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Life & Times Transcript

01/27/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Bullying may be an early sign of worse things to come. Is there a way to turn it around?

Jose Hernandez>> When I was younger, I used to get picked on a lot because I was like the smallest person in class. Look at me now. I'm like super huge. Basically I thought if they did it to me, why couldn't I do it to them?

Val Zavala>> And then, the port of Santa Monica? Wait until you see what almost happened to Bay City.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Val Zavala>> We've seen them in the movies and we've seen them in real life, bullies, that one kid that picks on little guys and steals the lunch money. But bullying is not to be taken lightly. In fact, it's often a start of more violent behavior. So what can a school do when it's got a bullying problem? Hena Cuevas takes us to one school that's found a solution.

Hena Cuevas>> This is Berendo Middle School in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles. It's a tough neighborhood and the school has a tough feel. For the past few years, it has also had a major problem: students bullying other students. One of the bullies was fifteen year old Wendy Cienfuegos.

Wendy Cienfuegos>> I will pick on kids. I mean, because I'm really tough. I'm a tough girl. I mean, I'm short and everything, but I'm actually tough.

Hena Cuevas>> The problem was getting serious and counselors knew that more serious violence on campus often starts with bullying.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> It was severe, severe. There was probably, you know, anywhere from five to ten incidents of bullying behavior each day at Berendo and that was what was reported.

Hena Cuevas>> According to counselor, Dee Dee Hitchcock, suspensions and other punishments weren't working, so school officials decided to take action. They empowered the students themselves through Project Safe School.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> Project Safe School is a student-driven program. They told us what they needed in the school. They told us what they needed when they were out at lunch to prevent this problem.

Hena Cuevas>> Project Safe School starts with a six-week course that trains both bullies and victims on how to resolve conflicts among themselves.

>> "Today on our agenda is mediation. David wants to know what is it? What do you two do? You who have already acted as mediators?"

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> We pair them up. They role-play, they role-play, they role-play before we allow them to go into mediation with other kids.

Hena Cuevas>> In today's role-playing, the new mediators are learning how to read body language.

>> "What are some of the specifics of passive body language? Daniel?"

Daniel>> "Looking down".

>> "All right. He made eye contact for a long time, but when Wendy pressured him, he got really uncomfortable and he dropped his eyes."

Hena Cuevas>> This is how it works. Whenever there is a problem between two students, the counselors give them a choice. Either get suspended or take part in a student-led mediation.

Daniel Valladares>> They prefer it because they get to solve the problem and they don't get suspension that day.

Hena Cuevas>> Daniel Valladares and Jeanny Fuentes are both in the eighth grade and are halfway through the program.

Jeanny Fuentes>> Well, they feel comfortable with us, so they come out and speak more with us and, with adults, I don't know, they have some fear. They actually respect us.

Hena Cuevas>> Neither one of them are bullies, but today they are role-playing with two former bullies. They are high school students who graduated from the program.

Daniel Valladares>> "We're mediators and basically help you to solve problems. That's it."

Hena Cuevas>> Wendy became a mediator after she was threatened with suspension and was failing all her classes. She says the program taught her how to control her anger and use her experiences to help other bullies like herself.

Wendy Cienfuegos>> I put myself in their position. It's like now that I think about it, it's funny because it's like I guess I'm mature now. I grew.

Hena Cuevas>> Another graduate, sixteen year old Jose Hernandez, was forced into the program by his probation officer. He was also failing his classes.

Jose Hernandez>> When I was younger, I used to get picked on a lot because I was like the smallest person in class. But look at me now. I'm like super huge. Basically I thought if they did it to me, why can't I do it to them? For a while, from like the sixth to eighth grade -- no, about the fifth to the eighth grade -- I was a big bully.

Hena Cuevas>> He says, having been a bully is an asset when it comes to helping other bullies.

Jose Hernandez>> It's pretty cool because I knew what the kid was talking about. I knew what had gone on. I knew like everything that happened.

Hena Cuevas>> The students who agree to mediation have to accept the mediator's resolution and everything they say and do is confidential.

Wendy Cienfuegos>> You get used to it and you know that you put yourself in their position. It's like you're talking to a person, say I'm talking to you, and it's confidential and you're my friend and I wouldn't want you to tell anyone because I'm trusting you.

Hena Cuevas>> And it works both ways. The kids who get in trouble also have to keep the conversation confidential.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> They can't go back out at lunchtime and say, guess what we did? You know, they can't do that. So if they can't stick to the confidentiality and agree to all the rules which is about the mediators as well, then they don't participate in the peer mediation.

Hena Cuevas>> That's a pretty big responsibility, though, to put on twelve, thirteen and fourteen year olds.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> It works out really well. The mediators that we pick come in all shapes and sizes. Some are really small sixth graders to really tall eighth graders. When they're done training and the ones that we pick to be mediators have a maturity about them that the kids do respect.

