User:Camp Roxas

Camp Roxas, Agat, Guam (1946 - 1972)
Camp Roxas in Agat, Guam, was the largest of several labor camps built by the U.S. government after World War II to house nonresident skilled and unskilled Filipino contract laborers to assist in the military reconstruction of Guam.

To resolve what the military believed to be a chronic shortage of labor, the U.S. Embassy in Manila and the newly independent government of the Republic of the Philippines in May 1947 negotiated an agreement for "the recruitment and employment of Philippine citizens by the U.S. military forces and its contractors in the Pacific, including Guam."

Following the 1947 agreement, Brown-Pacific-Maxon Construction Company (BPM) and Luzon Stevedoring Corporation (Luzdelco) were authorized to import Filipino labor from Manila and its surrounding provinces to provide support construction services for Andersen Air Force Base in northern Guam. The Guam Naval Supply Depot permitted the Marianas Stevedoring and Development Company (Masdelco) to contract employment from Iloilo and other Visayan islands of the central Philippines. Masdelco was a subsidiary of Luzdelco and based in the Agat-Santa Rita area of southern Guam. The initial bulk of Filipino laborers were recruited from Iloilo. All had to undergo rigorous clearance and background checks by the US Navy and Federal Bureau of Investigation before being admitted to Guam on a one-year labor contract subject to renewal for up to three years.

By the mid-1950s, BPM employed more than 17,000 laborers in makeshift camps, which later became cities, then disappeared upon completion of the contract. Such camp-cities included Marbo (later Magsaysay Village located opposite the present-day Ben Franklin shopping complex in Yigo); Camp Quezon, a large, rambling site near the present-day University of Guam; and, Camp Roxas, which housed Masdelco-recruited laborers near Naval Station in Santa Rita.

The single largest camp-city was Camp Roxas—its population totaled 7,000 male laborers and one female—that contained miles of barracks, a 15-acre beachfront, an open-air movie theater, post office, sports facilities, and a bakery. Surrounding the camp’s perimeter were miles of cyclone fence topped with barbed wire.