Densho Digital Repository - Hiroshi Uyehara Interview

Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: Hiroshi Uyehara Interview
Narrator: Hiroshi Uyehara
Interviewer: Herbert J. Horikawa
Location: Medford, New Jersey
Date: October 23, 1994
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-13-12

<Begin Segment 12>

HH: To what extent can you identify with other people of color in this country such as Latinos, African Americans?

HU: Well, see, in Los Angeles, I went to Lafayette junior high and, well, Ninth Street School and Lafayette junior high, Thomas Jefferson High. Well, I would think at Thomas Jefferson High, I think it was fifty percent Black. And then there was Jewish people, Russian people, Filipinos, Chinese, and then the Japanese. So it was a pretty cosmopolitan school. And then I grew up away from the Japanese community. It was only about five or six Japanese families in the area that I lived, but then there were Mexican families, so my playmates were Mexicans mostly.

HH: So you were very, as far as being multicultural considering you grew up with a variety of people. Would you say that the kinds of concerns that Asian Americans had are similar to those as Latinos and African Americans?

HU: Yeah, I would think so.