0:00:24.2
CLINE:
Today is July 7th,
2011. This is Alex Cline. I’m interviewing Joel Jacinto at my home, strangely
enough, in Culver City, California. Joel’s house is getting some work done on
it, and we didn’t really want to have the accompaniment of hammering—
JACINTO:
(laughs) It’s true.
CLINE:
—and pounding and things.
This worked out at the last minute. So, good morning.
JACINTO:
Good morning, Alex. Thank
you for having me here and for being flexible. This is great. Your home is
wonderful. I’m familiar with the area, and just to see all these familiar
things, these idiophones here, you know, makes me feel right at home, so, good.
CLINE:
I’m sorry it isn’t more
organized, but we do what we can do.
JACINTO:
Perfect.
CLINE:
These interviews always
start at the beginning. We tend to go chronologically, but, you know, detours
are welcome. I’ll start with the perennial first question, which is where and
when were you born?
0:01:43.6
JACINTO:
Good question.
Was born in San Francisco, California, December 10th, 1962, the product of an
immigrant family from the Philippines. My mother was in the Foreign Service,
Department of Foreign Affairs, so she was part of the diplomatic corps, and at
the age of probably her late thirties, along with my family who, between them,
already had three children at, like, nine, eight, and two, decided that life in
America might be better for them.
My father was a working architect and
my mother was part of the corps, so on her ability to get reassigned somewhere
in the world, they chose San Francisco, California, as their point of entry at
the old Ferry Building. In 1961 they packed up on a plane and left with three
children in tow, the five of them, to start their new life. When I look back at
that, I just—at midlife, basically picking up and going to another country,
saying, “Hey, we can get a better life here,” it’s amazing to me. So that was
September 1961, and about a year later, they—I don’t know if it was a mistake or
not, but I happened, and I came in December of 1962, about fifteen months after
they had come, after they arrived. So I was the American-born. I was the
different one than them, the bunso. Bunso, b-u-n-s-o, is the term for the
youngest, and as the youngest, you’re afforded all those things in that role
that you play in life, in familiar life, where you get picked on but you get
spoiled, and you’re everybody’s favorite because usually the youngest is. So I
enjoyed growing up in the Richmond District of San Francisco, Alex, a very happy
life, a very middle-class life. My parents, we had no pretension. We had
relatives here, but basically my parents worked, and we just grew up in, you
know, the urban setting. So that was our village, playgrounds and parks, movie
theaters, and friends and age-mates. So that was my early childhood. I went to
school at a Catholic school about two and a half blocks away, Star of the Sea
Academy. Incidentally, that’s where Grace (Gracie Allen), George Burns’ wife,
went.
0:03:55.8
CLINE:
Oh, interesting,
okay. Gracie Allen.
JACINTO:
Yes, Gracie Allen. It was
in the Richmond District, so it was very close by, and we spent twelve years in
our home. It was an old Victorian. Around our home it was called the Richmond
District, Clement Street. It was very famous for being very multicultural. You
have Label’s (Table) Delicatessen was there. You had Man Hing Market, Chinese
dim sum and everything like that. You had the Holy City Zoo, where Robin
Williams got one of his early gigs, was right around the block. So I grew up in
a very immigrant, Russian, Eastern European, Chinese—we were one of the few
Filipino families in the neighborhood, but very, very multicultural. These were
my playmates, these people, older guys, you know. My brother’s eight years
older, so at that time growing up they would be doing bad things underneath the
bleachers, and we would be there watching them, saying, “Wow, we’re going to
grow up one day and do those.” (laughter) But it was a very urban thing,
basketball and sports and schooling, nothing extraordinary. So family life was
very blessed in terms of being able to just have a good setting, parents who
loved me and who worked a lot, too, you know. So both my parents were very
dedicated to their careers. Father was an architect, Mom traveled a lot later on
when I was about ten years old. So fast forward to—if you want to catch me and
go back and ask questions, go ahead.
CLINE:
I’ll catch you then. You
mentioned your parents. Let’s start with your father. What do you know about his
family background and sort of his roots?
JACINTO:
Jaime Jacinto, my father,
was born in 1925 and passed away in 1993 at the age of sixty-eight, and his
family life in the Tagalog family, which Tagalog’s one of the major languages in
the Philippines, they usually adopt the Chinese style of naming the children. So
the eldest is kuya, eldest female is (unclear). The second is diche. So there’s
the terms, number-one son, number-two son.
0:06:10.6
CLINE:
Right, the
numbers, yes.
0:07:48.2
JACINTO:
Right. I think
my father was san go, which is the number-three son. He was one of twelve.
Imagine, a tremendous family, the Jacinto family. My grandfather, Alfredo
Jacinto, was, in the early part of the century, not a diplomat, but he was an
administrator within the American framework of government in the Philippines. He
took a civil service test and was found to be proficient, so the early
government—this is before Commonwealth (of the Philippines), the Republic of the
Philippines, before 1946—put him to work being a provincial treasurer, being a
provincial mayor, actually becoming the mayor of the first chartered city, Cebu
(City). Cebu’s a very famous city in the Visayas region too. So Alfredo was a
very esteemed individual and later became the Commissioner of Customs in the
Philippines, which is a pretty high-level ranking. So he had all these different
children and children outside of children. My father, I think, my grandfather
kept him close because he wanted to monitor him, for whatever reason I don’t
know. So he kept him with him. My father traveled with my grandfather and then
studied architecture. So my grandfather was the type that was very exact in that
he would determine his sons and my uncles’ careers and really guide them into
what they should be doing. With twelve or fourteen in the household, is
incredible, but, you know, that’s life in the early forties.
So Jaime,
my father, was a very hard worker, very quiet. I think when you grow up with
fourteen siblings, you don’t get to talk that much, you know what I mean,
because everybody’s talking at the same time. They would tell me later on in
life that he was pretty quiet. “Your dad was pretty quiet.” And so my
relationship with my father was, of course, one of love and that, but I don’t
remember a lot of interaction and I don’t remember a lot of heart-to-heart
talks, although my father demonstrated the paternal love that just was so
unconditional, that I really benefited. Only as you grow up do you remember
that. So he worked hard. He was a golfer. He drank socially. He drank fiercely.
He was very famous for holding court amongst my older brothers’ friends and his
compadres, Alex. So he really was very jovial and very adept in that. And he
smoked as well, too, which is what a lot of males did at that time too. So he
fizzled out early. He had a good life, but he checked out a little bit early at
sixty-eight. At the end of his life, we became closer when I was able to share
with him some of the things I had been doing, like working in the community and
my folk arts organization, so I was very happy that he was alive for our
wedding, to see our union and to see the beginnings of the life that I would
have now. So my father’s relationship and I was really good, very spartan, you
know, so I tend to be not the opposite, but I tend to be very cognizant of that
with my own son (Kai Jacinto), but in the end, sometimes you turn into your
father. (laughs)
0:09:34.7
CLINE:
True. That’s
transmission for you.
JACINTO:
Yes, genetic. Collective
unconscious. It happens no matter what. But I have fond memories of my father,
the provision, just the duty to family and to community, to a larger degree. He
was very famous for having hired a lot of Filipino draftsmen in his firm, which
is a firm up in the Bay Area called Davy McKee, and they did a lot of
architectural engineering. So he gave opportunity, he gave access, he serviced
his fellow countrymen, (unclear), by getting them jobs, and they were, of
course, qualified. So he really had a lot of compadres. So I learned about this
issue of having compadres at a very early age, not only hearing my father speak
to these gentlemen in the way that they were good friends—I know they weren’t
relatives, but they were compadre, compadre in a good sense, and that really
helped me build my service ethic about what am I doing for my fellow compadres
or countrymen. So that’s Jaime. He was a golfer. That was his sport, you know.
He didn’t do much of cultural stuff. That generation was very just, you know,
all about the family life, and as urban contemporary Filipinos, you know, that
colonial mentality was still there, where we’re not really so much traditional
in the expressive arts, but, of course, in the psyche and the idea of culture,
we were very Filipino in that, Filipino American, but not so much in the
expressive arts. So that’s father. Mother, Luz Bertha Angeles, was also born in
1925, passed away in 2001 of metastatic breast cancer, and so she had that for
about four years. She had a mamectomy (sic).
CLINE:
Mastectomy.
0:11:35.70:13:58.60:15:43.8
JACINTO:
Mastectomy
earlier, about ten years earlier, and then she had that. So she survived my
father.
She was the diplomat, the mother of the household, you know, the
entertainer. I think I sort of get some of my expressiveness and my diplomacy
from her, because everybody became her friend, you know, and she built very
strong relationships on her ability to engage and to create, I think, instant
kinship. People would tell me, “We loved your mom. She was just a wonderful
woman,” not in the sense that she was very passive, but she was very proactive
about reaching out and keeping in contact. So she was in the right line of work
in terms of being a diplomat. So with her, she was also hardworking, but she ran
us as a household very well and she was a very doting Filipino mother. As her
youngest, she tended to keep me under her wing more than my brother and sister.
As her being expressive, you know, I think I picked that up in terms of wanting
to explore, whether it be just playing the piano or dancing in front of a
consulate party where I was imitating Michael Jackson at the age of five. She
would encourage that. So I think that was a very important part of that it’s
okay, it’s good, and it pleases my parents when we do these things, either play
the piano—and all of us played the piano. The piano was the fifth child in our
household because it’s also the sign of not prestige, but of means, that you
have now just—you’re past sustaining yourselves, that you are into expression.
So amongst Filipinos and maybe other countries, a piano was definitely a sign of
some sort of status, a moderate social status too. So I remember going to a lot
of different parties in the Philippine Consulate because again, it was the
diplomatic corps, so I was always around people. At an early age they would get
me up to dance, and parties, and sing. My sisters, my two oldest sisters would
do that. My eldest sister would do that with me, too, as well, so I kind of got
into this habit of just sort of going and going and putting on with the Jim
Morrison, “Come on, baby, light my fire,” or those things that were—Michael
Jackson, you know, the Jackson Five. So those things, I think, shaped me, to a
certain degree.
So my mother, she worked very hard, the diplomatic
corps, went back to the Philippines. So when I was ten, I was going to
mention—in 1973 when I was ten, my mother brought me to the homeland for a
summer. And as a ten-year-old not knowing anything about the Philippines, and on
the plane ride over there, landing, you know, I said something to my mother and
it stuck in her mind. She goes, “Mom, I think I’m going to like it here,” and I
just had no pre-concept of what it would be like, but immediately (unclear) on
the plane and, you know, being welcomed by your kin, your extended family.
Remember, my dad is one of fourteen, so I had a hundred cousins, you know, that
were various degrees of proximity to us, and my father and my mother lived also
in a compound. A compound was basically a center courtyard surrounded by a
number of houses. In the Philippines that was the pre-World War II type of—for
families that had large families, what they would do. So they grew up in that.
So at ten, being exposed to the Philippine culture, my family was really shaping
for me as well, too, and I really had a good time that summer, and just knowing
about family, knowing that this is where I’m from, this is where my parents are
from, even though I play basketball, even though—and I’ve got to say the aside
for all of this is that I grew up in San Francisco and physically I don’t look
Filipino. That’s just it. People would always mistake me for Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, and even my own family would call me “Koreano,” a Filipino term
for—(unclear), “You don’t look Filipino.”
So they would kid me, but it
affected me, and I think to a certain degree not a very profound way. I’m not
damaged for it, but it always was in the back of mind. It’s like, man, I’m
Filipino and my parents are Filipino, but I don’t look Filipino, so how’s that
going? So I didn’t know how to come to grips with it till later on in life, till
I would learn about issues of identity and diversity within even the Filipino
culture, because as I say, I don’t look Filipino, but we do have Chinese and
Spanish blood in us, as many Filipinos do, so being very Chinese-looking, but
also having some sort of light-colored eyes, you know, I was really just like an
anomaly, even amongst my family, too, as well. So the idea of it, it would push
me later on in life, I think, I want to connect with my Filipino-ness. If I
don’t look Filipino on the outside, then I want to connect on being Filipino on
the inside. So it really was, I think, a driver for me in many ways to seek out
my own roots, to seek out my own being, what was me, because I identified as
very Filipino. I didn’t identify as Chinese, not because I didn’t want to be
Chinese or of Chinese origin, but culturally all I knew was I’m Filipino.
Whatever we are, whatever we are today is basically what I want to be identified
as. So when you’re visually pegged for something that you don’t identify with,
there’s dissonance in that in growing up, and some it wasn’t that bad, you know
what I mean. It’s totally fine now because it’s a gimmick for me now, Alex, but
it did sort of shape me and, you know, just sort of drive me and sort of tweak
me here and there amongst my friends. I was very sensitive about not looking
Filipino.
0:00:13.0
CLINE:
What do you know
about your mother’s family background?
JACINTO:
Artists. Again, she came
from another large family. She was one of twelve, I believe, the Angeles family.
I never met my mother’s parents. They died relatively young in the Philippines.
But I realize I think my grandfather was a schoolteacher, and I don’t know what
my grandmother did. But my mother comes from a family of artists where they
really value the arts. My Uncle Carlos Angeles was the first winner of a
national poetry award in the Philippines, a writer’s award, a literary award
called the (Don Carlos) Palanca (Memorial) Awards (for Literature). Carlos
Palanca was a very famous poet in the Philippines. So in the modern era he was
the first awardee of this prestigious award akin to something from the NEA
(National Endowment for the Arts), you know, in terms of literary arts, an
award. So she was very proud of that, and although I never really turned out to
be a writer, my brother turned out to be the writer, that I would recognize
Uncle—because my mom would show me his poems and his stories. My mother’s
family, because they were in the Philippines and L.A., in Los Angeles, I didn’t
really get to know them till I became an adult. In San Francisco it was mainly
my father’s side, so I identified much more with my—my father had a few siblings
that lived in San Francisco around the Bay Area, so we saw them every other
weekend, and I grew up with my younger cousins. I don’t have a cousin that is
exactly my age, so it was about four years younger and eight years, so I was
kind of the older cousin, even though I’m the youngest of my family. That’s my
family in terms of my mom.
0:19:32.9
CLINE:
How much do you
think having your father’s relatives be in the San Francisco area influenced his
decision to relocate there?
JACINTO:
I think that it was one
of the major ones, because my mother and my father were one of the first ones—so
as part of the diplomatic corps, you bring your household members. So, actually,
my mom and my father were sort of the pioneers that brought over other—they
petitioned at that time. Remember, in 1961 it was pre-‘65.
CLINE:
Yes, that’s right, anti
Asian immigration.
JACINTO:
So it was the diplomatic
corps that was the ticket. So my mom was the ticket for elder aunts and for
siblings, and I believe that she did sponsor a lot of people, again, pre—you
know, it’s only a few thousand Filipinos coming in pre-‘65 before the
immigration thing too. So my mom and dad were here. Now, I think a lot of people
said, “Okay, it’s good because Jaime and Luz Bertha are here and they seem to be
doing well. Let’s try.” So my father had a younger brother and two younger
sisters that came over and an elderly aunt, as well as we had second cousins
that were here already, too, as well. My mom didn’t have really family here in
the Bay Area, up in the Bay Area. They were here in Los Angeles, so that’s why I
don’t know much about the Angeles side. My mom’s an Angeles and my dad’s
Jacinto. I know much more about the Jacinto side.
0:20:56.1
CLINE:
Now let’s talk a
little about your siblings. Let’s get their names and what your relationship was
like with them.
0:22:59.5
JACINTO:
Correct. Well,
the eldest of us four would be Maria Eloisa (Jacinto). In the Philippines
culture, all the females, you would give them “Maria,” no matter what, because
they’re going to get a Catholic name. So she was Maria Eloisa. So we would
contract that to Mariel, okay, nine years older than me, born in the
Philippines, like a second mom to me, too. We’re very, very close because we are
that far apart, you know, almost like—nine years isn’t huge, but she was old
enough to really look out after me and really nurture me as a younger brother,
you know. I just saw her over the weekend over a wedding, and it’s always good
to see her. She went to school locally, went to school in San Francisco and just
stayed in that area pretty much her whole life. So she has three children and
married a gentleman from—not a childhood sweetheart; a teen sweetheart, Ilocano.
His name is Jojo Valdez. So they have three. She has a child in New York who’s
an artist, who’s a dancer off of Broadway, has a daughter that lives in Hawaii,
and a youngest one that lives in Hawaii as well too. So she has three children.
So Mariel, I got along very well with her because we were pretty much far apart,
like a second mom too. She works for the executive assistant for a property
management company, I think, Shorenstein (phonetic) or some big firm off of
Market Street in San Francisco. She’s in the business world. My only brother,
who’s a very pivotal person in my life, too, is Jaime (Jacinto), Jr. Jaime is a
product of the sixties and seventies growing up too. So I always peg him for all
my bad habits, and get into the big brother, right, eight years older and stuff
like that. You learn stuff from him, too, but he’s also your idol. He’s also
your role model. He’s also the person who beats you up and who tortures you in a
very familiar way. (laughter) You know what I mean?
Jaime, he is a
founding member of the Kearny Street Workshop writers’ group, an Asian American
writers’ workshop out of San Francisco, which in the seventies was really the
epicenter of sort of Asian American literary arts activism at a time that was
very pivotal in this field. So Jaime was a poet. He followed after my uncle. I
think growing up in the sixties really formed him to be a part of the whole
movement, not so much the hippie movement. It was more of just, you know, the
activist movement and the self-reflection. So he is a published author. He is a
winner of a Bay Area Book Award winner, and he went into ethnic studies. He went
into ESL (English as a Second Language). So in 1978 he went with my mom to live
in Mexico City. So there’s three years that my mom was in Mexico City, and Jaime
went with her, you know, because he had graduated. He was in college. He went to
(University of California) Davis and then (University of California) Santa Cruz
in fine arts. Critical writing was his collegiate degree. So he went over there
and he met the love of his life. Her name is Victoria, and she was also part of
the consular corps, her father. So my mother and her father worked together, so
they became friends and romance. So he married. She’s a mestiza-Bicolana
Spanish, so she’s part Filipino, part Spanish. So Jaime took very much to the
Mexican, the Hispanic culture, became fluent in Spanish and began to teach and
really became an educator. So he put in a lot of years in San Francisco State
(University), where he taught ESL and taught in the College of Ethnic Studies.
0:24:54.4
CLINE:
That was like the
big thing then.
JACINTO:
Yes, so he really
represents that. These Upward Bound programs that take inner-city youth and
really step to college, that was really his field of nurturing, being an
educator, mentor. So he continued to do that. He has two daughters with
Victoria. One is Camille, and Alexis. So, two daughters, and the eldest one just
had a baby, so there’s a generation, although he didn’t have offspring, male
offspring. I got the responsibility of doing that. He has a grandson now that is
a male in his line. So Jaime now, in his mid fifties, lives in Hilo, Hawaii, on
the big island, and he runs a Japanese immersion school that’s based in Hawaii,
but sends Japanese foreign students for two very intensive English learning
experiences in Hawaii, of all places. So it’s been ongoing. So he’s a vice
president there. He’s the headmaster of the school and he takes care of all
these Japanese students like that too. So he’s very worldly. Jaime is very
worldly, traveling to Mexico, learning languages like Mandarin. He wanted to
learn about our Chinese culture because of our ethnic background, and then Hilo,
Hawaii, dealing with Japanese. So Jaime is very much the linguist and the world
traveler, so to speak, and he’s a role model, too, because, again, of the arts.
With him, as I got older, it changed from being kuya, which is “older brother,”
a term for “older brother,” to now he’s, of course still my kuya, but we have a
reciprocal relationship where I develop my cachet and my career. So he looks to
me and recognizes me for my accomplishments as well as just always my older
brother. So it’s very nice. I don’t see him that often, but we do keep in
contact and we do follow each other’s careers and I do want to visit them. I
visit him every few years on the big island, and we’re due for one, a rite of
passage for Kai, my eldest. Around eleven or twelve, I think, is when it
happens, when everything blossoms, so I’m due to bring him for a little rite of
passage with Jaime next year.
0:27:20.4
CLINE:
Cool.
JACINTO:
Yes. So that’s Jaime, my
older brother, second. Then third one of us is another female, Josephina
(phonetic), or Joji (phonetic) was her nickname too. She’s almost four years
older than me, about three years, nine months. Because we’re closer in age, we
have closer-in-age dynamics of intimacy and fighting and struggle like that too.
Joji lives now in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Hawaii, called
Portlock, which is right before you go to Hanauma Bay and this bay called
Maunalua Bay. “Maunalua” means two mountains. Her backyard is basically a whole
bay. She lives a little (unclear), a little up from the water, and in the
distance in her backyard from her infinity pool and her 40-foot lanai opening,
indoor/outdoor living, she can see the backside of Diamond Head.
CLINE:
Oh, wow.
0:29:05.50:31:01.30:33:17.2
JACINTO:
Top
1 percent real estate in Hawaii. Her husband is a Hapa Hawaiian that she met at
Marin (County), at San Francisco State from Marin. They have inherited a
business from his father, Arnie’s (phonetic) father, was health insurance. So
Joji lives a very charmed and a very blessed life, and I’m so happy for her
because she shares that with us, too, as well. So defining things about my
sister Joji is that we nicknamed her “Queenie.” It’s okay. I know this is going
to go on the thing, too, but she was always—the middle child, you know,
especially when they like to be special, so Joji was the high-maintenance one
out of all of us.
We fought a lot because of, I think, that age thing
like that. Only till we did move away did we start to appreciate each other a
little bit more, too, but I’m really happy for her now because of the life that
she has and how she’s brought up her children. She has three children, her and
Arnie, two of them in Hawaii and one is just a graduate from USF. So she
provided a very good life for them, her and her husband in Hawaii, and they
invite us often to come to Hawaii, even though, you know, it costs a pretty dime
to get over there. But when we’re there, they basically take care of us. So
she’s there now and very much into philanthropy and volunteerism. She runs a
family and really works with Arnie to help him run his business. She’s also
involved in the hula. Strange, but I will say this as an aside, that Hawaii and
the mystique and the experience of Hawaii as just a group of islands, but not
just as a group of islands, but as a process and as a frame of mind, Alex, has
really drawn our family westward. So at an early age in high school I began to
travel to Hawaii in the summers and winters to spend time with my godfather. My
godfather was my basketball coach, like my erstwhile father. His name is Morris
Baker (phonetic), or Morrie Baker, who I met when I was ten years old as a
fifth-grader playing basketball. You know, you talk about those special coaches
that you have in your life. Well, I’m forty-eight now. We’ve had a
thirty-eight-year relationship where we maintained that not only as a basketball
coach, but just becoming a second father. So he latched onto me and I latched
onto him in terms of relationship of basically erstwhile father and son.
You talk about nurturing. You talk about how my father was very spartan,
of course, and that was a very Filipino way. You weren’t very demonstrative.
They called it c____ with your children, you know, because you had so many,
many. You’re a disciplinarian. You’ve just got to keep them in line, right? You
can’t let them think that you love them. (laughter) But Morrie was the nurturing
party. He never was my father, but he was my basketball coach. He turned me on
really to the ways of life, and so wherever he went, he’d say, “Joel, you want
to come visit me? You want to stay with me?” So that was a very pivotal part of
my life, Alex, the Hawaii experience, again, that I’m talking about. So I
started spending summers and winters with him when I was a junior in high school
and we continued for a few years. Over those course of the two or three years
and the summers and winters and my own development, my own personal development,
Alex, was tremendously fundamental in my appreciation, in my want to learn about
others as well, mainly the Hawaiian culture. So I began—the Hawaiian and Pacific
Islander culture, began this love affair with dance. I don’t know how, because I
was used to dancing in front of the consulate parties. From the consular parties
comes dancing on cruise ships, on Sunset Cruises, where here I was this mainland
boy, I was sort of brown, you know, looked Asian, so I kind of fit the roles, so
they used to give me these gigs where I would dance on the Sunset Cruise and
learn these Pacific Islander dances. So that was cool. That was fun when you’re
seventeen and eighteen, right, very exciting when I joined it, but what I
realized is that I needed to immerse myself in the local culture to understand
what one’s doing. It wasn’t just about dancing. So that was one of the first
times at about seventeen or eighteen that I sort of grasped sort of this
concept, what I would later understand at an emic point of view of culture, not
just what you do, what you imitate from others, but what’s going on, what are
the values behind it, what’s the context of all this, and it would really shape
me in my drive to want to learn hula.
Eventually when I was eighteen at
UCLA—so I graduated from high school. I went to a very accomplished high school
in San Francisco called Lowell High School, very smart high school. I wasn’t
very smart, although I graduated from there. At the end of my time there, I was
going to apply to a college, so I checked this box on the application, the UC
(University of California) system, because I said, “Hey, man, I want to go to
UCLA because I saw this Filipino guy play basketball there one year.” That was
Raymond Townsend. Raymond Townsend was the first player of Filipino descent ever
to play in the NBA, and he was a guard under Coach (John) Wooden. So when I was
twelve or thirteen, fourteen, junior high and high school, it was Bruins. It was
Bill Walton. I was depressed when they lost that one year, right, when their
eighty-eight-game winning streak lost. So you have all those people that played,
Kiki Vandeweghe, all those people, all those stars, you know, made me really
want to go to this college. So I checked a box on the application that had an
equal opportunity program. I don’t know why. Someone just told me, said, “Check
that. You might have a better chance of getting in.” Came out of high school
with a 3.4 and an SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) of 1100. That’s Bell curve
medium. I didn’t stand out at all. I don’t think my essay was halfway coherent
as well. But by checking that box, they had an outreach program UC system-wide
in 1981, targeted Filipinos as underrepresented Asians, African American,
Hispanic, Latina, and Filipinos, only Filipinos, in the UC system from the time
that the population of statewide high school seniors to the incoming freshman
group. So there was a special outreach program. So I got in through a program, a
special outreach program, and only later when I was at UCLA in my first two
years did I realize that I was a part of this AAP (Academic Advancement
Program), Advanced Placement, and AAP, the whole movement at UCLA that targeted
underrepresented groups. So when I got to UCLA in 1981, September 1981, comes
another important chapter, and I need to stress this.
0:35:33.2
CLINE:
We may wait on
this. I want to back up.
JACINTO:
Please do.
CLINE:
We’ll get to UCLA.
JACINTO:
Guide me on this journey.
CLINE:
Couple of things. One, your
erstwhile father. This is someone you met in San Francisco, but somehow he wound
up in Hawaii.
JACINTO:
Wound up on the big
island.
CLINE:
So how did that happen?
Maybe as part of that you could explain sort of a little bit what you know about
his background and the kind of person he is, because he’s clearly not Filipino.
What about him?
0:36:27.5
JACINTO:
Well, Morrie
Baker is a very—how should I say? Came from a Jewish family from Pennsylvania,
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, went to Penn(sylvania) State (University). He’s
sixty-nine years, so he’s twenty-one years older than me, too, as well. So he
just migrated his way westward after going to Penn State and said greener
pastures. You know, he had that very spirit.
So, ended up in San
Francisco, of course, which is a great place to be if you’re a single male, and
was married first. I remember his first wife. It was a very conservative Jewish
wedding. And we didn’t like her and she didn’t like us. We met her. That was his
first wife. When he first met us, he was married to Gail, and we didn’t get
along with her because she thought we were just too much rambunctious kids, so
he got rid of her. No, I don’t mean that lightly. But that marriage ended. So
Morrie was an entrepreneur. He got involved in real estate, so he didn’t work
for anybody but himself. Being a self-made made, he’s a businessman. He sold
pens. He did a bunch of different things like that. But somehow he actually met
my older brother first. He put an ad in the local paper. He lived like four
blocks away from us in the Richmond District, put an ad in the paper, said,
“Hey, I need some kids to help me clean my apartment up,” or whatever. So he met
my older brother, my older brother and his friends and a couple of his
age-mates. So Morrie knew Jaime and a couple of his friends. So he became
friends with them, and then my brother told him, “Hey, I’ve got this younger
brother in fourth grade.” They went 0-and-9. So we lost every game when we were
fourth grade. We were traumatized, Alex. We were the bottom. We were terrible.
We didn’t win a game in fourth grade. We were nine-year-old guys playing
basketball. So Morrie, because he was sports fan, coached us in fifth grade. So
in fifth grade, which is the first year that I met him as my basketball coach,
he turned us around from 0-and-9 to winning city championships, 11-and-0 in our
league.
0:38:08.9
CLINE:
Wow.
0:39:52.1
JACINTO:
From 0-and-9,
just 100 percent, just a 360- or 180-degree turnaround, Alex, was really pivotal
in terms of visioning what could happen if you apply yourself, if you believe in
yourself. So he nurtured us and he trained us well. So that really locked in our
relationship, too, with this guy who—and not only did he coach us well, but he
would nurture us. He would take us out to eat. He could feed a whole team at
like twenty bucks at McDonald’s back in the day, right? I had age-mates of other
Filipino guys. Three of us were pretty much pals. We would sit and ride in his
old Karmann Ghia. He would turn us on to the ways of single male. So we were
very inquisitive young boys, and he would help educate us as to the ways of
life. I’ll be very PC (politically correct) about that too. (laughs) But we
became of age hanging out with Morrie. So about him, he then got involved in
real estate and bought and sold some houses in the Panhandle and part of
Divisadero and part of San Francisco. He made a little bit of money. So in like
1978 or ’79 when I was, like, in eighth grade, he decides that he’s going to go
to the big island of Hawaii. I don’t know what drove him to Hawaii, but he says,
“I’m going to buy some land. I’m going to buy a piece of property in Hawaii.” So
he was in between marriages and he was seeing this one other second wife, so he
decides that he’s going to buy a plot of land on the big island of Hawaii on the
Kona coast on the west side, on the dry side, and he’s going to build a house. I
go, “Wow. What a trip.” I was still in high school.
So he left to do
that, but then he invited me to start coming and staying with him on the summers
and winters with them, on his dime. He’d bring me out there and just take care
of me and stuff like that. So my parents said, “Great,” because my parents
trusted—they knew him, Morrie, they knew he had his best interest, they knew
that he really loved me. So I started doing that.
CLINE:
That was my next question.
