My career spans the intersections of academia, community organizing, public policy, journalism, media production, public history, and film curation. Since 2017 I have lectured at University of Pennsylvania’s Asian American Studies Program where I teach courses on cinema and activism. Prior to that I taught Japan Studies at Arcadia University from 2012-2017. Over the last decade my academic interests have shifted from Japanese Cinema and Popular Media to Asian American and Pacific Islander Cinema and community organizing. Now in the past five years I have become more interested in the role that popular culture and public history play in propagating institutional racism and cultural violence. These are topics that I largely explore through a cultural history and media studies lens.
Throughout 2024, I traveled extensively to the former confinement sites where Japanese Americans were held during WWII in my previous capacity as Executive Director of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Consortium. While solidarity has always been at the heart of my own interest in this period as a mixed-race Japanese American, the opportunity to engage directly with many allied communities who share an interest in historic preservation from a non-white American lens has expanded my own understanding of both the role and responsibility that public historians have in safeguarding democracy in our global society.
I am currently working on two projects that have particular resonance to the theme of solidarity in public history. The first is a project with the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee to open a permanent local history museum in South Texas at the site of the former Department of Justice prison camp where Japanese Americans, Germans, Italians, and Japanese Latin Americans were held during WWII. Called My Story Museum: Tres Historias en Crystal City, work on the museum is being done in collaboration with the local Mexican American community who comprises approximately 95% of Crystal City’s current population. The museum not only tells the story of wartime incarceration, but also the Crystal City school walkouts of 1969 that played a pivotal role in the Chicano Movement and led to political victories by progressive third-party La Raza Unida.
In November 2024, a few days after the US presidential election, I traveled to South Texas to help open the museum. We were welcomed by a crowd of 250 local residents who attended the ribbon-cutting and opening panel discussion where two childhood incarceration survivors of Japanese American and Japanese Peruvian backgrounds shared their accounts of daily life in the prison camp. They were joined by local resident Ruben Salazar and Crystal City native Hector Estrada, both Mexican Americans, who saw aspects of their own struggles in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. As moderator of the panel discussion, I spent a great deal of time getting to know the four panelists and helping them to prepare some of their remarks. The common thread in all four of their presentations was both surprise and comfort in finding such similarities between our two communities – a feeling that was shared by the many attendees who heard these stories firsthand. Our communities have come together in an organic way by sharing these parallel stories of oppression, and in doing so, continue to build solidarity with one another.
More details on this project can be found on the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee website, an article from the UPenn ASAM newsletter, and through the recent newscast by KENS5 CBS San Antonio.
https://www.crystalcitypilgrimage.org/
The second project is a feature-length documentary film under the working title of Kiyoshi that I am co-producing about Japanese American activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Born at the Heart Mountain Incarceration center in 1943, Kuromiya was a tireless human rights advocate throughout his life who demonstrated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., co-founded the Gay Liberation Front–Philadelphia, and participated in numerous anti-war, civil rights, and gay liberation movements. The film is being produced in partnership with William Way LGBT Center (which houses Kuromiya’s papers within their archive) and is funded in part by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
This project is designed to bolster marginalized peoples and elevate voices that have historically been silenced. Kuromiya’s story is the embodiment of both intersectionality and solidarity. As a gay Japanese American who lived through some of the most conservative time periods in the 20th century (McCarthyism, Nixon, Reagan), Kuromiya not only survived, but thrived in an era when multiple aspects of his identity put a target on his back. Not only did Kuromiya persevere for his own sake, but along the way made tremendous strides in human and civil rights that bettered the lives of millions.
As a culminating event for the Pew funded portion of this film, a one-day symposium titled Kiyoshi Day is being planned for Fall 2025. The purpose of this event is to invite members of the respective movements that Kuromiya was affiliated with for a sneak preview screening of the film. Following that we will engage the attendees in a conversation about how we can better support each of our movements, as a tribute to Kuromiya, knowing that he would be there doing this work if he were alive today. By creating an opportunity to bring people into intentional dialogue with one another, bridging these currently disparate movements, this project will be catalytic.
In a time of great uncertainty when the political divide is more pronounced than ever before in recent history, Kuromiya’s story gives us hope for what we all might accomplish in these difficult times. Further, through Kuromiya’s life of activism, he showed us the critical path we must follow if we want to leave the world a better place. His story has the power to mobilize a diverse chorus of voices to join the current movement for collective liberation as we fight for the soul of America.
For more information you can visit the Pew Center website and the film’s Instagram account linked below.
https://www.pewcenterarts.org/grant/kiyoshi-project
https://www.instagram.com/kiyoshifilm
Given the context of these two current projects, I hope to share some best practices and lessons learned from the development of both. While there are many questions that could arise in greater specificity with either project, a few ideas that connect these two topics follow.
- How do individuals and groups of people develop a shared sense of empathy to one another organically, and are there strategies that could be implemented within the field of public history to replicate this process in the context of our work?
- How have marginalized communities successfully preserved their own community histories in geographic regions and various political climates that were hostile to their lived experiences being remembered accurately in the public imagination?
- In the context of this current moment in US politics, how can we safeguard historical accuracy and authenticity of marginalized communities whose histories call into question the moral authority of the US federal government?
Website: https://www.rbuscher.com/