https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/37070/archive/files/bca13cc28d7c9f814ee98f877691d570.pdf?Expires=1782345600&Signature=by1%7EE5C-hBPKBvI5TVWZLQFw3SIvu5hr2H5vWxad-qdYiYZ2fOobTQVVHS3RZA6IgS34m8Xqe9KVrJHwNxAbZnU5nm2sU2DNPtSIt8sr-x1pkt9t65moklkcKLGBOrsb23MYtN-zlrI0FKi4X4cc8rxi-PRiBUrhnT0OdduwjCUZjTONg72aOwzZ0rxi6vj04e%7EnZg8XfPvYlm5vslxM5-ivI33fguYIXHHmUW65pWIcKINc2nMqYw7iybc6v-8dygzFZ3BJTHYo3tes02%7EB9ccG%7EJN6nMW98v2elHjS5DSuAvexdQ0KluC85k76vBVfCYsUeZsFusqwnhmq41BLpw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 1ca8d042617207cfb998a8b99d7afa4a PDF Text Text Jim Higgins Interview, 7.12.2024 Khoun: [00:00:30] Jim, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us about the history of Lowell desegregation and the city's late 1980s English-only campaign. As well, we would like to hear what you recall about the treatment of Southeast Asian refugees as they arrived in Lowell in the 1980s. We are working to get as a complete picture as possible regarding the history of Lowell schools, the desegregation lawsuit, events leading up to the filing of the April 1987 suit by the parents, and the death of Vandy Phrong. This is being done with the intent of publishing an article. Please give a brief introduction of what you were doing in Lowell during this period. Higgins: [00:01:56] I came to Lowell and started working as an architectural photographer. Then I started doing more documentary photography work, getting away from doing buildings because it was sort of boring and the people were a lot more interesting. I did a book on Lowell at the time called Lowell: A Contemporary View (Editor’s note: published by Mill Town Graphics in 1983). It was like a documentary on the city, the people, the places. And because of that book, the International Institute contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in doing a documentary on incoming refugees from Southeast Asia. I knew very little about the situation at the time, but I was immediately interested because I have always, from a socio-political viewpoint thought the situation in Vietnam and the consequences that happened afterward were going to reverberate through the years. That's exactly what came to be because when I started doing this documentary on refugees coming in, you could see the consequences of our actions over there. I was somewhat interested in the beginning, but then I was totally committed after spending a year working in the community because they wanted me to do a book somewhat similar to the earlier book, but sort of documentary style on Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees coming in. And, they wanted it in four languages. We hired interpreters from the community. They could translate, but also give us the Khmer version. Originally, the script is in the book, for the captions and the forward and all that stuff. It's all handwritten. Was because at the time, I don't even know if there are typographic fonts in Lowell that could handle that because this is before computers came in. I mean, computers were not I don't want to sound ancient, but personal computers like Macs, they didn't come in till 1989 after our project. We had to have all the stuff, all the captions and everything in the book, handwritten in Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, not English. For the first year of the project, I knew that I had to learn so much. The other thing is I didn't want to just go into a community that I didn't know that much about and start photographing immediately because I felt like it was just not right. Simply because our levels of trust must be built up with people before you can do something like that. Higgins: [00:05:00] When I did the book, I had already spent 3 or 4 years doing research. I knew from that, that no matter who it was, you have to build that level of trust. We spent the whole first year and I wish I could have spent longer doing this, but I had after a certain point, they wanted me to get the book into production. My partner at the time, Joan Ross, is a graphic designer and we worked as a team. We spent a year just getting to know the community, not taking any pictures at all, not even taking a camera anywhere. We went and just went to, got introductions, went to weddings. 1 �Went to all types of activities that were going on in the community and just spending time in people's homes, talking and just getting to know them. It was based on the relationships that we formed in that one-year period that I felt like we were ready to take the next step of asking them if they wanted to participate in the project and didn't mind us coming in and taking pictures. And we became friends with a lot of people right away. Higgins: [00:06:12] For me, it was sort of a natural transition. I always talked to people about what was it exactly that drew me to the Southeast Asian community? And I think it had to do with the sort of injustice of the Vietnam War. And so, based on that I felt like it wasn't like speaking with strangers. It was speaking to someone that we did a real injustice to and I was trying to find out their story, what was their perspective? How did they feel about the United States sending troops and destabilizing Southeast Asia? That first year was a prep year. And then after that, we get into documenting the community. And then when we were finished in 1986, we were ready to publish the book, but we met Dith Pran from the film The Killing Fields. At that time, he was a reporter working at The New York Times. (Editor’s note: Dith Pran, [23 September 1942 – 30 March 2008] was a Cambodian American photojournalist. A refugee and survivor of the Cambodian genocide, he became the subject of the film The Killing Fields, 1984.) Higgins: [00:07:27] I went with Chanthida. (Editor’s note: Chanthida is one of the original dancer teachers who helped to