0:41:46.1
JACINTO:
Yes, and my
parents were cool with it, too, although my dad didn’t like it because Morrie
used to indulge us. He used to let us drive his cars. My dad didn’t want me
driving his cars and going out late and night, too, so there was a little bit of
tension there, but he had good relationships with my father because he was a
family friend. So those summers and winters, Alex, in Hawaii on the big island
just being exposed to a local culture really shaped my being today, and Morrie,
he just let it happen. He encouraged me. He just kept saying, “Hey, you could do
this. You could do that,” help me get a job on the Sunset Cruise, you know, so
start my lifelong profession of being an entertainer, to a certain degree. You
know what I mean? So I have nothing but love for him, and I still keep in
contact with him. He’s like a grandfather to my boys. He lives now in Scottsdale
(Arizona). So he, after getting married—his second marriage was in Hawaii, and
I’m eighteen, I’m his best man. We’re sitting under a chupa in Kona, Hawaii, on
the lanai of his half-finished house, you know. Then a year later, his son David
(Baker) is born on the big island of Hawaii, and I become his godfather, and I
learn how to sing the baruchas over his bris, the prayers over this guy’s bris,
phonetically. It was a trip, but that was sort of, you know, just very not
avant-garde, but very progressive. He said, “Joel, I’m going to teach you these
prayers, and these are the prayers that you do over this bris,” and a bris is a
circumcision, right, for a Jewish male. So I did that and became godfather to
his son.
Then he moved to Scottsdale a few years back, and we have
mutual friends that we connected on Facebook. It was incredible, too, after
thirty years, finding all these people like that too. So now Morrie’s in
Scottsdale and his son grows up and he has a couple of other marriages.
CLINE:
Oh, wow.
JACINTO:
So he really didn’t find
the right one, you know, and I always wanted for him the best in life because he
gave me the best in life. You know what I mean? So I’ve seen him, and the
current woman that he’s with, Marsha now, is the one for him, and I’m glad that
he found the woman. He had to find, I think, the right combination, so he had
like four, four marriages.
CLINE:
Wow. Amazing.
JACINTO:
But still to this day,
every conversation, every interaction would be one of nurturing, of
encouragement, of affirmation that you could do anything and you just dominate
play because that’s the person you are. So we talk about not inflating, but to
just nurturing and to driving and just encouraging. Alex, Morrie was that person
for me.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
So I’m not the person I
am today hadn’t it been for his just nurturing, just belief.
0:43:21.9
CLINE:
So what do you
know, if anything, about how he developed this particular quality that would
cause him to basically volunteer this sort of nurturing care for somebody who
was just a kid in the neighborhood?
0:45:22.5
JACINTO:
Right, right.
You know, that’s strange. I think that, one, because he really has a coaching
spirit, he has a nurturing spirit about him. Realize that he’s a contemporary
Jewish American whose father, Efrem Baker, was one of the founders of the ADL,
Anti-Defamation League, in Pennsylvania, so he comes from an experience of
struggle, of defense, and of passing on. I used to go to his contemporary
seders, so he turned me on to seders. He turned me on to a lot of Jewish things,
so the analogies of learning about Jewish tradition helped me sort of pave the
way to say, hey, but you have your own traditions, too, as well, and you could
learn those as well. So I was eating blintzes and chopped chicken liver, you
know, when I was a kid, and sticky buns and all these Jewish iconic things. By
just him exposing me—and he would tell me about his grandfather. He’d tell me
about the Holocaust and some of his relatives and that you must never forget and
all these things in his messages. I remember outside the Russian Embassy when
Anatol Sharansky was being incarcerated, and he wanted him to be free, and he
would bring me to these rallies and say, “Joel, you know, you need to know
what’s going on.” So from his own orientation of being a Jewish American,
finding out about his roots and wanting to pass them down—I mean, I was eighteen
when his son was born, so I’m really his firstborn. He adopted me sort of
spiritually. So he just sort of did this dump to me to say, “Joel, you’ve got to
do this. You’ve got to understand this things about that.” His frame, of course,
was the Jewish tradition, but he encouraged me to figure out everything else. He
encouraged me to go to Hawaii, all these things as well.
So in looking
back—and as we’re talking, I’m peeling back the layers to understand, because I
don’t do this often, Alex, but I’m connecting pretty quickly with the rationales
and some of the things and try to put things together, too, as well. So I’m
having a good time in connecting the dots about how did this get back, because
(unclear) I say, “Oh, Morrie, he’s great. He liked me and he loved me and raised
me,” but when you ask me these questions about that, what in his background did
make him want to nurture you like that? So his own orientation now of wanting to
just pass on, to be progressive, that he sees a spark, he sees something in me
that, unlike the age sets around, he gravitates towards me. So he dumps a lot of
focus on me, as well as attention, and that has been very apparent in my life,
too, as well. So by Morrie paying attention to me a lot, too, I realized, damn,
I says, “Morrie really likes me. I must have to do something to keep that up,
and I have to live up to his expectations.” It wasn’t any pressure, because it
was fun. He didn’t like pressuring me at all to do anything like that, but he
just was really out there too. So the continuing chapter of Morrie Baker
continues.
0:47:08.3
CLINE:
It’s unusual. I
was going to say, too, that here you are, you’re growing up in San Francisco.
You said you were in a very sort of multicultural middle-class neighborhood, not
growing up, it sounds like, with a strong sense of your own cultural roots, but
then you have this trip. When you’re ten years old, you go to the Philippines,
and it sounded like around the same time you also had your first trip to Hawaii.
JACINTO:
No, a few years later. So
Philippines at ten, and then the Hawaii experience happened a few years later,
about six or seven, when Morrie turned me on to that, too, as well. So that was
a little different. Sort of along those lines—and you’re right that the
traditional expressive culture in the Philippines, as traditional and folk arts
are known to be, was not really that present in my family. It was more the
implicit cultural context of we’re a Filipino family. My parents spoke Tagalog.
They didn’t teach us—the didn’t pass on the language to us.
CLINE:
Okay, this was one of my
questions.
JACINTO:
They did not, because
whatever that colonial mentality says, you can’t teach your kids Tagalog or
Filipino, because you want them to succeed—
CLINE:
In America, yes.
0:49:15.3
JACINTO:
In America. So
very much vestiges of the colonial mentality. The food, the familiar
relationships, that was very Filipino. And how do you deconstruct and describe
that idea of Filipino? You have to realize that my parents were contemporary
urban Filipinos who came from middle to higher middle-class families who studied
in public universities, in private universities in the Philippines, so they were
urban. They weren’t from the country. They weren’t country folk. They weren’t
farmers. They weren’t from cultural communities sometimes that live more
traditional lives, you know. I mean, so they were pretty much part of the 90
percent that are Catholic urban Filipinos, okay. So we have to qualify what that
means by “Filipino.” So in one aspect we were very Filipino in our lives, and in
another way we were the product of the layers of colonial mentality, where we
didn’t sing Filipino songs so much. The fact that my mom worked in the
Philippine Consulate means we did more Filipino things.
But I remember my
first exposure to Philippine dance and Philippine culture was probably watching
a performance of this group in San Francisco called Bagong Diwa, new soul or new
spirit. It was an avant-garde Filipino dance troupe that used the traditional
idiom to get with contemporary dance. It was so strange because it was on TV on
Saturday one time when nothing Filipino was on TV, you know what I mean, so my
parents made a big thing about it, and I didn’t care about it and I didn’t even
watch it. But the fact that I heard that there was something Filipino on the TV,
I was like, “Whoa, that’s weird. That’s something Filipino.” But I didn’t get
into Filipino dance till I was a senior in high school and learning a dance for
the Filipino Student Club, okay. That was my first exposure to sort of a
Filipino dance thing, although my sister would do Tinikling as part of her
talent competition early on in grammar school. I didn’t do it till I was in high
school. So the Filipino experience happens when I was ten, and then progresses a
little bit more and really blossoms in college in 1981. Then Hawaii experience
happens when I was later in life when I was like sixteen or seventeen, and then
progresses. So that’s how that went on, too, as well.
CLINE:
But I’m just thinking, for
example, the Philippines or Hawaii in terms of just the feel of it, the climate,
the look of it, everything is so not San Francisco. What was this like for you
just as a visceral-like experience?
0:51:31.9
JACINTO:
Yes, that’s a
great question. Viscerally and sort of in your insides—well, the Philippines was
more like a sea of humanity. The proximity of the closeness of everybody in
Southeast Asia, about personal space and about cousins and about that intimacy
really was new for me. I didn’t think it was bad, it was just like, wow, my
cousins, they hang onto me, they put their arms around me like that, and I dug
it. I dug it. As a ten-year-old, I really dug it, because I’m the youngest. I’m
very touchy-feely as being the youngest, you know, and being like that.
Then the climate and everything like that, I said, wow, I says, like a
hot place. I’d never been any tropical place like the Philippines, and when
you’re ten, the heat doesn’t bother you. You know what I mean? You can hang. But
the visceral, like this is where my mom and dad are from, this is who we are,
was really just a rush. I didn’t go back to the Philippines till I was
twenty-one, so eleven years passed since I went as a child to when I went as an
adult when I turned twenty-one, Alex. Hawaii seemed much more familiar, you
know. I think Hawaii drew me because of this issue of not only did Morrie invite
me at a time in my life where I was an adolescent teenager, and so therefore it
was really the girls, it was really just the mystique of being in Hawaii, and
the culture was really exciting to be there. It was very much sort of like the
Philippines, in a way, where people are very friendly. There’s a very
traditional culture there, you know what I mean, and I seemed to fit in in
Hawaii, you know, because in Hawaii everybody’s sort of local. You don’t get
pegged as Japanese, Chinese, Korean. You’re kama’aina. You’re local, and when
you’re local, that means you’re emic. If you’re haole or you’re outside, that
means you’re etic, you’re from the outside looking in. So I really developed
this issue of am I in the know or am I in the out. So I always want to be in the
know wherever I’m at, because I want to connect, and so that’s where sort of the
Hawaii thing went, yes.
0:53:23.3
CLINE:
Your family is
coming from a Catholic background. How much was that part of your family culture
and how religious was your family?
0:53:50.1
JACINTO:
Yes, pretty much
church every Sunday, and that was a family thing. I was an altar boy. As a kid,
I don’t know how, but young kids, young boys, it’s prestigious to be an altar
boy because you get this training and you get to participate in these rituals of
religious experience, but you’ve got to get up early. But I think I did that for
a couple years.
And growing up in San Francisco in that, there were
problems in the Catholic church in terms of the way they treated young male
boys. I saw it around and got impacted by it fringely in terms of growing up,
and that didn’t turn me off, but I just—because you kind of suppress it. You
weren’t really damaged by it, but it’s just like you go back to those things, I
said, you know, that’s a tough shot, that’s a tough situation. As an adult, you
hear all the things, the problems in the Catholic Church with priests and
everything like that, and abuse, and that shouldn’t be the basis of religion.
But I’ve remained a Catholic, Christian, being much more spiritual, I think, as
you get older. I didn’t change religion or anything like that. So my parents
really—prayer was very important part, too, although we didn’t pray together as
a family, although in the Philippines when we visited, every five o’clock every
day, no matter where we were, whoever’s in the house, we would pray the rosary.
0:54:49.8
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Yes, every day, Alex. So
that’s like a call to prayer. That was only one time. That’s not five times, but
that was a ritual that a family time that I experienced in the Philippines that
really reinforced another important ideology of family, of prayer, of devout
prayer, devotional, not fanatical, but pretty devotional.
CLINE:
Wow. How would you
characterize your religious context in relation to some of the more traditional
cultural things you were encountering, particularly when you get to Hawaii,
where for maybe lack of a better word, it can be a very sensual culture, very
different kind of context and not so controlled, especially at an age when
there’s a lot of big feelings coming up?
JACINTO:
Oh, yes. No, I think it
was very shaping on me. It was very positive because in the end, you see
everything as sort of ritual. There’s all these things that you do, all these,
you know, rites and stuff like that. I saw the Mass as a series of all these
different actions that people did, all these prayers, all these chants, right.
CLINE:
You’re learning about the
Jewish thing on top of that.
0:57:23.9
JACINTO:
Right, that,
too, so you have all those experiences, all that history. You mix that together
now with Hawaii and kahiko hula, and kahiko was what I learned first, ancient
hula, where either using the pahu drum or the ipu heke, the double-headed gourd.
But they’re saying these chants. For me, it was familiar because it was like,
wow, this is the way the Hawaiians do their prayer and their rites and their
rituals. I saw it as complementary. I just saw it as another outlet, but I was
familiar already with this idea of ritual, you know. Of course, I didn’t even
identify it as ritual back then, but I was used to seeing people do these
things, so it was cool for me. I embraced it. I really just became in love with
the movement, the manifestation of hula and dance to illustrate what the spoken
word is saying. How wonderful is that? It’s just like basically you’re learning,
you’re doing these songs about nature, about deities, and you are playing them
out. You’re using your body as sort of to amplify them, if you will.
So
then I became aware that there was a language base to Hawaiian culture and that
for other Pacific Islander groups there’s no dance if you’re not going to chant
as well. There are some, like Samoan, different types of dancing and other
Pacific Islander dance that’s dance-based and not oral-based, but by and large,
Hawaiian dance, hula, whether it’s kahiko or auana or modern hula, is based on
the mele or the oli. It’s based on the song. So I learned about all these
things. So as I’m looking back, it’s like there’s a Filipino dessert called halo
halo. Halo halo means “mix mix.” You probably have had variations over Southeast
Asia, where basically you have azuki beans, you have garbanzo beans, everything
that’s sweet, and jackfruit and coconut and sweet things and nuts and all kinds
of stuff together with grated ice and coconut milk and stuff. So it’s all this
stuff put together, all this stuff that’s thrown in. Halo halo means mix mix.
But it’s a dessert, and it’s intended as an afternoon snack. I’m looking back
now at my life and you’re helping me put together all these things, all these
ingredients put in to making something that was uniquely Filipino, which is not
pure. We have to realize that our essence as Filipinos is one of layers. We’re
not like Chinese. We’re not like Japanese. We weren’t insular. You know what I
mean? So we don’t have a pure Southeast Asian culture or pure Asian culture, and
I think that that really just created who we are, not only the opportunities and
the challenges as we are being a halo halo type of culture, you know, East and
West and all that stuff. I mean, there’s all these stereotypes, right? The
Filipinos are Southeast Asians, so they’ve spent three hundred years in a
commune and fifty years in Hollywood. That’s pretty kitschy, but, you know,
that’s—
CLINE:
Yes, it’s really almost
like an archetypal colonial model, you know.
JACINTO:
Yes, you’re right.
0:59:26.3
CLINE:
You can’t do
anything about it. That’s your history.
JACINTO:
What we can do is
understand it and embrace it and to work with it. What I find now in the
community, sometimes we work against ourselves, because we have to work with our
assets, you know, whether it’s self-hatred or being colonial or whatever. Deal
with it. Utilize what our abilities are. So that sensibility, that framework of
asset-based management as opposed to self-hatred, you know, that’s why I think
our organization (SIPA, Search to Involve Pilipino Americans) has been pretty
successful. So I use that as an analogy that really helps me hone in on my
background experience of having all this stuff, Jewish American, Hawaiian, stuff
like that, and even in our performances in Kayamanan Ng Lahi, there are those
elements that are very much tangible in our approach to folk and traditional
culture. We’ll get into that later on, but more questions.
1:01:01.7
CLINE:
Growing up in San
Francisco, what sorts of experience may you have had—or maybe you didn’t—related
to your ethnic identity? Two things. There’s always the potential for racial
discrimination, which maybe in your multicultural neighborhood in a city that
was so heavily populated by Chinese people was not maybe a big issue, but maybe
it was, and the other side of that being what was your sense of what people in
your neighborhood knew about or what their idea was of what it was to be
Filipino?
JACINTO:
Yes, good questions, good
questions. On the first level, you know, I didn’t experience racial
discrimination growing up in San Francisco. You know, it’s pretty hard to
experience racial discrimination in such a progressive place. But I didn’t
mention this issue of appearance, of the superficiality, and I was—I’ll try to
encapsulate. I didn’t think I was inferior to other Filipinos, but I was
different because I didn’t look—and people would always reinforce that in me. So
that issue, again, of not looking physically like archetypical Filipino, you
know, it played in me. That’s what sort of drove me. It’s like, but I want to
identify. I want you to recognize me for who I believe I am. You know what I
mean?
CLINE:
Yes.
JACINTO:
So, therefore it drove me
to—because how do I do that? You know, I can’t look any different like that,
too, as well, so I was searching for ways, because again, it made me feel
somewhat incomplete not to be, you know—oh, Joel, he’s Filipino. You know what I
mean? I was always very happy when people identified me as Filipino, and I would
always be like, “No, I’m not Chinese,” you know what I mean, when they would
mistake me for, even though I am ethnically, but it’s like culturally, you know,
culturally, my identity, my self-identity. So I never had that. It was sort of a
lesser, more subtle, more dynamic issue of where does my own ethnic community—in
high school, even though I was part of the Phil Am Club, the Filipino Student
Club, too, as well, they didn’t think I was Filipino, too, as well, and even I’m
eighteen, I have a Filipino girlfriend. I did have a Filipino girlfriend when I
was about a junior in high school. They still didn’t think I was Filipino, too,
so again it’s like, wow, you know. It’s like you even join the Filipino club and
things and it’s not really working.
1:02:57.8
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
The second question you
asked about in terms of—
CLINE:
What people’s sense of what
Filipino (unclear).
JACINTO:
Right, right, right,
right, right. In my neighborhood there were old families. They weren’t really so
much recent, recent immigrants. So the Filipino community that we dealt with was
pretty much the older families that had been around a while, and people’s
perception of us, too, was—I don’t think it was negative. I think that we were
very much part of the fabric of the local neighborhood, so they didn’t look at
us so much as foreigners, because we came at the same time as them. You know
what I mean? It was very diverse. So when you’re all around in the mix, you
know, there’s no hierarchy, pretty much, of, like, we came and now you’re more
recent, not like the Filipino Americans who had been here generations and then
the more recent immigrants coming from the Philippines. There’s very much that
division of culture and of language and everything like that, too, as well. We
blended in pretty much. Filipinos, I think, were always, even back then, looked
at as hardworking families, you know, Catholic families, pretty stereotypical,
although back in the days we had sort of barcada or gang issues around there
related to the—there were prominent Chinese gangs in around that area in the
sixties, and Filipinos had their counterparts as well. So that was another
element of the community that we would deal with, and later on in life I would
deal with them at SIPA where I worked. So again, all these things came back to
affect me about addressing these issues, about, you know, those types of
behaviors and the reasons why they come about. So I, in general, think that my
whole experience wasn’t so much negative, you know. It was multicultural.
1:04:53.5
CLINE:
Not much conflict.
JACINTO:
Yes, not much conflict.
I’m not going to put myself out as like I had a hard life. (laughs)
CLINE:
You said you, really more
than anything, wanted to be identified as what you were, Filipino, but how much,
if at all, were there times when you really wanted to perhaps identify with the
dominant culture, which, of course, was Caucasian and European Americans?
JACINTO:
Never.
CLINE:
Never. Wow.
1:06:13.9
JACINTO:
I never tripped
on that, Alex. I was always proud of who I—you know. Yes, I just never wanted to
be sort of—I never questioned—I don’t think ever sort of questioned—I knew who I
was. I knew where I came from. I knew I was Filipino. I was proud to be
Filipino, so I never lamented. I never wanted to go mainstream, per se,
identified a lot with being local from Hawaii, so there was issues about how do
I identify. Do I identify as being from the mainland or do I identify as being a
local from Hawaii, you know? Even though I had very strong, I tend to calibrate
myself to say I’m a mainland boy who’s very much shaped by my experiences in
Hawaii. So even to this day, when I interact with people from Hawaii, there’s a
mindset that comes in that’s very local, that’s very kama’aina, that’s very
either Pidgin-based linguistically, so there’s a sense of familiarity.
(1:06:13.9)
So I tend to be a cultural chameleon because I’m a cultural
broker. So if all these things are inside, when I go into a store and there’s
someone Hispanic, Latino, immediately I’m speaking Spanish to them because I
want to make connections, right, immediately, immediately. It’s like second
nature to me. If I’m dealing in the corporate world, obviously, you know, you
come out, then you interface as a representative. So all these things, and I’m
always wanting to make connections with people. My wife knows this about me too
well, you know, and that’s because that’s my job, my profession, in a way, not
only for SIPA, but for Kayamanan and being the program director and being the
emcee, not the performer; emcee. So that’s the element now where I’m the
cultural broker. I’m the facilitator. I’m the front person for my folk arts
organization, and it’s very important that we have that level of engagement as
opposed to, okay, we’re going to dance for you, you’re going to say, “Nice,”
clap, clap, clap. You know what I mean? I want people to be transformed. I want
them to know us. I want them to know themselves at the end of fifteen, twenty
minutes, so I look at every opportunity, every performance, no matter how small
or short it is, Alex, to be transformative not only for the audience, but for my
performers as well, because it’s never the same thing. You know what I mean?
(1:07:38.4) So, yeah, I never had problems, you know, sort of wanting to be
mainstream, because we are mainstream. Like, hey, look at where we are. This is
normality. I never grew up in a dominant culture where we were the minorities
and everybody else is out there. I never really saw it like that till I got to
UCLA, and then there’s much more diversity and a bigger pond. So that whole
chapter of UCLA later on is really, really significant for me.
CLINE:
I think that’ll be our next
session. But you didn’t grow up seeing, for example, Filipinos on TV every
night.
JACINTO:
No.
CLINE:
You didn’t hear their songs
being played on the Top 40 radio.
JACINTO:
Not commercially. For
families and stuff, once in a while we’d have the Santa Cruz and the procession
that you do, the Filipino club in the parish, usually a Filipino rosary group,
right, religious-based group, that would do these things. So we’d get up there
and I remember holding, you know, one of the poles to walk around, and I didn’t
know anything about it. It was just, again, more ritual, you know. (unclear). In
the family, you know, we had a couple of famous singers who was a distant
relative. His name was Jumidas Manturan (phonetic). He was like the Andy
Williams or the Perry Como of the Philippines in the sixties. He was a distant
relative. He would come to sing once in a while at our family gatherings, and
everybody would gather and just listen and croon, but he’d be singing these
Filipino songs. So again, linguistically I didn’t grow up with knowing the
language, but hearing here and there. It was very sparsely, wasn’t very, very
much entrenched. You know what I mean? And commercially, of course not. I don’t
remember hearing it, other than that one thing, and till you get to, like, high
school, and then, you know, you create your own environment now. There’s a
Filipino Student Club there, and yet what were we doing in the Filipino Student
Club, is basically girls that were doing the drill team, right, and guys that
were doing junior ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Program).
CLINE:
Oh, golly. (1:09:38.2)
JACINTO:
Those were the people
that really comprised the Filipino Student Club, and then we had these cultural
nights, you know, so therefore then you start to dance a little bit. So, very
sporadic, very, very sporadic, but there were punctuations, okay, because you
don’t see them all the time, so when it does happen, it’s like, ah! You know
what I mean. It piques these things’ interest in you, so I think they were very
important, nonetheless, although sporadic.
CLINE:
But related to the thing
like TV and radio and all that stuff, here you are, you’re in the United States,
you’re in a big, very, very diverse cosmopolitan city, urban environment. You
mentioned, for example, Michael Jackson and Jim Morrison. What was the impact of
popular culture on you growing up?
JACINTO:
Oh, very, very huge,
because I had older brothers and sisters that would listen to the music, and I
would listen to their music. I grew up on Earth, Wind and Fire. I grew up on
Stevie Wonder. I grew up on Santana. I even grew up on Leonard Cohen.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
For a couple years my
brother was into Leonard Cohen. We used to share the same room. He was maybe in
late high school and I was in grammar school, but I would remember going to
sleep and trying to sleep with this droning voice, (singing) “Suzanne takes you
down,” and as a kid, it’s like, oh, man, that’s—right? And you need a mature
mind to get into that music. It didn’t depress me, it just, like, got me into,
like, this funk, because it was very melancholy music. (laughs) So I had a very
diverse group, Bread and all kinds of, you know, pop, popular, Motown and
everything like that, because they used to buy all these—the Carpenters and all
the things, Alex. (1:11:19.1) So I had a very eclectic pop background and really
didn’t get into ethnic music or cultural music till I got involved—till my
brother-in-law, Arnie, who’s from Hawaii, gave me this album by the Brothers
Cazimero, and they are a very famous duo. It’s such a blessing, because through
some shape or form and knowing their family here in L.A., I had become a
consultant to Robert Cazimero and his halau. So Robert and Roland are, like, the
duo. They were there at the beginning, the renaissance of Hawaiian music in the
seventies, along with the Peter Moon Band and the Sunday Manoa. So they provided
the music that a generation of hula dancers danced to, because their music is so
iconic and it represented not the Don Ho—and not that he was bad, (unclear)
“Tiny Bubbles,” but it was the Hawaiian renaissance, so that. Arnie gave me this
album called Ho’Ala. Ho’Ala is the Hawaiian verb meaning “to awaken,” and it was
a very important album that came out in 1981. He said, “Joel, (unclear).” It was
an LP, and I looked at the liner notes and I looked at all the words and
everything like that and I said, “Wow,” and I listened to that thing (unclear)
every day.
CLINE:
Wow. (1:12:34.8)
JACINTO:
Every day for months till
before they prepared me for one of my first post-secondary trips to Hawaii. So
the summer of ’81 was really, really important for me, summer ’81. From July on
to December ’81, my life was written. (laughs) We could talk about that, but he
gave me this, and then so I got really turned on to Hawaiian music. To this day,
I am a connoisseur of Hawaiian music because I understand the language, I
understand the mele, I know the artists. Being a hula dancer, you know, you
appreciate music at a different level like that, too, so that was a very
important—
CLINE:
Wow. Interesting.
JACINTO:
—ho’ala, or awakening,
that it had. So it was very, very fortuitous.
CLINE:
Before we leave your youth,
you mentioned sports. You mentioned basketball, which I’m going to come back to
in my second question here, but what, if anything, in school or in your other
life activities were you showing an interest in as you were growing up in San
Francisco? Any subjects that you were interested in? What’s your picture of what
your interests were that may or may not have ultimately related to what you
wound up doing?
JACINTO:
Good question. You know,
I was a pretty good student till I got to Lowell High School, and Riordan High
School, where I spent two years, I was pretty straight As, you know. I played
freshman and JV (junior varsity) basketball, so again, basketball was my arena.
CLINE:
Okay, well, this walks
right into my question. Why basketball? I mean, for one thing, you’re not a tall
guy. There are a lot of other sports out there. What was it that (unclear)?
(1:14:25.6)
JACINTO:
Great question, Alex. One
is accessibility, you know. Basketball’s accessible. It’s not like tennis. It’s
not like baseball. You can play basketball anywhere and everywhere. We lived
right across the street from a public school where I went to grammar school for
a couple years.
CLINE:
What was the name of the
school?
JACINTO:
It was named George
Peabody (Elementary School) grammar school right on Sixth Avenue between Clement
and California (Street). So you walk over there for hours and you just shoot
baskets. Accessibility was an important determinant. Then I would say I got
hooked to not only the physical aspect of, you know, the competition aspect of
it, but by the dynamics of a team, where what is your role on the team, and more
it really helped me define that, again, going from a 0-and-9 to 11-and-0, where
(unclear) said, “Joel, you’re going to lead this team.” So obviously he saw in
me physical capacity at that age to play well, you know, to go, but he just kept
nurturing, you know, says, “Here’s what you’ve got to do,” and encouraging me.
So that almost manifests itself in your behavior, you know, and has such an
impact on you. So I excelled in basketball in terms of, you know, relative to my
height and my skills in grammar school, and then I play all the way to varsity
basketball at high school at Lowell.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
So through the basketball
experience, you learn about teamwork, you learn about encouragement, so I was
always known as the most inspirational player, the MVP or the inspirational
player, because it’s not so much just what you do and how good of a player you
are, but how good you make your teammates be as well. So I started to develop
that aspect of my persona to say, hey, I’ve got to encourage others. You’ve got
to get people pumped up. You’ve got to be a leader out there as well instead of
just doing it yourself. (1:16:30.3) So that became very, very important. So I
just think that because of the accessibility and because there were more
opportunities—I used to go to these basketball camps, and I did it all the
time—that was really my number-one sport. I only played, like, a year of
softball at one time, and then in high school I ran track. You know, I’ve got
short legs. I was a sprinter, but it was just really tough for me, too, so I
just stuck with basketball throughout my whole life till I got (unclear), played
intramurals at UCLA, and still pickup-wise, that was still your persona. If you
could play basketball, that was your social arena. As a male, how could you
compete? Did you have skill or not (unclear)? So it became a very important
field of performance, if you will, right, performing, performing sports, putting
yourself out there, and how you perform, how you compete was very much a
performance for me, too, as well, so still to this day, yes.
CLINE:
How do you think that
Morrie Baker learned about basketball?
JACINTO:
I think he was a big
sports fan, you know, at Penn State, and he used to have season tickets at the
(Golden State) Warriors, you know, in the glory years when Rick Barry and Phil
Smith—when we won the NBA championships in 1975, so he was that type that could
go into the arena and finagle his way down to center court. He just had that
thing, like he just—you know, “I’m going to find some way of just talking my way
down there.” So he used to get us these opportunities where we would be a little
team that would play for, like, ten minutes at intermission, the full court at
the Oakland Coliseum.
CLINE:
Wow. (1:18:11.3)
JACINTO:
So, you know, he would
give us those opportunities. Some of his friends were people on the Warriors
squad, Clifford Ray, you know, and he’d have these parties and (unclear), “Oh,
my god, Morrie’s friends with him.” So he turned us on to the fact that you
could be friends with anybody. You could talk to anybody. You just have to have
no shame. You just have to go for it. You just have to go for it and you have to
develop your confidence. So the idea of confidence and not so much charisma, but
just confidence and engagement, is really what Morrie helped me to identify and
understand like that, too, you know. He was always a sport fan, and still to
this day, he’s a great sports mind, and he continued coaching, you know, for a
few years back, but he just has that persona about him. You’ll meet him one of
these days. I have no doubt you’ll meet him. He comes (unclear) once in a while.
CLINE:
We’re probably drawing near
the end of our session today, but I wanted to ask you before we leave this
period in your life, this came up a little bit in connection with the whole
Hawaii experience in this time of your life, but things start to change when,
you know, the hormones hit and life starts to look and feel very different. You
mentioned at one point that you had a Filipino girlfriend, I think you said when
you were eighteen or something. (1:19:37.9)
JACINTO:
Seventeen.
CLINE:
Seventeen, okay. Growing up
in the diverse neighborhood of San Francisco, how did that work for you? How did
that manifest as you started to show an interest in the opposite sex?
JACINTO:
Actually, I moved away
from that neighborhood when I was twelve, and then moved over to another part of
San Francisco called the Balboa Terrace. It wasn’t as diverse. It was more upper
middle-class, just outside of St. Francis Woods, which is a very exclusive
neighborhood. We didn’t live in the woods. We lived off of Ocean Avenue, Alex.
