Interviewee: Gina Velasco

Interviewer: Christina Huang

Date: August 29, 2024

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Transcriber: Christina Huang

Length: 44:39

Christina Huang (00:00)
Hello. My name is Christina Huang. Today's date is August 29, 2024. I'm recording from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the unceded lands of the Occaneechi peoples. And today I have the honor of speaking with Dr Gina Velasco, Associate Professor and Director of the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Haverford College, and she was pivotal in the creation of the Asian American studies program on campus at UT Austin. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm very, very excited. Would you like to introduce yourself and explain where you're calling in from?

Gina Velasco (00:36)
Sure. So I'm Dr Gina Velasco. I'm Associate Professor and Director of the program in Gender and Sexuality that's at Haverford College, which is outside of Philadelphia, PA in a town called Haverford, and I'm happy to be here today.

Christina Huang (00:59)
Awesome. Thank you so much for that introduction. I would love to start early in your life and talk about your identity based experiences can you share with us your upbringing and how that influences your identity today?

Gina Velasco (01:11)
So I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I grew up at a time especially, and I would say this is still true today, when a lot of folks think about the South, or even when they think about major cities in the South, they don't often think about large Asian immigrant populations. And both Dallas and Houston have very large Asian immigrant populations. The histories of migration are a little bit more recent, and the places where people settle are a little different, like in sort of sprawling cities like that, a lot of Asian immigrants tend to settle in the suburbs and not in the inner city. And so it was when I got to undergrad at University of Texas at Austin, most of the people I knew were from either Dallas or Houston's who were all from large cities, and a lot of us who were involved with organizing for Asian American Studies were from medium sized to large enclaves of Asian ethnic communities within Dallas or Houston.

So at the time - I'm Filipino American - that the Filipino community was a decent size in Dallas when I definitely grew up with a community. And I think also because I attended Catholic schools, Catholic parochial schools, I would say Catholicism is still the dominant, although clearly not the only religion among Filipino American communities in the US. There were always a lot of Latina/ Latino/Latinx as well as Filipino/Filipina/Filipinx students in my Catholic schools. So I think I definitely had a sense of my identity before, but it became heightened when I got to undergrad and I realized I was interested in studying Asian American Studies, and that actually didn't exist. In the mid 90s, when I got to UT Austin, I dabbled in Asian studies. But the formation at the time, and I'm not sure if it's changed that much, has been one that's largely focused on China, Japan and India, because I had volunteered and lived in a couple of Latin American countries, I actually came in with something like 22 hours of Spanish and decided that I was going to be a Latin American Studies major, partially because of that experience volunteering in Latin America, but also because the experience of Spanish colonization seemed more comparable to the history of the Philippines than anything that I could have studied in Asian studies that was focused largely on China, Japan and India. So that was sort of the background in the 90s that I came to when I was an undergraduate.

Christina Huang (04:58)
Awesome. Thank you for going into that background and helping like form this picture of your identity. I think you're right, the formation of Asian right studies has often revolved around China, Japan and India, and I'm one of your experience as a Southeast person in this field, I wanted to ask about like you're visibly and invisibility while you're doing work in higher education or any activism work that you've done,

Gina Velasco (05:23)
In the 20 plus years that I've actually been an academic and I think I'm one of the few -- there's maybe one other person -- that I organized with as an undergrad who actually went on to be a professor and teach Asian American Studies. So, my view is a little different. I would say in the past 20 years, Filipinos have actually developed a very visible leadership role within the academic field of Asian American Studies. That was not the case in the 90s. There is actually a history within the Professional Association for the field, the Association for Asian American Studies, of Filipino Americans feeling excluded or marginalized. There was a very large public resignation of the board of the organization, I want to say, in 2000 at a conference in Hawaii, in protest to a novel being awarded an award by the organization that many felt had racist depictions of Filipino Americans. That was the novel Blu's Hanging. I was still an undergrad then, but that's the history of Filipino Americans within this larger field of Asian American Studies.

