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Taking its name from the Godzilla movie, Dragon Kingu Gidora, the original Gidra Newspaper-Magazine was founded in 1969 by a group of UCLA students who pitched in $100 of their own money to cover start-up costs.

It was one year after the term "Asian-American" had entered the national consciousness. “Asian-American” was coined by Yuji Ichioka, historian and UCLA professor, to frame a new “inter-ethnic-pan-Asian self-defining political group.” At the time, the preferred nomenclature for us was "Oriental.

︎The Return of Gidra

The Return of Gidra was ignited on May 6, 2019 when a group of  multigenerational and economically diverse Asian American and Mixed Asian American activists and students from UCLA and USC met at Revolutionario North African Tacos on Jefferson Blvd, 1.5 miles away from Gidra’s grown up headquarters.

The head agitator is Susan Park, aka “Mama Park” and “The Smoking Korean”. Taiji Miyagawa of Progressive Asian Progressive Asian Network for Action; David Monkawa (one of the contributors to Gidra 1.0), Dat Dang of Viet Unity, and Lynn Wang (environmental scientist and Sunrise movement leader) were among many in attendance. Our first monthly issue of “The Return of Gidra” will be published in December 2019 with the theme “50th Anniversary of Gidra and 50 Years of Asian America”.

The Art of Protest

Besides a monthly magazine, Gidra members are active in various political organizations, community groups, and tenants unions in every nook and cranny of Los Angeles.
They create content related to The Art of Protest such as zines, flyers, create story maps, and solidarity mapping projects, while also translating protest materials into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, and many other languages.
Gidra performs protests. They organize creative sit-ins. They takeover a gentrifying restaurant for a few hours with our theatrics.