So I was twelve, so I finished my eighth grade, and then high school was when—it
was about when you’re, like, a sophomore that we started to try to date and
everything like that. So we’d have to go to these other girls’ schools and
everything, and you have your age sets, so it was very awkward for me because
you don’t have your game yet, you know. So it was really sort of—for me, it was
just sort of trying to develop relationships with other females. I had
girlfriends from grammar school, you know, but then now you leave that sort of
adolescence and now you’re into more of your teens. So there was a couple years
where I was just trying to find myself, you know, and I had girlfriends, in a
way, and then my first formal Filipino girlfriend when I was seventeen. We were
together for about a year and a half before I graduated, and, you know,
boyfriend-girlfriend, was pretty steady at that time, too, even though I was
involved in everything else like that too. (1:21:17.6) But I think in terms of
what you’re alluding to, or what I captured is I really got fixated on the power
of dance to express and to receive, and I saw it in play in these shows, in
these performances in Hawaii where they’re very, very powerful, and I always
latched on. I always enjoyed watching the males dance more than the females
because the males, for me, had some sort of power and some sort of attraction,
that it was a good male dancer, to me, it could stump any female dancer because
of that energy of that mana that was coming forth. I looked at these guys dance,
these Polynesian, these Pacific Islander guys, dancing on these performances. I
want to be like them, because there was power of attraction. And attraction,
pure attraction, you gravitate to people. Doesn’t matter what your orientation
is. It’s like, wow, you gravitate to people who move well, and there’s this
issue of masculine grace that, for me, is just incredible. So that really drove
me to say I want to do that because I want to be able to express myself and I
want to attract females with that type of persona, and it did, it did pretty
much work that way. You know, I got a chance to work on one of those Sunset
Cruises. You really get notoriety from being a good male dancer. I’m not going
to toot my horn, but for hula, being a non-Hawaiian, that I accomplished a
pretty good level of accomplishment and artistry in being a hula dancer,
because, I think, of my ability to be emic, emic not only in cultural knowledge,
but emic in your body. So at UCLA I became a kinesiologist, so kinesiology
helped me to understand the vernacular, the vocabulary of movement, Alex, and
how through movement, you could speak. You could speak with an accent or you
could speak very fluently. (1:23:21.3) (Ricardo D.) Rick Trimillos, the
excellent ethnomusicologist, calls the Filipino polykinetic, and I think through
our genetic makeup and everything else, we are that very much. So if you look at
the populations of hula halau, or hula schools, throughout Hawaii, Pacific
Islander, Polynesian dance companies throughout California and the mainland,
heavily populated by Filipinos. Amy Stillman from University of Michigan had
been doing studies on sort of the issue of Filipino participation in Pacific
Islander, Native Hawaiian activities, but I think because we are polykinetic, we
have it in our genetic makeup, that Filipinos are able to adapt, to be flexible
in that. So I became aware of the power of movement and the intricacies of
movement, of how you move, what type of style, what type of language, type of
accent, whether it was a very etic, very outsider movement, just learning the
movements, and you could tell right away, or were you versed, were you just very
much in the culture.
CLINE:
Fully absorbed.
JACINTO:
Yes, yes, were you fluent
in the movement vocabulary, to coin the term. So that’s really what’s driven me,
because if you look at Philippine dance, you look at all our repertoire, we have
dozens and dozens of cultural communities that have their own movement
vocabularies, so the parallel is that being a Filipino dancer is like being a
Polynesian dancer. You do dances of Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand,
and in the Philippines, very parallel, you do dances of the north. You do dances
of Maricla (phonetic). You do very tribal dances, very communal dances, and
anything in between, so it was very parallel.
CLINE:
Not to mention Spanish.
(1:25:06.9)
JACINTO:
Oh, yes. So you have a
different carriage, you have a different vocabulary. It’s a Western movement,
but very Filipino, but still Western-based. So all those things helped me to
understand that I could use dance to attract, to express, to attract, to build,
to do all kinds of things that I think were identified as positive in my life.
CLINE:
Wow. Did you find that you
were attracted to lots of different types of women, or was it still mostly—
JACINTO:
Polynesian women,
Filipina. I always liked—I was attracted to Filipina women, and the love of my
life is archetypical, you know, (unclear). She’s says, “I look like everybody.”
I said, “But you’re mine.” So I (unclear), but Ave and I met when we were
eighteen, when we were freshman at UCLA, and we met, it was like love at first
sight, Alex, and god is good. The universe is good, because he brought us
together at an early age, and we’ve been together for thirty years. Thirty years
we’ve known each other, too. But I always had that attraction to indigenous,
indigenous women in terms of who looked very Hawaiian or looked very Filipina
and looked pretty in terms of—not that all indigenous women are not pretty, but
had that flair, because it always complemented me. I’m not looking pure. I’m not
looking—you know what I mean? So it was complementary to me.
CLINE:
Interesting. Yes, wow. So
you mentioned that you moved neighborhoods in San Francisco. (1:26:44.9)
JACINTO:
Yes, pretty traumatic.
CLINE:
Yes, that’s kind of what I
was wondering.
JACINTO:
I had to take the bus to
finish grammar school. That was only two years, and then high school was right
down the block from me, and so I took the (unclear), but just the whole change
when you’re twelve is kind of tough. You know what I mean? So that tweaked me a
little bit, too, but then, you know, my new neighborhood, I made new friends and
stuff like that. It was a nicer neighborhood per se, and we liked it that way,
and the house was nicer, but I just didn’t have so much a—I didn’t play outside
all the time when I was, like, in—we didn’t have a playground so close. I had a
friend in the background and became good friends with him right across the
alley, and we used to hang out for hours. So it was just more of the maturation.
You know, my junior high, my first three years of high school were pretty
uneventful. Two were at a Catholic high school called Riordan. It was run by the
Marianists, so they run University of Chaminade out in Hawaii. So I did two
years of that, and because I wanted to play basketball, I wanted to do sports, I
transferred to Lowell High School, which had a more progressive basketball
program that featured a game that was more towards smaller guys. The coach at
that time, the varsity coach, was Stan Stewart, who I used to go to his
basketball camp in Marin every year when I was growing up, too, as well. Other
than that, you know, my dad was happy because then he didn’t have to pay for my
Catholic education. So I did eight years of grammar school, two years of high
school, and then I finished up two years at a public high school called Lowell.
You know, those last couple years of high school were important because, again,
identity formation of more this exposure to Hawaii now when I was a junior,
involvement in dance. So the last two years of my high school really set the
tone for now what I was going to do in my collegiate career, which is very, you
know, foundation-building for the rest of my life, too, as well.
CLINE:
You moved and it was a
nicer house, but ultimately was an emptier house as well. What was that like for
you? (1:29:01.7)
JACINTO:
You know, just me and my
dad, okay, so family life transitioned because my mom had been now traveling
because she got reassigned, so she was gone. So my high school years, my father
was pretty lonely, you know, and so there were dynamics between my parents that
we had to deal with in terms of her not being around and just being me and my
dad and my eldest sister, the one I used to fight a lot more with at that time.
My brother was gone and my elder sister was gone, too, because they were out of
the house, too, as well, so that was a very kind of transitional time from about
1975 to 1981. I only spent six years in that house, and then when I was
eighteen, I left, and I never really came back to San Francisco. I was a
resident. So the last six years we were in this period where my parents were—it
was tough on their marriage because my mom was traveling, and the activity of
adolescence and teenage-ism was kind of—so that kind of—you know, it helped me
reinforce that I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted
to just get away, so therefore, I didn’t want to stay local. I didn’t want to
stay local. I didn’t want to stay in San Francisco and live at home, so I think
that’s one of the reasons why, Alex, thinking back—and thank you for just
uncovering these gems of rationale about how my life worked out the way it did.
I wanted to get away, so said, “Let me try UCLA,” you know, in terms of what I
saw in the past. It was written in the cards, because if I didn’t go to UCLA, I
would have end up at (San Francisco) City College, community college of San
Francisco, or maybe even San Francisco State, and had a much tremendously
different life, because I would have stayed local. I think going away from home
for me was the most important thing of my experience.
CLINE:
I think we’ll pick up from
that for our next session. Does that work for you? (1:30:56.6)
JACINTO:
Yes, yes, yes.
CLINE:
Okay, we’ll start with your
arrival at UCLA and this new chapter in your life.
JACINTO:
September of ’81, right,
right.
CLINE:
Okay?
JACINTO:
Thank you.
CLINE:
Thank you.
JACINTO:
Thank you, Alex. Great.
You’re excellent about sort of helping elicit these things, and I’m walking down
through memory lane, so there’s a lot of emotions that are running through me in
terms of remembering. So it’s cathartic, but it’s also stimulating in realizing
that all these things happened. So I really appreciate the interesting
opportunity to do that, too, you know. I really appreciate being here with all
of these things. (End of July 7, 2011 interview)
CLINE:
My biggest challenge,
knowing the date. (laughter) Today is July 20th, 2011. This is Alex
CLINE:
I’m here at my home in
Culver City (California) interviewing Joel
0:00:22.0
JACINTO:
It is our second
session. Good morning.
JACINTO:
Morning, Alex.
CLINE:
Nice to see you again.
JACINTO:
Thank you for having me
here again too.
CLINE:
We’re going to pick up
where we left off last time, but I’m going to ask you a couple of follow-up
questions to begin, one being you talked quite a bit about your experience going
to Hawaii and connecting with your godfather and basketball coach, (Morris)
Morrie Baker, and I wanted to ask you, once you were over there, you clearly
were captivated, but I wondered once you—well, it’s sort of a twofold question.
What specifically, if anything, made you decide to actually study hula, and then
how did you go about finding a way to do that? In other words, who was your
teacher or teachers?
0:02:11.5
JACINTO:
Good question
too. Well, the exposure to being in Hawaii came from Morrie Baker on the big
island of Hawaii on the Kona side, on the dry side, and I was about seventeen at
the time. I was a junior in high school and spent the summer with Morrie. So he
brought me over there and we went on—other than the general, you know,
captivation you mentioned about with Hawaiian culture, we went on a Sunset
Cruise. Sunset Cruise was called the Captain Bean’s Royal Polynesian Cruise, and
it was a very famous tourist type of two-hour, quote, unquote, “booze cruise,”
if you will, where happiness happens in two hours out of the (Kailua) Kona Pier.
Kailua Kona Pier is where the Ironman Triathlon starts, and it got its start
around the same time. This was 1979, 1980. This was about 1980.
So I
went on the cruise with Morrie. He took me on it. He wanted to, you know, expose
it to me. And seeing the people dance up close, the dancers—and these were local
people, local Hawaiians in probably their teens and twenties, and I was real
captivated by them. I said, “Wow. I want to do that,” and they got me up to
dance and they thought I was a local boy. Local means obviously kama’aina, or
someone from Hawaii, because I was brown-skinned, I was tanned, and culturally I
wasn’t. I was a mainland boy visiting, but I was—
CLINE:
But you could pass.
0:04:16.3
JACINTO:
—very open.
Visually, again, visually. There’s a visual, you know, skin-wise and visual-wise
as opposed to cultural-wise, which is inside, and I knew I was a mainland boy,
but I said, “Wow. This is wonderful stuff.” Dancing on the table and making a
party for these people, what a great thing. So I didn’t know any dance steps, so
I just kind of just moved around, felt kind of embarrassed and awkward, but I
knew that this was something I wanted to do. So I went back to home, San
Francisco, after that summer and sought out a very famous Polynesian dance
company ensemble called Tiare Otea Polynesian Folk Ensemble, or Tiare Otea, that
was it, run by a woman named Tiare Clifford from the island of Kauai, moved to
San Francisco probably in the seventies, had a wonderful group, a just huge
group. It was the premier Polynesian group ensemble in San Francisco in the
seventies and eighties until her death, I think, in the nineties. I asked, I
enrolled, showed up, I said, “Auntie T, I want to learn how to dance,” and I
felt so awkward because I gave her a sheet and I said, “I’ve got to learn these
dances,” because I had corresponded with the Captain Bean’s Cruise, and I asked,
“What’ll it take for me to get a job on this?”
Then they sent me back a
letter and said, “These are the typical dances a male host does on this cruise.”
When I look about that, I’m not embarrassed, but I really look at my journey in
terms of, you know, giving a paper to a person, saying, “I’ve got to learn this
culture.” It was very much at the beginning of my immersion into any sort of
cultural activity, and in a way, in retrospect, you don’t learn culture that
way. You don’t learn it as a job, or you can, but I evolved so much more,
transformed so much more than that. But by approaching it as an opportunity to
work a summer job, she probably looked at me and said, “Oh, this boy.” (laughs)
You know? But she took me in nonetheless, and I spent about a year with that
group and learned a couple of dances, so I got very, very basics. I learned a
little bit of hula auana, which is modern hula, and I was taught hula by a
gentleman by the name of Mark Keali’I Ho’omalu.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Mark is a kumu hula,
master of hula, and he’s actually the voice of the movie Lilo and Stitch. If
Xinwan’s (
0:05:44.4
CLINE:
’s daughter) ever
watched Lilo and Stitch, you know, there’s the Hawaiian rollercoaster ride,
there’s someone who’s chanting, and that was my kuma, my hula teacher, at that
time.
So from that exposure in probably 1980 to 1981 till I graduated,
which was about a year, that’s how I began my formal Hawaiian hula and
Polynesian dance experience, and I took that—I started to dance. In 1981 I went
back, said, “Hey, I know those dances.” (laughter) So kind of strange about,
“Okay, I know this much. Hire me,” but they did because it was a job, it was a
profession, it was tourism. So from that, I did that for about a year, almost
two years working on that off and on, because I went back to UCLA. I was already
enrolled in UCLA, so summers and winters on the big island, back to UCLA. It was
very difficult for me to do that during the summers anymore, so I ended up
staying on the mainland during summers. So, Alex, that is sort of how I got my
digs in hula. I mentioned the last time that I was introduced to Hawaiian music
by my brother-in-law, Arnold Baptiste, who gave me this album, right, Ho’Ala by
the Cazimero Brothers. Incidentally, last Friday, since we met last, I have
become a consultant and a kokua, which is a helper, to Robert Cazimero, one half
of the Cazimero Brothers. So I coming full circle, and the gentleman that helped
awaken me to Hawaiian music, I’m able to support and help him now in the field
of nonprofit arts development.
CLINE:
Oh, wow.
JACINTO:
So it’s really fulfilling
and very fateful.
0:07:41.9
CLINE:
Then the other
thing I wanted to know, since you mentioned high school, you said there was a
Filipino students’ organization at Lowell High (School), and you gave a little
bit of a sense of the kind of people who are in it, but how big of a Filipino
student population—
JACINTO:
Population at Lowell?
CLINE:
Yes.
JACINTO:
Pretty significant.
CLINE:
Really.
JACINTO:
Pretty significant. They
were very active in ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Program), junior ROTC, and
the drill team, you know, because they were all about the same size, you know,
these Filipinos, same phenotypes. There were a couple hundred, I’m sure, or at
least one or two hundred. Of a graduating class of eight hundred, there was
probably at least 10 to 15 percent that were Filipino. And the student
organization, I don’t remember what it was called—it was the Lowell Phil Am
Club, right—probably had twenty-five to fifty active members that met on a
regular basis and did activities, did basketball tournaments. So I was a premium
because I was on the varsity basketball team with a friend of mine who was
another Filipino, so we were the two Filipino athletes. So we did do that,
although socially I was more Phil Am and they were kind of more immigrant, so I
didn’t hang out with them all the time. I knew them, they knew me, but my age
set, the people I hung out with were sort of the athletes, because that’s what I
was doing, playing sports, and they did more social things.
0:09:02.1
CLINE:
How diverse was
that group of people, the rest of the population, or just your friends, the
athletes?
JACINTO:
In athletes, oh, very
diverse, African American, Caucasian, you know, Latino, and stuff like that.
Lowell’s a progressive school, so it was very, very, very diverse, but, you
know, at that time when you’re eighteen, you’re defined by what you do, and I
was an athlete. It really happened after I graduated high school that identity
becomes more and more of an issue.
CLINE:
Right. Well, that’s, I
guess, traditionally when those issues start to really take hold.
JACINTO:
Yes, yes.
CLINE:
So you had told us before
that you really only applied to UCLA. They had the special program that made it
possible for you to start as a student there. Describe, if you will, what this
was like for you, maybe what your expectations were and what you began doing
upon coming south to UCLA. For example, I wanted to know if you had any—people
in Northern California often have certain ideas about Southern California. I
mean, I know you had relatives down here.
0:10:58.00:12:58.1
JACINTO:
I did
have my mother’s sister, so I did have family, and she lived in what is now the
east end of Koreatown, and I remember coming down. I had spent the summer in
Hawaii and came back, you know, and I was still in the Hawaii mode, so I was
presenting myself as sort of a hybrid of a mainland guy that spent a lot of time
in Hawaii, because the summer of 1981 was a very, very critical summer for me
because I worked full-time on the boat. I became very, very close to the locals
in Kona. They were my friends that, to this day, I know, Alex, so again, that
summer of when I was eighteen before I got to UCLA was very shaping for me, so a
lot of things blossomed.
So when I got to UCLA, I didn’t have very many
friends, only had some relatives, but I wanted to reconnect with Hawaii. I
wanted to keep that going because that’s what I felt comfortable with. The
people accepted me. So I sought out others who were from Hawaii, and I did make
friends with some guys that went to high school, they graduated from high
school, they were from Hawaii, and hung out with them. So I had a dual thing,
hanging out with the Hawaii guys as well as wanting to, you know, to hook up
with Filipinos. So that brought me to the Filipino student club at UCLA called
Samahang Pilipino, Pilipino with a “P.” It’s a statement of ethnic identity that
there is no “F” in the Filipino language, even though the national language is
not called Filipino, back then there’s no “F,” so it was “P,” so SIPA (Search to
Involve Pilipino Americans), SIPA, the name of my organization. I wanted to meet
other Filipinos, and so I went to the meeting, one of the first meetings, I
found out about it, the student club. It was in Ackerman (Union) on third floor,
and must have been September of 1981. I remember going, and there were a lot of
people there, and we were all eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you know, young guys,
and I was just checking everybody out, you know, sort of seeing who’s the crowd.
I was checking out all the females, you know, very respectfully, but my eyes
fixated on this one young lady on the other side of the room, and she was
wearing a white Esprit t-shirt, had her hair up, and she just had this, you
know, bright, very pleasant look about her, and, you know, a strange but real
thought came through my mind at that time. I thought to myself, “I wonder what
it would be like to marry that girl.” I kid you not, as god as my witness. I did
like a mental internal double-take. I said, “What?” I said, “I wonder what it
would be like to marry that girl.”
Later I find out that that same girl
sort of on the other side was looking at me, you know, not fixated on me, but
looking at me and wondering, questioned—she thought I was Chinese—I do have
Chinese blood, but she thought culturally I was a Chinese guy in a Filipino
student organization. She’s like, “What’s that Chinese guy doing in this
Filipino student organization?” So she was questioning who I was, my identity
through my visual-ness, through my skin. Well, as fate would have it, you know,
we got to be friends through mutual friends, and very early on, within the
month, Alex, Ave and I fell in love and connected. That was October 23rd of
1981, almost thirty years ago, and we have been inseparable in spirit and in
love ever since for almost thirty years too.
CLINE:
Wow. Now, her family was
from here or from—
JACINTO:
They were immigrants.
They were immigrants. They came in about 1968 and they lived in Culver City,
like the edges of Marina del Rey off of Centinela (Avenue), and she was one of
five. Ave’s one of five, and they were all born in the Philippines. They came as
immigrants. She came when she was about two or three, so she has linguistic
amnesia. She started speaking Filipino language, and then lost it here, but she
understands. So that was so important, that one month. Going to that student
organization in September of 1981, I look back, and everything in my life that I
have, all the gifts, all the roles that I have, have emanated, have come from
being involved in that student organization, and so it was a very fateful, very
determining point, not even period, point, in my life about going to student
organization.
0:15:09.8
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
So I met Ave. I developed
an interest in Philippine dance because at that time we were preparing for a
festival to be held in October or November at the Dickson Art (Center) quad, and
it was an outdoor festival, but it was a student-run cultural performances that
would be a precursor to the Pilipino Cultural Nights that were on campus. Very
fateful, at the same time in the Dickson museum (Wight Art Gallery), or hall,
art hall exhibit, there was an exhibit called “The People and Art of the
Philippines.”
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
It was probably one of
the most significant visual art exhibits, artifacts, cultural artifacts, to come
from the Philippines throughout the United States, and it was there when I was a
freshman. I remember walking through and being kind of amazed, and yet still
ignorant about, wow, all this is Filipino, incredible, but I didn’t have the
lens to appreciate it. It just was kind overwhelming, you know. There was a
volume. There was a book, seminal book, and I have two copies of that I got on
eBay because I went to hunt for it. But that period of seeing the artifacts, of
dancing in my first festival, dancing the dance that’s iconically Filipino, the
Tinikling, and with Ave, it was really just, in those few months, just
incredibly important, Alex.
0:18:03.3
CLINE:
Wow. Interesting.
I’m trying to imagine. You come to this place, I mean, UCLA is an intimidating
place. It’s very big. It’s very, very densely populated. I’m trying to imagine.
For one thing, you had somewhere to go, which is already a great thing. You had
this Filipino student organization. But it isn’t necessarily the case that
someone’s going to in their first month at school decide to go to something like
this. For one thing, how did you find out about it? And for another thing, you
just must be a lot more outgoing than probably, say, I would have been in the
same situation where I would have just kind of hidden, perhaps. I mean, you went
for it. I guess this is what I’m saying. So what an amazing and fortuitous thing
that you did, but how did you find out about it, and what was your feeling on
being at UCLA, being in L.A.? You’re away from a home. You’ve been away from
home because you’d gone to Hawaii. What was that like for you?
0:19:17.6
JACINTO:
Kind of
intimidating, in a way. You know what I mean? I spent eighteen years of my life
in the city, in the confines of San Francisco, which is like a thumb, 7-by-7, so
my universe was pretty—although I did travel here and there a little bit. I
traveled to Mexico and went to the Philippines when I was a kid, too, Alex, but
I never spent an extended amount of time other than Hawaii, so I’ve got to say
that my Hawaii experience, being by myself with Morrie, my godfather, in Hawaii
helped prepare me. So it was like, wow. I could do all this. I could meet all
these people. You know, as the youngest in my family, the youngest tends to be
the most outgoing because they’re the most indulged, if you will, right, so I
had that sort of thing about me. Then when I got to L.A., of course my family
was there, but they lived far away, so I didn’t look to them, you know, because
I didn’t grow up with my aunt. I loved her, my mom’s sister, and she’s still
alive, but I didn’t grow up with them, too, so I sought the same feeling, the
same camaraderie, the same relationships that I just had in Hawaii. That’s why I
went to hang out with the Hawaii guys, and they became my good friends.
Then there was this, again, this issue of wanting to make connections
with who I am, and so I found out about Samahang Pilipino probably by going up
Bruin Walk and them passing out flyers, or there was a mixer. I don’t exactly
remember, but I’m sure they were doing outreach, trying to catch Filipino
freshman coming in, say, “Hey, join us,” okay? So I think it was that
combination of their outreach and me wanting to connect, because I wanted to
connect. I didn’t want to go, because I was kind of scared. I was intimidated,
if you will. You know what I mean? It’s like I don’t know anybody, and this is
big, you know, walked in the first—I don’t remember what my class was. It might
have been a freshman Psych 40 class, that there’s hundreds in this section with
you too. It’s like, dang, it’s intimidating. So I wanted to have friends.
CLINE:
How did you connect with
the Hawaii guys, as you described?
JACINTO:
We would hang out.
CLINE:
How’d you find them?
JACINTO:
They were in the dorms.
They were in my dorms, so there was a couple in Dykstra (Hall) a few floors up,
and then we just started hanging out and, you know, just started—we would go out
and drink, we would go to parties and stuff like that, we’d talk about Hawaii
and play sports and things like that, pretty much social stuff. So I had, again,
them, so I had a couple of different circles, if you will. The Hawaii guys
weren’t my only friends. It was really combination of three: the Hawaii guys,
the Filipino Student Club, and then my dorm experience. The people around my
dorm, you live with them, right. They’re your roommates, and I had an older
roommate who was into sort of folk music. He was in his early twenties, but he
was living with a freshman, me, so people used to call him “Gramps” because he
was an older student, an older student at twenty-three or whatever. Because I
checked on the box I like folk music, you know. They try to pair you. So the
dorm experience was good for a year.
0:21:27.2
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Many things happened.
(laughter)
CLINE:
Ah, the dorm experience.
JACINTO:
The dorm, right.
CLINE:
What, if anything, had you
indicated that you were going to concentrate on academically once you started at
UCLA?
0:22:44.4
JACINTO:
Right. It was a
rude awakening, though, you know what I mean? Because I graduated Lowell
probably with about a 3.4 average, and that’s probably less than I could have
done. If I graduated from Riordan High School, I went, I probably would have got
better grades, but Lowell academically was tougher. At UCLA the first quarter
was like, you know, I was getting Bs and Cs and just trying to keep up because
all these smart people. You can’t make any mistakes, you know. The bell curve
has just shifted to the right. So I was like, “Wow, man, I’ve got to study.
That’s what I’m here for.” So it was very rude awakening in terms of
academically, you know. I wasn’t declared at the time. I didn’t have no idea. I
had pre-notions. Maybe I’d be premed or something like that. I had a medical
inclination or something like that, but later I would enter the health
profession through kinesiology, through the physical sciences like that too. But
I was just trying to take G.E. (general education) classes.
Then the
freshman year, the spring quarter of the freshman year, spring of 1982, there
was a class that was being offered. It was a very, very important class in the
Asian American Studies Center, and it was called the Filipino American
Experience class, but I never knew about Filipino American history before then,
hardly anything at all. Alex, I took that class, and it was cool because it was
warmer and there people’s a little bit more casual, but there were a lot of
Filipinos in the class. It was one of those really foundational classes that
really change and help establish your perspective on the world, and I took that
class and I became Filipino Americanized, you know, by knowing history, by
actively knowing history.
CLINE:
Who was teaching the class?
JACINTO:
His name is Felix Tuyay.
Felix was from (University of California) San Diego, and he drove up once a week
to teach these class because they didn’t have anybody. Later what I find out,
because I was EOP, Equal Opportunity Program, that meant I could avail of the
services at Campbell Hall and AAP, Advanced Academic (Program) Placement, and
tutoring and support. So I took advantage of the whole progressive outreach to
Filipinos and other minorities at that time. Apparently, I would learn that this
was one of the few classes that they had about Filipinos at all and they had to
get an instructor from far away. So I did okay. I got, like, a B in the class,
but I just learned perspective about the push-and-pull factors, the waves, the
issue of the waves of immigration from the Philippines to America, the Hawaii
experience, and then, again, all the Tydings-McDuffie (Act) and the Treaty of
Paris, all the whole thing where Philippines and America had sort of those
formal relations. I learned about neo-colonial, colonial identity, all those
things. As an eighteen-year-old, as a nineteen-year-old, those are all new
concepts, you know. So that I look as a punctuation in my development as well in
having that now broad knowledge of our community.
0:25:23.6
CLINE:
Wow. Yes. Let’s
remind ourselves what was going on in the nation at that point. It was a more
conservative turn of events.
JACINTO:
Reaganomics. Exactly,
exactly, exactly.
CLINE:
How did you find the
climate in terms of sort of the sociopolitical situation at UCLA when you were
there?
JACINTO:
I tell you, I didn’t have
much of an awareness other than at that time you tend to divide yourselves in
terms of “This is us now,” and “This is you guys.” “You guys” ended up being the
fraternity system, the Greek system.
CLINE:
Right, which had gotten
popular again at that point.
0:26:58.1
JACINTO:
Right, in the
early eighties, and there was these issues of these ethnic parties that they
used to have, these, you know, Poncho Villa Day and these parties, theme parties
that were very, very divisive, okay, because being part of Campbell Hall, being
part of the progressive part of the community, you end up interacting with MEChA
(Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlan), with BSA, the Black Student
Alliance, with the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition, so you get activated. You
become student activists because you want to know. You get on fire. You want to,
you know, rally and run (unclear), and your ideals start to come through about
what your vision of the world is, and so we used to fight the sororities. We
used to picket them, you know, and they used to, you know, throw tortillas and
things like that, and it was very confrontative at that time, you know. I don’t
think that Chancellor (Charles E.) Young really helped with those relations at
the time. He sort of just sort of let it play out, but there’d be big battles,
big battles.
So I found myself leaning towards a progressive part of the
campus, okay, because this is what was supporting me. I found out, hey, I’m here
because I checked that box, and they’re helping me because I’m Filipino. I go,
damn, if I didn’t check that box, I might not have gone to UCLA. I might not
have come down here. I might not have the life that I was living. Well, later
did I say that, you know, but it’s incredibly important. So I became involved in
that whole Asian American Studies Center and Advanced Placement Program, AAP,
and dealing with the progressive student organizations, or the Third World
Coalition, if you will, I don’t know, we called ourselves, students of color,
you know, yes, yes.
CLINE:
How did you start to
determine your area of academic concentration? You said you got into
kinesiology.
0:28:48.1
JACINTO:
Yes, probably a
couple years later on, after researching and figuring out what I want, you know,
because you’re into sports and you’re into health and things like that, too, so
I wanted to learn about the body. So I think it was about my junior year, so
about halfway done, said, “Let me try this kinesiology. It seems really cool,”
because I realized I didn’t have the intellectual and the capacity to commit
myself to something like psychobiology, which was the premed, or biology or some
other hard physical science major, because I was having too much fun with all
these extracurricular activities, active in Samahang Pilipino.
So when I
was a sophomore, I danced with the student organization at the festival, and we
started performing in the spring of 1982 having just performances here out in
the community, went to Oxnard, went to Santa Barbara, and we performed for other
student organizations. So we traveled, and I said, “Wow.” That’s my first taste
of performing in an outside venue as a student organization. I remember we went
all the way to Santa Barbara, right, from UCLA. So I got my taste of performing
more and said, “I like that. That’s cool.” So later that year I volunteered to
become the dance troupe coordinator of my sophomore year, the next year, ’82 to
’83, Alex, and the name of the dance troupe of Samahang Pilipino was called
Sayaw Ng Silangan, Dance of the East or Dance of the Heavens, and it was the
performing arts component of Samahang Pilipino that had, you know, sort of a
life of its own, because we practiced and we danced and we performed on campus
and in the community. So I became the coordinator, but not knowing much, you
know, only just have a lot of drive, a lot of energy. You know you want to do
things. So that was another period where, gosh, I was faced with having to
coordinate, to learn, to teach. It was like the blind leading the blind, though,
right?