Hena Cuevas>> The mediation program has been at Berendo for about two years now and, in that time period, fifteen students have graduated as mediators. And even though it may not sound like a large number, school counselors say you need to keep in mind just how many students they've been able to help. In those two years, they've conducted over two hundred mediations with a ninety-seven percent success rate.

Jeanette Stevens>> There were no concerns with the power of children helping children.

Hena Cuevas>> Jeanette Stevens is the principal at Berendo Middle School.

Jeanette Stevens>> I think, when children work with children, they are seen as an ally and sometimes, especially at this level, the kids don't necessarily view adults as allies.

Hena Cuevas>> Stevens says the peer mediators don't just reduce hostility among students. They free up her full-time counselors to spend more time with other troubled children.

Jeanette Stevens>> And I don't know that we'd be able to reach all of the children in the capacity that we're able to reach them at this point.

Hena Cuevas>> The program costs about two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year to run and the initial federal grant for two years has ended, but the program was successful enough to convince the school to pay for a third year itself, although it's a scaled-down version.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> It's not like they're going to get in trouble or we're going to call their parents because they're having a fight with another kid. We handle it in a way that the kids don't feel like, you know, it's going to be a punitive punishment.

Hena Cuevas>> It goes against everything like everybody's always heard of the way that you deal with discipline.

Dee Dee Hitchcock>> Yes (laughter), yes. It works, though. It works.

>> "Not only are you helping kids out at the time that they have a problem, but you're helping them out for the rest of their future."

Hena Cuevas>> That's certainly true for Jose and Wendy. Both are getting good grades and are proud to say their days as bullies are over. Jose wants to go to college and Wendy is looking forward to becoming a counselor someday.

Wendy Cienfuegos>> Everything I've gone through in life, you know, is going to help me and now that I've been trying to be a mediator, it's helped me a lot because it's a step closer to being a counselor.

Hena Cuevas>> This is the only school in Los Angeles that's using Project Safe School, but for those at Berendo who've seen the program work, they say this could be one solution to the bullying problem other schools are facing. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Thirty years ago this month, one of the most painful chapters in American history came to a close. It was the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. Now three decades later, thousands of Vietnamese children who came to the United States have grown up and one of them is Quang Pham. The amazing story of his father's imprisonment and their reunion after twenty years is told in his memoir, "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey". I talked with Quang Pham at Skylight Book Store in Los Feliz. You have an amazing story which you've managed to put in a book because you said it was bottled up for so long inside you?

Quang Pham>> Yes. There's this great debate about the Vietnam War and nowhere is the South Vietnamese point of view. My father was one of those South Vietnamese who, after the Americans left in 1975, was in prison for twelve and a half years.

Val Zavala>> In a communist re-education camp, right?

Quang Pham>> Yes. The North Vietnamese put him in the camp along with a million other South Vietnamese and, thank God, the United States didn't forget about him because he was able to come here and we were reunited in 1992.

Val Zavala>> Your father was a fighter pilot, is that right?

Quang Pham>> He was a fighter pilot for part of his career in the South Vietnamese Air Force. There's this whole side to the Vietnam War that this country doesn't want to talk about. It's almost if we can absolve our problems and our mistakes in Vietnam by not talking about the South Vietnamese, our former allies. The South Vietnamese depended on the United States to fight the communists and when the United States decided it had had enough, it withdrew and that hand-off after the Paris Peace Accord left the South Vietnamese basically high and dry. The South Vietnamese made some mistakes too, but to blame them all, that's what happened during the last election in 2004. The pundits and all the experts blamed it all on the South Vietnamese.

Val Zavala>> His father, who had been trained as a pilot in the United States, was now imprisoned in a Vietnamese re-education camp. He would remain there for twelve years while his family settled in America.

Quang Pham>> My mother and my three sisters and I came to Oxnard just an hour north of Los Angeles. Probably like a lot of immigrants and single-parent families, my mother didn't speak any English, so we grew up -- it was tough during the first couple of years, but there are some good things that we encountered, some good people. After about three years, a lot got better, certainly a lot better than the people of South Vietnam.

Val Zavala>> So you grew up and you really felt compelled in a sense to join the Marines, is that right? Like your father?

Quang Pham>> Yes. I wanted to fly as a child in Vietnam, so I joined the Marines basically for three reasons. To follow my childhood dream, but also to dispel that myth that the South Vietnamese weren't worth fighting for. I was also chasing this American identity. I had no identity. I lost my country. The last part, I wanted to pay back for my citizenship and the education that America gave my sisters and me and many South Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon.

Val Zavala>> And how long were you in the Marines? How many years?

