Hell to Eternity with Special Guest Prof. Greg Robinson
Not Rated
Run Time: 180 min. (includes 132 min. film & Q&A)
June 21, 2023 at 7pm
Clive
Starring: Jeffrey Hunter, David Janssen, Vic Damone, Patricia Owens, George Takei
Director: Phil Karlson
Screenplay: Ted Sherdeman, Walter Roeber Schmidt
The true-life story of Guy Gabaldon, a Los Angeles Hispanic boy raised in the 1930s by a Japanese-American foster family. Later, during the war, as his foster parents are interned at a camp for Japanese Americans, Gabaldon’s ability to speak Japanese helps him become a lone-operating Marine hero. A Q&A with historian and author Prof. Greg Robinson follows the film, moderated by Catherine Ladnier.
About Greg Robinson
Greg Robinson, a native New Yorker, is Professor of History at l’Université du Québec À Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada, and a researcher at that university’s Center for United States Studies and Chaire de Recherche sur Immigration, Ethnicité et Citoyenneté. A specialist in North American Ethnic Studies and U.S. Political History, Robinson teaches courses on African American history, Twentieth-Century U.S. Foreign Policy, American Immigration History, and visible minorities/racial groups, among others. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from New York University, and a B.A. in History and French Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.
Robinson’s first monograph, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of
Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001) is an in-depth history of the
decisions behind the government’s mass removal and confinement of West Coast
Japanese Americans during World War II, one which centers on the role of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. His second solo book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, (Columbia University Press, 2009),
winner of the 2009 History Book Prize of the Association for Asian American Studies, is an ambitious transnational history of the wartime confinement of people of Japanese ancestry throughout North America. His most recent solo work, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012) is the first full-length book to discuss the experience of Japanese Americans across the continent in the years following World War II. He has served as regular contributor to historians’ blogs, and has made frequent appearances on television and radio programs.
About Catherine Ladnier
Catherine Ladnier is a native of El Monte, California. El Monte was the heart of Japanese American agriculture in the fertile San Gabriel Valley prior to WWII. Following Executive Order 9066, the Japanese Americans of El Monte were incarcerated at the Santa Anita Race Track and later Heart Mountain, Wyoming. She grew up unaware of this complicated history until 1960 and the premiere of Hell to Eternity. She attended the grand opening in El Monte with her closest friends, the children of Guy Gabaldon.