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
I had a little bit of
background in hula, you know what I mean, and that’s what people recognized
before, but I didn’t know much about Filipino culture or Filipino dance. So at
that time as a student, what do you do? You study, you look at others, and there
was so few resources in Philippine dance, Alex, at the time. There was no place
that we could look to. There was no masters, or in Hawaii we call them kumu
hula. There was very, very few resources, and so we ended up making stuff up.
You know, you take what a senior student would teach you, and you just got to
redo that and kind of just do things that you think are Filipino, but there’s no
basis for them, you know. So that was not a difficult, but it was a very—again,
a formative period of my life because we were always looking to learn. We wanted
to find about the cultural truth, and yet we didn’t have access to it.
0:31:26.3
CLINE:
What was happening
in the dance department at UCLA then? They obviously weren’t doing anything
Filipino—
JACINTO:
No.
CLINE:
—but there were other areas
that they were interested in and teaching, sort of the dance ethnography.
JACINTO:
Right. At that time we
had no formal relationship with the dance department, because we were a student
organization, so our relationships were, like, Student Center for Programming
and, oh, you know, Student Services Commission.
CLINE:
ASUCLA (Associated Students
UCLA).
JACINTO:
Yeah, the student-based
stuff. We weren’t recognized by anybody else, and the fact that we practiced
outside women’s gym was interesting because that’s the dance building.
CLINE:
So that’s where it was,
yeah.
JACINTO:
Right, but we did catch
the eye of a woman who I became very, very close to. Her name is Judy Mitoma,
and at the time Judy was getting ready to form WAC. WAC formed in 1985.
0:32:16.4
CLINE:
World Arts and
Cultures, for people listening.
JACINTO:
Worlds Arts and Cultures
was formed with the merging of the dance department and this new—and in
hindsight, I was already down the path of kinesiology, you know. Maybe if WAC
started earlier in my academic career, that I would have gone the WAC path, but
I don’t remember how we started a relationship with Judy. All I remember was
that the woman had this wonderful warm smile. Gosh, I don’t remember, you know,
how we started to interact, but we just started to interact and she knew about
us, and I would become very, very close to Judy in the later years of my
collegiate career till I graduated, and thereon. We still have a relationship to
this day. But again, we didn’t have a formal relationship with the dance
department. We were a student-run organization, so we were sort of left unto
ourselves.
CLINE:
Right. Okay. So tell us a
little bit about kinesiology and how that went, because at some point you’re
going to graduate from UCLA.
JACINTO:
Yes, gosh, I know, and
I’m glad. I’m glad it happened, because I can say I graduated from UCLA.
CLINE:
Doing something.
0:34:30.3
JACINTO:
The kinesiology
had to deal with the psychosocial and the physical aspects, physical and
physiological aspects of human movement, so it’s a major that folks that do
physical therapy and nurses do a lot of, okay? The doctors, the people on the
medical track, they do something else. They do more the hard, the micro
sciences. So kinesiology was considered sort of—I call it a softer physical
science. But I was very interested in how the body moved. I was very interested
in anatomy, and later it would help me very much because as a dancer, you have
to understand your body, you have to understand how to train your body, how your
body moves, how the mind-body connection works.
So I started taking
classes in anatomy, and I really liked it a lot, too, because it was something I
could wrap myself around, you know. We had to deal with cadaver arms and legs,
and so that was kind of interesting, but that was a learning experience unto
itself in Boelter Hall, you know. So, you know, muscles and tendons and things
are all pretty much—they’re physical. You could see them. You could touch them,
you know. So I did pretty well in the kinesiology department and I learned a
lot. To this day, all the things that I learned in terms of dance I applied in
what I learned. Other than that, my electives were really around activity in the
student organization, Alex. Because Ave and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, we
spent a lot of time together, and I had a lot of extracurricular stuff, had a
lot of friends, you know, so that really fulfilled me and it rounded out my
thing. I wasn’t a bookworm, you know. I did a lot of different things. I was
always active in the student organization, you know.
CLINE:
How long did you live in
the dorm?
0:36:14.1
JACINTO:
One year, one
year in the dorm, and I got to get out of there. Then we went to Venice-Barry
off of Venice (Boulevard) near Barrington (Avenue), or Barry, lived there for a
couple years, moved out to Palms and lived in that area for the remainder till
1987, when I moved to Hawaii for a couple years. So from about 1984 to 1987 I
was in West L.A. off campus, off campus.
I graduated in 1986, in
December of 1986, so it took me five years and a quarter, and took me five years
and a quarter because two times—and I apologize to them to this day—I never told
my parents that I withdrew two times, but the world will know now, and when you
withdraw, you pay your student fees and then you don’t finish. You just get a
withdrawal, right? I did that two times because I was so immersed in student
activities, you know, and sort of what would be considered extracurricular. I
feel bad about that now, knowing that I wasted money, my parents’ money, you
know, but it’s just something that I did, you know, that happened to me. So I
would have been done in four and two quarters, but it took me five and a
quarter. I graduated in December of 1986 with a bachelor’s of science in
kinesiology, and I had a lot of coursework in psychology as well, but it was,
you know, my B.S. in kinesiology. So I did it.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Did it.
CLINE:
Then when did you get
married?
JACINTO:
We got married in August
of 1990, but what happened from—
CLINE:
Oh, quite a few years after
you got together.
0:39:08.2
JACINTO:
Right, right. So
there’s a period in my life where—I call it our premarital purgatory. (laughter)
Pretty early on, Alex, Ave and I knew that we were made for each other, that god
gave us each other, you know, so we were very, very blessed to realize that at
eighteen. So we were pretty single-track. So when we graduated, I still had some
dreams that I wanted to experience, and I asked Ave, I said, “You know, I want
to go to grad school in Hawaii. I want to go to grad school.” And I think the
grad school was not an excuse, but the grad school was a way for me to go to
Hawaii to continue dancing hula and maybe to dance Filipino dance, because I
wanted to seek out the teachings of some masters in Hawaii, right? I wanted to
experience Hawaiian hula in a formal halau setting, but I had it here on the
mainland, but it’s not the same, okay, and I wanted to learn more about
Philippine dance. So grad school and learning more about dance, so I’m still
committed, right?
So in September or August, I applied to graduate
school at the University of Hawaii, and I apply in the master’s of exercise
physiology, okay, an M.S in exercise physiology, which I really found out right
away was very clinical, and I didn’t like it because it’s more lab work and more
just, you know, muscle (unclear). It wasn’t macro, which I was used to. But
going back to the transition from, you know, being in L.A. from 1981 to
basically 1987, I started dancing hula in the community as well. I need to share
that with you. So I danced for probably three groups in the community, outside
the campus and in the community. In 1981, also, I learned about the Hawaiian
community because by some way, shape, or form, I got hooked up with people that
were involved in one of the Hawaiian civic clubs, and they would bring me from
UCLA to Carson, you know, to go sing in the choir when I was a freshman. They
couldn’t do that all the time, so I lost contact with them, but I realized, oh,
there’s a Hawaiian community here, too, as well.
CLINE:
Yeah, down in South Bay.
0:41:50.60:43:48.60:44:36.30:47:24.4
JACINTO:
Exactly.
Exactly. So I would reconnect with them a couple years later. So in 1983, Ave
and I ended up starting to dance for a haole gentleman, a Caucasian gentleman,
by the name of Jack Kinnear, who founded the Otea Polynesian Folk Ensemble. So
it was music and dance of the Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, okay, and it
was a very diverse group. The majority of people were not of Pacific Islander
descent. It was more diverse, culturally diverse, so it was great. So we did a
couple of years with them, and with Jack, you know, we developed this idea that
you don’t need to be Polynesian or Pacific Islander to be a good student. You
have to understand culture, though, and there’s a continuum of how well people
can learn and immerse themselves in the culture. So Jack was a role model to
say, hey, you don’t need to be Hawaiian or Tahitian or Samoan to perform, but
there is a continuum in how well that you understand and how well you
internalize, how well you bring it back to the audience in terms of how
Hawaiian, how Pacific Islander you are, how you perform, okay? So that was very
important.
We did that for about two years and we felt it was time to
move on, so about 1985, I linked up with a Hawaiian woman from the big island.
Her name is Clarice (Wahineali’i) Nuhi. Auntie Clarice was in Hawaii community,
and she welcomed me to dance in her halau, (Hawaiian phrase), the Hula People
of—(Hawaiian name) is her Hawaiian name, meaning “royal woman.” So she was very
Hawaiian, and I was very excited to dance for a Hawaiian, right, because I
danced for a non-Hawaiian. So I spent a couple years with her. Meanwhile, Ave
gets linked up with a woman by the name of Rolanda Valentin. She’s from
Honolulu. She’s actually a dancer. She’s Filipina, Filipina descent, but she
studied hula and her parents ran a Philippine dance company in Hawaii that I
would later dance with. It was very incestuous, very tight, woven like this
thing here (referring to the wicker seat on the chair on which he is sitting).
So Ave dances with her, starts in 1985 and dances. I have to say that Ave got
involved in hula—she already had a love of things Hawaiian, of local culture.
There were groups in the seventies called, like, Kalapana and Cecilio and Kapono
that really defined the pop Hawaiian sound, okay, like Earth, Wind and Fire or
something like that on the mainland. So we were listening to some of the same
things at the same time, but she began to get involved in hula as early as 1981,
because I used to live in Hawaii, so she wanted to be close to me that way, too,
and god bless her, because she turned out to be a wonderful hula dancer, you
know. So we were very fortunate that we both had aptitude and did well as
performers.
So Ave starts to dance with Rolanda, and we now get a very
more targeted Hawaiian experience in our hula. So after two years with Auntie
Clarice—and the thing with Auntie Clarice, and I will reveal this because it was
very important, my time, a lot of my hula brothers, and “hula brothers” is a
term for the males that you dance with, or hula sisters, it was pretty much
males and females, but all the males were older and they were gay, and me as a
young heterosexual, I was probably the only one that wasn’t. I was the youngest.
I felt out of place. I didn’t feel threatened, but I just felt out of place.
Later, you know, it would teach me issues about diversity, you know, but I said
I wanted to dance with more guys my age.
So I left Auntie Clarice, but I
didn’t leave her the best way, because I didn’t tell her, and I started dancing
with Randy Chang, Randy Kaulana Chang, from the Chang family, were very
prestigious, like a Hawaiian Samoan Von Trapp family. You know, they had, like,
ten kids and they all sing, and they’re based in Carson and very strong Mormon.
So I started dancing with Randy about 1986, and Randy also was doing things with
Rolanda, so again there was really some confluence there, where Ave’s dancing
with Rolanda, I’m dancing with Randy, we do stuff together. So we had a
collaboration. But Auntie Clarice, you know, caught me at one of the Hawaiian
festivals and she asked me, “You know, you haven’t been around, Joel. What is
your intent?” She even gave me a Hawaiian name. She gave me the name M____.
M____ means sort of “sparkling eyes” or “happy eyes.” You know, my eyes
(unclear). Then he goes, “Auntie Clarice, I didn’t tell you that I’m dancing
with Randy now.” She looked at me and she goes, “You know, Joel, you will
realize that every halau is different, but you must pay respect to your
teachers.” So I didn’t really tell her, and I learned a lesson early on that I
needed to have more protocol, not just it was about what was important to me,
you know, but that I had to have a deeper sense of respect of communication. You
know, it hurt me. I felt bad and, you know, it shaped me. It would influence me
in my future decisions. I continued with Randy. I continued with Randy until I
left in August of 1987, Alex, so again, there’s that whole hula exposure in
relation to the Filipino side. And the students, what are we doing on campus
from 1981 to 1986? We’re birthing the genre of the Pilipino Cultural Night, the
PCN, Alex, and if you know, at UCLA we developed a genre that was really a
modern-day vaudeville type of student-based production. There’s a lot of work
that’s referencing that, some great work by Theo Gonzalves out of University of
Hawaii (UH), or he was at (University of California) Irvine at the time, and
some other folks who have written about the significance and the phenomenon of
the Pilipino Cultural Night, the PCN. It’s a “P” again. We were there before it
was termed a PCN. It was just student-based programming.
In 1983,
sometimes it’s considered sort of one of the starting points of that, it was the
Ackerman Grand Ballroom, and it was, I think, the fall of 1983, where we did a
production that included dance, that included skits or acts. The storyline was
that it was sort of the story of the Philippines all the way up to contemporary
modern day, so there was a travelogue, if you will, of Philippine and Filipino
American experience. That was very, very important because if you look at the
Filipino student-based community now, it is an institution and it literally
involves thousands and thousands of students all over California. It’s really a
West Coast phenomenon, but there’s so much student activity in this process, in
this phenomenon that was the Pilipino Cultural Night, and at UCLA Ave and I and
our group at UCLA were there in its inception, kind of, in the formation. So
that was really great to see, but we were, you know, busy doing these Cultural
Nights where we would perform at either—we did Ackerman Grand Ballroom. That was
1983. Then in 1986 we ended up being the first student organization to perform
at Royce (Hall) in 1986. 1987, I think we’re at Royce, and then for a few years
we go to Wadsworth (Theater) after that, but I’ve already graduated. But again,
in 1986 before I graduated, we become the first student organization to perform
at Royce Hall. That was a big moment in terms of student-based production. Now
if you look at the campus today, a lot of the student organizations are all
doing these Cultural Nights.
0:49:17.3
CLINE:
Right. They all do
them, yeah.
JACINTO:
Based on, I think, what
we think is Samahang Pilipino’s lead.
CLINE:
Yeah, the model is
important.
0:51:06.3
JACINTO:
The model, if
you will, because it social messaging, performance. It’s basically
student-initiated production, okay, so there’s both product and process,
(unclear). So I was very, very shaped and spent a lot of time organizing and
planning those and being creative and seeking out people that could help us do
different things. All the while, though, we didn’t have many resources in terms
of Filipino things. There were some people that we learned from. Actually, Ave
and I and a few of our cohorts went to France and danced with a Philippine dance
company that was based in Central Los Angeles called Silayan Dance Company run
by a woman, bless her soul, Sonia Capadocia and her daughter Dulce (Capadocia).
Dulce’s still active in—she’s a modern dancer, but Sonia recruited us and
brought us to France for these dance festivals, south of France. So we learned a
lot about, again, performing in a foreign country and, again, the lament of here
we are, we’re a student-based organization, we’re students, basically, young
people, some of us are not even Filipino, and we’re representing the Philippines
and yet we do not have a strong foundation of Filipino cultural knowledge
ourselves. Many of us did not even know how to sing the national anthem, and
here we are representing the les Philippines in the world stage, albeit it was a
dance festival in Chateau Grombert (phonetic) in Marseilles in the south of
France, but we were representing, we were fronting.
The dissonance, I
think, that happens in that early age about you’re doing this and yet this is a
reality, those shaped me a lot to say I need to be more in alignment about what
we’re doing. So everything I can see now—and I love this process because it’s
helping me make connections myself—the dissonant points forced me and encouraged
me to gain stronger alignment to what I was actually doing, so the knowledge and
the identity would match more of our external thing. Okay, you’re representing
the Philippines. How much do you understand about the Philippines? You’re
dancing hula? How much do you understand about Hawaiian culture? How much do you
understand about Hawaiian language? Those types of things. So as I matured, as I
got older, my decisions would lend me more to align my inside self with my
external self.
CLINE:
I had a question going back
to the hula training with Ave. She was studying with this woman Rolanda.
JACINTO:
Rolanda, yes.
CLINE:
Did she only teach women,
or is there—
JACINTO:
She taught males at
times, but for special occasions, but Randy taught more males. Randy’s had males
and females, but mainly males, so we matched together.
CLINE:
I was just wondering why
you were with different teachers.
JACINTO:
Right, right, right,
right, right. Because Rolanda was more female, yeah.
0:52:49.0
CLINE:
So now that you’ve
been going through this whole sort of Filipino awakening, as it were, at UCLA
during these years through the eighties, what did your family think of this?
JACINTO:
Well, other than their
not knowing that I withdrew, I think I invited my mom—my dad didn’t come down,
you know. My dad was busy paying my bills, so he was like, “Are you done yet?”
You know what I mean? So my dad took care of me, god bless his soul. My dad, you
know, paid for my college education, and I love him for that, because again, if
he didn’t sacrifice for me, I wouldn’t have been able to have the life. I
invited my mother probably in 1985 down to a Cultural Night at Ackerman Grand
Ballroom. Ave and I were the prince and princess, so we had a major role, and I
think she was very pleased that I would get involved in Philippine culture.
Being her youngest, being the American-born, having, again, all these, you
know—you wouldn’t expect that I would be the one. And my mom being a diplomat,
you know, representing the Philippine government, obviously I’m pretty sure she
was pleased that I did do this, because I was representing—I was into Philippine
things. My brothers and sisters were much less active. None of them did these
things hardly at all, you know, so I was really the only one. So my parents knew
that I was taking a while to finish class, you know, but I was happy and I
hadn’t really had any problems. They didn’t have any problems with me, just I
was away from home. I was a college student, you know, and go back to see them a
couple times a year, Alex. So it was pretty uneventful. You know what I mean? I
didn’t tell them, and I think they would have got much more agitated.
0:54:35.3
CLINE:
Sure.
JACINTO:
“You wasted what? You
wasted $1,500 because you withdrew? Why did you withdraw?” “Because I’m active
in all these things.” “Oh!” So I saved us a lot of conflict. (laughs)
CLINE:
I understand.
JACINTO:
But I think my parents
were generally supportive.
CLINE:
You said that ultimately
you go and live in Hawaii for two years, and we’re in this period that you’ve
described as premarital purgatory. Why do you call it that?
JACINTO:
Yeah, because, well, I
told Ave, I said, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to go to grad school, and
then I’m going to come back.” Okay, so I go there in 1987, and in 1987 I have to
get a job, right, as well, because I’m at UH. So I end up searching for a job
that I knew in Hawaii in the big island, and that’s working on one of the Sunset
Cruises. They have a lot of Sunset Cruises over there. It turns out I did
interview and get a job with the Alii Kai catamaran. Alii Kai catamaran’s a big
catamaran. It’s the largest covered catamaran in the world, and there was a
company that had purchased the original Polynesian canoe that I had worked on
before on the big island seven years. It was like, oh, my god. It was, like,
fateful. (unclear) all these fateful things. Captain Bean’s, they purchased the
original boat of Captain Bean’s, a smaller catamaran that held about 127 people,
and it’s incredible. So I got a chance to dance on that because I knew the
business. I (unclear), so they hired me right away, although I had to do a lot
more service and it was a bigger canoe, a bigger catamaran, and it catered more
to Japanese, and my Japanese wasn’t up to speed, so I had to learn a little bit
more Japanese.
0:56:25.3
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
But I might an individual
that I will punctuate this story by. I started watching, when I was, you know,
1981, 1982—Morrie Baker would tape these videos of this festival called the
Merry Monarch Hula Festival. Happens on the big island of Hawaii every April,
and the Merry Monarch Hula Festival is dedicated to King David Kalakaua, the
last reigning monarch of Hawaii, who died in San Francisco. He was called the
merry monarch because he was the Hawaiian monarch that was responsible for
bringing the hula back to the Hawaiian people, so he very much was Hawaiianist.
So this hula festival became very, very important because it’s like the Olympics
of hula, and groups from all over Hawaii would compete on this stage at the
(Edith) Kanaka’ole Tennis Stadium in Hilo. So what started out to be a parks and
recs festival became this worldwide phenomenon. So now almost fifty years later,
Alex, it’s broadcast on the Internet. Every year it occupies almost twenty hours
of Hawaii broadcast time that’s broadcast throughout the state. That’s
incredible. It’s such a phenomenon. Hula is really the Hawaiian gift to the
world. We’ll talk more about hula as we go on. I started watching these
videotapes, and in 1986 the competition featured this group called Waimapuna
(Hula Halau). Waimapuna is a Hawaiian halau led by a very large Hawaiian guy
named Darrell Lupenui, who was a very dynamic hula teacher. He was larger than
life. He was, like, 600 pounds.
0:58:20.2
CLINE:
Wow.
1:00:24.0
JACINTO:
His band of
Waimapuna (Hula Halau) did this ancient kaihiko. They competed in 1996. They won
first place in the kaihiko in the ancient and the auana and the modern, but
there was this—their number featured them doing this warrior dance of Molokai.
Molokai is known for its warrior dances, and all they had was, like, little
pouches and they had these spears, and they were all just, you know, like
Hawaiian warriors, and it was probably the most incredible hula I had ever seen
performed by males. The one guy in the front, I recognized him, too, because he
was only one that didn’t have a part. He was Alii Kai. He was the front guy. He
was working on the boat, the Alii Kai. His name is Derek (unclear), and
immediately I said, “I know you. You’re the guy on the video,” and he’s looking
at me, “Who this guy?” Because (unclear), I had no shame. I just wanted to make
friends. You know what I mean? He’s probably taken aback, say, “Hey.” You know
what I mean? But his sister was my boss, and I became very, very close to Derek
(unclear) since that time, and that’s over twenty years ago. His family
basically adopted me. They (unclear) me as a mainland boy living in Hawaii, so
for two years I was very, very close to Derek and his family. I was working on
the Alii Kai catamaran. I was working also at a Hawaiian insurance company
called HMSA (Hawaii Medical Service Association), which is Blue Cross/Blue
Shield of Hawaii, going to school at UH in the areas of now not exercise
physiology, but public health and dancing Philippine dance with the Pearl of the
Orient Dance Company, which is Rolanda’s parents, and also dancing hula for a
Hawaiian halau called the Gentlemen of (unclear) led by Frank “Palani” Kahala,
who was a very avant-garde, very well-respected younger kumu hula.
So
from 1987, August, to May of 1989 I would have, you know, just a wonderful time
of learning, of experiencing, of being able to compete in Merry Monarch in 1988.
So I competed with them. I joined the Gentlemen of (unclear) right when I got
there in, like, September, and in April I was already competing with them, and
we placed in this thing. It’s on Facebook. I’ll show you the link, I mean,
dancing, if you want to see it. You’re not on Facebook?
CLINE:
I have a Facebook page and
I never, ever use it.
JACINTO:
Okay. One of these days
I’ll show it to you, Alex. But it was a great thrill for me to be able to dance
on this stage, to dance for this halau, and I would also graduate from one level
of hula to the next. So when you start hula, you’re a haumana, which is you’re a
hula student, and the next stage is olapa (phonetic), which is an agile dancer,
but we had a contemporary ritual where you would pass these series of tests and
exercises and you would graduate, and I was able to do that before I left. But
that process of graduating and studying hula and chants and book knowledge and
taking tests and doing projects really helped me shape my approach to Philippine
dance and to understanding culture so that the inside matches the outside, going
back to that issue of there’s strong alignment into what you physically do and
what you know spiritually, what’s inside of you. That’s why I think this issue
of culture became very, very important to me, the idea of culture, and I’ll talk
a little bit more about that later in terms of my own curriculum we developed in
Kayamanan (Ng Lahi) too.
1:02:12.0
CLINE:
Right. So how did
your relationship fare those two years?
JACINTO:
It was tough, you know.
We argued a lot and stuff like that, you know, and she wanted me to come home. I
thought I was going to try to ask Ave, you know, “Would you want to live in
Hawaii?” He goes, “No, you’re coming home.” (laughs) So after 1989 in May, I
came back, and then immediately the next couple months I got a job working for
this organization called Fitness Systems Incorporated, which was a corporate
fitness outsourcing organization that ran fitness centers in some of the major
corporations. So I got a job with Fitness Systems working at the fitness center
at Hughes Aircraft (Corporation), which is now LMU (Loyola Marymount
University). So I did that for about two years, all the while coming back. So
that was June of 1989 till about July of 1991 that I was working at Hughes
Aircraft, but also, Ave and I, we get married in 1990.
CLINE:
What was she doing after
graduating from UCLA?
JACINTO:
Ave was just working. She
was working for a psychologist who made those biofeedback cards with thumbprint,
you know what I mean, and just biofeedback, and so she was doing administration,
and, you know, she was very smart in marketing and could handle all those
things.
CLINE:
What was her major at UCLA?
JACINTO:
Psychology. It was
psychology. So Ave was working and just patiently waiting for me—not patiently
waiting. I mean, you know, we knew we were together still, and I would come
visit every few months like that, too, but it was time to settle down. We were
twenty-seven when we got married, which is, you know, is about the right age.
It’s about time for us, too, so our marriage was a very blessed thing, and then
we had, like, five hundred people at our wedding. We had students. We had the
Hawaii people come. We had all these different things. It was a great gathering,
if you will, of all our relations, so it was a wonderful blessing and one of the
highlights of our lives.
1:04:23.1
CLINE:
When you said
Hawaii people came, did they come from Hawaii?
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Derek
and his family came. His parents who had never come to the mainland before, and
these are Hawaiian folks, and they come because they loved me, you know. I asked
them to be our (unclear) and (unclear), our godparents, of the wedding, so they
had a special place, a special role in witnessing our marriage, and to this day,
you know, they still occupy that role. So that was August 4th, 1990, Alex, we
get married.
CLINE:
So you have an anniversary
coming up.
JACINTO:
Yeah, our twenty-first.
CLINE:
Wow. Where did you get
married?
JACINTO:
At St. Augustine’s
(Catholic) Church.
CLINE:
I guessed.
JACINTO:
Yeah, local—
CLINE:
Since you’re local here.
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah. No, Ave’s
parents, they worship at St. Gerard’s (Majella Roman Catholic Church) over there
off of Culver (Boulevard) and Inglewood (Boulevard), but we just like that
church better, so we go to that church. It’s a little bit east. We’re closer to
St. Gerard’s, but anyway, we like St. Augustine’s. Then we had our reception at
the Marriot, LAX Marriott, and our wedding went from ten in the morning to
probably midnight because we had the ceremony, and then we a reception from the
afternoon, and then we had an after-party where we had kanikapila, we had people
dancing. It wasn’t one day; it was a five-day, week celebration. We had people
come in. We had parties. We had gatherings. It was just a wonderful—I still get
chicken skin thinking about that, about that time too.
1:05:57.5
CLINE:
Was your father
still alive at that point?
JACINTO:
Yeah, Jaime was, yeah,
and so he had a great time. I think he was very proud. My father’s very spartan.
He was very spartan with me, because I think he came from a very large family,
you know, that they didn’t—and he said he was pretty quiet anyway, and so I
think that he just, you know—he didn’t communicate much.
CLINE:
Yeah, not the emotional
type.
JACINTO:
Right. Right. I mean,
he’s pretty sociable, very, very sociable, I think, and very, very good host,
you know what I mean, in terms of when he was on, when people were at his home,
too, but, you know, with his children, you tend to take those—at that time that
generation’s very spartan in their discussions of emotions and things like that
because of their own upbringing, too, as well. But he was very happy, he was
very proud.
1:06:49.5
CLINE:
When did you start
to learn about the history of the Filipino community here in Los Angeles?
1:09:03.0
JACINTO:
Okay, so taking
that first class, 1982, and then I got involved in some projects where we would
go out and visit historic Filipino town not designated back then, Alex, on
Temple Street, and we got involved with a couple of events that were held at the
Filipino American Community of Los Angeles, or FACLA, F-A-C-L-A, and it was one
of the oldest organizations recognized in America that were Filipino. So we
actually got to deal with other older Filipino, more the immigrant generation
who were the pioneers, who were active. I learned about SIPA as probably a
twenty-one-year-old student who began to volunteer tutoring students and
teaching dance to some of the junior high students in Virgil Junior High
(School), which is right off of Vermont (Avenue), so we began going into the
community, off of campus and into the community, to visit and to learn. So it
happened around that time, and just exposure to say these are the struggles,
these are the issues, and we wanted to make connections. We wanted to be active
as well. I would meet a gentleman by the name of Royal Morales, or Uncle Roy,
and if you weren’t Filipino, you would call him Uncle Roy because he commanded
that respect. He was like a cross between Yoda and Ho Chi Minh. He had this big
long goatee, but he was a wise old sage. He wasn’t old, but he just had this
really long—this goatee. But Uncle Roy was a co-founder of SIPA, and he also
began teaching the Filipino American Experience class at UCLA in about 1983
after I had taken it, but he became the educator. He became, you know, the face
of Filipino American activism, if you will, very important, although people
would later tell me—and I believe this to be true—when we were hiring for the
SIPA executive director that I was going out for in July, August of 1981, I
wasn’t his first choice, and he knew me as a student activist, but I wasn’t a
social worker, and his orientation was as a social worker.
So I think he
wanted someone that had a little bit more community background or service
background, but I realized that I think they hired me because, one, is I started
my own nonprofit. So after we got married in August, Alex, we founded Kayamanan
Ng Lahi in November, but it was based on a trip that we had taken to the
Philippines in May before we got married, and I don’t know if you want me to go
on then, but that’s another chapter.
CLINE:
Let me just clarify one
thing, though. When you were hired at SIPA, what year was that?
JACINTO:
It was 1991.
CLINE:
Okay, so ’81 and—
JACINTO:
So ten years, here in
L.A., two years in Hawaii, come back. I’m coming back to L.A.
CLINE:
Right. And you got married
in ’90, and then ’91 you started SIPA.
JACINTO:
Right. Right. Right.
Right. Right. The way that I started at SIPA was, again, this idea—this might be
a good break. Sylvester Mendoza, one of my clients at Hughes Aircraft, was in
human resources. He was on the board of SIPA. He joined the board of SIPA
because he was corporate relations and stuff like that, and there was some
allegations that there was some discrimination things going on at Hughes
Aircraft, so they invited Sylvester to come on down. Sylvester, he was from San
Francisco and he went to the same high school as I went to, so we became very
close friends, and he knew that the fitness center, our fitness business, was
going to lose a contract because of corporate downsizing because he knew that
Meg Thornton, the previous executive director at SIPA, who’s been at UCLA—
1:10:53.3
CLINE:
Oh, yeah, I know
(unclear).
JACINTO:
—in Asian American
Studies Center—
CLINE:
Yeah, I’ve met her, sure.
JACINTO:
—right—for the last—we
switched. Right? Meg’s not from L.A.; she’s from San Diego, but she was the
executive director for three years before me. So she goes and starts to work for
the School and Community Projects unit of the Asian American Studies Center and
Sylvester supports me to be the next SIPA executive director based on the fact
that I think he saw that I had potential to be a front guy for SIPA. The fact
that I had started my own nonprofit, I think, bid well with everybody because
they say, “Hey, he has a nonprofit orientation,” but I didn’t have a social work
background, didn’t have a community-organizing background, because I had an
activist background. I think people were shocked that SIPA would hire a dancer.
You know?
CLINE:
Yeah.
