#gidra

Founded in 1969 by 5 UCLA students, the radical publication Gidra was a critical voice in the Asian American movement. The publication was filled with art, poetry, and coverage of anti-war movements, ethnic studies fights on college campuses, critiques of capitalism and global imperialism, and more.

Gidra was pan-Asian American but largely staffed by young Japanese Americans and hundreds of volunteers. Over its original 5 year run, thousands of copies were circulated to Asian American activists and allies around the US.

Because I haven’t had a chance to create any Radical content for this self-proclaimed aesthetic zine-blog (Yet. I’m working on it, I swear 😭), I thought I’d share what I’m reading right now to hold you over in the meantime. And that is the collected archives of Vietnm-era Asian American publication Gidra, available through the Densho Digital Repository. There’s some fascinating stuff that connects the struggle at home with a Third Worldist ideology, documenting imperialism in Vietnam and beyond (including the United States occupation of Okinawa in the years just before my family emigrated) and emphasizing the ties between the Asian American movement and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous struggles.

One issue in particular that I really recommend to get a feel for it is that from April 1973, which focuses on the Wounded Knee incident while also containing an article on community mental health, a great short story about Hawaii, and instructions for making your own pants.

http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-297/

Three years after Malcolm X’s death, in the spring of 1968, Murase, then a college senior, and his friends began to hear about groups of students of color protesting at their campuses in northern California. At San Francisco State University, one group of black, Chinese, Mexican, Filipino, and Native American students known as the Third World Liberation Front, had organized sit-ins across campus, demanding that the university establish new departments devoted to ethnic studies, to hire more non-white faculty, and to accept more non-white students. The student strike lasted nearly five months, becoming the longest in US history, and eventually spreading to Berkeley and New York. 

Around this time, newsletters started appearing at college campuses across California, from a new student group at UC Berkeley called the Asian American Political Alliance. “We believe,” one of them read, “that the American society is historically racist and one which has systemically employed social discrimination and economic imperialism, both domestically and internationally, exploiting all non-white people in the process of building up their affluent society.” 

Murase and dozens of other students approached UCLA administrators about forming its own ethnic studies department. The department would hire faculty and offer courses on black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American history and anthropology. The university said no but granted permission for the students to establish informal study centers without faculty or courses and the black and Mexican-American students soon received funding from the university to start their own publications on campus. Murase and his Asian-American friends asked administrators for funding to start one of their own. They argued that the budding Asian-American community needed a forum for creative expression and discussing the social and political issues affecting them. The administrators replied that they would only grant funding if they could have final editorial say. 

Murase and four friends—fellow UCLA students Dinora Gil, Laura Ho, Tracy Okida, and Colin Watanabe—decided to start the newspaper on their own. Each student kicked in $100 for ink and printing supplies, and filled four pages with essays and poems and illustrations. They called the paper Gidra—Tracy, a third-generation Japanese American, made up the name one day while thinking about King Ghidorah, a three-headed dragon-caterpillar known as one of Godzilla’s archenemies.