Quang Pham>> I served, Val, seven years in active duty and six years in the reserves, most of it in Orange County just an hour south of here.

Val Zavala>> Finally in 1987, Quang's father along with other South Vietnamese officers was released from the communist camp, but it would be five more years before he decided to come to America.

Quang Pham>> By 1992, he was able to come to the United States and our family was reunited after seventeen years.

Val Zavala>> What was that like?

Quang Pham>> Well, you spend all your life longing for your father and, for my mother, it was much more difficult. She had become this independent American woman instead of a mother of a Vietnamese fighter pilot raising four kids in Saigon, so the happy family reunion didn't happen, but we were glad to get him back. My parents were divorced and I never became close with my father until the very end. There was just a big cultural and generational gap and there was all that pain that he didn't want to talk about. His years in the prison, how the United States abandoned South Vietnam, and he also felt that we were also Americanized. We spent many years after he got here and we finally bridged the gap, but unfortunately, he passed away in 2000.

Val Zavala>> So you and your father must have had very different perspectives on the Vietnam War and the United States role in the war. What was the difference between you?

Quang Pham>> When he first got here, I was a young Marine officer, a captain, and I was very gung-ho about the Marines. What my father saw and the way the United States fought with the South Vietnamese during the war was a completely different picture. He was very proud of my career --

Val Zavala>> -- he was? He was glad you joined?

Quang Pham>> He was glad that I followed his footsteps, but he also knew that there were some mistakes made in the way the United States prosecuted in the war. They kind of just shoved the South Vietnamese aside when we landed in Vietnam in 1965. So he held back about his feelings towards the Americans because he didn't want to insult me. He didn't want to downplay what I was doing with my own life in serving in the United States Marine Corps.

Val Zavala>> Quang Pham graduated from UCLA. Then after serving in the Marines, he became an executive with a pharmaceutical company. He went on to start his own successful business and, now that his book is finished, he's speaking publicly about his story and the South Vietnamese view of the war.

Quang Pham>> If you look at what happened to the American vets after Vietnam, it took about twenty or twenty-five years for this country to welcome home the American vets, but the South Vietnamese were the real losers. So it's going to take a little bit more time, but it's coming. All I want is not even an appreciation, but just acknowledgement that there was another side to the war. The South Vietnamese were our allies and, in the end when we decide to pull out of Iraq just like the South Vietnamese, we have to make sure the hand-off is complete so people that are depending on us don't get put in prisons and don't get put into camps for many years.

Val Zavala>> So that's in a big part what this book is about, right? Trying to make people acknowledge and appreciate the South Vietnamese perspective?

Quang Pham>> That's about a third of the book. I mean, there's greatness about this country, but I also wanted to share the story of many Americans that helped my family along the way and the greatness about this country. So it's a balanced book. It's not just a book that tells the ugly side of the war in Vietnam. It tells about a family that came to the United States with nothing and, thirty years later, we're living in freedom and we're able to pursue whatever we want to pursue in this country.

Val Zavala>> And hopefully will help fill the gap on the bookshelves on some history of South Vietnam.

Quang Pham>> If it does that, I would be very happy.

Val Zavala>> Well, Quang Pham, thank you so much for your time and your story.

Quang Pham>> Thank you, Val.

Val Zavala>> There's an exhibit commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. It's at the library at Cal State Fullerton. It includes documents, photographs and art by refugees and prisoners. It's on display through June 30.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Did you know that a railroad used to run alongside Santa Monica Beach? And some people wanted Santa Monica to become the huge port that Los Angeles Harbor is today? But Santa Monica Beach was destined for different things and now a local historian is telling his story. His book is called "Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History". Vicki Curry talked with the author, Ernest Marquez.

Vicki Curry>> Ernest Marquez has spent years compiling his family history, but that history is also the history of the town of Santa Monica. In 1839, the Mexican government granted much of the land there to his great-grandfathers, Ysidro Reyes and Francisco Marquez.

Ernest Marquez>> It consisted of 6,656 acres and they settled in Santa Monica Canyon. My great-grandfather had a home in Santa Monica Canyon and so did Ysidro Reyes and they raised cattle. This was a cattle ranch at that time. Ysidro Reyes's youngest daughter and Francisco Marquez's youngest son, Pascual Marquez, married and they are my grandfather and grandmother.

Vicki Curry>> So they settled here in the 1830's and cattle-ranched, but they soon found that a lot of people liked to come and visit from Los Angeles and they allowed those people to hang out on their land.

Ernest Marquez>> That's right. During the 1850's, Santa Monica Canyon was a popular resort for people living in Los Angeles. They had a horse and buggy that would bring people to the beach at the mouth of the canyon. There was obviously nothing there but the creek and a few sycamore trees and people set up tents and they could stay there over the weekend or as long as they liked.