establish the Angkor Dance Troupe.) You don't know her, but a couple of other people in the community, and we went to New York, and he was so gracious to us. We met at The New York Times. We told him about our book project, and we asked if he would want to write the foreword for the book. He said yes, but he wanted to see what we had so far. We basically had almost everything done. We showed him the photographs from each of the communities. Then we showed him the translation, and when he saw how the translation was written he said, oh my goodness “this is going to have to be rewritten and redone.” I wasn't aware of this at all. A thing about translation that I've learned since then from I think it's R.F. Kuang who wrote The Poppy Wars and Babel and those books. She is Chinese and she talks a lot about translation and how things get screwed up in translation. While the person that wrote the translation for us, the Khmer translation, was speaking in what he called “a high class tone” that he felt the refugees in Lowell now would not be able to relate to. He said you have to have somebody that speaks the language, because most of these people are agrarian. From small villages. And this text is written like it's from somebody, a scholar from Phnom Penh. I thought, oh my goodness, who am I going to get? But Pran helped us with it and he and someone else I forget who the other person was collaborated on doing the text in the proper way, which was caught at the last minute. I would have felt awful if we had ended up publishing it and people were offended in the Cambodian community. But there are distinct differences between the three groups. And for some reason, I think from some weird spiritual level, I just communicated more and I was more relaxed with them. But the bonds were strong in all three. That's how we get started and we will be going from there. I lost my train of thought. Higgins: [00:10:25] Well, the other thing I shouldn't forget to add is that we did have, we had hired a humanities scholar to work with us because we were being funded both from the International Institute and from the Mass Foundation of the Humanities. And one of the 2 �stipulations is that you have to have a humanities scholar working on your project. And we had Hai Pho from UMass Lowell at the time, but he's Vietnamese, so there were some people that were a little bit worried about the Vietnamese perspective. If he wrote it from a Vietnamese perspective, it would be problematic for the Lao and the Cambodian. Khoeun: [00:11:03] Yeah, a lot of tension. Higgins: [00:11:04] Which was interesting to learn all that because right in the very beginning, I wasn't aware of the level of tension until people in all three communities started to tell me about their particular history and how it related to the other countries. It was a real sort of going back to school type thing, but not learning about American politics, learning about Southeast Asian politics. But politics is politics. Unfortunately, it's the same everywhere. There's always infighting and people power grabbing and stuff like that. But the common folks are the ones that end up getting hurt, so we tried to get most of our perspective from people that weren't in politics. Fortunately for us, Hai Pho was a very honorable person who tried to see things from each perspective. Because he wrote about it, because he was writing from the original incursion of French colonialism for us coming into Vietnam and then Kampuchea, Cambodia, I think for us, and then Vietnam. But the Americans coming into Vietnam and the consequences of that. Then he gave his perspective and I was clear to tell everyone, this is his perspective from a scholar’s perspective of what the consequences were of the Vietnam War and how it affected Cambodia and how it affected Laos. We had a map showing all the different routes coming in for us of soldiers and then refugees fleeing out. He helped with doing all that. I think we found an area where even though he was Vietnamese, he could speak to the origins of the problem and the consequences without getting into the politics of Southeast Asia. His wife Lan Pho was also a professor at UMass Lowell. I've known that whole family since that book. Because we photographed his mother or her mother. At the time, she was about 90 years old and traditional. Total traditional Vietnamese outfit. It's part of the Vietnamese section. And also they introduced us to a lot of people in the Vietnamese community, both in Lawrence and Lowell. Yeah, it was it was a cool connection there. [Editor’s Note: On April 15, 1975, Lan and Hai Pho and their baby boy caught the last commercial flight out of Saigon before the South Vietnamese capital fell to North Vietnamese forces. The Phos were U.S.-educated and had U.S. residency, which allowed them to return here. The Phos brought family members to the U.S., welcomed other Southeast Asian refugees and cofounded the Indochinese Refugees Foundation, which scaled up its services when the U.S. government settled about 100 families from Cambodia and Laos in the Greater Lowell and Lawrence area.] Khoun: [00:13:53] The next question has to do with the 1987 lawsuit. How did you learn about parents in Lowell advocating for their children's education and the school committee's opposition to this effort? And did you become involved in this effort in any way? And did you document this time-period with your camera? Higgins: [00:14:18] Well, I had the time-period documented from the perspective of the Southeast Asian project of the first book. I had to go back to the politics thing. I always stayed 3 �away from politics of all kinds, but especially some of the politics was going on at that time. But I heard a lot from the families themselves. Anything you hear from the politicians is always slanted one way or another. You have to talk