And I would say, unlike places on the west coast or maybe even east coast, the activism at UT Austin was actually not led by East Asian American students. It was largely led it was a multiracial group. For one thing, there were white folks, Black folks, there wereAsian folks. We had called our group was the Asian American Relations Group. We had close ties with the Anti-Racist Organizing Committee, which was a broader campus coalition that organized, particularly in response to racist remarks made by a law professor at the time against Black and Latinos. So I would say that the majority of folks I organized with were South Asian American, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Indian, with maybe a handful of Chinese American and Korean Americans. I was definitely the only Filipino. But I think partially that reflects the large South Asian communities, especially in the Houston area, but to a certain extent in Dallas. So, my experience is probably different than, say, some of the organizing that happened, like at Columbia or at or that happened, you know, decades earlier at Berkeley in terms of the racial makeup of the group.

Christina Huang (08:49)
Yeah, totally. And it's really nice to hear about the multiracial solidarity and of this push. I would love to hear about what this solidarity community building look like when you were at UT Austin.

Gina Velasco (09:02)
So a lot of our members, like I said, were the same folks who organized a takeover of the main building on campus, the UT tower. I think that was in 1999. So you know that that included folks from Mecha, that included, everyone from, like the socialists to Black and African American student orgs. And I think that really was demonstrated in our friendships. So that a lot, some of my best friends from college are, or were, Black students from Houston, who were involved with Asian American organizing, and one of my friends actually ended up going to film school NYU and writing her dissertation was on representations of Black folks in Japanese film. So, I feel like those kinds of intersections were things that happened in our social lives, but also intellectually and politically.

Christina Huang (10:34)
Yeah, that's really interesting to hear about. And I'm glad you brought up the also, the building the takeover, the sit in the tower takeover. I know that there is a main focus historically of the sensationalized moment, but I love to hear of that builds up the expansive history of advocating for these studies programs before, a huge moment. Can you walk me through what that advocacy look like?

Gina Velasco
So the occupation that led to the arrest of myself and nine other students who were dubbed the UT 10 was actually the culmination of at least a decade of organizing by largely Asian American students who had been pushing for Asian American Studies. At the time this, the 90s were some of the most contentious battles on college campuses around things like the dismantling of affirmative action, right? So there were student protests happening across the country, and you were also connected to some of the protests, the sort of resurgence of protests at Berkeley. You also have to keep in mind this was right before the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, so this was a time, and I feel like we have returned to this time with the protests against the genocide in Gaza, where students felt empowered, motivated and nationally in solidarity with each other around related social justice struggles. And so, yes it was about the racist comments that a law professor made, but was also about the larger battles to keep affirmative action, and as Asian American students realizing that we were in solidarity with these efforts to [against] dismantling affirmative action, even as Asian Americans have to a certain extent, certain ethnic groups have seemed to benefit right supposedly now that's been shown to be a very problematic narrative, and definitely Southeast Asians are not part of the group that have benefited from affirmative action, but at this moment in time, there was a ramping up of campus activism around issues of race, and like I said, there was a lot of cross fertilization from these anti racist organizing coalitions into Asian American Studies and a lot of use of similar strategies, like doing things like protest theater, connecting with activist faculty and graduate students.

There is, I don't know if it's still there, but there was an activist anthropology graduate student track at UT Austin. So a lot of our comrades were actually graduate students and faculty in that program who - several of them were also arrested - who were committed to doing political work, and professors who actually were on the picket lines with us or chose to have class at the buildings that were occupied. So a lot of the things that you see faculty doing now, and all the encampments against the genocide, are things that faculty and students had been doing together in many, many iterations of these campus social movements.

Christina
Yeah. Thank you so much for explaining that. And I think it's very important to contextualize because Asian American Studies does not happen in some sort of vacuum. There's a lot of things happening, but before, after and during. And it's very interesting here about the cross fertilization as you said, I think that's a really good term, in talking about the strategies and the people doing this work. I would love to hear about like, what you remember from that day? I think it was May 1999 and it was five hours. What do you remember from that day?

Gina Velasco (15:21)
So I think the students who have been involved in campus now know that at the end of the spring semester that it's almost like this waiting game where the administration is hoping that it will just die down before classes end for the summer, and we had decided to occupy one of the major administrative buildings, until the dean, at the time of, I think the Dean of Liberal Arts, agreed to speak with us. He basically refused to speak with us. And so the UT police were called in to arrest us. And this was, you know, among many, many, many people, both inside and outside the building, chanting, sitting down, refusing to leave. Graduate students and faculty were there as well with us. And it was something that we agreed upon in advance. And I think that, if anything, what, what the movement against the genocide has shown us is that student organizers are incredibly savvy and prepared, right? So we knew. We decided in advance who could take the risk, what our legal resources would be, what would happen if we were arrested. Not everyone could take that risk and basically, after we were held overnight and after the arrests, there were protests every day, including a disruption of a live recording of Good Morning America to drop the charges against the UT 10. So rather than sort of the protest dying down, the arrest actually ramped up student involvement. And I do think it was the turning point where the administration finally decided to include student voices and to start to commit to establishing the Center for Asian American Studies, which still exists.

