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BY
LAUREN BARTLETT
UCLA Today
They live on opposite sides of a cultural chasm that seemed unbridgeable
— 21 youths from underprivileged areas in Los Angeles and
28 youths from the remote Hoopa Valley Tribal Reservation in Northern
California.
Several months ago, a UCLA-affiliated group of
undergraduates and recent graduates helped the two disparate groups
make a cultural crossing. After two weeks of living together on
the reservation and learning about each other, they found common
ground.
“It definitely was a journey and a true
cultural exchange because the kids had to work for the friendships
they built,” said alumna Theresa Walsh, who led the cultural
exchange with 12 other members from Equal Opportunity Productions
(EqOp). The UCLA group served as the youths’ mentors.
EqOp, which evolved out of UCLA’s Community
Programs Office of the Center for Student Programming, has been
leading such cultural exchanges for several years.
Initially, the Los Angeles youths, from different
ethnic backgrounds, thought they would find teepees and people
dressed like the Lone Ranger’s Tonto on the reservation;
the Hupa children assumed their Los Angeles counterparts would
be as rich as the Hollywood celebrities they saw on TV, said Mike
de la Rocha, a former undergraduate student president who is now
managing director of EqOp.
“What really helped was when we talked about
our cultural backgrounds,” de la Rocha said. In addition
to workshops in music, dance and other art forms, the two groups
attended a Hupa language class taught by tribal elders and cultural
presentations by tribal leaders.
“We found that kids, no matter what their
economic status, bonded together over simple things,” said
Tim Ngubeni, EqOp adviser and director of UCLA’s Center
For Student Programming, “like learning to catch salmon
— simple things, but indelible in their minds.”
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