about people that are getting affected by policies. And those were the people that were always working on the book project. And in all three communities, but especially the Cambodian community, because it was interesting. I think the level of trauma was the highest among the Cambodian people. I mean, from the parents, mainly from the parents, kids adapted quickly. But the parents that came in I think about the parents from Laos and the parents from Vietnam, the trauma and the parents from Cambodia was the worst because of Khmer Rouge, and they were the ones that went through that. Their acclimation time took a lot longer than the Vietnamese or the Lao. I think because of that, and they suffered a lot in the sense that they got a disconnect between their kids as far as what was going on in school because they were just trying to survive. Higgins: [00:15:45] Everyone was working 12, 14 hours a day. And, the kids were mostly, the oldest, older kids were taking care of the younger kids. Parents were working just in survival mode. And a lot of the folks, the older ones didn't pick up the language quickly or not at all. To this day, because my crew, Monica, her mom speaks hardly any English. Linda Uch, same thing. Her mom knew hardly any English. Even though I get along with both of them, great. We have other ways of communicating. But the thing is the parents’ trauma. It just was too much. But the kids adjusted quickly. That created a divide in the Cambodian community. And the information that came in was slanted again by if the kids were even in school. A lot of the kids were dropped off at school and then as soon as the parents left, they would go out the back door of the school and then go down to Clemente Park and hang out with the gang or whatever and the parents didn't know it. And then I started finding out by this one kid. Shannon told me he felt so bad because his parents came to the graduation thinking he was going to be there, and he hadn't been in high school for three years. Higgins: [00:17:02] He'd been dropped off every day, but he was going out the back door to school and never attending school. Once he saw the effect that it had on his family, I think he became a youth counselor and started talking to the youth. You've got to be more responsible because this is devastating to our parents. But so much of it was that they were able to get away with it because the kids were the interpreters for what was going on at school, because they knew the English at school, and they would come home with their news and tell their parents. But the parents couldn't do it the other way around. Go to school and talk to the teachers because the teachers didn't understand them. They were depending on their kids for what was going on in the schools and depending on that particular child and believe me, not all the kids were running out of the back door at school, but a sizable amount of them were because mainly the whole parental system sort of broke down because of the need to survive here. And the parents were in the dark; it was that type of situation. Khoeun: [00:18:09] With the language barrier. Higgins: [00:18:11] The language barrier. When it came time to go to student-teacher stuff at the school, I witnessed firsthand. I got three generations starting from the 1980s and stayed friends with those families all these years. I knew the stories from the kids. Even as they got older, they 4 �started telling more of the stories about this whole thing about depending upon what situation you were in school, whether you were hanging out with a rough crowd or if you were just a serious student and the parents would get a certain type of story. If you were successful in school, then the parents would find out about this stuff. But if you weren't, you were still told. They still told their parents they would do fine, but they weren't even going to school. But when I did go to one of those meetings, one of the kids asked me to go. She was getting close to graduation, and she wanted me to go as her parent. I said, I don't look like your parent. That's going to be so obvious. I'm not your parent but the situation was that she was just embarrassed not to have anybody from her family there. Her father had left. Actually, they got another family somewhere else. There was a bad situation, and her mom was just embarrassed to go because she couldn't speak to any of the teachers. She wouldn't go. I ended up going as a stand-in. But it was sad that the parents couldn't be there. To make a long story short, the parents didn't know what was going on. As far as the overall politics goes and all that stuff, they were just not prepared for any of that stuff. I could see that the representation among the parents, coming out and fighting against some of the bigots in the local schools was just not going to happen because they weren't even showing up for the studentteacher meetings; they made it difficult. Higgins: [00:20:25] It was different in the Vietnamese community; it wasn't that severe level of trauma in the Vietnamese community. A lot of them were able to transition to the school system a lot faster, and a lot of them sent their kids to Catholic schools. Once they came, my parents found out about the Vietnamese kids going to the Catholic school. They get them out of the whole gang culture and stuff like that. Then they started sending their kids to Catholic schools like Saint Patrick's and Linda, her dad was determined to take her out of high school because he was so worried. I mean, it wasn't like the parents didn't care once they started to find out what was going on. But they handled it within the family. That was the thing, and they didn't go interface with the teachers and or with other city councils and stuff like that. Now it's different. Now it's totally different. Khoun: [00:21:28] A lot of