JACINTO:
Because it was a
youth-serving organization, and back then the moniker of SIPA, it was at-risk
youth, at-risk youth, because that was the vernacular that we’re using to
describe who we served. So at that time, you know, people equated SIPA with sort
of like, yeah, but no. It’s like, it’s needed there, but we don’t really pay
attention to SIPA because SIPA’s bad kids, you know. So SIPA deals with that
part of our community that we don’t really want to talk about, kids that were
involved in gangs, kids that were at-risk, kids in the criminal justice system,
and the tough issues of life. So we had an image problem. We had a PR problem
when I started.
1:12:39.0
CLINE:
Wow. When did SIPA
start?
JACINTO:
SIPA was founded in 1972.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
It started in 1972, and
it was an organization that was really the name of a two-day conference, a
search to get people involved in youth activities, and it happened at Camp Oak
Grove in San Bernardino. So what started out as a two-day conference, the
concept stuck and people wanted to keep this thing going, and it folded in.
There were existing programs and services that were dealing with the Filipino
community and job training, you know, in the late sixties, Filipino youth
services, things that were helping, you know, doing counseling already, but that
didn’t have the name of SIPA, they were just called Filipino Youth Services. So
it kind of melded into one, and SIPA was incorporated in 1972 till about 1980.
In 1980, Reaganomics and the conservative right eliminated all the War on
Poverty and all these things, so SIPA lost its funding, and it was put on the
shelf for about five years. So it still had the nonprofit status, but didn’t
have any resources, no services, right?
CLINE:
Right.
JACINTO:
In the early eighties a
cross-section of the community said, hey, man, we still needed services, so they
revive SIPA by getting it to be a member organization of United Way in 1985,
Alex. We were the only Filipino organization that was a member organization of
United Way when United Way had core organizations. So we were able to revive
ourselves in 1985, okay, again, serving at-risk youth and working in the
community. So I came in six years after that in 1991, and so I’ve been around
almost half of SIPA’s life cycle, and it’s just been a tremendous, a tremendous,
a tremendous opportunity to serve. It’s been the most challenging, but it’s been
the most rewarding in my life next to my family.
1:14:54.0
CLINE:
Wow. Interesting.
JACINTO:
So everything that I do
in my life today has a reference to my culture, to my community, and through my
identity, not in an insular way, but in the way that I can share and represent
that and negotiate that within, intra, and inter, with the mainstream. So being
at the Skirball Cultural Center for Family Day for me, for our group, Kayamanan
Ng Lahi, is very, very important because it’s an opportunity to educate, to
entertain, and to enlighten people, audiences, as to what is Filipino, why is it
good, why is it nice, and how can we engage people in that. So I’m so happy that
you were there to experience what we do as a cultural organization.
CLINE:
My pleasure, for sure. So
the big things coming up now, then, are the founding of Kayamanan Ng Lahi and a
trip to the Philippines, it sounds like.
JACINTO:
Right. Right. Right.
Let’s use 1990 as now, because from ’81 to ’90 is really the UCLA experience,
UCLA and Hawaii. Eighty-one to ’86 is the UCLA. Eighty-seven to ’89 is Hawaii,
and then 1990 begins a whole—
1:16:29.3
CLINE:
You get married,
and now we’re starting a new chapter.
JACINTO:
It’s a big year. It’s a
big year.
CLINE:
So let’s take that up in
the next session. Does that work for you?
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah.
CLINE:
Okay, and you can get to
where you need to go.
JACINTO:
Thank you, Alex. Again, I
really appreciate the process of thinking back, so that it helps me to make
connections that have just, you know, been in there. So I really appreciate this
process as well.
CLINE:
Well, I said this, I think,
last time, but connection seems to be the thing that keeps coming up when I hear
your story. There’s so many amazing connections and just things that—it’s like
just these spirals that keep cycling around, and it’s really (unclear).
JACINTO:
Yeah, and some of them
are purposeful and some of them are fateful, right? Some of them are fateful, so
this idea of the cosmic alignment of things and the way that the universe allows
these things to happen is, for me, at least, is so overwhelming.
CLINE:
Thank you.
JACINTO:
Thank you. (End of July
20, 2011 interview)
CLINE:
Today is July 27th, 2011.
This is Alex
CLINE:
I’m once again interviewing
Joel
0:00:21.5
JACINTO:
at my home
studio in Culver City (California). This is our third interview session. Good
morning.
JACINTO:
Morning, Alex.
CLINE:
Thanks for coming over
again.
JACINTO:
I feel real comfortable
here, too, because I got four little kids in my living room running amok, and
that’s a Filipino word, if you will.
CLINE:
Oh, yeah?
JACINTO:
Amok. Run amok is the
Filipino contribution—
CLINE:
Really.
JACINTO:
—to the English language.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
As well as boondock,
boondocks.
CLINE:
Oh, yeah, the boondocks.
JACINTO:
It’s Filipino.
CLINE:
Really.
JACINTO:
Kid you not.
0:00:54.3
CLINE:
See, I knew I was
learning things, but I didn’t realize I’d be learning these amazing linguistic
details. I had no idea. That’s cool.
JACINTO:
That’s value-added, okay.
But thanks for having me.
CLINE:
Yeah, it’s very quiet here
right now. Last time we left off with basically your entrance into the 1990s, so
in 1990 you got married. In ’91 you started at SIPA (Search to Involve Pilipino
Americans), and it sounded like you were about to lead us into a tale that I’m
thinking narrows the gap that you were feeling between what you knew about
Philippine dance and what you wanted to know about Philippine dance. It sounded
like it was becoming, over time, a real longing or even an aspiration, if you
will, something that was really important to you and maybe a little frustrating.
JACINTO:
Oh, yeah, definitely, all
those things, all those things.
CLINE:
You said you wind up going
to the Philippines, and I guess we’re going to hear about that today.
JACINTO:
Well, the setup is
probably about 1986, a friend of mine from UCLA—I remember his name. It was
Dennis Gorospe. Dennis gave me this VHS tape, if you remember what VHS tape was,
and it contained three shows of a performance group from the Philippines that
was performing at the Canada World Expo 1986, in 1986.
CLINE:
Right. In Vancouver.
JACINTO:
In Vancouver.
CLINE:
Yeah, I played up there.
JACINTO:
All right, Alex. So I
viewed this video. He said, “Joel, here, here’s a tape of a relative.” It turned
out to be a distant relative of his who had this group. So I watched this. It
was almost three shows, because they had three different shows. This is 1986.
We’re still at UCLA, almost done, you know, at the tail end of our collegiate
career, and we had been, you know, longing to learn the “truth,” quote, unquote,
not just about Philippine dance, about Philippine culture, because it wasn’t
just about the dancing itself, the physical. You know, we were really longing
for identity, for cultural identity, for cultural context, to understand the
ritual, to understand the things that make these dances Filipino. So I watch
these and I turn it on. And our main exposure to Philippine dance before this
was basically the Bayanihan (the Philippine National Folk Dance Company), the
state-supported dance group, what is termed dance diplomacy, right?
0:03:35.2
CLINE:
Right, right.
JACINTO:
The state-supported group
that does the revue of all, very flashy, very theatre, you know, almost stylized
and balletic, you know, in some ways, and then some other local dance troupes.
So it was a big gap, didn’t have anything, a third reference. Then when I saw
this group perform, something told me inside—there was a gut feeling that, wow,
this is different. This seems more Filipino. Yeah, it seems more Filipino. It
doesn’t seem as contrived, as stylized, as theatricalized. It was still. It
still was in the realm of folkloric, but it felt little bit more, quote,
unquote, “closer to the village.” It just attracted me. I had an instant
attraction to it, and so I became fascinated with that tape and watched it again
and again and again. So the name of the gentleman whose group it was is Ramon
Obusan Folkloric Group, R-O-F-G, or ROFG, for short. Turns out that—a little
background—Ramon was a dancer and a researcher with Bayanihan in the seventies,
early seventies, during pretty much the heyday of Bayanihan in terms of its
world tours. So he was a researcher. He was an anthropologist.
0:05:03.6
CLINE:
So when would that
have been, its heyday when it was touring?
JACINTO:
Seventy, ’71, ’72, early
seventies.
CLINE:
So that’s when this is
happening, and apparently from countries all over, they’re all doing it.
JACINTO:
(Igor) Moiseyev Ballet,
the (Almalia Hernandez and Ballet) Folkorico (de Mexico), all those type of
things, dance diplomacy, really. (unclear) writes pretty eloquently about that.
And the Philippines, they were at the start in ’58. Actually, Bayanihan started
in ’58 even before Almalia Hernandez and Ballet Folklorico, so it’s kind of
common knowledge that Philippines almost helped start the genre of the
state-supported dance group or dance diplomacy. So Ramon was there and he wanted
to start his own group after this. He said he wanted to give it a different
flavor, I think. He wanted to be, quote, unquote, “more authentic,” and we can
deconstruct that later on, but he just wanted to put his own stamp on things, so
he formed his own group, which is very different than the state-supported group,
which is a collective, right? “Bayanihan” means collective. The Ramon Obusan, it
was focused on him and his life’s work, so it was very ego-centered. Good or
bad, it was ego-centered, Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group, not anything generally
Filipino. So when I watched that, Alex, I wanted to learn that style of dance. I
was really entranced by it. So 1986 I go off to Hawaii, and then another thing
happened to me in terms of fate. I had a friend from Hawaii, he was an artist,
his name was Brian Ibaan. He was a watercolorist, and I met him at UCLA, but he
was from Hawaii, so we made that connection. In the beginning of 1990 he comes
back and says, “Hey, Joel, I just came from the Philippines and I met this
group,” and he took the pictures. It was the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group. I
said, “You found the group I had been watching for a few years.”
0:07:06.8
CLINE:
Yeah, wow.
0:08:55.6
JACINTO:
He met the guy.
He met Ramon, and Ramon was very open with him in terms of allowing him to come
along, take pictures, and he was artist, because he painted. So I wrote Ramon a
letter in probably March of 1990 and I poured my heart out to him. I poured my
heart out to him. I shared my aspirations, my frustrations, and my longingness,
as you say, to just learn more. He wrote back. He wrote back, and I still have
that letter somewhere, and he goes, “Joel, pack your bags. Come on down,”
because Ramon was so open with his knowledge. Unlike the state support, which
really has protocol and a lot of, you know, layers of entrance and access, Ramon
has his home near the airport in a certain part of the city of Pasay City near
the airport of Manila International (Airport). In May of 1990 before we got
married, Ave and I decided to take a trip to the Philippines to buy things for
our wedding, barong Tagalogs, the shirts that the guys will wear, so get some
things, do some wedding business, and to meet Ramon Obusan. So we do that, and
we spent almost three weeks there, and it was an incredibly life-changing trip
in many ways for me because I met Ramon. He blessed me—he invested a lot of time
when I was there and he saw the fire in me and he just poured fuel over it by
sharing with me his ideals, his approach.
At the end of the time that I
left in June he gifted me with cultural material, or material cultured from the
Philippines, costumes and instruments, to start a group, you know. Alex, we
always know we wanted to have a group, but the time with Ramon in May of 1990
said that we could do it, we could start a group, because we had him as a major
resource. He said, “I can serve you as a resource for you.” So that sort of
said, wow, we can do this. So we get home—and, of course, it started my—he died
in 2006, so it was a sixteen-year relationship, a very close relationship that
I’ll talk about. Then we get married in August, and then we start our group in
November of 1990. Remember, I don’t know if I talked about this, but Kayamanan
was founded by four individuals, (Leonilo) “Boy” (Angos) and Barbara (Ele). Boy
Angos and Barbara Ele were from the Bayanihan side. Actually, Boy Angos called
me—okay, here’s the story of Kayamanan. I don’t know if I said it. I get a call
after our wedding from a gentleman who I met a couple years before. His name was
Boy Angos, and Boy was the musical coordinator of Bayanihan. He was a
percussionist and instrumentalist, but his father was the first rondalla maestro
in 1958, (Juanito) “Nitoy” Gonzalez, a very famous musician and composer in the
Philippines, and I met Papa Nitoy by playing at UCLA. He used to play for some
of our gigs at UCLA, but here he was having another life as a musician in
America, but he had this world-class, you know, experience. So Boy, his son,
knew of our student activism, and Boy was not done yet playing music. He longed
to play music as well, and so he called me in probably September or October of
1990 and basically said, “Hey, Joel, you want to start a group?”
0:11:17.2
CLINE:
Where was he?
JACINTO:
He was in North
Hollywood. He was living in North Hollywood.
CLINE:
Interesting.
0:13:05.2
JACINTO:
So he had
located here, and he had a wife and he had a young, young daughter. His wife,
Barbara, was also a soloist and also came through Bayanihan. So Boy and Barbara
came from that state-supported, you know, world travelers. Both of them had
traveled the world, okay? Remember we had all these materials, and so the
confluence of us having this materials, having the support of Ramon Obusan, and
then it was almost like an idol of mine, because I used to listen to—before I
knew Ramon, I would listen to the recordings of Bayanihan on albums, right, and
try to recreate the rhythms of the percussion, of the indigenous
instrumentation, because we had lack of instruction, lack of access to
instruments as well as instruction. So we’d just pound it out, just kind of
listen into how do you do that, you know, and it was more like rhythmic mode.
There’s no technique. There’s no cultural context behind those things. That’s
how in the dark we were. So when Boy called me, it was like another cultural
mentor or cultural icon was calling, said, “Wow, what confluence all this has,”
in the span of from, you know, from meeting Ramon in May to getting a call from
Boy in September, you know. So things happened really, really quick. So we
decided to do it. We take a leap of faith and said, “Okay, let’s try to form a
group,” with Boy and myself were the principals, but my partner in crime and the
better half of me was Ave.
So Boy and Barbara from the Philippines, Ave
and Joel, although Ave was born in the Philippines, came over here at a young
age, so basically Fil-Am and me being Fil-Am. So you have this couples, Filipino
and Fil-Am, right, Filipino American, getting together to start this group
Kayamanan Ng Lahi, which means “treasures of our people,” and the thing there
about it is it is not the worldly treasures, it’s not the material culture, per
se, that is the treasures; it’s really our culture in general, the intangible.
CLINE:
Where did the decision come
from to call it that? Whose idea was it?
JACINTO:
Ah, okay. It came from
me. I had a dream, and a lot of things come to you in dreams. I had been reading
a book about Philippine jewelry and Philippine wealth—“kayamanan” means wealth
or treasures or riches—and it was a big coffee table book, and I got it when I
was in the Philippines, and I think that word “kayamanan” stuck in me. So I came
up with Kayamanan, and then my aunt in San Francisco said, “Joel, you know, you
should add Ng Lahi,” treasures of our race or treasures of our people, so that’s
how it got to be Kayamanan Ng Lahi. Boy wanted something little bit shorter like
(Philippine phrase). (Philippine word) also means, like, treasures, but we kept
it Kayamanan, and the name has stuck. So our initials are KNL, Kayamanan Ng
Lahi, so that’s how we refer, because it’s Kayamanan Ng Lahi is, like five
syllables too. So yeah, so Boy and Barbara, and at the first it was like a
lesson in cultural détente, because Boy and Barbara had their formula and what
was successful on the world stage, and Ave and I were the opportunists who were
based here, who did things already as student activists and didn’t have the same
orientation as them. We didn’t have the same background. We were culturally
different, very, very different, and that was a challenge in of itself.
0:15:17.8
CLINE:
I’ll bet.
JACINTO:
Yeah.
CLINE:
How much did your depth of
experience in your encounter in the Hawaiian culture help make the détente a
little smoother?
JACINTO:
Yeah, it did to a certain
degree, you know, because I had the orientation, again, of knowledge being
passed down from generation to generation. I had that orientation, and that’s
what gravitated to me in the beginning of sort of handling the education, the
program, if you will, Alex, okay, the program, how we do things, how we
research, how we acquire knowledge. I mean, that’s my thing. That’s my role. Boy
was immediately the musical and the technical coordinator about, you know, the
presentation and some of the artistry and especially the music. Barbara, his
wife, although she’s a dancer, was kind of quiet in the beginning because we had
another choreographer working with her, so she was mainly a dancer, but in the
next couple of years she really blossomed into taking the role as the dance
director and choreographer who I would work with closely. So the fourth wheel,
Ave, Ave’s always about business, always about the administrative, handling the
managing aspect. So we all had four different roles after, you know, the initial
three or four years that worked really, really well.
CLINE:
But you were also all
performing then.
0:17:10.9
JACINTO:
And we were also
performing, yeah, yeah, so, you know, you’re inside, you’re doing your lugging,
you know. It was everything, you know. When you start a group like that—and
twenty years later I realize how much of our lives we devoted to just birthing
this folk arts organization, as we call it. It’s a nonprofit, but we’re a folk
arts organization—of the Sunday rehearsals, you know.
We started off at
UCLA in the amphitheater, in the Fowler Museum Amphitheater. Actually, we had
our first one over at a Filipino bookstore off of Wilshire (Boulevard) in
Beverly Hills. That was the first one, and then we relocated to UCLA, and for
the course of the next twenty years, we would be practicing in YMCAs and YWCAs
in and around West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Venice. Then in 2006 we made a
very strategic move to come to Historic Filipinotown and to, you know, basically
fulfill the opportunity we had with SIPA, where I work as executive director.
But Kayamanan really represents the diversity of the Filipino community as it is
because we’re heterogeneous. We come from different orientations. We have
different cultural experiences, you know. So it was really a microcosm of the
community, you know.
CLINE:
Now, there are these four
people and you’re starting out. How did you go about putting together your
program and looking for venues? You kind of defined what people’s roles were.
I’m thinking that either very quickly or eventually there were more than four
people involved in this, so how did that evolve?
0:19:18.4
JACINTO:
You know, the
intent with Kayamanan in the beginning when Boy had called me was that he knew I
came from UCLA and that was our base of support, that was our base of our
participation, so naturally we recruited from our friends at UCLA, the people
that we taught with and danced with, and the collegiate level became our first
batch, and that was true, because we came with this, you know, this following,
this participation. So we were close to the Westside because we lived in Culver
City, you know. We probably started out with about twenty to twenty-five people
who would rehearse with us on a weekly basis.
The repertoire was pretty
much a replica of Bayanihan’s work, and then a couple years later when we had
our first major performance, we started our own concept of creating Philippine
dance, contemporary Philippine dance. It was mostly the Western Christian
influence because that’s what, as Westernized Filipinos, we had, I think, more
apt and more inclination to do. So Barbara and I created these dances based off
the musical compositions of Nitoy Gonzalez, and we did our first major
performance. It was called Tertulia, and “tertulia” was the colonial term for a
soiree, an afternoon soiree, where arts and music were an integral part of it,
small, parlor-like, but we blew it up into a production at the Hyatt (Hotel),
one of the Hyatts downtown. I think it was the Hyatt on Seventh (Avenue) and—I
forget the actual—
0:20:32.3
CLINE:
Near the 110
Freeway.
0:21:07.9
JACINTO:
Right, right. So
we did that, and that was our first big production. So again, you have a
Bayanihan repertoire and then you have this orientation of Ramon Obusan, so over
the years, I think, I don’t remember, but it was pretty close within the first
five years did we start to include the repertoire of Ramon Obusan, who actually
Boy had a relationship when he was in Bayanihan. So there was some dynamics of,
okay, now we’re trying to insert another artistic—and we were pretty much all
open to it, you know what I mean, but there was dynamics there.
I have
to say, we had a choreographer who was working with us initially at the
beginning. Her name was (unclear), and (unclear) was a good friend of Boy’s and
Barbara’s and had come from the Bayanihan, too, as well, but she wasn’t really a
founder. I think over the course of the probably two years, that she basically
transitioned out as our choreographer and Barbara sort of blossomed into taking
that role. She didn’t take that role initially. Barbara was kind of quiet. She
was a little bit younger. She was probably two years or three years younger than
us, not that much, you know, but she really blossomed in the first five years of
our existence too. Okay, so important performances in the first couple of years.
We really got a lot of support from people like Judy Mitoma at UCLA, CARS
(Community Arts Resources), Aaron Paley, and the (International) Festival of
Masks.
CLINE:
Oh, yeah. Right.
JACINTO:
Right? That was really
big. I think the Festival of Masks really helped put Kayamanan on the world
stage map of Los Angeles because the International Festival of Masks was an
important cultural tradition, multiethnic, diversity, right, using masks as the
idiom. Michael Alexander at Grand Performances picked us up early on in our
first five years to start performing at Spiral Court in California (Plaza), the
Water Court Plaza and everything like that, so we had a lot of play there. On
the community side, the Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture, or FPAC, was a
newly formed festival tradition. It started after the ’92 riots as a
collaboration between the (Los Angeles) City (Department of) Cultural Affairs
and the Filipino community, and I happened to be the community liaison because
they were working with the nonprofit SIPA. So again, all these things in my life
had intertwined, so therefore we get a lot of play by being one of the anchor
groups and cofounders of that festival as well. So, early on we were able to
make our entrée to the world dance scene in Los Angeles because of also there
was a lack of representation.
0:23:28.9
CLINE:
Yeah, exactly.
JACINTO:
Now, before us came,
there were other Philippine groups that were still active, most notably folks
like Fil(ipino)-Am(erican) Family Cultural Group led by a dear lady, Betty Sison
Friese, who passed away in 2002, and that was really a cultural icon. They
performed a lot for the Irwin Parnes world dance revues at the Dorothy Chandler
(Pavilion). Irwin Parnes was a pretty famous impresario who handled those. So
there had been other groups that had come before us in the community. So our
context for Kayamanan—because we had to go out there and sort of pay our
respects to Tita Betty because we had performed with her as well, but when we
told her, “Tita Betty, this is not something to compete with you. This is
something to really use as an educational outlet and the continuation for UCLA,”
and there was dynamics in that. Even though we said that to her, I think she
felt that we were not a threat, but we were—she’s like, “Why do you have to
start a group? Why don’t you just join my group already?” But we had a different
orientation, and the orientation was that we would have not an activist, but a
very specific approach to Philippine dance and music.
0:24:55.8
CLINE:
There’s a word
that I’m trying to come up with, but it’s okay. I’m interested if you can
articulate what that difference is.
0:27:26.4
JACINTO:
Well, the
difference is that Tita Betty and preceding groups basically followed the revue,
the idea of this suites, the idealized stereotypical Philippine iconic
stereotypes of the primitive tribal person, the exotic southerner, the
happy-go-lucky countryside person, peasant, you know what I mean, the
sophisticated Spanish mestizo. All those stereotypes, because they are put forth
in the performing arts, are very powerful. We didn’t want to destroy those; we
wanted to evolve those. We wanted to go a little bit deeper, so maybe we wanted
to, ourselves, jump into the emic approach. So early on I began to try to figure
out how I could bring a stronger framework, a stronger approach, a stronger
understanding to what we were doing, Alex, and it would drive me to go back to
school in 1995 in anthropology, and not just cultural anthropology; applied
anthropology at California State (University) Long Beach. So from 1995 basically
to 1999 I did the graduate coursework. I didn’t finish, and I regret not being
finished, because we were having some family issues and, you know, relationship
issues that really just was really difficult, and I was working at SIPA, and I
would do grad school at night and the additional work at SIPA, so it was really
hard on our marriage, but I got all the knowledge and I got what I came for. So
I came out of four years of applied anthropology graduate coursework with a
framework of culture based on a cultural anthropological model that we would use
to build and to formalize the program framework of Kayamanan Ng Lahi, and we’re
really, really proud of that because it’s applied, it makes sense, and it’s
based on theory, but there’s the idea of it’s applicable and it’s helped us.
We’re testimony, because we have been using (unclear), and that cultural model
is basically the ideological, the behavioral, and the material dimensions of
culture.
So we approach our cultural productions and our cultural
processes with the issues that we first have to understand, we have to train,
and we have to have the materials in order to—that’s sort of the package. I
developed this equation, “I plus B plus M equals P,” “I” for ideological, “B”
for behavioral, “M” for material.” All that goes in, equals the “P,” the
production, the presentation, the performance. So what you saw at Skirball, this
“informance” or this “edutainment,” was a process that’s our framework at play
where we try to have educational, entertaining, and enlightening performances
that are based on strong ideological content. So we’re not just dancing and not
explaining, but we’re sharing with you cultural norms, cultural ideals, ideals,
so that the process of production is a process of engagement where we’re drawing
you in, we’re helping transform you as an audience member and as a performer in
the span of half an hour to an hour, you know. So that was a big thing for me,
and that was my responsibility for the organization, to bring in, to develop
this program that we have used, you know, since that time, since 1995, and
continue to use it as a basis for our educational and our training and our
performance model.
CLINE:
Wow. Through things like
the Festival of Masks or whatever, how much awareness of and/or exposure or
experience with some people from different cultural, different traditions—how
much interaction did you have with people during maybe similar things from
different traditions?
JACINTO:
So, you know, being part
of the world dance scene, we get to know who’s who, stuff like that, so we
developed relationships with—I got to say also in 1994 we began to be part of
the Dance Kaleidoscope—
CLINE:
Oh, yeah.
JACINTO:
—with Don Hewitt.
0:15:09.8
CLINE:
At the (John
Anson) Ford (Amphitheater).
JACINTO:
Right. At the Ford and at
the Luckman (Fine Arts Complex) and everything like that. So we joined that
league of Dance Kaleidoscope, and we see everybody that’s doing it, (unclear)
Brasil, Linda Yudin, Gema Sandoval, with Danza Floricanto, with Sophiline Cheam
Shapiro, and Japanese, but all the hula, of course. We’re still maintaining my
relationships with all the hula. We’re still performing, Ave and I, at least. So
we have the Hawaiians still. We have all these relationships that we’re just
drawing and just understanding and referencing where everybody’s at. “What types
of shows do you have?”
CLINE:
Right. That’s what I was
wondering.
0:31:38.5
JACINTO:
So everything
shapes us. All our experiences shape us, and we really sort of are eclectic in
taking these things. What is clear is over time, what draws us, especially what
draws me, is the groups that have a strong narrative, because to share culture
is a very open-ended conversation. If you’re not able to get an answer, you’re
just going one way, and so the narrative for us was a way of drawing in the
audience by having them think of their own narratives, so I immediately became
attracted to all the groups that had really strong narratives. It’s hard
sometimes in world dance to draw good narratives. It’s not the revue type; it’s
anti-revue, because anti-revue is just like the dances themselves tell a story,
but that’s a very, for me, again, a superficial story. There’s other deeper
things. So we looked for different narratives and we began to start to perform
using a thematic approach to dance, meaning that we would sort of break down the
barriers and do things outside of the box, take dancers from different regions
and put them together because they had the same theme.
So we tried to
deconstruct and reconstruct Philippine culture using themes that, for one
instance—and we got this, again, from Ramon. He really helped inspire these
different things, dances that people do throughout the lifecycle. So you take a
human lifecycle and you take dances and you highlight the lifecycle through
these different dances so people can see the narrative of dances when you’re
young to dances as you’re growing up to dances that males and females do
separately to learn their genders in their life to dances of courtship to dances
of marriage and to village celebration and death, and that goes back around.
Those things, to me, they captured me, and, you know, I think that helps convey
messages because it’s a frame that people understand. It’s a human narrative as
opposed to just a Filipino narrative. We’re just sharing with you what happens
in the Philippines. So again, we get influenced by all these other dance groups
because we’re a part of it now, we’re a player, and that was what we really
enjoyed as well.
CLINE:
Were there some that really
you found to be particularly influential that you can name?
0:33:26.0
JACINTO:
Gema Sandoval,
her Day of the Dead, her Chicano series where she’s doing Mexican folkloric
dance, but from a Chicano perspective, like Si Se Puede. She did dances about
Cesar Chavez, and these are folklorico style. She did a collaboration with
Loretta Livingston about modern dance and using Mexican music, and we would
later work with Gema on a historical project linking the Philippines and Mexico.
I began also to take the legends of Hawaii, because that’s what hula is,
obviously, accounts oral history and of legends, and there was a gentleman up in
the Bay Area, his name is Patrick Mukuakane, and he had been doing really great
work in terms of he did a series about Hawaii and effect of the missionaries
coming, you know, and did these modern dance interpretations that were
really—some say were sacrilegious, but they were very powerful because they were
very much narrative-based. So those types of groups really engaged me, and sort
of tried to weave the same things into what we were doing as well, yeah.
CLINE:
Wow. Yeah, you walked into
my next question, which is if you were able to somehow draw on the hula side of
your, in this case, adopted cultural context to interact with the material you
were dancing with, Kayamanan.
0:35:52.1
JACINTO:
Oh, yeah. Alex,
that’s a very important part because I think the respect and the integrity of
understanding—and hula, hula is based on an understanding and an appreciation
and a closeness to the (unclear), to the land, but also to the spoken word and
the power of the spoken word. In order to be not just a basic hula dancer or
performer, you need to understand language, so just understanding Hawaiian
language—and I have a basic understanding of Hawaiian. I know verbs and nouns.
When a Hawaiian song comes on, I can understand what it’s saying, generally, you
know, because I have that basic knowledge. But that primary responsibility, that
primary acknowledgement, that primary study of languages, you know, these are
things I translated over to Philippine culture, says we can’t do this dance
because we don’t understand enough of it or we don’t have the material culture
to represent it well or we don’t know the music. It helped me develop a lens of
critical analysis, of self-reflection, and, I believe, of cultural integrity.
So my hula background really shaped not only the program aspect of it,
the knowledge and the types of knowledge that you have, like to our students, to
our members, you have to have this knowledge, and I think it’s some at the
beginning, because the dynamics of the group are that a lot of people came
because they were friends of ours, right, and some were more heavily in the
culture, some were not. But I’m pretty sure that in the beginning I tended to
sometimes be overbearing and a little bit harsh on people, like, “Oh, here goes
Joel again with his culture,” and everything like that, because they did not
have the same orientation, you know, and they weren’t used to it, and no other
organization really had this level of cultural responsibility and cultural
initiative, Alex. So I’m sure it created some dynamics with the organization.
You know, they weren’t limiting, you know. It still gave us life. It still
defined us, but, you know, that was really, I think, my role for the
organization, to help give it our cultural soul.
CLINE:
How much do you think you
were able to open the eyes or minds and perhaps inspire some of the people who
were performing with it to appreciate and get closer to connecting with that
than they had before? How much do you think that may have happened?
0:38:22.00:39:58.4
JACINTO:
I think
that’s probably the biggest delta of the transformation in our group, that, by
and large, everybody who comes through our group and stays significant amount of
time reports and shares that, you know. There’s two aspects of the group that
why people stay and why people thrive, and some people have been with us twenty
years, and the average tenure is eight or nine years, Alex. One is of the
culture, of the culture of the organization. Three things. The culture of the
organization, which is one of nurturing, one of social camaraderie, because one
of the things why we started Kayamanan is, well, we wanted an outlet for people
to find community. It’s not just about the culture we represent, but our
culture, us as people giving something. So the culture of the organization, the
culture that we channel and are able to spread out, so all the education. People
have been transformed by, “Hey, I become a better Filipino. I understand more
about myself and more about my heritage through Kayamanan.”
