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BN: Another thing you kind of wrote about in the "Towards Barefoot Journalism" piece is that -- this is around '71 -- that there was complaints from readers about negativity and wanting more hopeful articles. And you wrote, "People can't relate to something that jumps out at you every month to remind you how messed up society is." And you talk about how now things like recipes and sewing patterns and how to fix a toilet and things like that start to appear. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Little bit of a shift or expansion, maybe.

MM: Yeah. As we were growing up, way before Gidra, many of us were influenced by the Black community, as I said, and culturally relating to Motown, R&B and all of that. Others of us were more, like Steve was a Deadhead, Grateful Dead, the Beatles, hippie movement, Woodstock. There were so many influences in the 1960s on all of us, and so I think incorporating all those things and saying, part of it is like one, I wouldn't even say groups of people, but one idea might have been to say we have to point out these shortcomings, these wrongs in society. Because we're in the process of wanting to change society, change those things. Others might have taken the view more like, maybe not even verbalized, but to say, "Yeah, this society's fucked up, I'm going to retreat from it." Kind of like develop ourselves, we're not going to count on society changing for us to us to feel better, we're going to grow our own vegetables. And that was a trend that came out of the hippie era, sort of drop out of society. So there were all those influences that are at play. I don't think there was anyone who advocated strongly for one or the other or other kinds of things. But that's part of the Asian American experience, too, because as a relatively small minority in this country, we were impacted by other cultures, other norms, and we took whatever we felt was right for us.

BN: Then to what extent did you kind of consciously try to cover and/or build bridges with sort of other Third World peoples or other communities of color at that time? Because that does come up a lot in the articles.

MM: Yeah. I think in the core of it, I think most of us felt an identity with what was called "The Third World," or people of color, BIPOC, whatever terms that they use now, but I think we related to and appreciated their... and part of learning our history is to learn about the history of other people who were also ignored or marginalized in society and to find commonalities. And so we did do that, but even that was kind of haphazard. We had exchanges with all kinds of newspapers, movement newspapers, radical newspapers, underground newspapers. We had the Young Lords of New York, Black Panthers in Oakland, Akwesasne Notes, the Native American paper. And there was a white youth-led revolutionary organization in Chicago that used to put out a paper, we had exchanges with them. And so we tried to learn as much as we could from them, but we didn't ever get to the point where we had person to person, face to face exchanges with them or anything like that, or to even think about building the movement together. But we appreciated all those independent efforts that were going on. Also you had to remember, too, the international influence. The fact that there were countries all over Africa and Latin America who were fighting for national liberation from colonialism, winning, and becoming... it was a very turbulent but exciting times. The fact that the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam, and all these, what were considered less developed countries, were becoming greater influences. Because I think irrespective of how things turned out now, I think China was a big influence on all of us, and Chairman Mao was a big influence. And I think many people either embraced Marxism or Leninism as a worldview in a conscious way, or others of us took parts of it and applied it to our situation. So all these influences, I think nationally and internationally, played a role in that.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.