distrust with authority. Higgins: [00:21:32] And there were some bigoted people in the community, the worst people. Khoun: [00:21:37] What was it like to see the bigoted people talking? Higgins: [00:21:41] That was embarrassing. I'm not from Lowell originally, but I came from a town like Lowell, a working-class town. My family is Irish. We were discriminated against when we came here. Like, mainly my parents and grandparents, always the last one to get a job. The Irish need not apply signs in the store windows and stuff like that. But what was most embarrassing about it is the light bulb mentality that all these groups get, like the Irish and the Greeks, because of what is his name? That guy with “speak English”? Hilarious. He should have known better. Just like the Irish should have known better. [Editor’s note: He is referring to George Kouloheras, chair of the Lowell School Committee in the 1980s and 1990s and a leader of the city’s ‘English only’ movement.] But they developed this light bulb mentality where they came to this country they were prejudiced against overseas and stuff like that. And you think that they would be more sensitive 5 �to people being discriminated against here, right? But as soon as they made it in, as soon as the Irish established themselves, as soon as the Greeks established themselves, they just think we're in a lifeboat now. We don't care about you people swimming, trying to get in the boat. In fact, we don't want you in the boat because it's too crowded already. It is that type of mentality that's so hypocritical because I think about it, and I talked to a few in the community about this that I know in the Irish community and Greek community. And in fact, my father-in-law was a part of them. He was Greek, but incredibly bigoted. Marriage only lasted two years and we fought all the time because I tried to just look at it from a viewpoint of human beings. We're all human beings, but we set up these artificial barriers based on nationality and based on religion, but they're just ways to separate us. In the end, we're just all still human beings. Unless we do something about it, we'll never survive as a species. But he didn't want to hear that. Once you go down that road, they say “We've got our culture and our customs.” And I go, that's great. It's wonderful to have cultures and customs, but when you use them as a hammer against somebody else, it's different; then, it's bad. You have to know when it's good and when it's bad. And so we're fighting all the time over that. But it was an embarrassment to me, especially in the Irish. Not so much in Lowell but in South Boston when they fought against busing. That was a complex issue because even though the Black community didn't want to be bused into a white school, but the overall thing about that was to get rid of this thing of schools being segregated, and that's a good thing. But the way they went about in Boston and to some degree, the way they went about it in Lowell, was a little flawed. You can't force people into those situations. You've got to go in and talk to the communities and have like basically town hall meetings where all the groups are invited in to get to know each other as humans first, and before I think that's always the way because it's always a lot harder to be evil against somebody. If you've had dinner with them and you've shared a glass of beer or wine or whatever, but if you skip that step, then it's so much easier to demonize them. That's exactly what we did when we went to Vietnam. Our soldiers were trained to demonize the Vietnamese as all of them being Vietcong as they term ‘gooks’. Right? That way it enabled the soldiers to see them as less human, less human. In that way, they would pull the trigger easier because you don't want your soldiers to have humanity because if you do, nobody would be killing each other. It's like they'd have to go home and do something else, or maybe be friends, but it's just the way it is. Higgins: [00:25:38] I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by their reaction to it, but I have to say, they did a lot. There were a lot of good people. I don't want to demonize everybody in the Greek community and in the Irish community because the French, the same thing with them. But all of them. There are good people in all those communities, too. Eventually, those voices started to be heard that sort of countered the bigots in the community like George Kouloheras. There are other people, other Greeks in the community that spoke against George Kouloheras and the same thing in the Irish community. Whoever gets the soapbox first is usually the one that sets the agenda. And that's all you hear about. We always hear about Kouloheras and other people think, oh yeah, there must be some truth in what he's saying. But, if they stop and listen to it, they can figure they know immediately it's totally bigoted, especially the Irish because that's the way they were treated when they came here. 6 �Khoun: [00:26:36] Where are you? Where are you part of how closely did you end up with the lawsuit? Like where did you end up working with the families or anything like that? Higgins: [00:26:47] I was strictly in the area of all the people that I worked with on a Southeast Asian project and not just the first book, but we did another book, a follow-up ten years later that was all on a more personal level, and I it was weird. I just have a disconnect with politicians. Not all, you've got Vanna Howard (MA state representative) who's wonderful. She is a non-politician politician. But then you have so many others, even in the Cambodian community that, I won't mention any, I don't want to mention the name in particular, but one of them was a student in my class because I taught a class on film and all the students were Cambodian and Vietnamese because it was a film-making