of the Latte cultural and adventure park.

There’ll be Saturday’s opening ceremony, which will feature dancers representing 14 Chamorro gumas, or dance houses. 

And there’ll be the overall sense of cultural pride, which is expected to again draw thousands from many miles away.

“It was amazing when I started to talk to people, you know, I asked them where they came from,” Punzalan said. One group had come from Las Vegas. Another was from Texas. Still others had come from the Mariana Islands themselves.

“It’s home,” Cayton said of the festival. “It’s an opportunity for everybody from the Marianas to be home once again, and for their kids to be at their home, their motherland that they don’t know or don’t have the means to actually see. Yeah, it’s just home.”