KQED: Common Ground : Reflections of Rabbit in the Moon

MARIA BLANCO
Civil Rights Attorney
MALDEF: Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
www.maldef.org

The film shows all the different reactions obviously to the internment; of them, are the resistors who say this is not okay, and they allude to the fact that this is a violation of their civil rights and that it's unconstitutional.

And I thought one of the interesting things that comes up with that is that they, in some ways, were acting very much as Americans, I mean when they're raising the constitution, they're talking about civil rights, they're talking about due process, they're talking about equal protection. In some ways, that was proof of the fact that they had really become Americans, that they had internalized those values of free speech, of equality, of due process.

So it was interesting to me to see the resistors not as sort of the pro-Japanese, but they were really, I felt, were doing it in the American tradition. Even for people like myself that are sort of seen a little bit like the trouble makers, maybe we're more American than people realize.