project about them and their voice. They brought me in because of my work in the community to teach them the tools of filmmaking and then let them tell their story. But one of the students in that class later became a politician in the community. And we have major disagreements. Higgins: [00:28:02] You know mixing, not looking at people again as human beings and repeating the same mistakes that the Irish did and the Greeks did, and others who don't look back and they don't even want to walk in the other person's shoes to try to understand their point of view. It's like to me a disease that affects every cultural group, politics, and, that thing about once you get a certain amount of power, you don't want to let go of it no matter what. And look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a good human being, a decent guy, but he is totally screwing himself on this. And the way people are going to see him from this point on, because he should have done the honorable thing and just agreed to one term just so we wouldn't have Trump in office and then let the younger people come up, somebody within the Democratic Party, there's got to be other people out there that have a strong voice, give them a chance. Instead, he is determined. He's like a fighter who's been in the ring too long, like Tom Brady had a good sense of knowing when he should quit football. LeBron, he's approaching the same thing. He's approaching 40 years old. But he's aware that he's going to be retiring soon. But what's the deal with Biden? He's like 80 years old and he doesn't want to retire. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world to retire. People still come to you for advice and stuff like that. He's doing a disservice. And if it turns out that Trump wins because of that, I think his legacy and Biden's legacy is screwed. Don't get me going. It's like I get upset when I get into that topic. Khoun: [00:29:30. Our next question will have to do with Vandy. Do you remember Vandy’s death? And then if so, how did it affect you personally? Higgins: [00:29:55] I do remember his death. And I remember I wasn't surprised by it. I was in the second stage of the second book. The second book, I worked as a mentor in Tiny Rascal Gang. A lot of the kids who are on the cover of the first book that Joanie and I did were in the Tiny Rascal Gang when we started to try to find them ten years later, because we wanted to do a follow-up on those kids who are on the cover of that first book to see what happened with them. Where did their lives go? That's when I found out that 3 or 4 of them that were on the cover were in the Tiny Rascal Gang. I tried to find out where they hung out. Like good luck would have it, 7 �because I love playing basketball, they played basketball down at Clemente Park. Well, it was Palin Park or now it's Palin Park, was Clemente Park at that time. For me, it gave me an entree. Higgins: [00:31:03] But the first time I walked down there, I was the only white guy down there. It was all at that time, it was both Cambodian and Latino. When I went down there, they thought I was an undercover cop. But then a couple of kids recognized me and once they recognized me then I was in because I could be trusted because one of the kids was like the top person in the gang, vouched for me. But then I got the reversal from the cops who thought, who is that guy down there? First, I'm an undercover cop and then I'm a drug dealer because they thought I was selling drugs to the gang, right? And unfortunately, I had made pictures for them. It was a group shot we took of all the gang members, and plainclothes cops were down there that day, and I was talking with one of my friends, a girlfriend of one of the guys in the crew and she wanted to see the pictures. She was all excited and I took them out. And I should have never done that because out of nowhere, this unmarked car pulled up. They jumped out, they grabbed the pictures out of her hands, and it was a record of the whole gang. It was awful. It was this weird sort of moment. I didn't know we were being surveilled. And then bang out of nowhere. That was a really uncomfortable situation. Later I was mentoring within that group. In the first book there was mainly the parents that were talking to me about a lot of the situations. And I did hear about that, and I was seeing the beginnings of that, like the tension between the white community and the teenagers and the Southeast Asian community, mainly over on Bridge Street. That's where there was just like there was just so much prejudice in the white youth community over there. And they looked at all the Southeast Asians. They used that term ‘gooks’ to describe them as Vietcong because you guys got to get caught up on your politics. I mean, this is not politics. They're not even from the same country. Higgins: [00:33:30] You've got three distinct groups of people. But the problem is when people don't take their time to know about history. And I'm not I'm not trying to slam on them too heavily, because a lot of those kids from Back Central and that neighborhood over there, they had a rough experience, too. Nothing equated to the Southeast Asian community, but they didn't come from the best of families. A lot of those kids were hanging out in the street and getting away with all kinds of crap and not paying attention in school and not even going to school. So how are they going to know about the complexity of Southeast Asian history? You have to keep that in mind, too. You have to think of all the extenuating circumstances of why people are coming from this place of prejudice. A lot of those white kids were coming from that place. They had no clue on what was the difference between a Cambodian and a Vietnamese and a Vietnamese and a Lao. It didn't surprise me at all when I heard it. Higgins: [00:34:26] It was sad