And I will say, as someone now who has been on the other side as faculty for over 20 years, I am still impressed by the level of participation that we fought for, because it's still not the norm. I remember I was the liaison for students for the first tenure track faculty search in Asian American Studies. And now, when I see that there are rarely, if ever, any students, even if they're graduate students, but much less undergraduates in faculty searches, I realize how unusual that was, and that's the difference with a student led, student initiated program, and I think that's that really goes to the heart of Asian American Studies and ethnic studies, which is that it's always come out of community struggle. And I think - the field has been around for a really long time. I'm currently on the board of the Association for Asian American Studies. And sometimes I think that some folks forget that, that we come out of community struggle, that this is not solely a vehicle for individual career enhancement. So, I would say there are still folks in the field who are leaders in the field, who believe that, and some who don't. It's a field that's been professionalized over the past several decades.

Christina Huang (19:43)
I think that's a brilliant point at the end where you said that there's a difference between when something just comes out of administration versus like student led and student voices having agency over what a program or a center would look like. So I wanted to ask, like, you're in higher education now and were part of a community, student oriented movement. How do we kind of leverage the currencies and almost capitalist tools that the university has that we need to develop such a program, but also avoid this complete institutionalized Asian American studies, where it's solely just literature and scholarship, how do we find the two to fight for self-determination and building of liberatory pedagogy?

Gina Velasco (20:30)
I think a couple of things. It's by forging strategic alliances with faculty and administrators who can help students navigate these institutional structures and provide a bridge in terms of the longevity these efforts will need beyond your four years, right? So sometimes students don't really know how decisions are made, and what we found were activist faculty who were willing to be our advocates and were willing to mentor us, while also deferring to the desire of the group, right? And by that, I mean there are plenty of high profile faculty who just want student followers like so that is not what I am referring to. I'm talking about faculty who will help, sort of guide students in terms of what is going to lead to long term institutional change, because often it will take longer than the four years that you're around. What students can do on their end, and something that we definitely worked on doing was having our own mentoring within the group, so that you take first or second years and you teach them the skills and the history of your organization, so that you're not reinventing the wheel every three or four years. There doesn't need to be a new student org formed every three years because the previous leadership graduated.

So I can see from both sides now. I can see the passion of students. I can also see that sometimes they really do not know how decisions are made. That said, I will always take the side of the students, and I will always encourage my students to disrupt business as usual, because that is how change is made. Even if that is not message that admin, that higher administration will tell you, and we see this happening over and over right now with the genocide. So you need to find those faculty who can both guide you and have your back, like the faculty who will actually show up there when you get arrested. Those are the faculty you need in your corner, and especially if they will literally put their bodies on the line for you, because you see in some of these faculty encampments, faculty serving as barriers, because we know we have more institutional power, right? You've seen that happen couple of months ago, and you'll probably see it ramp up again now that the fall semester is starting with the with the movement against the genocide.

Christina Huang (23:52)
Yeah, totally. And I think thinking about networks within faculty is so important. And I think something I wanted to ask you about since you were a student at a public university and now a professor in a private university, could you tell me a little bit about like, how decisions are made?

Gina Velasco
So the Board of Trustees has a lot of power. The higher level administrators, the provost, the chief diversity officer, the Dean of Students, these are all folks who make a lot of the decisions around whether or not to allow encampments, whether or not to raid encampments, whether or not to allow, what role campus security or the campus PD should take. Because I teach at a small Quaker College, the discourse is largely around Quaker values, around peace, around getting along. And what I will say is that students need to learn the language that holds currency for their specific environment. It is very different environment at a place like Haverford, where there's like 1300 students and 40% of the faculty live on campus, then a place like UT Austin, with 50,000 students, where armed military were called in during the encampments, right? And faculty can help you to understand this, right? It really depends on the size and the culture of the institution as to how decisions get made. This is only my third year at this college, and I have very much learned from faculty who've been around for decades about how things happen, how decisions get made. Like learning the culture of the place is also very important for that reason.

