Othilia Figueroa controls her body. She reigns in her muscles as they flex and contract in syncopation with the modern pulse she inhabits this evening at The Metronome, her dance studio on Portrero Hill. When she’s not busy working as the studio’s associate director, she tests her stamina in one-on-one lessons – primarily modern, Brazilian Samba, ballet, and jazz – and in pursuing an acting career, socializing with handfuls of friends, and discovering fresh highlights of the city she’s called home for the past six years.

A direct descendant of one of Guam’s seven original families, Figueroa lived out her first 19 years of life on the island, a U.S. territory located in the Pacific Ocean approximately six thousand miles west of San Francisco.

She reflects upon her upbringing with mixed emotions.

“Back home, there’s no sense of urgency. Everything is ‘as is,’” she says. “You wake up, you cook, you go to school or to work, you come home and spend time with the family.” Because Guam is predominantly Catholic and family-oriented, she says, most people she knew didn’t think twice about pursuing much beyond the development of a strong and extensive familial structure. She has fond memories of regularly-occurring fiestas that spanned the entire 212-square-mile island–times when everyone would pitch in to cook large meals and where most people were so laid back that they would leave their doors open to any guests who happened to walk through them.

The backbone of Guamanian society, supporting its deeply-rooted family structure, is a matrilineal constitution, wherein every family decision must go through the head woman in the family. “She controls everything, from who you’re going to date, what you’re going to eat in the morning, to what school you’re going to go to. Your moms and your sisters and your aunts run your whole life basically,” she says.

To her, the most ironic aspects of this matrilineal setting were that women were still being suffocated in traditional roles they didn’t necessarily want to fulfill and that most of the men she knew ended up having alcohol addictions and issues with machismo, prominently displayed or excessive masculinity. “It makes sense,” she says, “because moms favor their sons. At the fiestas, the boys cook the pig, put up the tents, and then, as all the women cook, all the men get drunk.”

Figueroa, who has 52 first cousins and whose oldest sister had two children by the time she was 17, left Guam partly because she didn’t want to end up hooking up with a Chamorro (a dominant Guamanian ethnicity) man, marrying him by age 18 and immediately producing children with him. She had ambitions for herself and she didn’t see herself achieving those on the island.

Rhys Boyd-Farrell is Figueroa’s current boyfriend. The recent law school graduate, who met her online two years ago, remembers feeling instantly drawn to her sociable, laid-back, and silly qualities. He believes that even though they come from different backgrounds and aren’t of the same ethnicity–she’s predominantly Chamorro and he’s white–they share a lot of common ground: “Both of us came from somewhat working class families and have had to work hard for what we have,” he says. “We are also both open-minded and easygoing so we don't have any problem adjusting to each other's various interests.”

Though he says their relationship hasn’t encountered many hurdles, Boyd-Farrell remembers times in the beginning of their relationship when Figueroa would be shocked by some of the obscene humor on standard television shows they watched together. She wasn’t used to it!

“It was really interesting when we would watch shows like Family Guy. [Even though] she was not offended and thought they were funny, it was great seeing her eyes get wide and mouth drop open as she looked at me to confirm that she really saw what just happened,” he says.

Figueroa contends that even though Guam never tried to “sell” as much sex and propagate as much adult humor as the U.S. does (most of the island’s programming is brought in by the typically-conservative military,) it was still sexually alive. She says that after she graduated high school, the ‘cool’ places to hang out were the strip clubs.

“Everyone who was anyone was there and it wasn’t strange that we all just hung out,” she says. “I don’t think its still that way, but my generation had a surge of sexual exploration.”

Due to what she now calls “strip club madness,” she says that she attended many amateur strip nights where girls she knew and was friends with would strip. “That started a whole new world on Guam. Now there were amateur nights everywhere, and then calendars, and then wet t-shirt contests, and then magazines, etcetera of our local beauties volunteering to be sex symbols,” she says.

The biggest issue she had with her generation’s “sexual revolution” also had to do with the idea that women weren’t as liberated as the strip scene purports to make them. “I didn’t have a problem with [amateur strip nights] as those girls were my friends,” she says. “What I did have a problem with was that they weren’t getting paid as professional models and were being treated like whores.”

She also recalls times during her adolescence when, every few months, the U.S. Navy ships would dock on Guam. “All these fine American men just tromping around town with their southern or Hispanic accents used to drive us all crazy,” she says. Figueroa, who worked in one of Guam’s vacation spots, says she and many girls she knew had the urge to find refuge in landing one and that they ended up hooking up with handfuls of them.

“All the girls wanted a Navy man. They were beautiful and heroic, they represented the American dream in some way, and we all wanted a piece of it,” she says. “Some girls got pregnant by Navy boys, some girls married Navy boys, some swore them off forever, but whatever the outcome was, we all wanted some of that dream.”

“Even our local men wanted that dream. While some were fleeing Guam to go to school in the U.S., instead of sleeping with Navy girls, others fled to the military.”

By the time she was 19, she finally decided that events in her life nudged her vigorously enough to compel her to pursue her own American dream: her parents had gotten involved in a widespread wave of crystal methamphetamine use when it reached Guam in mass quantities during the mid-90s; her oldest sister, resultantly, had spent multiple years raising her alongside her middle sister and two nephews; both of her sisters were married with children and moving out of an apartment they had all been sharing, and she couldn’t afford to rent an apartment alone.

“I always felt that I didn’t belong there,” she says. “I loved the island life but I knew, ‘There’s more out there than this.’” She feels lucky to have had relatives who lived away from the island because she was accordingly afforded the opportunity to leave and extend her vision toward a brighter future. And, though San Francisco is sometimes vastly different from Guam, she has been able to grip onto a steady passion: the long-standing thrill she feels when she’s mastering her own body.

While, throughout her life, she has learned to dance Brazilian Samba, ballroom, swing, Argentine tango, Salsa, the Cha Cha, jazz, ballet, tap, and Meringue, she says, appropriately, “Modern dance would be my favorite. I’ve never felt so free dancing anything else.”