and awful, but it was just a matter of time before that was going to happen. And then shortly before, well, not shortly, but before that when I was involved with Annie Vong. She had the Humanities store for a long time. Her dad was killed by two white guys down outside Boston. (Editor’s note: Cambodian Bun Vong, 35, was pulled from a car in Medford, by two white men and beaten on August 4, 1985. He died a few days later.) They got into a fight out of some traffic incident, and they beat him up and killed him. That was Annie's dad. I was working on the first book when that happened in 1985. It was the oddest experience going to that funeral. I didn't even know Annie personally at that time. I got to know 8 �her later because when she found out that I was a photographer that day, it is then we became close friends. But she was only about four years old when that happened. I had to go to the funeral, and it was a flashpoint. Higgins: [00:35:38] What happened with Annie's father became a big issue. The whole Boston area, Governor Michael Dukakis came to the funeral. Every politician came out of the woodwork saying, “We don't tolerate racism.” I don't know how many of them were also saying, “You should be speaking English in school,” but they're all saying what they should be saying that day. They converged on Annie's mom when she came out of the funeral home. It was just overwhelming, from all sides, all these news people from the different channels in Boston. So that was the experience. They were at that funeral. I was close to that issue. Then later getting to know Annie, and her experience with her eyes, when that happened, it's sort of how you get involved. Seeing that on the state level was a pretty heavy-duty thing to see. It wasn't just in Lowell. It was everywhere. The pressure on Lowell was incredibly intense because all of a sudden, they went to a situation where they had a school crisis on their hands, where to put all these students. And, given all those dynamics that were going on, the violence, the school situation, I think in the end, they basically, there were a lot of faults, but I think there were a lot of people going to bat for the Southeast Asian community. And I think eventually those people started to win out over time. So yeah, it was it was good and bad. Khoun: [00:38:51] We're interested in learning how residents reacted to Vandy’s death as the issue of school desegregation and neighborhood schools heated up. What do you recall about this or any other episodes of anti-Asian violence in the city? Everybody talked about Bun Vong. He was related to Lowell in some way, but he happened outside the city. Do you remember any other incidents? Higgins: [00:39:40] No, and it's not because I had my eyes closed because I definitely would have heard about it, but there weren't many. There was a normal amount of stuff that goes on with teenagers no matter what. If you're the other, even if you're French, German, Irish, Greek or whatever, if you're a newcomer coming into a school, there's always a certain level of tension and violence. What goes beyond that is yelling racial epithets at people and stuff like that and take it to the next step. I didn't hear about a lot of incidences beyond these two that we just talked about. Khoun: [00:40:19] Do you recall how the city officially responded to Vandy Phrong’s death? Higgins: [00:40:26] I think there are a lot of people with a conscience in law, and there are people like we talked about the light bulb mentality and stuff like that, but there were a lot of people that were grateful to be in a lifeboat and didn't forget about where they came from, and those people ended up stepping out, meaning that they are there in a lifeboat now. They're okay. But we were there once, and we got to give these other people a hand and let them come into lifeboat two, as opposed to kicking them out of the boat, and I think that there were a lot of, just as many of those people as there were the other, in fact, probably more so. Eventually their voices started to speak up and try to help out in the community. The International Institute. The people that sponsored us on the second book were wonderful. They 9 �set up, when things got overwhelmed in the school system, their own classrooms. But they didn't say you had to speak English. It was mainly Lao and Cambodians who took advantage of the stuff at the International Institute, not so much Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese were a smaller population, too. They're only roughly 5,000. Lao was maybe seven or 8 or 9,000, but Cambodian was closer to 20,000. And so obviously the resources went more to the Cambodian community because of that. But the resources were there for all three if they wanted it and the International Institute was a great place that helped out a lot. A lot of people respected what they were doing and were supportive. I have another shot in there (photograph) of the first woman to graduate from college in the Cambodian community. This was in 1986. Everybody came to her graduation, and it was a big news event and people wanted to trumpet this success. They wanted to say that there is some light at the end of the tunnel type of thing. Higgins: [00:42:35] And thank God if it wasn't that way, I would want to live somewhere else. Khoun: [00:42:42] Last question. Why, in your opinion, do you think parents took the dramatic step of moving forward with a lawsuit against the school committee and by extension, the city of Lowell? Higgins: [00:43:00] I can't answer simply because I don't know the particular parents that went forward with that. But I did have a question for you about that. Are you talking about the parents in the community? Are you talking about other parents? Khoun: [00:43:13] So far, we've gotten information about the Latino community and the Cambodian