Christina Huang
Drawing from historical context and universities history, I think you're right. So important. And I think you keep mentioning and bring up parallels to today with the encampments. And I love to give space to talk about that. Since you said you're on the board of the Association of the Asian American Studies, and since they were the first academic institution to endorse the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement and talking about the parallel.

Gina Velasco (26:52)
So I have to, I have to start with saying a caveat, which is because my young daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes. I actually went on family medical leave in the spring, and so I actually stepped away from teaching. I stepped away from all of my board duties. I stepped away from I had been organizing with Faculty for Justice in Palestine prior to doing that. So I have, I'm only now returning. I will say that it has always taken advocacy within AAAS, within the organization, to maintain a commitment to BDS. It was largely, although not limited to, Filipino American scholars, who organized in 2013 to pass the resolution to support BDS. And when this came up around discussions with the board in fall of last year, when I was active with the board, I emphasized, and several of my other colleagues emphasized, the necessity and the urgency of us making a statement as a board that was in line with the previous resolutions that the organization had already passed. And I think there is so much repression and so much targeting of academics, faculty, academic administrators right now, including lawsuits and people losing their jobs, that a lot of people are afraid. And so even though, as an organization, we had already voted to support BDS, there were still individuals who were concerned, because there's so much repression and targeting.

So I will say that because of my work, my advocacy around faculty for Justice in Palestine in the fall, part of that was motivated by the fact that a student I know, a Haverford student was shot by a white supremacist for being Palestinian, wearing a keffiyeh and speaking Arabic in Vermont around Thanksgiving, right after I had been part of putting together a teach in on Palestine. He survived, but it was definitely something very close to home. So, as a result of the kind of visibility that I got around that event and around those things happening, I was actually named in a lawsuit targeting Haverford College for creating anti-semitic culture. It was by parents of students who are Zionists and supporters of the State of Israel who were accusing the administration of Haverford of allowing anti-semitism, which basically in this context, in the US, anti-semitism is equated with any criticism of the State of Israel. So it's still, campuses right now are a battleground, right and it's different than it was in the 90s, but not entirely because it wasn't settled at the time, the end of affirmative action, we still believe that it was something that could be saved. Right? There's a lot of things now that people have accepted or come to terms with, like the end of Roe v Wade that were not a done deal before. So this is to say that there are real threats, and there are people within Asian American Studies who are afraid to speak up, or, even worse, who they themselves support the goals of Zionists and or supporters of the State of Israel.

Christina Huang (31:54)
So sorry to hear about having to go through all that. That seems like a lot to take on as you're trying to support your students. So yeah, I'm thank you for sharing your story. And so it sounds like it's very difficult when you're being an advocate and you're doing more for community, and you face either the university repression in censorship and lawsuits or backlash from like family members of students, or if it's like bringing in police and things like that. Do you see like changes between like what you saw in the 90s in terms of university response and how they brought in police in today's in 2024

Gina Velasco (32:45)
Yeah, I think it's much more violent now. So if you look at the history of large university police departments, a lot of them are more militarized now than they ever were in the 90s and in terms of actual, either actual weapons or training, there are some police campus police departments that either receive trainings or weapons from sort of collaborators, folks or programs in Israel, right? So there's actual connections to the training of domestic police and University Police and the US’s is larger relationship to the State of Israel, in terms of the military and the idea of security. So this is a direct connection to why the disruptions and the raids of encampments have been so unnecessarily violent. Because of the increased militarization of campus police departments, right? There have also been very strong campus movements to get the police off campus. And it's not something that I have a lot of direct connection with now, because I teach at a small Quaker liberal arts college, and there's a very tiny Campus Security Department here. I'm not saying that folks haven't been abused or discriminated against. But it's a very different relationship when students know all the cops on campus, right? It's a very small department. Then when you have a school with 30,000 people and a police force that is meant to contain 30,000 students.

Christina Huang (35:08)
Going into the differences, because I think it's so important that we draw on parallels, relations between like historical events and contemporary times. They may not be completely analogous, because I think Palestine has always been the asterisk to like to everything about progress and liberation, but it's important to kind of form this connection to one another. So my question to you is, there's a lot going on. Like you have your own life. You said you had to go on medical leave for a semester. How, how did you then and now, kind of keep the ball rolling, also set boundaries and prevent that burnout.

