Guam Municipalities (original) (raw)

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Updates:

I added the population data from the 1950 and 2010 censuses.

Country overview:

Guam became an unincorporated territory of the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War in 1898. It still retains that status. It was occupied by Japan during World War II.

Other names of country:

1. English: Territory of Guam (formal)
2. French: Guam m
3. Icelandic: Gvam
4. Italian: Guam
5. Portuguese: Guam m
6. Russian: Гуам
7. Spanish: Guam
8. Turkish: Guam

Origin of name:

Possibly a corruption of Chamorro, ethnic name

Primary subdivisions:

Guam is divided into 19 municipalities.

FIPS PUB 5-2 assigns Guam an alphabetic code of GU and a numeric code of 66. FIPS PUB 6-4, which ordinarily has three-digit codes for each of the second-level subdivisions of the United States, only lists one code in Guam: 010. When the FIPS 5-2 and 6-4 codes are concatenated, the result (66010) is a code that represents Guam as a county-equivalent unit.

Time zone: On 2000-12-23, the time zone for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands was officially named "Chamorro Standard Time". The abbreviation is "ChST". It corresponds to UTC+10 hours. Daylight saving time is not observed here.

Postal codes:

Guam uses the United States system of ZIP codes. Its codes are in the range 96910 - 96932.

Territorial extent:

Guam occupies a moderately large island, the southernmost in the Marianas group; and some adjacent islets. All of the municipalities lie mainly on Guam Island. In addition, Agat municipality includes Alutom, Anae, Bangi, and Facpi Islands; Merizo includes Agrigan and Cocos Islands; Piti includes Cabras Island; Santa Rita includes Neye and Udall Islands; and Tamuning includes Alupat Island.

The UN LOCODE page for Guam lists locations in the country, some of them with their latitudes and longitudes, some with their ISO 3166-2 codes for their subdivisions. This information can be put together to approximate the territorial extent of subdivisions.

Change history:

The municipalities of Guam were first established in the 1920s. The original set of municipalities was as shown in this table, and on the map at source [1].

Source [2] shows the municipalities and their populations in 1941. The areas in the table below were calculated by dividing the population by the density. Population data from source [3] are much different, but perhaps World War II accounts for the changes.

1. 1950-08-01: Guam Organic Act made Guam an unincorporated territory of the U.S.
2. 1971: The municipalities of Guam were the same as above, except that Sumay was replaced by Apra and Aga�a was replaced by Tamuning. Agana was located in Tamuning municipality. Apra covered the same territory as Sumay in the table above. Agana municipality in 1930 was equivalent to Barrigada, Dededo, Machanao, Sinajana, Tamuning, and Yigo in 1971.
3. 1998-04-08: Name of capital and its municipality changed from Agana to Hag�t�a.

Sources:

1. [1] Our Changing Island : A History of the Census in Guam. Lesson plan, offered by the Bureau of the Census website (retrieved 2001-05-25).
2. [2] The NationMaster Statistical Data site has amap which cites Thompson, Laura, Guam and its People: A Study of Culture Change and Colonial Education. San Francisco, 1941. (Retrieved 2008-01-29.)
3. [3] Demographic Yearbook , 7th Ed. Statistical Office of the United Nations, New York, 1955 (retrieved 2011-08-20).
4. [4] Census Bureau press release : "U.S. Census Bureau Releases 2010 Census Population Counts for Guam" (dated 2011-08-24, retrieved 2011-12-11).