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BN: So I'll follow it up with a couple things. One thing you mentioned, and I was going to ask about, too, is that Gidra is defined as an Asian American paper, but the staff is largely Sansei. I mean, was that any... was there...

JF: Did we see any of the contradictions?

BN: Yeah, or did you actively try to seek out, I guess at the time it was mainly Chinese, Filipino, and a handful of Korean Americans who were around? And then I guess related to that, did you have interactions or influenced by other African American, Chicano, Native American kinds of publications as well or interactions with...

JF: When I think about both of those questions, it kind of reminds me, I don't know why, of this organic term. Because we never really did that consciously, but I think it happened. It happened because some of the staff members were involved in those communities and so they would draw in maybe not staff members, but at least people who would contribute to the content from their point of view, which we didn't have, so that was great for the newspaper. But I wouldn't call it like a conscious effort, it was just, there's an activity in the community, in the greater Los Angeles community that is getting some attention. And we know this person's involved with it, so let's get an article about it from them. As far as other publications from other communities, we looked at the BPP, the Black Panther Party paper, and that was, talk about style, some people might call it crude, but it's like everybody can kind of read that and relate to it. So there was no obstacle as far as obtaining the content that was for them, and their content was pretty focused on the violence against the community by the police at the time, and still now. Yeah, so our content wasn't focused on the same subject, but the manner in which they were reaching out to people, I think, at least, I tried to not mimic it, but to borrow that approach.

But I have to say, the first thing when I think about working with Gidra is how close we all became as good friends. And we had a lot of fun together and that was, I hate to say that that was probably one of the primary things that kept the staff together. It's how much fun we had with each other and around each other. Producing the paper was a lot of work when you think back about it, I mean, we would pull all-nighters, and I remember staying up until three when we finally decided we'd better eat something. And then we took another hour and a half just to figure out where we're going to eat. Because of course we did things collectively or as collaboratively as possible, not thinking that, I don't even know if that word was spoken back then, collaboration and stuff, which is, that's the way we worked. That's why it took a long time to make decisions, even like where are we going to eat, where are we going to go, when is this article going to be up? But yeah, we managed to do it for every month, that's a miracle. [Laughs]

BN: Only missed one.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.