Vicki Curry>> Santa Monica started booming in 1875 with the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The township was established and the Santa Monica Hotel was built at what is now the corner of Ocean Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. It was soon followed by the first bath house built by Michael Duffy in 1876.

Ernest Marquez>> And all through the years, they just kept getting bigger and bigger. After Michael Duffy's bath house, the Santa Monica bath house was established and then later in 1894 the North Beach bath house was built. But in order to reach the beach, they built a staircase at the foot of Arizona Avenue and it was a wooden staircase that had ninety-nine steps in it. They called it the Ninety-Nine Steps throughout its entire life. That access to the beach is still there today. Today it's a cement overpass that crosses over the Coast Highway to the beach.

Vicki Curry>> The luxury Arcadia Hotel was built in 1886 and included Santa Monica's first roller coaster built not for amusement, but for transporting guests to the center of town.

Ernest Marquez>> The thing traveled about five hundred feet, but it took a whole minute to do it. It went very slowly and it was all gravity-run. They would start down a steep hill and that was enough momentum to take it all the way to the other side.

Vicki Curry>> Although Santa Monica was quickly becoming a resort town, the businessmen of the time weren't interested in tourism dollars. A railroad magnet named Collis P. Huntington wanted Santa Monica to compete with San Pedro to be the primary harbor for the city of Los Angeles.

Ernest Marquez>> To do that, he built a wharf just above Santa Monica Canyon that extended out into the sea four thousand seven hundred fifty feet. It was almost a mile long and, at that time, it was the largest wooden pier in the world. He got the right-of-way for railroad tracks that would be run from Los Angeles through a tunnel all along the base of the cliffs here to the long wharf and then out onto the wharf. Finally the Congress of the United States said the harbor should be at San Pedro and not anyplace else. When that happened, of course, businesses and the long wharf declined, and by 1916, it was half demolished and, about 1920, it was gone completely.

Vicki Curry>> But during the short life of the long wharf, a Japanese fisherman came to town and a village of about three hundred families soon developed.

Ernest Marquez>> The Japanese families in Los Angeles started coming down here. They had Japanese fishermen there who would go out fishing and soon they built hotels and it became a resort for the Japanese families in Los Angeles.

Vicki Curry>> The long wharf was just one of many piers built and destroyed during the early years of Santa Monica, but one still remains. The Santa Monica Pier. It was originally called the Municipal Pier and was built in 1909 to hold a sewage pipe. That didn't stop it from being a tourist attraction, especially when an amusement pier was built right alongside it.

Ernest Marquez>> Well, the second pier was built in 1916 by a man named Charles Looff. He was a manufacturer of amusement rides. He made carved animals for carousels. It's still there. The carousel is still there and the bowling and billiard building are the only two original buildings that were built in 1916 that are still on the pier.

Vicki Curry>> Santa Monica continued to grow in the early days of the twentieth century. The Santa Monica Land and Water Company, which had owned most of the land on the beach, began selling lots to individuals for private homes.

Ernest Marquez>> In the 1920's, the movie industry and movie stars discovered this area that would be a nice place to have a home because it would be isolated. They started buying these lots and building homes on what they called the Gold Coast. The largest home built on the coast was Marian Davies' house. It was paid for by William Randolph Hearst.

Vicki Curry>> It was during this time that Ernest Marquez was born and, over his eighty years, he has watched the landscape of Santa Monica grow from a small town to what it is today.

Ernest Marquez>> Well, it's changed so much that I don't recognize it as my hometown. All the things I knew as a young man or a young boy are no longer there. It's not the same place. I just don't recognize it.

Vicki Curry>> One thing he does recognize is a place in a canyon neighborhood hidden away from public view. So, Ernest, this is something that's not included in your book, but I wanted to come and see it because it's a very interesting part of your family history. What is this place? Where are we?

Ernest Marquez>> We are in our own family private cemetery that we think was established sometime in the 1840's by my great-grandfather, Francisco Marquez. He was living here in the canyon. Right where we're standing was where his adobe was constructed.

Vicki Curry>> And this is the primary marker. There's one other on the lot, but that's it. The rest of the graves are unmarked.

Ernest Marquez>> The other graves had wooden markers and, over the years, they've been taken away or lost, or I don't know what's happened to them.

Vicki Curry>> And it's just this little piece of land that's tucked in amongst a bunch of houses that have grown up around it in Santa Monica Canyon.

Ernest Marquez>> I think it's charming just the way it is. You know, it's natural in its own way.

Vicki Curry>> Ernest Marquez, author of the book, "Santa Monica Beach", thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Ernest Marquez>> Oh, you're welcome.

Val Zavala>> The name of his book again is "Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History". And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Sponsored in part by:


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