I think the
third thing would be the culture of interacting with our community and outside
of our community, so the culture of performance, the culture of transaction, you
know, where we’re not able just to do this inside our group, but we’re able to
go around. We’re able to do these mainstream things. We’re able to go to
Acapulco (unclear) to represent the Philippines to Acapulco and those types
of—they’re mainstream, because they’re outside of our community, so not only
inside our community. Inside our community we mainly do weddings and rituals of
celebration, if you will, but outside it’s when we get a chance to do things
like the (unclear) or the Skirball. So what you witness was a very life-giving
performance to our organization. Why? Because we’re making connections. We’re
making connections. We’re able to touch people. We’re able to see that
transformation, that glimmer in their eye. I had a gentleman from Nicaragua, and
he came and he goes—he was speaking to me in Spanish. I speak Spanish, so he was
speaking to me (unclear), “(Spanish phrase),” I’ve never seen this type of
cultural performance in Los Angeles. So for him, he felt compelled to tell me
it’s like not just a good show, but, like, I never seen that before, “(Spanish
phrase),” you know.
So those types of things are really, really
important because our culture is very democratic, or we feel that it’s our
commodity. We can trade and represent, you know. On the world stage everybody’s
equal, right, and we just happen to have a lot of cultural commodity, so we use
that to bring our community notoriety, which is important because there’s an
issue of Filipinos in America, Alex, flying under the radar. What are we known
for? We’re known for Imelda (Marcos). We’re known for shoes. We’re known for
Ferdinand Marcos. We’re known for these stereotypes that don’t really tell the
whole picture. So part of it is messaging, you know.
CLINE:
Well, I think the big
confusion is what that picture is, because if the Philippines are even known to
be what we might call the kind of archetypal colonial model, thereby it’s
incredibly layered, it’s incredibly diverse, and in a very nuanced and
potentially very confusing way, I think, to people outside that point of
reference. So I’m not sure people really even know what it means to be Filipino.
JACINTO:
Right. Exactly. You’re
right.
CLINE:
So what do you do? How do
you present it, then?
0:42:01.8
JACINTO:
You can start by
what we do in terms of culturally who we are. What are some tidbits? In fifty
minutes you can only do so much, but you can do a lot. So if they understand,
oh, Filipinos are Southeast Asians, they have all these layers of influence,
they have this Western influence and they have this indigenous thing here going
on, oh, and Filipinos are close to the environment. They tend to create their
dances about the animals in the environment.
Okay, so you’re learning
these different things, and it creates a picture, an essential picture, if you
will, a foundational picture of who the Filipino is from a very cultural
standpoint, that music and dance are very much an important part of our lives.
Hopefully all these things can come through in a fifty-minute performance. Maybe
not. You could ask yourself how much—and you’re an insider, in a way, you’re in
the know, but for the average person who comes to our show who sat through one
of our shows at the Skirball, what did they learn? What was transformed? Oh,
they learned a rhythm. They learned that Filipino culture is participatory, so
you’re not just watching; you participate, too, as well. Oh, that’s how
Filipinos work in the fields, little things. I mean, they’re little things. No,
as trivial as it may seem, you know, I think that it steps up a person’s
knowledge from one level to the next, and that’s important. We take that
responsibility—and that’s what I think defines our performances, as audience
engagement types of things, because we take that approach. It’s not about, okay,
watch us. Here’s a show. But we really consider the audience to say how do we
make you a part of it, because that is very Filipino, and if anything else, if
people walk out saying, “You know, Filipinos are very inviting, they’re very
sharing,” well, shit, then we’re good.
0:43:52.3
CLINE:
This is so funny
because as soon as you stopped, I was going to say my impression was that
probably the average person came away with the following feeling. The Filipino
experience is very inviting and very uplifting, so you walk out feeling better
than you did when you came in.
JACINTO:
Right. And that is to the
core, to the core, Alex. Being a Filipino American or even a Filipino, we don’t
actively—we’re like in a fishbowl. You’re Filipino, who cares? I’m Filipino. I
know, I know. You’re innate, you know. It’s all implicit in with you. In an
American landscape and where we’re here now we are challenged, and we have the
opportunity now to look at our culture, embrace it, and to be able to talk about
it, to represent, to manifest itself, to talk about it explicitly so that it’s
not just a cultural thing because we’re all the same. We’re not all the same. We
have to share it and help understand. So the challenge for Kayamanan is taking
something that is internal within us and innate and implicit and making it
explicit. So the idea of there’s a central core theme that really guides, I
think, a Filipino spirituality and culture is the idea that in everybody there
is a creative living being, and the idea of kapwa, k-a-p-w-a, is this idea of
shared humanity. How more basic can you get? That in everything there is this
life-giving force, and the whole idea about life is to be able to make
connections with that creative life force and other beings recognizing it so you
all become one. So the idea of Filipinos sort of going inwards to say we are all
humanity is a very fundamental driving thing. I don’t care how many layers of
influence you got, Chinese, Spanish, American, if you have something of Filipino
blood in you, that is there, and bringing that part of the collective
unconsciousness to the surface is really, I think, the key, because that’s a
good thing. Shared humanity and valuing everybody, that’s a pretty relevant
theme these days, right, so it helps the Filipino become a world citizen to be
malleable enough to be able to deal with this and that. No, oh, that’s not like
us. You know what I mean? We’re very obviously inviting. We’re very easy to
acquire new ideas on top of our own and mix those with our own. So that’s a very
important part of this stage twenty years into the game, being more purposeful
in relaying these cultural themes and ideas.
0:46:37.1
CLINE:
How much were you
able to plug into some of the extent avenues for getting work out there in the
community, things like Performing Tree or Music Center on Tour (MCOT)?
JACINTO:
Yeah, good question.
Those things we had been less successful with because of the limitation of work.
None of us, we’re all full-time. I mean, that’s just the thing, so, Alex, we
always wanted to and we had the perfect setup for Music Center on Tour,
Performing Tree. I don’t think Performing Tree is still around, are they?
CLINE:
No.
JACINTO:
No, so MCOT, Music Center
on Tour, is there, and we talked to them a number of times. You know, to make
the leap to say, okay, we’re going to be available for, you know, three hours
and school assemblies—I even developed a repertoire and everything like that and
a script, so we were all ready to go, it’s just the time, the
operationalization, like that too. But what we were able to do is, you know, we
get known in terms of if we perform in a wedding, inevitably we’ll get referrals
by word of mouth. So we’ve done in twenty years probably close to three, four
hundred weddings in the Filipino community.
0:47:37.4
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Then, you know, in the
mainstream our names are out there, so we’re out there performing.
CLINE:
How many gigs do you tend
to do per year outside the wedding circuit?
JACINTO:
Together with the
weddings, we probably do anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. We did more in the
first ten years because, you know, we didn’t have families. We turn down a lot
more because it’s, again, quality time, and we have to be very sensitive to our
performance so that they want to do it, you know. But outside of weddings, we
probably have anywhere from a dozen to fifteen performances out there in the
public in some way, shape, and form.
CLINE:
You mentioned how when you
went back to school it was hard on your marriage. How do you make time for all
this?
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah, good
question, Alex. Well, first of all, you know, Ave and I consider Kayamanan as
our first baby because we helped give birth to it, too, as well, but like any
other family, we wanted our own, and so we embarked on our own journey of having
children starting from when we got married all the way up until 1999 when Kai
0:49:15.30:52:21.2
JACINTO:
was
born. So we basically went through the world of sort of prayer and science
combined, you know, faith and science.
So I was very blessed, actually
went to the Philippines and participated in a fertility festival called
(Philippine phrase), the Dance of Obando. Obando’s a town north of Manila in
Bulacan province that is where childless couples come to dance and pray for
children or women pray for a male and males pray for a female to different
saints, so it’s very iconic, very, you know, very religious-vow-type, and I went
in 1999, and it was in May. Because of, I think, our faith and my faith, that we
asked god for a child, and Kai came in December. Then the year next I went back
as my religious vow and my bainata. Bainata is “religious vow,” the Filipinos’
(unclear). Again, for the Catholics, it’s a very strong Catholic tradition. Went
back and we had another baby five years later, so I don’t have to go back
anymore, but the idea that stuck with me is this idea of religious vow or a vow,
whether it be—others call it, you know—monks take a vow of silence, a vow of
piety, a vow of poverty, a vow, and a vow is something very powerful because
it’s your total commitment. So, Alex, I think that I realized that Kayamanan and
our work is our vow for the gifts that have been given to us, right, for all the
investments, all the universe, and god has given us all these blessings. It’s
our responsibility, it’s our vow, it’s our intent to pass those on to future
generations because we’re at the point we’re realizing that, hey, the Philippine
culture in America—we’re not going back to the Philippines. Our children and the
generations after us are going to be totally Filipino American and then some,
probably, over the course of generations, and it’s our responsibility. In other
communities like the Native Hawaiian and Native American they always consider
the actions in your life and where you are in the milieu seven generations
before you, your ancestors, and seven generations after you, and with that type
of, you know, perspective, it makes things little bit more clear about what your
responsibility is. All you have to do—not all you have to do, but you just got
to pass it on to the next one, not only the knowledge, but also the
responsibility, just pass it on. That’s why for our twentieth anniversary last
November or theme was “Salin Lahi,” which is generations for passing it on from
generation to generation, because now our kids are performing with us, and
Barbara and Boy’s their daughter had been performing with us a while. We’ve had
generations of kids come, but for me and Ave, it’s just, you know, twenty years
now. That’s the short end of a generation, but we’re coming to be a generation,
so the issue of how will Kayamanan Ng Lahi survive past its founders.
There was a death of a founder of a group in San Diego just two days
ago, Lolita Carter, who founded Samahan Dance Company, and they’re going to be
dealing with that issue right now, because we realized that other groups have
died because they were founder-based, and that’s not our intent. I think
Kayamanan, our intent is that we have a program that’s so important, that’s so
integral and so relevant and so appropriate that it’s got to be cared for and
passed from one generation to the next, so that’s the type of program we have of
one of documentation, one of using technology, one of being very purposeful, is
really important.
CLINE:
Do you keep an archive?
JACINTO:
Yeah, we keep written
archives and visual archives, audio archives, although that needs to be, you
know—if you mean they’re on CD, on DVD, okay, they’re there, but they’re not all
labeled. I have some level of documentation, of indexing, and of—what would you
call it—of cataloguing, but it’s at a very infantile stage, and I think as I
progress, I will devote more time and effort to that and engage others to help
me, because what we have in Kayamanan is probably the most extensive research
and archival and source material in the United States of any Philippine dance
group in the United States.
0:54:38.9
CLINE:
How much, if any,
inroads are possible, or that you witnessed have been possible, to be made
between the type of people that you serve through SIPA and cultural
organizations like Kayamanan as perhaps alternative avenues for people who are,
to use the term used last time, at risk, for example? You hear sometimes about
cultural organizations providing an outlet for people who didn’t have a healthy
outlet, perhaps, in their own community? How much connection have you seen in
that regard?
JACINTO:
Oh, yeah, I think
tremendous, tremendous, not only Kayamanan, but as a community at large. Realize
that who are the major participants in these Philippine dance performances? It
tends to be children, youth, and young adults, you know.
CLINE:
Yeah, dance tends to be
kind of often, anyway, sort of age-limiting.
0:55:44.50:57:28.9
JACINTO:
Right.
Although we’re trying to change that, being in the late forties, to say, hey,
man, the best dancers are the mature dancers. They may not move the best and
they may not amplify everything, but they got the most soul because they got the
most history, right? So I’m trying to live that life. (laughs) In the context of
the village or our first voice, life, you don’t stop dancing because, oh,
someone’s wondering I don’t look as I good as I used to. You know what I mean?
So we’re trying to encourage our dancers, say, “No, you dance throughout life.”
But at SIPA in particular, when I was brought in—and again, I was
brought in because I started a nonprofit a year before, and so they saw in me
obviously this fire, this opportunity to be the front guy, but also that I had a
commitment to nonprofit work or mission-driven work, okay. I brought in the
culture with me. Of course, I brought in the resources in Kayamanan and some of
the same things, so I used to work with our kids. I used to teach our kids at
SIPA, and they were at risk. They were knuckleheads, you know, the batches that
I taught when I first started the first five years, and I taught them ritual
dances. I and our senior leadership taught them dances really of ritual because
we wanted to give them not just movement and happy, happy stuff, but ritual so
that they could get an idea about ideas of use of symbols and use of special
performances that punctuate your life, you know what I mean, give them a little
bit more depth. To this day, some of the kids who are now young adults who are
now married look back and report to me, “Joel, man, those dances you taught,
man, that was so important,” because we gave them self-esteem. It gave them an
identity. It gave something to latch onto, say, this is part of who I am, and
when you’re able to give that to a young person who has no mirror, if you will,
has no cultural reference—it was different than their parents, right. They don’t
share the same culture as their parents, and you give them something that could
relate them not only to their parents, but to their culture, to the homeland,
you’re giving them almost, like, an anchor to latch and say here’s a tether. No
matter where you go, this is who you are, this is where you come from, and
that’s very empowering.
So we have at SIPA literally used culture to
bring all these hundreds and hundreds of kids throughout the years, you know,
some more than others, and whether it is promoting a sense of idea of community,
because you’re in a community-based setting, or issues of kuya and ate, which
are terms for “older brother” and “older sister,” you know, terms of respect,
those are all things that help kids develop this idea of this is who I am, I’m a
part of this. Even if they’re not, you have Latino Mexican calling kuya, ate,
using terms not reserved, but intended to call your older brother or sister, but
they’re using those, so it’s very eclectic like that too. So, good question. We
do, we intertwine that. I brought that because of my background to SIPA, and
Kayamanan—and we go back to 2006 to say, “Hey, man, we’ve been around for a
while. We should consider bringing our program closer to the center of our
community,” which was on Temple Street at SIPA, Alex, so that’s when we started
to run our program out of SIPA.
CLINE:
Creating a bit of a
commuter situation for—
JACINTO:
Well, for us, but, you
know, others, you know—because we all come from all over L.A., you know, L.A.
city and beyond, and people will travel, you know, to be with us because they
love the organization, they love the group.
CLINE:
Right. Yeah. How much
interaction do you have, then, with other Filipino-based performing groups
(unclear)?
1:00:37.61:01:32.9
JACINTO:
You
know, there were a couple that started in the nineties or early nineties. From
1990 to 1995 there was a proliferation of Philippine dance groups, probably
three or four in addition to us, so we were, like, five, and we all see them
around, you know. It’s sort of this issue of tribalism, you know. You’re not us,
so you’re the other, but the idea is at a strategic level what we’re all doing
is incredible work, because we’re doing this to put forth this love of culture.
I realize that we need to have all these different dance groups because L.A.
County is so broad, you know. You can’t service all the people. You have to have
regional groups. We tend to be, you know, centrally located, as well as Westside
because that’s where Ave and I are living. Other groups are Glendale. Other
groups are the (San Fernando) Valley, you know. So there were a couple of groups
that were at the community-based level, you know, that had a level of capacity
that was—how should I say—mainstream-ready. I don’t know what that means, but it
had a certain level of artistic achievement where, you know, it was programmed
in the mainstream as well, just a couple, probably not more than two or three.
The other phenomenon throughout the years, we talked about this idea of
dance at the student-collegiate level, and Kayamanan, because of our
orientation, always went back and were asked to go back to teach at the
collegiate level. So technical assistance and consultation is one way by which
we’ve been able to sow seeds, so for twenty years we’ve been working with all
these different—not all these different, but different student-based
organizations who would come to us to learn repertoire, to learn our dances, and
so that is where we provide services to our community as well. These are the
eighteen to twenty-five, that demographics of young adults who are in college
and who are using their student experiences to further their cultural identity,
you know.
So there’s a phenomenon, Alex, that’s known as the Pilipino
Cultural Night, or PCN, okay, and in the eighties Ave and I were at the birth of
the genre at UCLA and other colleges and we’ve seen it become an important
vehicle for identity development within that age group. So we’ve tried to really
organize and help them understand culture as well, because there’s not just
culture. There’s skits. There’s themes. It’s like a vaudeville show, you know.
There’s modern dance, and they do kind of visual stuff as well. You know what I
mean? But at the heart of it it’s the Pilipino Cultural Night, and it’s not
really so Pilipino. It’s Pilipino American or Filipino American, really, because
that’s the context of what this is, but we try to help keep the “P” in there.
CLINE:
So how did starting
Kayamanan increase your awareness of an involvement in the activities of other
Philippine performing arts groups in the area? How close are some of these
groups to one another?
1:03:28.6
JACINTO:
We have cordial
relationships, you know. Sometimes we’d do stuff with them, you know. As
community folks, we all have relationships, you know, so it was very fluid, in a
way, you know, in terms of sometimes we would have members come from one group
to another, you know, but it was always about—and it was microcosms of the
community in terms of conflict and resolving conflict, because there’s this
issue in the Philippines and other communities where we don’t resolve conflict
well, so what we’ll do is we’ll start our own group. You know what I mean? So
you have the inability or that sort of dynamics about not being able to get
along or not being able to work it.
In Kayamanan, I think we have been
very, very noted for being able to take diverse points of view and working it
out. So again, Boy and Barbara from the Philippine side and Ave and I, and so
we’re like—and now Boy has stepped out as musical technical director. He’s a
consultant, but he’s really handling the music with another group, and he still
comes and performs with us, so we’re still led by us through Barbara as dance
director and choreographer, myself, program director, and so Barbara and I are
like the co-artistic directors, and then Ave as our business, so we’re the
triad. So Barbara and I, and with Ave’s sort of overall management, take care of
the organization, and we’ve stuck together. We go back and forth. Sometimes we
don’t totally agree, but we learn to compromise. We learn to say, “Hey, man,
that’s your expertise. I could do it as well, but you know what? Just do it,”
because it’s this idea of working in the collective and cooperatively and
teamwork as opposed to, like, I want to work it all by myself. You know what I
mean? In other groups it works that way, but in ours it’s just too much. It was
too much to ask of any one person.
CLINE:
When this blossoming during
the nineties happened of these Filipino performing arts groups and you started
to see a bit of a proliferation in dance groups and things, what are some of the
developments that you’ve seen come out of the community that are perhaps new and
different since that time?
JACINTO:
The dance groups have
shrunk. A number of those groups that were started in the early nineties are not
as active anymore. That’s alarming.
CLINE:
How much of that is an
age-based phenomenon?
1:06:22.71:07:34.0
JACINTO:
Not so
much age-based. I think it deals with a number of issues, including
infrastructure of the organization, of attrition, because what happens is as you
focus on kids, once they get to high school, there’s difficult break in high
school, and high school students are less around because they got so much more
competing things. So you have them from the time they’re up to, like, twelve,
thirteen, and then you lose them for high school, and then you gain them back
for college, and then hopefully on. So the groups that are really youth-based
that don’t have the other end of the spectrum tend to go through cycles where
they lose their performers, okay, so attrition, age-based. Programmatic
activity. If the group is not active all the time and you’re not able to engage
and keep people rehearsing for what, you know what I mean, then, again, people
tend to fall out.
So that is alarming, and I don’t look at that
something as very, very positive, you know, like, because we don’t want to, nor
do we intend, to monopolize the Philippine dance scene in the Southland, but
we’re probably one of a handful of, you know—a couple of groups that are
performing for shows. So there’s a lot of demand for a group like ours because
people want us to service a community, you know, and we have to respond to that
demand. So that means driving all over, you know. But what has happened in the
community is that it’s very, very difficult to start groups now because of the
idea of longevity, of how do you sustain basically a volunteer-driven arts
organization, Alex. You have to understand about Filipinos. None of the members
pay dues. We have an administrative fee at Kayamanan. You know what a person
pays for Kayamanan for a quarter, which is basically about ten to twelve weeks?
Thirty-five dollars. That’s more of an administrative fee, you know, and they
don’t pay for any of their costumes or anything like that. We handle that
through grants and through contract and revenue income and generation.
So, by and large, none of our dance groups in the community charge a
fee, and maybe that’s, you know, something, an issue that we need to take a look
at in terms of other services. If you take your kid to a ballet or another
class, you would pay $50 a month for one class a week. You know what I mean? So
what we charge, 35, other people sometimes charge $150, $200.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
Yeah, it comes out to
like $3 a class, and on average, you’re going to pay $10 a class for a dance
class. You know what I mean? So there’s tremendous value in it, but for
Kayamanan, that’s not a limiting factor. What keeps people coming back is what
they learn and, again, those three things, the drivers, the culture of the
organization, the culture of the country or who we are, and then the culture of
performance.
CLINE:
What about other performing
arts forms or medium? I’m thinking of particularly coming out of the Filipino
American experience as the generations start progressing. We have more young
people coming through the American cultural filter. What kind of developments do
you see coming from that experience?
1:09:38.31:11:38.3
JACINTO:
Very
acutely dance, dance and music, so as a pop culture, Filipinos are always
exposed to that, too, and take to that readily, Filipino, Filipino American
youth. So the hip-hop and the contemporary pop culture is huge, and so there’s a
portion of these PCNs that feature modern dance. It’s usually hip-hop-based, and
it’s huge. If you look at the commercial world right now, America’s Best Dance
Crew, So You Think You Can Dance?, it’s populated by Filipino winners and people
that have done well, Dancing with the Stars, Cheryl Burke. You know what I mean?
So there’s that issue of Filipinos are good dancers, you know. The world found
out. Well, we already knew.
So Filipino American students are taking all
their experiences and weaving it into their Cultural Nights because they’re
appropriating this as their culture as well. There’s a lot of Filipino rappers.
There’s a lot of Filipino dancers, you know, out there, in general, Alex, and so
we’re trying to monitor that and realize that that’s part of the contemporary
thing. So we’re trying to weave that in some way, shape, or form into our
performances. We have numbers where, you know, they’re part of our dance
performances and concerts, but they’re modern-dance-based, you know what I mean,
because Filipinos are doing it. It’s part of culture, because our little kids
are doing it. We’re passing it on from generation to generation, and that’s
obviously the idea of cultures, learned and shared behavior that’s passed down
from generation to generation. It’s more of a contemporary cultural expression,
but it’s cultural, nonetheless, when it’s passed down from generation to
generation, you know. So dance, especially, because it’s very participatory,
it’s very accessible. You know what I mean? You can have 10,000 people dancing,
and student numbers, you know, they have hundreds of students participating in
these Cultural Nights on individual campuses, and that’s a lot of human
resources. That’s a lot of initiative when you’re able to get people together to
rehearse intensively for that amount of time. So we’re monitoring that, and we
want to bring that in, because the idea of Kayamanan is a Filipino American
endeavor. You know, if you talk about this issue of are we a pure Filipino, no,
we’re not. We have to be real. Some of our members have never been to the
Philippines. Some of our children, you know, this is the only Filipino thing
they’ve ever done, and so we have to be really transparent about where we lie in
the continuum, and it’s being true to ourselves and it’s being true to who we
are.
So on the world dance stage, you know, Kayamanan is very much a
folk arts organization. It’s based on folk arts, but it’s very much in the
Filipino American context, so therefore, we don’t replicate things that are done
in the Philippines. We don’t follow the Philippine trajectory, because that’s a
different mindset. That’s a different market, if you will. They say when you
dance in Philippine groups, you’re basically dancing for the economics for it,
that you either want to get a job going to America or to do other things. It’s
not so much for the love of culture, because you’re already Filipino. You know
what I mean? That’s not a study, but that’s a thesis or a hypothesis that I
have, that the motives for dancing in the Philippines is different than the
locus of motivation for Filipino Americans, and I believe it’s different.
CLINE:
These are the kind of issue
I think I want to take up in our last session, a lot of issues of identity and
what it means, especially for you personally, and all the different layers that
you’ve been able to experience and draw on to define who Joel
JACINTO:
is. Related to this, I
wanted to ask you a really kind of nuts-and-bolts question. How many languages
do you speak?
JACINTO:
Spanish as a second
language, because I studied it a long time in school. Tagalog is jack. It’s
half-half. I understand it and I can form small sentences like that, so that
would be my third language. My fourth one that I understand enough and can speak
a little bit of is Hawaiian, through the mele, through songs. So that’s it.
That’s not a lot.
1:13:34.2
CLINE:
I imagine your
pidgin is also quite developed.
JACINTO:
Yeah, my
vernacular—pidgin, yeah. If I talk with someone from Hawaii, then it comes out.
So I’m a code-switcher. I am a code-switcher. I am a code switcher, and I
believe that that is a skill that you need in order to make connections, so I
find myself as not a cultural chameleon, but as a code-switcher. So if I’m with
my folks from Hawaii and there’s a friend and I want to make connections, I’m
going to code-switch. I’m going to go immediately into pidgin because it’s the
language you’re most successful, and I do this a lot. Sometimes I make mistakes.
If I’m in a store and someplace and clearly the person is Hispanic or Latino,
I’m going to speak Spanish to them just because I want to make connections with
them. I want to speak their language. I want them to know, you know what I mean,
whereas Tagalog, an elder person, then I’ll speak. If it’s a younger person,
then, you know—so it’s this whole idea about how we communicate and using
different languages, begin to make connections.
CLINE:
How much of the language
connection do you see being maintained among the younger generation in the
community?
1:15:25.2
JACINTO:
Oh, it’s very
dismal if you didn’t grow up with the language. A very small percentage of our
Fil-Ams are able to speak Tagalog or any Filipino language just through learning
it—if they’re a recent immigrant, of course they have much more, because they
were born and raised or they had much more exposure, Alex. But language is an
issue in our community because there are not enough—you have second- and
third-generation Filipino families who haven’t been able to give language to
their children, so the language is lost, and the parents’ generation didn’t have
it either. My parents were immigrants, and so obviously I had a little bit
because my parents spoke Tagalog to each other and to us, but now my generation
that didn’t grow up as native speakers and have this issue with the generations
down the line.
So as a community, we’re trying to deal with this issue
of linguistic amnesia, you know. How do we bring it back? I don’t think we’re
going to be able to bring it back to have everybody become proficient speakers,
but it’s more of the heritage learning where language is a part of heritage and
identity learning, so it becomes more holistic than intensive language
instruction. As long as my kids understand concepts of kapwa, of respecto, and
certain nouns, then, again, that’s a part of a picture that they’ll have. We
would love to have Tagalog taught as Spanish as a language, so we have to do the
advocacy there as well, and that’s a big issue. In San Diego they’ve done a much
better job about teaching Filipino in different levels at the high schools and
the colleges in San Diego, and in L.A., (demonstrates). So the venue that has
the most Filipinos outside of the Philippines has a dearth of access to Filipino
language instruction, which is shitty, because, you know, the politics of
advocacy and the allocation of resources, it’s just really tough, you know, but
that’s part of our work at SIPA. So we’ve had our own attempts at language
heritage learning, and we’ve been very successful, but again, we’re trying to
build a sustainable model where it’s based on fee for service, because for
language, it’s different than dance, you know. You have to pay instructors that
are very skilled, not that dancers are not, but that have the capacity to teach.
So we had ones for a number of different cycles at SIPA, but we kept getting
that request all the time, and we could say, “We wish we could fill it.” We’re
still intent on it because it is a market need, if you will, speaking from that
standpoint.
1:17:27.6
CLINE:
You mentioned last
time that you were on a Sunset Cruise dancing for mostly Japanese tourists.
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah, Alii Kai,
yeah.
CLINE:
You didn’t know much of
your—
JACINTO:
No, I didn’t learn that
much Japanese.
CLINE:
You didn’t learn much
Japanese.
JACINTO:
No, because I only worked
there two years, and I worked there part-time, so it wasn’t my major profession,
although my colleagues who were female and males, that was their livelihood, you
bet they learned Japanese enough to converse. My dear friend Derek Nui Heiva was
an interpreter, so he knew Japanese enough to be a primary speaker. So he
married a Japanese girl, too, and he has that duality about him, too, as well,
and that’s why he’s been able to teach hula in Japan where, again, I mentioned
it’s the largest market in hula in the world outside of Hawaii.
CLINE:
Wow. There you go.
1:18:26.2
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah, so
you have a lot of hula instructors that are going there too. So, Alex, I think
this was really good for me this year, to talk about, again, the dynamics of the
nineties and the communities, and then the next time—
CLINE:
We’ll finish up next time
talking more about where Kayamanan’s at now, where you’re at now, and basically
I’d like to get a picture of how you think of who you are with all these various
dreams all coming together to form Joel
JACINTO:
Okay?
JACINTO:
Great.
CLINE:
Layers. We’ll look at the
layers.
JACINTO:
Layers, strands,
weavings, yeah.
CLINE:
Okay?
JACINTO:
Very good. Thank you,
Alex.
CLINE:
Thank you. (End of July 27,
2011 interview)
CLINE:
Today is August 12th, 2011.
This is Alex
CLINE:
interviewing Joel
JACINTO:
once again at my home
studio in Culver City (California). This is our fourth session. This is going to
do it for us.
0:00:27.7
JACINTO:
laughs) I know.
I’m always just completely disappointed when these interviews end, but it’s
great we have today. Thank you for coming by.
JACINTO:
Thank you, Alex.
CLINE:
We talked a lot last time
about Kayamanan Ng Lahi and its artistic direction, its position in the Filipino
American community here in Los Angeles, as well as how it relates to other world
dance groups in the area. There’s a little bit more I want to cover about that,
and then I want to also get into some more kind of just personal areas,
identity, cultural, artistic, personal, etc. First of all, one of the things I
wanted to ask you about is you mentioned how in Kayamanan Ng Lahi there’s a lot
of commitment that people either bring to it or that gets nurtured and then
perhaps blossoms during people’s tenure in the company because of the culture of
the company and the connection to the culture, in this case Filipino culture,
and the performance culture. So what I wanted to ask you first off is if there
is ever an attraction by people who are not Filipino to work with the company,
and, if so, who are those people?
JACINTO:
Yeah. Wow. Great
question. You’re reading between the lines. (laughter) Let me just say that is a
phenomenon that has existed in Kayamanan since our inception. In the early
nineties we welcomed a Chinese American gentleman who stayed with us for five
years till he went to graduate school. Currently we have an Irish American,
pretty much very light-skinned, brown hair, from Brooklyn by way of Arizona. Her
name is Colleen (phonetic) and she is a staff member. She is over and above not
just a performer, but a staff member. She danced the Philippine dance at
Arizona, experienced—it goes back to non-Filipinos interactions with Filipinos,
okay, so I think this phenomenon is not unique to Kayamanan Ng Lahi, but rather
it’s a reflection, a manifestation of Filipinos’ general acceptance, recognition
of the creative life force in other beings, Alex. So I’ll go back to a very
fundamental Filipino concept of that of—
0:03:08.1
CLINE:
Is it kapwa?
