<Begin Segment 14>

JH: When Lane was in high school, he was part of the rock band generation, and he's smoking pot, you know. He was playing for a group called Muscadine Blues Band, and I don't know if he really actually, I think he actually went to school, but I don't know if he was doing anything. [Laughs] Sometimes I'd catch him sitting on the furnace grate laughing to himself, and I'm saying, "Oh, my God," you know, what happens. Well, he saw his friends flipping out, and all of a sudden in senior year in high school, he made a hundred degree turn. And he was tutoring kids at Tam High, and then he got into Sonoma State in a special program. It was small seminars from the get-go, and the Hutchins School program at Sonoma State. And he went through that program to get his liberal arts degree, and when he was about a junior, I sent him down to Brazil where my older brother was a foreign service officer in Brazil at that time, just for him to get some cross-cultural experience. And I caught up with him on my month's vacation, and I was Dean of Ethnic Studies at that time. And we traveled back together, and he didn't know where to go, so I went to the places I wanted to go. And we went to the Japanese community in San Palo, and we went to Machu Picchu in Peru, and we went to Indian markets in Ecuador, and we did all these kinds of things. Guatemala was also the same thing, Mexico City. So after that trip, he was between junior year and senior year, and he says, "Oh, in graduate school, I'm going to major in anthropology." And I thought one anthropologist in the family was enough, you know, but I says, "If you're gonna do that, then I'm gonna send you to Berkeley," and I had some colleagues there. One of my colleagues is, from Harvard, is Laura Nader, Ralph's older sister. So I sent him to study with her, and she sent him down to Oaxaca, where she had done field work. And he followed the Mountain Zapotec into Mexico City, and did a study of the urbanization of Indians in Mexico City for his dissertation. But once he got his degree, he applied for a post-doc at Asian American Studies Center.

MA: At UCLA?

JH: UCLA, and he's been in Asian American Studies ever since.

MA: Right, so it's interesting he has this background in Latin American studies.

JH: Right. So I got him involved in the Museum project, and Akemi Kikumura's trained in anthropology as well. So we traveled to Brazil and to Chile. Akemi had some connections down there, and it was quite interesting for us to go to Chile. This is mainly postwar Japanese.

MA: You mean people who, Japanese who had come, immigrated after World War II?

JH: After the war, yeah. So it's really quite a different scene. After Japan's economic boom -- of course, there are more Japanese in Brazil than the whole of North America. Because after the immigration stopped in the U.S., it shifted to Brazil. And so they're one generation behind. When we got there, all the Niseis down there were Sansei age, 'cause they started their migration about 19, mid '20s. And anyway, we got to, in Chile, it's been after Japan had an economic development after the war, then their connection. So the population there is really much more Japanese. Japanese-Japanese. And then, because University of Colorado made, joined a group to sponsor a festival in Santiago, Cuba. If you have educational reasons for going to Cuba, you can go directly, you don't have to go through another country. So University of Colorado had this for the festival in Santiago. And so I went with Lane to Santiago, then we went up to Havana. And Havana, Evelyn had a connection with a Chinese American artist there.

MA: This is Evelyn...

JH: Hu-DeHart.

MA: Hu-DeHart.

JH: And so she gave us the address of this Cuban Chinese artist, and he took us around Havana. Really kind of interesting, he joined the Chinese Brigade during the revolution, and fought with Fidel and Che. And his artwork incorporates all that kind of stuff. So it was really interesting to go there, and there is a Japanese colony there.

MA: In Cuba?

JH: In Cuba. Isle of Youth, I guess it's a, they put Japanese in camps, but it was just the males that were taken there.

MA: This was during World War II?

JH: Yeah. And the females and kids stayed wherever they were. And there was a guy named Mikasa who was a student at that time, and joined the revolution. And he did travel up to San Francisco not so long ago, and I was able to meet him. But someday I want to go and visit that Japanese community there in Cuba.

MA: What is the, I guess, status of Chinese, Japanese, in Cuba? Did you get a sense of that when you were traveling?

JH: Well, you know, as I say, both of these people were part of the revolution, so that they're still working in the small, you know, they have small community groups. I never got to go to the Japanese section during my visit, but with the Chinese, the neighborhood group is still operating as a Chinese Cuban group. And I guess with all the fuss and the embargo and everything else, what I have to say is that when I was wandering around Havana, I didn't see any homeless on the streets like I do in San Francisco. So that can't be all bad. [Laughs]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.