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BN: Now, I know you've told the, kind of, Gidra origin story a lot of times, and I think you referred to it briefly in the first interview, but I still want to go back to it if you could just talk about how it began?

MM: I have to step back a few, a couple years or a few months before Gidra. I'll talk about it through my personal involvement. So when I got to UCLA in 1964, I would say the population of Asian Americans, and among them, Japanese Americans being the most dominant, probably no more than ten percent of UCLA. Unlike subsequent decades when you had like thirty, forty, fifty percent in many colleges. So I think a lot of the Japanese Americans gravitated towards this organization that preexisted us called Nisei Bruin Club, which was a social club started in the prewar years, pre-World War II years. And so we kind of embraced that and took that on as kind of a social club along with Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa something, two sororities that existed. So that was the social milieu that we had on campus. And that was my first two years in college. And then around '66 was when I started getting introduced to different ideas, and it came from all different angles, but it was the middle of the '60s. It was a period in which, throughout the world, things are happening, just great changes taking place. But in the U.S., starting with the Free Speech Movement in 1964, but that also the impact of the Black Panthers being started in 1966, Malcolm X being assassinated in 1965, so all of those things. The Black Civil Rights and Human Rights Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement were two big catalysts for many students to get involved in questioning things. And part of the questioning was, as we learned more about the reasons for the war, reasons for why the South is the way it is, we started to learn more about U.S. history, the history of racism, and also then to start to think about our own background and history. And despite having taken U.S. history many times, we never learned anything about ourselves, so that idea of creating ethnic studies, I think it took root in places, campuses like San Francisco State, Columbia, Berkeley, all these places. By the time it came to UCLA, it wasn't the great turmoil that it took in those other pioneering campuses. But Chancellor Charles Young was more amenable to having ethnic studies, and so the four studies centers were formed. I don't know if I should explain what our limited understanding was of center versus department, but that came later. We just thought, oh, great, we got ethnic studies.

And then one of the things was to figure out what to do with ethnic studies. We didn't have professors who knew anything about Asian American history, we didn't have books, not compared to now anyway. I mean, we were not that interested in sort of like mainstream or analysis like Harry Kitano, and so we decided to strike out on our own, develop our own ideas, research, go back into the communities, all that. So ethnic studies is one. The other was both organizing, getting the ideas that we had, that we were learning about, out to more people. But also, so there was a component of wanting to chronicle the events that were taking place. One example was that -- this is much later, after we started Gidra, but I'll give you an example. There was a large demonstration on the UCLA campus in May of 1970 after Nixon decided to expand the war into Cambodia and bomb Cambodia. And the demonstrations were so large that the administration called in the police, LAPD, and it was kind of a police riot there. And that politicized a lot of people, and so a lot of people subsequently got involved in Gidra as well.

But just to back up to why we started it, in addition to chronicling, we felt that there were, we wanted to create a vehicle to give voice to young people. Because if you look at television news, LA Times, Rafu Shimpo, there was nothing that was really reflecting our feelings, developing our identity and such. And as young people, I think we felt that we had the right to pursue and seek our own identity and figure out who we are in this country. Because the other paradigm at the time was, it was very black and white. And at the time, I don't remember that much about sort of a societal influence of Mexican Americans or Latinos at that time. And so for Asian Americans in a society that's sort of black and white, how do we fit in? Where do we fit in? And I think that was a part of the, a big part of an identity-seeking process. So I think the earlier issues particularly of Gidra, poetry and expressions of emotional things, or even things like this essay on white male qualities. A woman, a Sansei woman wrote that, extolling the virtues of white males, comparing to Japanese American men. I mean, you know, that would never appear in anything else but Gidra. And I think we wanted to make room for that, too. I mean, we disagreed with it, but we wanted to print that. I think... yeah, so there were a lot of things that young people were thinking about that wouldn't have got captured if we didn't have Gidra.

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