JACINTO:
—kapwa. I mean, you
recognize your shared humanity, so it doesn’t matter if you’re Filipino or not.
You have this creative life force, and so therefore were, I think, very open,
very much willing to share and to just make connections with people too. So
people who are interested, that’s basically the prerequisite. You’re not
interested, you’re not interested. But Garrett (phonetic) was as a Chinese
American. Colleen has been as a Filipino American. So I just had a Mexican
American boyfriend of a sister of a member who sat in a workshop, a music
workshop, taught in Philippine, ensemble music, communal music, and through the
course of that interaction, he wants to come back, said, “Joel, I want to play
music with you guys. Tell me if there’s a next step.” So I think our ability to
recognize that, to welcome, to engage, and to share is definitely what makes us
attractive to people, makes us accessible. We’re not insular and we’re not
regimented, so to speak, little bit more organic and fluid.
0:05:05.9
CLINE:
Right. Well, one
of the things we talked about last time were some of the qualities that seem to
be the kinds of feelings that people come away with upon seeing a performance of
Kayamanan, and we came up with a few words. The word that I was thinking of that
I did not express last time was inclusiveness, which is, I think, exactly what
you’re describing, and that also made me wonder about in terms of what Kayamanan
is doing now, how much, if any, effort is made to, in a sense, reach out beyond
the Filipino community to find participants, or do you even ever sort of do
outreach or recruitment, as it were?
0:06:21.3
JACINTO:
Yeah, that’s
another great question, because we talk about how do we sustain the organization
over the course of a longer period, and what is our operational procedure about
recruitment, and we’re always open. We accept students on a quarterly basis, so
they have to come at the beginning of January or the beginning of April, the
beginning of July or the beginning of October, and we basically want—in order to
bring in new people, we have to orientate them well. We have to welcome them,
give them the program, so that happens through people just saying, “I have
friends.” Someone sees us in a performance, so they write us on email. We have a
lot that are college students or graduates who have seen us throughout the
years, that they’re now old enough and they can drive themselves or they have
the time now to spend. They’ll come on their own and then they’ll join us, so
that we have multiple ways, although we don’t do actual recruitment per se. I
don’t go out and I don’t recruit at the students. It’s more of by virtue of who
we are and what we do, people will come, and we always—I mean, we make ourselves
accessible on the website saying, “Hey, if you want to join, here’s how you do
it.”
So we make it easy, but we don’t structure it so much, but we do
have a structure for the orientation, and the orientation is something that I
think is unique to Kayamanan Ng Lahi out of all the Philippine dance companies
that I’ve seen, and I’m pretty sure, because we give them about a two-session,
three-hour orientation about the organization, about our mission, about our
program, and then we give them an additional lecture—and I do this—about our
framework of culture, and we share with that. It’s a toolkit. It’s a framework
that they could use for whatever because it’s based on cultural anthropology
too. So we get people from all over the place, you know, and especially from
those that we provide technical assistance and training, because that’s one of
our programmatic services. We consult, we support student-based organizations in
their Cultural Nights, so we’re a prime resource, Alex. So we’ll catch people
to, “Hey, I want to come and learn,” because they enjoy learning with us. So it
happens a lot.
CLINE:
Then how much, if at all,
do you ever recruit based on perhaps a need, like we need somebody who is a
really adept athletic male dancer or something like that? I’m thinking that
perhaps the extremely already accomplished dancer-type person might also come
with a certain different attitude that may not fit in, but still sometimes if
people have needs or goals, how do you go about a way to realize those things?
0:08:44.70:10:33.2
JACINTO:
That’s
a very good question, because we just went through a situation, and I’ll be very
transparent because this is a great story because it deals with a UCLA student,
a younger dancer that had been very active, very wonderful dancer. His name is
Peter Paul de Guzman. He’s actually a WAC student that I wrote a letter of
recommendation before he got to UCLA in the late nineties and was a dancer with
many other organizations, and we’ve seen him blossom to be such a great dancer
with many companies. We saw him, you know, performing, guest performing with
others, and he had specialized in a southern dance form called palalai, and
there’s not too many male practitioners in that that are good practitioners,
because he went to the Philippines and studied.
So by some way, someone
in the group invited him to perform for our twentieth anniversary last November,
and he accepted, and that was a very nice thing. It wasn’t so much we want you
to dance because you’re a good dancer as it was because we’re very inviting, and
people that work with us in our network—and he had collaborated with us on other
shows through other groups, so he wasn’t like an outsider; he was an outsider,
insider. We said, “Come in. We’ve seen you do this with others. Come and
participate with us.” So it turns out that he just got too busy and he had other
commitments and he couldn’t. So, Alex, our thing is because we’re so democratic
and participatory, we don’t really say that we need the special role, so
therefore we’re going to go out and get this special role. It’s basically
whoever you got is whoever you got, too, so we haven’t had to do that. That’s
not really the way we do things, because of the dynamics of people that you
invite that just didn’t come through your ranks have maybe a different artistic
vision, socially they haven’t meshed, so we really like people to do things, to
collaborate with us, and when you collaborate, you’re still you, you’re not us.
Then through that process of collaboration and working together, then people
see, because I think in our own Filipino community if you’re outside of
Kayamanan, people don’t know us very well, so they may have stereotypes,
perceptions of our group that are not totally correct, especially from other
Filipino performing arts groups. So the only way to find out about it’s just to
experience us, so that generally works out well. When people work with us, they
want to work with us.
CLINE:
You mentioned last time how
in the first half of the nineties there was a kind of a proliferation of
Filipino dance groups in the area. Considering how difficult it was for you to
fulfill your aspiration to learn the type of material, the repertoire that you
learned, with the kind of depth that you obviously longed to be able to have,
these other groups that kind of sprung up during that time in the area,
regarding them, where did those people learn the tradition that they were
demonstrating?
JACINTO:
Well, I’ll speak to L.A.
In L.A. there was a group called Silayan Philippine Dance Company that had
existed before us, and it’s probably one of the oldest, one of the two
longest-running groups that passed from an educator, Sonia Capadocia, to her
daughter, Dulce, and Dulce is a modern dancer as well. So Dulce has kept her
group alive, albeit small, not as active, and more contemporary dance, more
modern dance than Philippine folk-based. Then another one, the Fil-Am Family
Cultural Group founded by a woman Betty, Tita Betty.
CLINE:
Right. You mentioned
(unclear).
0:12:59.9
JACINTO:
We all came
through her at some—not we all, but many young people, and after her passing in
2002, that group has since become defunct. So the proliferation in the nineties
which I mentioned, which was right around the first five years, there was
probably four or five groups, community-based, that proliferated, and I think
that some of the leaders come from ex-Bayanihan members and some of them were
offshoots of Tita Betty’s group and other leaders. Because it takes so much time
because it’s all volunteer, it really takes a tremendous commitment, and
sometimes it’s easy to start, but, you know, that Filipino term “ningas kugon,”
which is kugon grass on top of a roof will burn very quickly, but it’ll burn
out, was a metaphor for Filipinos sometimes starting projects, putting a lot of
effort, but then in the long run, it’s not sustainable or it just dies out.
So out of the groups that started—and I’m going to be very transparent
and very honest and very objective about things too—out of probably the four
groups that started in the early nineties, Kayamanan has probably been the only
one to survive, even twenty years later, or close to twenty years later, Alex.
So that tells you of all the challenges, the obstacles of sustaining a program,
sustaining a vision, developing and sustaining it. It’s easy to develop and
attract, but it’s very much more involved in living it over the long term. So
they’re not basically around, those three other groups. Cultura Philippine Folk
Arts is still active to a certain degree. (unclear) is another group that is not
as active, and (unclear) is a group that was and that is not even around anymore
too. So gives you a little bit of indication. It’s tough.
0:15:10.8
CLINE:
Yeah, well, this
is one of the things I wanted to talk about today, so since you’ve opened the
door, I’ll walk through. Clearly one of the things I think that it’d be safe to
say about you is that you have a lot of passion for what you do. Clearly that
must help. On the other hand, the environment for opportunity here in Los
Angeles in terms of performing, in terms of being able to sustain something even
beyond the artistic, but just on the nuts-and-bolts practical, number of
performance, keeping people interested because they’re active, how have you seen
the performance opportunity environment change since the beginnings of Kayamanan
when apparently there was a little bit more of an initial energy kind of
situation happening, you know, and also, when you answer, keeping in mind what
you were already talking about, which is how you sustain something for that long
and stay committed to it and keep that passion, that fire stoked.
0:16:32.70:19:09.0
JACINTO:
Well,
that’s another excellent question. You know, I’ll refer back to the geographic
landscape. We’re here in the biggest basin in the most biggest metropolitan area
around, so my perception of this, my understanding, is that there’s a large
market. There is a huge market because of our geographic dispersion. There’s
always been, you know, in terms of world dance, you know, in the mainstream—I’ll
first talk about the mainstream—always opportunity for Filipinos to participate
in the mainstream. The other organization that’s had a lot of success mainstream
was—in the past it was Silayan, and then more recently Cultura Philippine Folk
Arts, and Kayamanan had both participated in the Dance Kaleidoscope types of
things, and they were very active in other mainstream events, too, as well,
especially around Glendale as a locale because they were based in Glendale. So
if you look at this issue almost—and I’m trying to make an analogy of, like,
islands, Cultura really took care of the Glendale side. Kayamanan, we had the
Central Los Angeles and the Westside because of our presence of where we were
located, but, you know, there was always opportunities for our organizations to
be able to perform in the mainstream.
Alex, I think the issue was what
was our access and what was our relationships that got us to be able to do that,
because part of our challenge is sometimes we’re very insular and we don’t look
outwardly. We perform amongst ourselves, you know, sort of at the regional level
or community level, and yet we don’t know or have access or are not able to make
that jump from being a Filipino group to being also a mainstream group as well,
and that has been less of a success for our organization. But I will say that I
don’t think it’s a good thing that there are less groups now active, because it
reveals the challenges and it reveals the fact that we’re not building,
sustaining our cultural organizations, and I’m very alarmed on this because I’m
not just talking about Kayamanan, because Kayamanan cannot serve all of L.A.
County. If you look at L.A. County as really our service area, we can only do
because we are finite in our space and our time. But that’s why it’s very, very
important, and I want to understand more about why there are not groups
flourishing throughout L.A. County that have a sustainable program, okay. This
is one of the reasons why we started this Philippine dance gathering workshops,
Alex, was we wanted to share resources so we could swap stories and understand
what makes things sustainable, what element, what programmatic elements, what
organizational elements are necessary to be able to sustain yourself over the
past one generation. Because there’s a woman now, a founder of Samahan
Philippine Dance Company in San Diego, that just passed away. Her name is Dr.
Lolita Carter. We need to follow Samahan now to understand what their trajectory
is and how they survived past the founding generation, the next generation. We
know that Cultura, after their founding organization, they have a little bit of
a break, or there’s a break in service. After Tita Betty died in 2002, there’s
not a death, but basically there’s dispersion of the organization. So we really
have to look past that generational, the founding part, to do that.
My
thoughts on that is that it really is an issue that we have to look at in the
community, because ideally I think we should have a number of, four or five,
community-based groups throughout the Los Angeles County area that are able to
service their area. It doesn’t make sense for us to take fifteen of our members
and to spend six hours traveling to the East San Gabriel Valley or Anaheim Hills
performing, and then coming back for the economic issue of the deal, of the
business transaction. It still is a service and we’re happy to do that, but in
terms of these times when you’re competing for people’s time and attention, that
we just can’t say, “Spend six hours and you’ll have a nice time.” Intrinsically
that’s a large part of it, but that can’t be all of it, and so I’m very
concerned with how we run our organizations as Philippine dance entities here in
America.
0:21:05.6
CLINE:
Speaking of—you
mentioned the economics. That’s, unfortunately, perhaps always an issue. How
much, if any, has external factors like the economy, the changing of people in
positions of authority or decision-making over organizations that potentially
hire groups like Kayamanan, their coming and going, the climate for just general
cultural activity flourishing or diminishing here in L.A. County, how much of an
impact do those sorts of factors have on your organization?
0:23:17.10:24:29.5
JACINTO:
Yeah,
good question. So from an external, internal resources, you know, in terms
of—and access and performance opportunities, you talked about that, too, as
well. We see the external environment again contracting with California Arts
Council (CAC), and when the California Arts Council sort of took a dive in the
early 2000, that really hit a lot of multicultural entry groups, MCE groups, if
you will, sort of the world dance, the folk and traditional arts field, along
with other small arts organizations. So we did take a hit at that level, but it
wasn’t a significant hit because basically in Kayamanan we’re pretty much
self-sustaining. We don’t rely on grants and contracts and performances to keep
ourselves going. We’re sort of self-sustainable, as long as we’re able to
perform, and the biggest thing, the biggest not moneymaker, but the largest
contracted service that we have in Kayamanan is wedding performances. So as long
as we do weddings for our own community, we’re okay. If we wanted to do larger
projects—and so therefore now we talk about our initiative, and we’ve been
blessed, Alex, to—one is to have the organizational credibility that is able to
attract resources from the local level, which is at the city level; the county
level, Los Angeles County Arts Commission; to the state level, CAC; to private
foundations, including the Fund for Folk Culture and now ACTA, Alliance for
California Traditional Arts; all the way up to the NEA (National Endowment for
the Arts). So we’ve gotten funding for all these different levels to do our
certain projects, and we never really did operating core support, you know, but
we always thought that the strongest things was to do—let’s do a specific
project. So we’ve done probably more than ten distinct projects that we’ve
gotten funding for, and I think, you know, out of especially Los Angeles, we’ve
been the most successful at grantsmanship and accessing public sources, but
we’re not so dependent on those public sources that the removal or the cutbacks
or the dynamics are going to severely impact us, because we’re project-based and
we have a very sustainable core.
Our core is just we train our members
on Sunday. They perform. We pay them a little. If they come up, we give them a
little bit of gas money and we try to feed them, so if nothing else, “You paid
for my way and you fed me, and the rest is my experience in being with you all.”
So they benefit on those two sides. That’s all we can offer them, and we have to
keep it that way, so that if we try to pay them much more, we couldn’t sustain
that, right? So we can’t make them dependent on that, and if we didn’t pay them
anything, it’s just like, “Oh, god, I don’t even get gas money. I’m losing money
here coming out too.” But the experience is priceless, and if you interview our
performers, you know, for a Saturday night performance at a wedding, just to be
there as part of a community is a very powerful, transformational thing, because
I think of the impact that we make on the audience, and the performers are
transformed in that as well. It’s not the audience members and the dancers just
dancing, ah, you know, it’s like a one-way thing; it’s a two-way thing. So
there’s impact on both. So in summary, we have been okay, you know. We don’t
really go for corporate grants, although we’ve gotten support here and there,
but it just adds to the pot. So we’re pretty much lean and mean. (laughter)
CLINE:
You mentioned the
programmatic aspect of this. How do you keep your repertoire fresh and evolving
not just for the audience who may see you multiple times, but for the performers
so that they continue to grow and stay interested?
0:27:08.30:28:31.4
JACINTO:
Yeah,
yeah, that’s a great question, too, in terms of our program. I think the analogy
I like to say is there’s a term called a baul. Baul in Spanish and in Tagalog is
a “trunk,” and it’s usually where you put your heirloom things, your jewelry,
your best pillows, at a time when the bourgeoisie, they would put their (Spanish
word), all their Spanish-influenced jewelry and big manton de manilas, and
everything goes into that baul because that’s where you keep your—if anything
goes, you got to—if there’s a flood, you take that baul and you’re gone, you’re
okay. So we’re fortunate to be inheritors of a tremendous baul that has a body
of knowledge that is humongous. So we’ve inherited dances that we haven’t even
done yet, Alex, and we’re twenty—because of the Philippine cultural landscape is
just all these cultural communities. The dance culture is not one dance culture.
There’s so many. We’re not lacking of repertoire. What we are trying to do is to
continue introducing that traditional repertoire in a very rigorous way so that
the ideological, the training, and the material culture are all—you know,
there’s a good package around that. So we still continue to do research so that
when we teach it to the members, there’s this really transformational thing
about we’re giving them something very, very culturally—there’s a lot of
cultural integrity. There’s a lot of—we call it (unclear). There’s a lot of
substance to the dance, so that they’re internalizing it. They’re transformed by
what it—because when we teach a dance, a ritual, we use that cultural model, and
the two other questions that we ask them to say, so what makes this dance a
ritual, Filipino, and what’s important about it? Why study it? So we try to give
them some relevance, and then they could internalize that dance. It’s like, “Ah,
this dance means this to me.” Then it becomes much more powerful. So that we
have a lot of, too, and so we try not to shoot our wad, so to speak, and just
give them everything and, you know, just pound them with new dances, new dances,
because then they don’t appreciate the dances that they do.
We have
standard ones that we do that are iconically Filipino, and then there’s this
other thing of Kayamanan artistically, trying to create our place in this
evolution of Philippine dance in America, and no longer is it Philippine dance
or just Philippine dance, Alex, that Kayamanan, our mission has really evolved
to preserve, present, and promote the riches and diversity of Philippine culture
through dance and music. Over the course of time, there’s a little marker, a
postscript that should be added: “in America.” In America, which is different
than a mission that we would probably have in the Philippines, because we’re
very much different than groups in the Philippines. So this whole idea of how we
function in America and what artistically do we bring to the equation is
something that we have started from the start, that we have created contemporary
Philippine dances with Barbara, myself, and now the other core staff have
created or choreographed contemporary Philippine dance forms, because in order
for Philippine dance to be relevant to us, we have to be a part of it. We just
can’t be doing things in the Philippines. From a traditional folk dance
standpoint, those things—we will continue to perform those as those are given to
us and as those are updated and on a generational basis because even in the
Philippines there’s culture change.
Here in America the other part of
that Filipino American side, the continuum—if you’ll remember, we have a
continuum—we have to be contributing, otherwise there’s no imprimatur, there’s
no ownership, there’s no sense of this is ours, in a way. So we’re trying to
balance that and represent it in the culture that we are a part of and also
presenting the culture that we are making ourselves as Filipino Americans. So
parts of our shows always feature contemporary stuff, and I think that that’s
another gimmick. Not a gimmick in a bad way, but another feature, another
value-add. So when you go to Kayamanan Ng Lahi, you’re not going to see the same
show. You’re not going to see the standard state-supported group. And for
Jennifer Fisher and Lewis Segal to compare us to the Bayanihan—and just to say
that, of course, we can’t achieve their spectacle, but we’ve given the audiences
an alternative, is the greatest validation we could ever—because it speaks to
you’ve achieved what you tried to do, not to mirror, not to be a Bayanihan
Junior or a Ballet Folklorico Junior, but to be yourselves. That, for me, was
the epiphany. It started in the 2000 when people started comparing us to the
national state-supported group, tremendously liberating, Alex, tremendously, and
validating, saying we’re on the right track, because the mainstream recognizes
it.
CLINE:
Right. Wow. Therefore, I
guess, the way I hear that is what you’re doing, it was far beyond just being
sort of a museum sort of presentation, yeah, so it’s alive.
JACINTO:
Yeah, it has to grow.
0:30:25.3
CLINE:
It’s not in a
glass case.
JACINTO:
Correct, and we see that,
and part of that and the orientation is, again, I go back to my layers. This
might open up another door, but seeing hula and being—kahiko is ancient hula.
You do it by the chant, your ole and your mele, and you do it one way. It’s
kahiko and it’s ancient. That’s what ancient means. “Kahiko” means ancient. Then
you have your auana and your dances that are with European instruments, and
“auana” means to wander, and so therefore you could do whatever you want,
basically. It really helped me develop another continuum between the things that
come from the village and that we have to understand in a village context, and
the Hawaiians are going through the same things. In order for hula and Hawaiian
music and Hawaiian culture to be contemporary to them, they have to be a part of
it, they have to create. When I was dancing with Frank “Palani” Kahala, he
created, he composed chants in the kahiko style, but they were very
contemporary. So as long as you understand what you’re doing, then you need to
contribute to the body. Otherwise you’re just doing other people’s stuff. You
don’t have your own artistic body.
0:32:39.4
CLINE:
But, say, sort of
starting with you personally and then moving even sort of farther outside as it
extends to people around you, sometimes no matter how positive an experience
something is and how much for maybe a fairly extended period people really get
something out of it, it still becomes hard to, especially for some people,
perhaps, maybe not for you—I don’t know, you can tell me—really stay inspired
about it, really stay committed, and certainly there’s a lot in American culture
to distract and to compete for attention, not to mention just all the various
practical demands of life that we’ve already kind of touched on. But starting
with yourself personally, and then if you can—I don’t know if you can, but if
you can speak to how it maybe affects others, how do you keep that sort of fire
lit?
0:35:20.00:36:30.6
JACINTO:
That’s
a good question, Alex. So we’re going back to sort of the future, present state
of the organization and the future, too, and Ave and I liken—as a director and a
co-founder, right, we liken Kayamanan to being our first child, right, because
you really give birth to it and it is your responsibility. The buck stops with
you. So for the four of us, now the three of us, Barbara, myself, and Ave, we
have that sense that Kayamanan’s still our child, but now it’s a twenty-year-old
child, and as the child grows, you give it more responsibility. You’ve nurtured
it and you’ve instilled in it all your cultural, your familial values and
everything like that, and you now want to now see and give it space. So twenty
years later, Ave and I and Barbara not have pulled back, but we’ve tried to
balance our lives more, because we gave so much of it early in our lives, too,
and we have children and we have our careers and so, so we have a little bit
more balance and we’ve given a little bit more leeway to invite others, the
children, so to speak, and these are the core staff and performers. There’s
about eight, I believe, that are with us that do anything from administration to
the material culture to teach dance with us as volunteers under our direction in
collaboration with us. So even at that staff level, some people come and go, but
we’re flexible enough so that we can all cover for each other. But this issue is
if you’re asking what are the challenges, you know, and what do we see, for me,
Ave, and Barbs, we’re going to continue, but we’re going to be more purposeful
now of nurturing leadership, of trying to wrap ourselves around the program and
around that to contain it and to do something artificially in terms of talk,
document, and write things down so that we can pass it. For me as an educator,
as an applied anthropologist, my whole thing is that how do we bridge this issue
from one generation to the next, and the way that I know about it now is to
create this tangible body of knowledge that’s not aural-based—it’s very
different—but that is documented. There are actually documents. There are audio
files. There’s video files that we are trying to assemble in order to be able to
pass it on, and not only the repertoire, not only the arts, but the
organizational stuff, too, as well. So we’re starting to think about that too.
We’re transitioning, you know, twenty years later, and we’re trying to
now see not just so much our staff that’s probably four or five years or ten
years younger than us, but even where we can we start to invest in training the
next generation twenty years, because we have some people in their early
twenties that we now want to attract to say, “Hey, you could be a dancer.”
Really with the senior folks like that, too, they come and go, but they’re
pretty consistent in terms of—unless they get married. Marriage is a major life
transition that really takes people away for a few years, maybe, but we still
have some people that got married and have children, and then the mothers come
back, right, and because we have males and females both, we have a diverse
membership base—it’s not all females, Alex. We’ve been very blessed to have a
large male population, because, again, it’s always harder to get males to dance
than females, and good males like that too.
So in terms of where we’re
going with that, I think that we’re trying to put more time and effort into
supporting and just putting our hands around the culture of doing things, the
policies and procedures, if you will, although as ethereal as it is, so that
people can be guided about how we should go about doing things. Some things are
really tough. It’s like negotiation. How do you put on paper how to represent
your organization in the mainstream? A lot of it at that level, culturally, you
shadow me when I’m performing. What I talk about, sometimes there’s a dance or
there’s a performance role that only you could do. For me in my organization,
that role for me has evolved and just to being a performer, a dancer, a musician
to being the engager. So I’ve sort of naturally been doing that, but more
purposefully, because we’ve seen that it becomes a more integral part of who we
are. So the more I’m trying to expose other people to say, hey, we’re not just
performing, but we have to engage, we have to participate. That’s our culture.
That’s our style of a Kayamanan Ng Lahi performance. If we don’t do that, then
we have lost our cultural roots, and we shouldn’t and can’t ever lose that sort
of cultural value. So, you know, we’re doing okay twenty years later, because
we’re looking for our twenty-fifth, and we still have a steady stream of folks,
Alex. So I think the future for Kayamanan Ng Lahi is positive. We’re not on the
wane. What we are is we’re at a rising point to see—and we haven’t even peaked
yet, but as an organization, what we have to be concerned with is how we pass
information and knowledge. It’s about the infrastructure, because it’s all still
contained with the founders, pretty much, you know, and we have to be able to
address that in the future.
0:38:36.6
CLINE:
Do you consider
sort of an apprentice sort of approach ever, or is it less personal, more
collective than that?
JACINTO:
Part of it is collective,
because we share the things with everybody. You know what I mean? Then in terms
of our positions—and Ave’s trying to find an apprentice or someone to take over
more of the business, administrative side, right, because of our raising our
boys. With me, I work with Bugsy (phonetic). Bugsy is my assistant program—but
there’s not a lot of people that are as obsessed. (laughter) I’m trying to find
another anthro guy or woman to really work with me to say, hey, if you talk
about what is really Kayamanan’s treasure, it’s the culture that we represent,
which has produced the culture that we, ourselves, produce, right? So therefore,
that body of knowledge that using the anthropological model, although we give it
to everybody, we need people to continue giving in that life. So, Alex, I am
starting to look out and see who could I tap to say, “You’re going to work more
closely with me,” because I truly believe that our cultural program is really
the core of our organization, and everything else radiates out from that.
CLINE:
You used the term
“obsessed,” and I guess what I’ve been wanting to get at is for you, how do you
stay fired up, inspired, connected, committed? How much oscillation have you
experienced in your commitment to this? I guess I’m wondering if there have been
periods where you’re just, like, you know, sick of it or you’re just like you’re
losing interest, you’re burning out, or not. You are a person. There’s a lot of
other things that take up our time and energy.
0:41:20.00:42:49.5
JACINTO:
Right,
right. That’s a wonderful question because it really brings it back full circle
with us. I mentioned in an earlier part that Filipino value of bainata, or vow,
and it comes from, you know, the Spanish religious vow. Every year you do a
fiesta for the patron saint, right, because that’s your religious vow. The
patron saint bestows. As I matured, I’ve really taken and internalized that
issue of vow to understand the Kayamanan as sort of our first child and of our
realizing that Kayamanan is our responsibility in our place in the cycle of
life, that it’s woven into me.
I don’t look at Kayamanan or our culture,
for me, at least, and my family, something that we do (unclear), and then we let
it go, that if you look at a sipa ball, a sipa is a woven tan rattan ball, sepak
takraw, the really ones that they use in Southeast Asia, it’s woven of all these
different strands, and no matter what, you can’t extract that strand out of you,
because it’s a part of it. Otherwise, the ball unravels and you’re not whole.
For me, Alex, there’s superficial times where you pull back because you’re
really busy or your life happens, and therefore you don’t do as much, but
Kayamanan’s a central part of our lives because it is a vow, because it’s given
us so much as a couple, as a family, and therefore we really internalize that,
so therefore we have to give it back. So it’s a very much integral part. I’ve
been blessed because the situation that I have, all the circumstances of working
in the Filipino community has allowed me to function in that way too. So god has
given me a great opportunity, said, “Joel, I’m going to give you a great way to
do it. I’m not going to give you a desk job or a technical or something that
cubbyholes you and it doesn’t allow you to be an organic well-rounded person
working in the Filipino community and externally.”
So really I have this
ideal professional life, professional, personal, cultural life, that’s all
interconnected, because when I’m doing (unclear) and I’m working with the
Hawaiians or whatever, I’m being a Filipino, and I work, whether it’s social
services, there’s a lot of cultural identity. So I just tend to think my life
has really come, and it’s just all interconnected, and that’s a central theme of
me in my life that I try to bring to the organization, that of magkaugnay.
“Ugnay” means to be interconnected, and I think that’s an opportunity we all
have. So into the future I’m just going to continue, given my set of
circumstances, to play it out as far and as long as I can, you know, so that I
can share that with as many people as I can, because what my gig is I go out and
I like to work with the students to give them my framework, you know, to give
them a twenty-year jump on the thing so that they have the benefit of others
trying to figure things out and sharing with them tools that they could use just
to make culture a better part of their lives. So I think that’s going to be more
and more, and as I continue to work more with students at the collegiate level,
I’ll find people that I could work with and are willing to maybe want to work
with me more in depth. I start with UCLA because that’s our home, that’s our
base, but I work personally with students from half a dozen different schools
and individuals, as well, too. So, you know, I’m not, like, I’m ready to retire.
It’s really just part of my life, and not just my personal life, but my
professional life, my entire life.
0:45:04.0
CLINE:
You mentioned
working with students. I was just wondering if there are any other practices or
strategies, if you will, that you use to nourish this inspiration and your sense
of connection that work for you, how you nourish that sense of vow?
0:47:30.4
JACINTO:
Yeah, that is a
hard one. That is a hard one because that takes a lot of contact or that takes a
lot of very purposeful thing, but the other ones that we do that could lead to
that, because that’s a very deep thing. But I’m very encouraged because I see
other younger groups, particularly in the Bay Area. So L.A., we’re waning.
They’re thriving in the Bay Area in a smaller area. As, like, the San Francisco
Bay Area, they have probably five or six groups that are in that rising stage,
so I see a lot of younger leadership, and one of the reasons that we founded
this Philippine dance gathering and workshops model of gathering was to be
reflexive and to talk and to move past the stage, to move past the
transactional, to be more reflexive and analytical about what was the process of
this amongst ourselves and by ourselves, because then we could talk about
burnout, we could talk about organizational stuff. We’re not just talking about
performance. We’re not talking about artistic achievement; we’re talking about
ourselves. So, Alex, I see us continuing to do things around working with
leadership, you know, instead of just the masses. My compadre, my colleague
(unclear), we are the co-founders of the Philippine dance gathering and
workshops. We just talked a couple of days ago about how a strategic move for us
would be sort of not just trying to do everything in terms of all the dances and
trying to build the network by doing the foot-soldiering, but the focus on the
leadership, because the leadership is the most strategic of trying to see what
issues they have and how to—not to indoctrinate them to anything, but just to
find what are the issues, how do we keep ourselves going, how do we support
ourselves at the leadership level, because other people don’t have such an ideal
situation as I do. Some people maybe need more money. They need to earn because
this is something that they need to do. You know what I mean? So there are other
people in different situations. So I think we’re going to continue with that
gathering and that consultative process in our community and sharing, right?