Gina Velasco (35:52)
I think I just, I've always had the ability to say no, and I remember, even as an undergrad. I had some friends I organized with who didn't work; like school was their main job. And I remember just saying to friends or the people I was organizing with, “I'm just not going to do a meeting that starts past 11pm at night, like I have a job, I have to go to work and school.” So, and that's what let me keep going. I think that also it's always been important. - I'm a feminist, I teach feminist theory - to think about the dynamics that are happening within organizing spaces. I have been in more than one organizing space where there was an implicit assumption that women would be the ones like cleaning up or doing that kind of labor, and so I feel like being aware of what we're asking our comrades and friends to do, and being aware of the limitations has always been important. So, when my kid got sick, I bowed out of everything, I just said, sorry. You're not going to see me for like, six months. So, I went on family medical leave. That's just the reality.

And I think that the more that folks realize that, in order to be the most accessible space as possible, that there needs to be a disability justice perspective that understands people's limitations, and one that takes into account things like socioeconomic differences, providing childcare, providing food, providing transportation stipends, right? That's what allows more people to be involved.

Christina
Your advice before is, like, very meaningful, Zooming out, like, what does it mean for you to be part of this Asian American Studies movement as a whole?

Gina Velasco (38:40)
Two things. Part of what organizing for Asian American Studies taught me is that what we study in school, or whether we're students or scholars, is and will always be connected to creating the world that we want to see, right? And I know to some folks this would seem a very naive thing to say, but I do believe that to be the case, that my role as a teacher is to always give students a language for how to critique the injustices of the world and to develop their own blueprint for the world that they want to see, and what their place is within that. And being part of a student movement showed me that that kind of work would always be central to what I wanted to do with my life.

And it's actually true. I think for all the people I'm still in touch with 20 plus years later, right? Everyone is still doing some sort of social justice related work, whether, I mean, it may have nothing to do. A lot of it has nothing to do with Asian American Studies or nothing to do with Asian American issues, but that sort of praxis of believing that you can and you should be involved with making structural change as a young person is really foundational to the path that you choose later on. So I would say not so much Asian American studies, but the experience of being part of a youth movement or a student movement is crucial to shaping who you are at such an important age and moment in your life. And that was true for me, and I feel like that was true for the folks I organized with, like nobody went on and said, f --this, I'm just going to support corporate America, like none of us, right? So, I mean, not that there's anything wrong. People make whatever choices they need to support their families and whatnot, but I'm saying that commitment to making larger societal structural change became a core value and continued to be a core value for all the folks that I knew, who I organized with over 20 years ago.

Christina Huang (41:57)
Yeah, and that's very beautiful. I think it's firstly, there's a lot to be said about students like yourself who put their safety on the line for this greater change that will impact so many students. And UT Austin has one of the largest and robust Asian American Studies programs in the US South. So, I think the sacrifices that you made then are impacting so many students. I did oral history with Mohit Mehta and keep talking about the programming and things that are going on there. So, you have left like such an impact on so many students are going through those doors and leaving a legacy. And I hope that students continue this work that you've done.

Gina Velasco (42:41)
Thank you. That's so good to hear. It's just given the state of politics in Texas that is so good to hear. Because I haven't kept in touch with UT's Asian American Studies Center, I know there are good folks there. I'm happy to hear that's the case, because it's actually in places like Texas that that a strong Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies curriculum is the most needed.

Christina Huang (43:20)
Yes, totally. You keep in touch with the other UT 10 folks?

Gina Velasco (43:23)
A couple of them, Yalini Dream, is actually one of my best friends.

Christina Huang (43:37)
Oh, my god, yeah. Did you guys become friends because of this or through organizing?

Gina Velasco (43:42)
Actually, through organizing together. And she's one of my best friends still, I live in Philly, and she lives in New York, so we're not that far away from each other. We actually went to a protest in New York in the fall around the genocide and I posted something about, like, more than 20 years of protesting together. It was really sweet.

Christina Huang (44:26)
Yes, you guys are bonded now. And now another second wave, I guess, of intense campus organizing and activism.

Gina Velasco
Well, there have been many waves, and I'm hoping there will be many more.

Christina Huang
Totally, you're not done. It's an unfinished project.

Gina Velasco (44:34)
Well, it's not about me now, it's you guys. That's the good thing about being at my age. I'm like, all right, it's your turn.