<Begin Segment 6>

TI: I want to go a little bit back to Edison Uno, because the reason I brought him up was, it was something you said earlier, how the repeal of Title II was like a precursor to the redress movement. It was sort of an important step to get to redress, and Edison was involved with the repeal of Title II --

RD: That's right.

TI: -- and is oftentimes viewed as the "Father of the Redress Movement," I mean, he was one of the very early Japanese Americans who started pushing for that. You mentioned you had that conversation in 1976, that he had this vision. Did he ever talk about how important the repeal of Title II was to his education? Was that something that ignited -- I'm trying to figure out what ignited that spark in Edison.

RD: I don't know. But he'd already pioneered, along with Jim Hirabayashi, and the Chinese American historian Him Mark Lai, L-A-I, in teaching Asian American history at San Francisco State. University of California campuses were very slow to pick up on this. Shortly after I came to Cincinnati, I was approached by the department at the University of California... the one that's halfway between L.A. and San Diego in Orange County. Anyway, they had me come out there, and there was a student revolt. That had never happened before, but the Asian American students were furious that no arrangement had been made for me to talk to them, and they raised hell. And when I got out there -- the people who called me out there were very embarrassed by this -- they said, "They want to talk to you, do you want to talk to them?" I said, "I'd be delighted to talk to them," and they were somewhat relieved. But it gives you some idea of what went on, and that was not a job for me or a place I wanted to go. Well, the campus and the general setup there was no place for a man who doesn't drive, but that's another story.

TI: But going back, so the students were protesting, so they knew about your work, and probably through Concentration Camps USA and other... and they were offended that you weren't speaking to them also.

RD: Yes.

TI: Because this was a time period when it was sort of the emergence of the Asian American studies, and people were..

RD: And the University of California campuses all resisted it very, very strongly. And in many ways, it took an unfortunate path in that too many bright people who wanted academic careers got in it, and they wound up not being trained in anything. It probably was not psychologically possible, but it would have been so much better for their careers -- because most of them didn't have good academic careers -- if the arrangement had been you trained as a historian or a sociologist or a political scientist with an Asian American orientation, but were grounded in some discipline thoroughly. And they tended not to be, and most of them -- to get back to the whole question of my own career, I had assumed, when I thought I had two books and then done, because I didn't have a command of any Asian language... I'm not even good in Spanish; my languages are all European... well, that's a European language, or was a European language. But, of course, I eventually found out that most Asians, like all immigrants, the second generation never really gets the language; they can talk to their grandmothers.

Many years later -- this would have been in the '80s -- I was invited to go down to the University of Texas at El Paso as a consultant. They had gotten a very, very interesting idea, and they pursued it since, that being where they were, that they should make their history major intensively immigration-conscious. Not just Mexican immigration, but immigration period. And I was the person they asked to come down and consult with them. And when you do a consulting job, you know what happens. They send you a stack of paper like this, and I'm dumb enough to read it all, or at least to skim. And it turned out that the dean down there was someone I knew from graduate school, UCLA. And one of the things I had discovered was that the University of Texas at El Paso, that you could take almost any standard course in the arts and sciences in either English or Spanish, there was a Spanish section. And I went down and walked in, we sat down, and I said, "I saw this thing about the English courses. It's very good that you have this kind of a relationship with the Chicanos here." And he laughed in my face and said, "They don't take these courses; they're kids." And I knew this, but I hadn't made the two things. "They can talk to their grandmothers, but they're no more going to take chemistry in Spanish than anything else. There's not a good university on the Mexican side of the border for hundreds of miles. And we have a large number of students who commute, some of them live over here but most of them commute every day. And it's a lot easier to take courses outside of your major in a language you're more familiar with, and that's why we have those courses. Anybody can take them, but in fact, the only people who take them are people who are Spanish majors, so they get more facility, and people who are Spanish speakers and find it easier. And I should have been able to connect the dots with that, because I knew the phenomenon.

TI: Because the analogous thing would be, in your relationship with Niseis, they're second-generation Japanese Americans --

RD: Like anybody else, they're second generation Americans.

TI: And they're going to speak English.

RD: They're going to speak English, and most of them are not going to have -- and some of them don't want any part of it, you know, the whole story of the resistance to the language schools. So that there was a place for me. But that became -- and this is the distinction -- I'm more a historian of ethnicity in this instance than of immigration. I do immigration history. But here, I'm dealing with the American experience of recent immigrants and their descendants, which is a very, very different thing from doing immigration history. I've done both. One of my early fights with the orthodox immigration historians has been that I wanted the organization to be called the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and campaigned against it and got voted down. Twenty-odd years later, I had nothing to do with it at the time, I was in Europe, there was a change of the title and it's now the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, because lots more people are doing that. But I was ahead of the curve on that. And that's why my initial notion of what I could and should do was erroneous. Because one of its predicates, and I don't have any of these languages, I can't do it. So I thought I had an obligation to continue doing this kind of work.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.