CLINE:
But I’m just curious to
know, just for you personally, say, you know, Joel is sitting somewhere alone
and not engaged in doing anything other than reflecting maybe on the sense of
that vow, that sense of vow. Is there some way that you find works for you to
remind you to reconnect you, to nourish that sense of vow that’s purely your
personal sort of strategy or technique? I didn’t want to use those kinds of
words, but what works for you? I mean, it could be anything. I’m just curious.
JACINTO:
What works for me is
still learning, you know, because I’m a Fil-Am. There’s so much culture here,
right, Alex? Anytime that I get a chance to learn from first voice, that’s where
you get replenished. So when I work with people like (Danongan) “Danny”
Kalanduyan who is a master artist, you know, there’s that primacy of you’re
hearing it from the first voice. You’re catching it. That’s what always give me
life, as opposed to learning a dance from another group that’s a one-off. So
what replenishes me, what helps keep me close, helps keep me excited is really
being either in the field or people from the field, and there’s not that much
chance to do that. There’s not a lot of opportunity because here in America you
have to go to the Philippines, and I used to go to the Philippines a lot more to
do field work and everything like that.
0:49:24.1
CLINE:
Which was my next
question.
0:51:42.5
JACINTO:
Right. I haven’t
gone since 2004, and so it’s different now because the kids were really young,
they were babies, and now they’re older, so now it has to take the time. I have
to take them now. I have to expose them to our home country, and I want to do
it, but I feel that I’ve had the opportunity a lot. I have to give opportunity
for others to experience the same things, you know, intensive training, field
work in the Philippines, because when you’re able to do that, you’re
transformed, you know, you’re not just a dancer learning from books or learning
from videotapes. You actually have experienced it. Your body, your mind, your
heart have experienced being in the field. You know, that’s huge. But for me,
Alex, what really nurtures me is developing tools. I don’t know if that sounds
weird, you know what I mean, but thinking about how do we share this. How do we
understand this and how do we share this are two central questions that really
give me life, because it gives me purpose to be able to understand something, to
package it in the way where we could give it to others, but also that third part
is that how do we transform those participants and the people that we give it to
in such a way that they are enriched by what they are learning in a deep way, in
a meaningful way. How does it add to their cultural IQ? That’s weird, but, hey,
some Fil-Ams, some Filipinos have a very low cultural IQ because of the fact
that they’re not able to explicitly identify. They’re fishes. They’re in the
fishbowl, but we’re in an artificial situation where we have to develop the IQ
so that they can, in turn, share it, they can communicate it, they can
understand it themselves to say—because we’re here in America, and that’s why I
always talk about America being our place as opposed to the Philippines where
you just do it because you’re there. It reinforces who you are. Here in America
we’re creating this situation where we have to create our situation for
ourselves, you know, so it’s a little different.
CLINE:
Fortunately, you’ve
perfectly set up my next question, which is how much interest do you see in the
youngest of Filipino American generations coming up now coming up, as we’ve
mentioned before, in a very different culture, even a different culture from
their Filipino American parents?
JACINTO:
Right, right. That is a
very salient question, given what’s going on today, given media, given
technology, given this barrage of just stimuli.
CLINE:
Social networking.
0:54:01.5
JACINTO:
All this input,
all this input. The situation that we’re facing is that all the stuff is
external coming in. As an organization, what I have to do and what my family and
everything like that is ask question that—or to give them a process that helps
them discover who they are from the inside, so it gives them sort of that
umbilical cord that they have that’s real, like who you are, your identity, your
cultural heritage, albeit Filipino, it’s wide, so that in building up themselves
internally, they would be able to negotiate all this external stuff. But what I
see pretty much—and this is just passively—is that there’s still interest, that
kids, in general, if you engage them on opportunity, if you give them an
opportunity to learn about themselves, they’ll do it. They’re happy, because I
think you don’t really get that burning sensation to self-discover to you’re
kind of in college, you’re maturing. The other time you’re happy to have it if
it’s given to you, but if you don’t, you’re fine with it, right, because you’re
sort of dependent on your parents to be able to do that. So I’m looking at the
parents. I’m looking at the schools, and the schools aren’t going to do it.
There’s no one externally other than maybe a community-based setting like a
dance troupe or your parents to support that child in it.
So therefore,
bringing in children to our group, we still have it, but we don’t have enough
going on in there, and so I think that the parents, especially the parents of
children who they themselves are Fil-Am, are very receptive, given that there
was a program that they could bring their kid to, Alex, and that’s the challenge
for Kayamanan, because to have children are a tremendous amount. What do we
charge? We charge $35 for eight weeks. That’s $3 a class, you know. We have to
maybe take a look at that thing, but again, we don’t pay the instructors
anything, anyway, so that’s not the issue here, is the economics of it too. But
how do we structure a program that really brings in kids a little bit more
earlier too? But when you say “youngest,” what do you mean in terms of ages?
CLINE:
Yeah, that’s what I’m
talking about. I’m talking about preteen. I mean, you’re answering my question,
but how much opportunity is there for them to—
JACINTO:
Yeah, there’s not a lot
of opportunity. There’s not a lot of opportunity. There’s a gap between the need
and the ability to fulfill that market, because geographically is one issue as
well as program. So as a community, we are—and I’m trying to talk with others
about that, about how do we get kids, you know. They don’t need a whole dance
company per se. Maybe they just need little exposure things that they could do,
because again, the commitment there is a lot different than as you’re eighteen
and above or even high school, where you’re there for a lot longer, you’re more
purposeful and everything like that too.
0:56:00.8
CLINE:
Right. When you’ve
got the Pilipino Cultural Nights, which seem to be serving that.
0:57:43.9
JACINTO:
Exactly. It’s
during that age, the collegiate and beyond, Alex, that I think is our sowing
fields, even more so than the children, because we don’t have to access to them
because of geographic and because of just some limitations of our time. Ours
tends to be high school and really college, college, because then they can start
to drive themselves. Even in high school, they’re not driving. They’re not
driving themselves. It’s their parents. So they’re dependent on their parents,
which really is a severe limitation because then their parents have to be there
as well, almost, too, as well. So the future of Philippine culture and
Philippine dance in America is bright because there are these vehicles where it
can happen, that it’s still an issue in our community, that people, by and
large, want—there’s not self-hatred or that colonial mentality, if you will, if
you come from an immigrant saying, “(unclear).” You know what I mean? So we’re
shedding that post-colonial, you know, shroud of self-hatred to more of wanting
to understand, you know. So like the Fil-Am or the Filipinos in America are
wanting to virtually go back to the Philippines, which is the crossing of the
ship of the Filipinos in the Philippines wanting to virtually become
acculturated, become Americanized because they equate that with success. So
maybe therein we lie in the middle, but it’s going back and forth like the
galleon trade that has to happen. You have to go there and you have to come
back. You have to go there and come back continually to make your life as
complete.
CLINE:
Interesting. This is really
your story. What you’re describing is your story, your own story. You
mentioned—I didn’t get the name of it, but the ball made of many strands.
JACINTO:
It’s a sipa ball, sepak
takraw. Sepak takraw is the Southeast Asian foot soccer, foot volleyball, and it
happens to be—sipa, s-i-p-a, happens to be the Filipino term for “to kick” or
hacky sack or foot volleyball. That is the name of my organization. So the icon
is a woven rattan ball made up of certain strips, number seventeen strips to
form perfect pentagons and perfect triangles, and it’s a mathematical equation.
But that analogy, I think, serves well for Filipinos, in general, because we’re
made up of all these different strands. We’re not a pure culture. We’re not a
pure race. We have all these cultural influences, and yet, you know, all those
create who we are.
CLINE:
Right. But I see that as
also, therefore, the perfect metaphor for who you are—
JACINTO:
Yeah, oh, definitely.
CLINE:
—because you have so many
different strands integrally making up who you are, whether that’s the
Philippine dance and music component or the hula component or the American who
grew up in San Francisco and went to UCLA component or, you know, the
basketball-playing component, you know, the family man, the person who has
approached what he does in terms of a vow, in all these things that are
characteristic of who you are, some of them on the surface seemingly perhaps
somewhat diverse—
0:59:41.9
JACINTO:
Disjointed.
CLINE:
—in the sense of being
disjointed, but, in fact, seem to weave together in this very seamless and
perfect sort of sphere like this ball. How do you think of yourself, other than
a sipa? How do you think of yourself in this cultural landscape here being a
Southern California Filipino American or whatever?
1:02:17.01:04:50.1
JACINTO:
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, well, you know, that’s good. And thank you for asking me that, Alex,
too. I think at a certain level—and I’ve been doing work around issues of life
purpose, you know. As you get into your middle age, so to speak, you know, you
start to think about that more and more. On a very fundamental, you know, being
a Catholic Christian, the spirituality in terms of my faith has become more
important to me in terms of what I’ve been given, the gifts and sort of the plan
and that whole thing, and so I’m very much tied into my life purpose from a
spiritual, about that energy, the positiveness, the life that I’ve been given,
so the life that I lead and the gift that I give back to god for all the things
that he’s given me. So that’s sort of the foundation. How that manifests itself
in my mundane physical world is really the opportunities to do my own thing, to
exist as a father, as a professional, and all the things that are sort of
disparate, but to work that whole scene, to live that whole scene—not to work
it. That’s a bad a word. But just to function with these values that are these
cultural values. So it’s like the divine and the cultural. It’s like godly and
worldly, trying to put those together to say, hey, I’m human. I come from a
place, I have all this stuff, and the journey, myself, trying to tap into the
best so that I can sort of internalize it and put that out wherever I’m at,
whether I’m talking to a staff member at SIPA where I’m dealing with another
mainstream people that are not paying attention to us or at home with the boys,
which I do less of, you know. All those opportunities to live a blessed and a
cultural life is, you know, I think, sort of that life purpose for me now.
So that means that I will continue for the rest of my life in this
journey, this cultural journey, with Kayamanan. I don’t think I’m going to
retire from it. You don’t retire from your culture. (laughs) Okay, I’m done
being a Filipino, so I’m not going to do that anymore, right? Because again,
we’ve situated Kayamanan as a way of life, as a religious vow, which you don’t
stop when you’re sixty-five. You do it for the rest of your life, and that’s
what I want to try to share and get out there in our community about our
cultural being being a part of our matrix, that you don’t take off at night at
home and you stop doing after a certain while. I see myself continuing to be an
engager, a facilitator, a cultural broker, a cultural advocate not just for
Filipinos, but for all things culture, especially the ones that I know of, you
know, Native Hawaiian and, to a certain degree, Pacific Islander, because it’s
the rhetoric in which we—it’s a political box in which we operate in, although I
think it’s very bizarre, you know, because, you know, East Asian is so different
than Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, except it’s all lumped into one. It’s
like, y’all are a box. So again, I’m very blessed to have this opportunity to
live this certain type, where my work and my culture, my life are all sort of
intertwined, and I think the key for that is to continually give back the
blessings. If I’m able to do that, then I’m just sort of keeping the good stuff
going, and I’m just going kind of keep that—like communal music. You’ve got to
keep playing your part. If you play your part, you take your part on that gong
line or whatever, then it’s missing something, and I’m not (unclear). It’s one
individual, but I realize that I’m in a place of access. I’m in a strategic
place for myself, my family, my organization, and my community, so I realize
that responsibility and that opportunity, and I want to hopefully continue to
receive the energy and the blessings to be able to play that, to keep dancing,
to keep playing music, you know, doing all that good stuff.
CLINE:
In terms of the Filipino
American contribution to the culture of not just this country, but let’s
localize it and say this area here, the area in which Kayamanan Ng Lahi is a
performing arts group serving the community, which includes all the community,
everyone, from the inside, how do you view the larger contribution to the larger
community? How would you define it or characterize that?
JACINTO:
Well, I would do that two
ways. One is in terms of our contribution to our own community, right? And I
think we’ve done a lot to help the understanding, appreciation of who we are as
a community, as a culture, you know, when we go out, whether it’s weddings and
that whole thing too. So I think we’ve done a tremendous job about that. I also
think that we’ve helped really put the Philippines and the Filipino American
community on the map of L.A. through our work with the mainstream, you know, in
the performance venues, in the relationships, in the access that we have,
because again, when I’m at the (John Anson) Ford Amphitheater at the Ford
Foundation being an advisory board, I’m there performing as well, being
inclusive, being participatory. So the cultural values even can extend to at
that level as well, so I think that I’m going to utilize all those opportunities
to continue, and that we’re just going to have—it looks like we should have more
and more opportunities to do what we’re doing. I don’t think that we’re going to
have less opportunities, if you will. Did I answer your question?
1:07:14.2
CLINE:
That works. And
what about in the larger community? One of the things we keep hitting on is how
the perception of what “Filipino” means outside the Filipino community is
confused. How do you think that’s going to get improved?
1:09:15.61:11:03.0
JACINTO:
Yeah,
well, that’s a problem because there’s a lack of knowledge and sensitivity to
the Filipino, Filipino American experience, and who Filipinos are, in general,
right, because educational-wise it’s not going to be in the media. We’re not
going to have the media be able to educate, and it’s not going to happen in
educational system, right, because in K-12 Filipinos are not around. We’re
absent. We’re absent on the physical landscape, pretty much. If you look at it,
if you really look at it, the Filipino presence in the mainstream is just—we’re
undefined. We’re interstitial. We’re intercultural. So, you know, other than
icons that you have, like half Filipinos like Tia Carrere—she’s full—and Rob
Schneider and Marta Coscos (phonetic), you know, these are Filipino people, but
you say, oh, (unclear) Filipino, but you don’t understand anything of them. Our
ability to do that when we perform in mainstream is a major way, and so
therefore we realize that, and so we have to seize that opportunity. In March of
2012, Kayamanan Ng Lahi will be performing for the (J. Paul) Getty Museum at
Sounds of L.A., okay, so we’re gearing up for that because that’s a tremendous
opportunity we have to reach a mainstream audience that, in the context of
Sounds of L.A., okay, music played by people, by cultural communities or
whatever in Los Angeles, okay. So how can we infuse that performance with great
entertainment, great cultural and artistic value, as well as great educational
value and great enlightenment potential? So we’re thinking on all those
different levels as we develop the repertoire that we’re going to do, and I have
no doubt we’re going to be successful like we were successful in the Skirball to
engage the audiences. I think we’re going to be able to do that in that as well.
So we look for those opportunities and we seize them.
That’s all you can
do, is, like, you know, you try to make a mark when you can, because you don’t
have a lot of opportunity to do that, but, hey, there’s not a lot going on in
the Filipino community, you know, mainstream. So I’m not tooting my own horn,
but I’m a suspect and I’m called upon a lot of times, whether it be as a board
member for Arts for L.A. or just someone to help out in the community as a TA
person, that I’m going to seize it. I’m going to try to see how much I can
extract, whether it’s one conversation or one meeting or one project, Alex.
Robert Muller, the Secretary General of United Nations, had this thing about
advocacy, and he said that you have to use every conversation you have, every
letter that you write, every chance to affirm your vision of the world, and that
you have to radiate that. You have to just continually put it out there so that
your energy is out there so you affect others, you uplift others. So I really
subscribe to that. He called it network, and, you know, networking has its
superficial level, but I think networking—but when he talked about affirm your
vision of the world and you have to radiate, you are the center of the universe,
you know, it’s very powerful. I came across that saying in the early nineties
when I was younger, to really use every conversation you have, every chance,
every interaction to affirm your vision of the world. I think it was incredible
in terms of that opportunity.
CLINE:
How much do you see the
Filipino American communities’ situation in this regard being the same or
different from some of the other so-called ethnic communities in the area in
terms of presenting, in this case, their traditional arts, whether they be
Balinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Guatemalan, whatever? What is perhaps unique or not
unique about the Filipino American situation with regard to that?
1:14:03.6
JACINTO:
Right. That’s a
good question. I think in terms of the whole world dance—and not just Asian
Pacific Islander; just world dance—because we have such an interesting history
and we have so many different streams, I think we’re good material, you know, so
therefore, if we have a good matrix, a good foundation of stuff, we have this
ability to make connections with pretty much every part of the world, right? So
if we’re able to do that, then we’re successful. The tendency has been, “This is
the Philippines. Look at us,” and that’s it, “Okay, appreciate us.” But there’s
no been engagement to say, well, what do we share together? What are those
bridges? I think that that’s, you know, again, more participatory, more
engaging, more participatory, if you will, when we’re able to do that. So I
think we have not an edge up, but we just have this great opportunity. If you
compare that to other cultures that are presenting, they just don’t have that,
and that’s not bad or good. It’s just it is what it is. So I really look that
the opportunity for Filipino culture in America is really bright, and yet we as
a community, as a practitioners, have to be able to be present. We have to
develop ourselves so that we can be worthy, because there’s this issue of what
level are you. You’re looked at in terms of your quality of presentation, and I
tend to think in the community enough we’re not as progressive in our
participation. We tend to rely just on what’s done in the past, what worked for
the state-supported group, but what worked for them is not going to work for
this situation. That was fifty years ago. We’re talking about a whole
multicultural society, and it’s not dance diplomacy anymore; it’s a different
type of dialogue, you know, like this is the Philippines. This one is more like
this is our community here. This is what we came from, so it’s an evolved type
of thing, and the more contemporary we could be, at the same time with the
conviction and the integrity of culture.
So again, it’s living in the
village and living on the stage. How do you wrap that all into one and put it
out there? That’s why I respect so much people like Patrick Makuakane from San
Francisco in taking traditional hula and really making it contemporary where
people can just get into it. Those are the people that I dig with compelling
narratives. You know, that’s what makes me tick, if you will. That floats my
boat. (laughs)
1:15:29.3
CLINE:
Here in this
Western culture we tend to put virtually all art forms into a context that
appears to be separated from the rest of life. It’s on the stage. It’s in the
theater. It’s in the museum. It’s in, you know, the concert hall, whatever it
is. Organizations like yours which are coming from a culture where there is not
this distinction, tend to run into an interesting challenge with regard to how
to treat that particular issue, and I think that’s what you’re talking about
now. I’m just inviting you to, if there’s any more you want to say about that
particular aspect of presenting what you do to the larger community, if there’s
anything that you’d like to add.
JACINTO:
Well, you know, that’s an
important point, too, because you really make a good point, Alex, about this
issue of art versus culture. I’m on the board for Arts for L.A., but I asked
them to—we need to break down the issue of art and for people that come, and
that there’s no term for art, that it’s all part of our culture. Then you have
to get that, because then you’re not recognizing a large portion of our
community. In Kayamanan what we’re doing, obviously we’re performing, and a lot
of times what we have less is doing, is culture for ourselves, and that’s a
challenge, okay, because as a performing arts groups as well, you know, that’s
what you think you do. You perform and then you don’t perform. So I’m helping
trying to use the organization as an analogy of life to say our culture is
happening. Our culture’s happening within this organization, so that we’re
always performing. We’re not always performing, but we’re always being cultural.
So I think that is something that I’ve been trying to do more purposeful with
Kayamanan folks to help them understand as they’re teaching, that’s being
cultural, and that’s important. The way we teach, the way we pass on
information, the way we nurture each other is very cultural. It’s very
essential, and it’s not just on the stage that we have to pay attention to the
process of how we do things as well. I don’t know if that makes sense.
CLINE:
Yeah, it does make sense.
JACINTO:
But that will keep the
cycle going. That will keep the cycle going.
1:17:37.8
CLINE:
In terms of the
importance of the culture and of the cultural identity, you mentioned, for
example, that you’ve had, you know, a Chinese guy and, you know, an Irish or
Irish American woman performing with you. In terms of presenting the culture and
keeping the culture vital and connected, how important or not is it for people
representing the culture, in this case in the form of dance and music, to be
Filipino?
JACINTO:
No. It’s, like, no.
That’s a non-issue. That’s a non-issue because—yeah, no. I’m very much a worldly
person, too, as well. I’ve been Filipino American dancing hula, you know what I
mean, as well, too. So I think the boundaries of culture are—there’s a
difference between ethnicity and culture. So if we’re talking about ethnicity,
I’ll never be Hawaiian. I don’t have Hawaiian blood, although Filipinos are the
ancestors of the Hawaiians, and everybody came from Formosa, from Taiwan, so
we’re all made in Taiwan, actually, to a certain degree. Alex, that has never
been an issue and I know it probably never will be, especially for us, so
therefore it just leads itself to when you can get a group of non-Filipinos to
replicate a simple communal rhythm, it’s not so much they’re doing something
Filipino, but they’re being cultural. They’re creating kinship. They’re doing
things very transformational like that too. So, yeah, we’ll teach anybody that
will come through the door and try to relate it to who they are, too, as well.
That’s the thing.
CLINE:
As this also relates to
your experience with hula, sort of related to that, as somewhat of an insider,
but not totally an insider, and all these interesting distinctions that
ultimately just seem completely artificial and transparent, how much of this
aspect of what you’re doing is a big part of the American piece of the puzzle?
JACINTO:
Yeah, well, it depends on
how you define “American.”
1:19:23.1
CLINE:
Exacly.
JACINTO:
Our part of America,
especially L.A., where it’s multicultural and it’s that, I think is more
progressive, right, that anybody can do anything, that you could be—to learn
flamenco, you don’t have to be Spanish, to learn tango, you don’t—I mean, that’s
the progressive environment that we live in in L.A. I won’t say that’s the case
for the rest of America. That’s for damn sure. I’m scared of the rest of
America. You know what I mean? I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else just
because the intolerance and just because of just, you know, the history,
entrenchedness of our culture and ideology in the vast majority of America, you
know. So I’m happy I live here in L.A. I don’t think I’d live anywhere else
besides California and West Coast and in multicultural areas like that too. So,
you know, in L.A. it’s so progressive, and I think it’s so nurturing. You know,
it’s the best place for us to grow and thrive because of the tolerance, because
of the acceptance, because we have the most amount of people. You know, L.A. is
the center for the largest populations outside of countries for many, many
communities like that, you know, and that just lends itself to it, too, yeah.
1:21:16.7
CLINE:
In terms of the
furthering of your own culture and of the Filipino culture here in America, we
talked, for example, about how language is not being continued education-wise in
a concerted way, in the way that maybe would be helpful to the community. In
terms of your own family, I mean, you have two sons. How are you raising your
sons with relation to their connection to your culture outside of Kayamanan,
since I know one of your boys already is performing?
JACINTO:
Right. Oh, both of them
do. So the performance side—and again, through Kayamanan, they learn Filipino
cultural values. It’s not as purposeful and explicit, just they’re experiencing
it. So the idea of kuya and ate, terms to understand—so I call you kuya, which
means older brother, but I call my own brother (unclear), he calls Kai kuya,
which is the term for older brother. He doesn’t call him his first name. I’ll
call you by your title of your place. So they’re learning familiar relationships
by kuya and ate, so they’re learning about this idea of extended family. So
that’s important for them to do. But you asked a specific point about language,
and that’s what Ave and I are trying to introduce more, is language, is
vocabulary, because they get a lot of it through our cultural lives with our
families, especially Ave’s family, which is close, very close Filipino family.
We just are ramping it up more with them in terms of their active knowledge, and
for them, it’s got to be active knowledge. It just can’t be passive. It just
can’t be, okay, do this and understand it, but why do you call it? What does
kuya mean, and why do you call him kuya? Because they come from a point where
they haven’t lived it. They’re not exposed at all. They have to understand this
culture and not just live it, because in order to pass it on—because the rest of
their lives don’t include that, and so I’m not catching it great, but it’s more
like active knowledge, that everything that they do that we have, they have to
understand it from a third-person, so we do this because—
CLINE:
Yeah, they need some
explanation.
1:23:52.7
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, so that it clicks more, because they’re doing that with everything else,
but they’re learning, and so we need to make our own. So language, we’re now
introducing Tagalog flashcards, and their pronunciation’s all whacked out and
everything, and that they can’t do this, you know, but they’re starting to, and
so we’ll continue with that as much as we can teach them language. Or they’re
singing songs, okay? They’re singing songs (unclear), and so they’re learning
language that way, too, as well, and they have just a great—I forgot about
children’s ability to just replicate and remember ditties and tunes. It’s been
so long. But they’re doing it. They’re singing songs that we did in our
twentieth, you know, anniversary, and they’re just, boom, and they got, but
note-wise, but then language-wise they don’t understand the whole context of the
words too.
So I think that for our family, that will continue more and
more, and the question of what they will do with Kayamanan in the end twenty
years down the line is still remains, hopefully that they will. You can only do
what you can do, so I’ve been purposeful not to force it upon them, but to
incentivize them, to reward them for doing, just like I’ll reward other people,
too, with praise, with encouragement, and by giving them the opportunity to
learn more and more, right? So my little boys, for being with Kayamanan, they
got a chance to perform at Staples Center. They got a chance to perform at
Dodger Stadium.
CLINE:
Wow.
JACINTO:
For them, those are the
(unclear), like, “Wow, we were playing with the—I’m on the jumbotron.”
1:24:39.5
CLINE:
Yeah. Right. No
kidding.
JACINTO:
Those are great
experiences in the mainstream thing, not just as a Filipino, but, you know, so
those add to their self-esteem. Those add to their appreciation of, “Wow, if I
do this, when I’m being Filipino, I can experience (unclear).” It’s a positive
thing. So we as an organization have to really give them those opportunities so
it just reinforces that being Filipino’s a good thing as opposed to other
tougher things.
CLINE:
Right. Or something that
just makes you different from your peers.
JACINTO:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CLINE:
Is there anything we have
not talked about that you feel you would like to get into the record now before
we conclude the interview?
1:26:59.1
JACINTO:
No, I think
we’ve done—in looking back for the how many hours, the eight hours or something
like that, that we spent like that, too, I think we’ve done a really good job,
Alex, about listening to me, leading me, being a partner on this journey back,
because I haven’t done this to this level. Been interviewed a lot, but not this
in-depth, so I really appreciate you being a partner with me on this journey
back in time and bringing it forward. I don’t know if it’s a closing statement,
but just sort of a statement to sort of maybe summarize is that I feel that I’m
still learning and evolving and I always will be, because I’m basically—I’ve
always been seen as a sponge that, yeah, Joel always wants to—he wants to learn.
He wants to understand, and I think that that’s what drives me, is really to
understand things, values, understand people so that I can better relate to
them. So in the end, I’m just trying to live that idea of kapwa and make
connections with people, because I want to see that in other people. I want to
other people to want to know about me. I want other people to know about people
they didn’t know about, and I think that that is the energy that this world
needs more of, one of tolerance, one of acceptance, one of mutual respect.
Because I work at all these different levels, I see where politics and
resources and the economy really divide and create all these strata and create
all these inequities, create all these situations of oppression and of social
injustice, and I can only do what I can do, but I’m going to do that damn near
to the best of my ability with as much passion, with as much energy as I can. So
whether that’s in the corporate boardroom or on a stage, I’m going to try to
perform, utilizing the best of my cultural attributes and things that I’ve
learned in my life that I’ve received, gifts I received from other cultures, in
order to create and affirm the vision of the world that I want to see and that
we deserve.
CLINE:
Wow. Well, I do want to ask
one really nuts-and-bolts question, and it actually comes right out of what you
said, and it’s just because I’d forgotten to ask it, which I think could be
important, especially in continuing what you’re doing. How do you stay in
physical shape?
1:29:06.8
JACINTO:
I don’t dance as
much as I did, and I’ve gone up and down in my physical—I mainly deal with
issues of stress because of the mental issues that I’ve been dealing with in the
last few years of my life too. But in the last few years I’ve tried to eat
better, you know, in terms of—because food is a medicine, and I realize that
more and more. It’s strange because at UCLA I was into kinesiology, but that’s
the physiological aspect. It doesn’t talk about nutrition as much, and
nutrition—and I look at you and I know just by being around you, I know you’re a
very holistic, very healthy person, Alex, and so you understand that food and
what we take in our bodies is medicine and heals us. So I’ve tried to learn more
about nutrition. Exercise I do. I mean, you know, I’ll exercise here and there.
I’ll lift weights and things like that too.
I don’t do that enough, and
I constantly struggle with that because of the amount of time that I spend, but
I’m trying to prioritize that more, but also, I think, the outlook of my
relationships and my home life is peaceful and filled with love, and if that’s
good, then your mind and your body tends to follow like that too. So Ave has
been a good partner for me, so physically we have a good life together, you
know, spiritually, sexually, physically, emotionally, like that, so that helps
support. So people say, “Yeah, Joel, you look pretty young.” I say, “I’m
forty-eight,” but I was twenty-seven when I started this, and so I spent the
better—almost my entire working career, and I’ve gone up and down, but I think
in the last five years when I was able to take a Durfee Foundation fellowship,
Alex, it really helped me gain more perspective about taking care of myself,
about how good a shape could I get myself into for the long haul, for the
marathon too. So nuts-and-bolts-wise is very much of attention to diet, and then
with exercise can be more and more. So I went back to studying Filipino martial
arts, and for me, something new again. At this stage I’m rewiring my brain to do
work in all these different—and it’s tremendously uplifting, and I’m so excited
about being able to learn another Filipino art form, but in a Filipino American
context, again. This guy Dan Inosanto used to be Bruce Lee’s student, but he’s
very Filipino American, okay, so he’s very much like me, so I relate to how he’s
interpreted our culture, and I’m having a real good time there as well, yeah.
1:31:01.8
CLINE:
Great. Well, it’s
been absolutely wonderful to talk to you. Seems to always be the case, and it’s
so sad when these interviews end.
JACINTO:
Well, it’s not, because
our relationship, I hope and trust, will continue.
CLINE:
Absolutely.
JACINTO:
And that we are joined
and we’re colleagues and friends, and so wherever we go throughout life, I’ll
know—we know Pip Abrigo, all those different things that we do, and I will call
on you, Alex, and I will remember you and keep you in my network of people that
I’ve come across and shared some wonderful time and hope that you will do the
same, too, as well.
CLINE:
I intend to, and I
appreciate that a lot, and thank you. On behalf of the Center for Oral History
Research at the UCLA Library, the department and your alma mater, we greatly
appreciate this time you’ve taken. Thank you very much for you contribution to
this series.
JACINTO:
I got to say that when
Ave said, “Hey, this guy Alex
CLINE:
from UCLA’s calling,” and I
said, “UCLA?” So we didn’t know each, but when obviously UCLA, our alma mater,
is calling, that pulls at your heartstrings, said, you got to do it. I know you
chased me for a long time, but I’m honored to be included in our alma mater
because, again, UCLA is the birthplace of everything that I have for my life
today, too, and I wanted to be able to support the archives and the oral history
project in whatever way in getting the voice and the experience of whatever
topic that I could be of service. So you let me know if I could share with you
people that you got, as well, too.
1:31:01.8
CLINE:
Okay, you got it.
JACINTO:
Go Bruins. laughter)
CLINE:
Thank you. (End of August
12, 2011 interview)