community. But it looks like the Latino community was the community leading the charge on the lawsuit. Higgins: [00:43:36] Would be hard to get back there because back then there was a huge disconnect and most of the parents couldn't speak English. They were having that problem with their kids picking up the language very quickly but depending on the kids as translators. Things got lost in translation. They would have been ill-equipped to go in and confront teachers and city councils and stuff like that. And it was the dynamic of what we talked about with the trauma. There were a lot of reasons why that was; it wasn't because they were lazy or they didn't care. They cared a lot, and they worked twice as hard. But the thing is, there were those other dynamics that I couldn't see them going into those situations and advocating because they didn't have the tools, like they do today. It's a totally different landscape today. And I think also within the Vietnamese community, in the Vietnamese community in Vietnam, the French were very instrumental in the educational system. The dynamic was different between the two. I mean, there were a lot of people that gravitated towards Saigon at the time and got their education and stuff like that. Higgins: [00:45:00] Once Lon Nol came to power in Cambodia, everyone talks about the golden age of the 1960s and Cambodian rock and roll and stuff like that. It was a beautiful time in Cambodia, but quickly it devolved because of certain politicians. They knew they were in a position where they could influence things, and certain politicians took advantage of that. Unfortunately, a lot of people misplayed their hand. In the end, it turned out to be a disaster. 10 �Sihanouk went into exile. There was so much disarray that even before the Cambodian refugees at the time it was labeled as refugees came here. They had already gone through 4 or 5 years of trauma and the beginning of the breakdown of the government before that. A lot of them were agrarian. They were outside of Phnom Penh and they were dependent upon a strong network that would connect them to an educational system. And I just don't think it was there; that would be like a whole other area of study. But I always felt like the Cambodian community got the short end of the stick because they came here with these disadvantages. Obviously, of course, it's going to take them longer to get up to speed. The Vietnamese get up to speed relatively quickly, because I know a lot of people in the Vietnamese community and how quickly they get into the educational system that that route into, like, higher ed in a Cambodian community took a lot longer than it did in the in the Vietnamese community and allow was somewhere in between, but for good reasons. There were a lot of reasons why. And that brings us back to the other thing about why they could possibly be seen as not proactive, or who are the ones that were active. Probably very few for all those other reasons, which to me says a lot about how they were just determined to survive. That was their number one priority, keep the family alive and survive and then, take things from there. And now it's interesting. It's hard now because I think I'm mainly about Monica's mom and Linda's mom. It's weird because in their generation there's more even now, a sense of isolation, even though their kids are like Linda and Monica, great to their parents, they're there all the time. But I think all those years of having that disconnect had taken that toll too. It is a complex situation. Khoun: [00:48:03] We were learning he seems easy to forget. And even a lot of the elders in our community have no clue. He can tell me two other people that fell in the river around 1987, but he can't tell me about Vandy Phrong. Why do you think that Vandy has been so forgettable? Higgins: [00:48:32] It's a sad thing, but I think if you think about all that we've discussed right now where were the people's thoughts, right? I think it's hard. I've seen how close parents are with their kids. But also, I've seen the damage that post-traumatic stress has done and that trauma has done. I think that that mentality was for a lot of people, we've just got to move on. And in fact, because you talk about we talk about this one particular issue, but then you talk about the whole genocide and how the parents, it's so hard to get them to talk anything about that, and what struggles are within our own crew, because a lot of our work is based on the experience of the parents, of the people in our crew. In fact, in a social club, they're basically playing their parents; Monica is playing her mum and dad in 1995, but in a different reality. And so this recent film is that, what if there was a different reality and my parents at the time said, we don't want to be defined by the genocide anymore. We want to be seen as just like everyone else, searching out a wonderful future and experimenting with different things and not always looked down on as “just people of trauma.” That's why we came up with the idea for the Survivor Club. We pretend that Monica's parents went out to Arizona and opened up a little roadhouse and stuff like that. They start to get in touch with the whole thing with the migrants coming up from Mexico. We delve into that issue about how even the Cambodians aren't immune from that type of prejudice against people that aren't in the boat yet. Because in the Sahara Club, Tim's character, he thinks that Monica is way too lenient on the migrants, letting them hang out at the club and stuff like that, and saying, everyone's starting to talk about us in town. Even the mayor. The feel good mayor doesn't want to talk anymore. He's worried about the repercussions to him and the business and that type of thing. We addressed that issue about, well, we’re all susceptible to that. 11 �But the overriding thing is our club is the willingness to reinvent themselves. And there were some people in my community at that time, but most of them didn't have the tools to do it. Then we go back to your questions about back in the 1980s, that even fewer tools at that time, we're talking about the parents and to deal with any of those issues and the fact that forgetting about it was just another means of survival. Khoun: [00:51:15] So do you think it will be I don't know about timely, but a good time to bring back Vandy’s story. Higgins: [00:51:32] The thing is, it could be anybody's story. That story. The thing is, I think as far as human life goes, every story is important. Every incident that happens is important. I would say yes, of course, but how much it's going to resonate within the community, I don't know, for all the things we just talked about. That's one of the things about trauma and for better or worse, it shapes you in ways that are both good and bad. I don't know what the reaction is going to be to that. The other thing and this is it's mainly the sad state of our society right now. There are many other issues that are verging on catastrophic, like climate change and the fact that Trump gets back in office and forms a dictatorship and all this other stuff that people are feeling under siege. It is hard. And because I had a discussion with this one guy about empathy and he literally yelled at me and said, empathy. He goes, how can I even think about empathy when politicians are blah, blah, blah, blah and stuff like that? Well, doesn't it all start with empathy? If you want to make any change, we change to something better than what we have now. I don't know. I think empathy in some ways is in short supply. And I think it's going to reflect on this particular story too. In some way, I don't know. There are always good people out there and we should never forget any incident, including this. But there are other people who are just sort of overwhelmed, and they probably don't even want the memory to come back. And there's not a lot of people that will tell you that. But I think that's just the reality of the situation. 12 � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/37070/archive/files/cf03be16df09720831f954089b6686f5.m4a?Expires=1782345600&Signature=tG7aHY4uRhSRlK%7ET4IdRxybloPgSkksXKtaceNJRZiXSQHI3lUTfU%7Em02jfpLuPL9No9gj8OMtZDyDJYSQymE8vkeL5EWfzWbfC4ja%7EJkAyHc53U8iPKXzFKDDQR9ym%7EDQRWrfQ6QhYpHV%7Ep0j3nvTzrIFTD4WuRHx2CjimS6H0Shht%7EGQRc%7EYJwdtVqeqM94m9LVrGaUNHS4Q4Q7JoH1t9iF64kYbv2gH7kh9ppy3GCWrWmXpGR47jHGMPcoLVyEKiJ%7EsgENy8cI8PeAgZQpUdvME8xAqYSH2rxT2luy-ODhGZXp9I12MrtNgzKG5n0PrEqm53XEYpxgaw2QE3mgg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM c9a7e62f0ca337c78b4fc93b9ffdc699 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Equal Education in Lowell Research Files, 1970-1990 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-1990 Description An account of the resource These research files were collected while writing the paper titled <a href="https://scholarworks.umb.edu/iaas_pubs/53/">"The History Matters: Fighting for Equal Education in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1970-1990"</a>, published by the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.<br /><br />The supplemental materials provided in this collection cover the story of how Southeast Asian and Latino parents in Lowell confronted the Lowell School Committee in the late 1970s and 1980s, demanding that schools be desegregated and that their children have equal education opportunities.<br /><br />Some items are restricted from online publication due to copyright law. Researchers can access these materials upon request. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Forrant, Bob Khoeun, Chandaranee Khuon, Chrisna Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Born digital collection preserved at the Center for Lowell History. Donated by Bob Forrant in May 2025. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted: This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. In addition, no permission is required from the rights-holder(s) for educational uses. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). No Copyright - United States: This item is believed to be a part of the Public Domain under the laws of the United States. Language A language of the resource English Spanish Subject The topic of the resource Public schools School facilities Immigrant students Racism in education Educational equalization Education, bilingual Latin American students Hispanic American high school students South Asian American students Legal briefs Racism against Asians Veterans Public housing Gentrification Immigrants--Housing Education, bilingual School boards School integration Racism against Hispanic Americans Puerto Ricans--United States City council members Social work with immigrants Cambodian Americans Lawyers Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF m4a Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Audio Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lowell (Mass.) Revere (Mass.) Cambridge (Mass.) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Yem, Paul Ratha Perez, Camilo Kiang, Peter Higgins, Jim Gargiulo, Chales Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jim Higgins Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024-07-12 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Khoeun, Chandaranee Khoun, Chrisna Subject The topic of the resource Southeast Asians Refugees Racism against Asians Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Higgins, Jim Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted: This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. In addition, no permission is required from the rights-holder(s) for educational uses. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lowell (Mass.)