Oral history interview with Cynthia Mun conducted by Vanessa Concepcion and Stefani Evans on March 31, 2021 for Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. Cynthia Mun discusses her upbringing near Seoul, South Korea and her family's immigration to Los Angeles in 1974. She talks about her parents' employment as a seamstress and a janitor, as well as the educational mentors she encountered who helped her to succeed at Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena and later at Yale University. Mun shares her corporate employment history, including helping to launch the Pandora streaming service and creating an accessible platform for E-book use before the creation of Amazon Kindle. Mun talks about her career working at MGM International and how this opened the door for her mother to become an MGM employee and access better working conditions with union employment.
Oral history interview with Dr. Javier A. Rodríguez conducted by Elsa Lopez and Barbara Tabach on December 19, 2019 for the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project. Dr. Javier Rodríguez, Biology Professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, talks of his personal and educational history that led him to UNLV. He discusses his migration from Puerto Rico to California where he received his PhD from the University of California Berkley and became a biological museum curator for various animal specimens. He later moved to Las Vegas to teach at UNLV where he has now been for nearly two decades; Dr. Rodríguez shares how UNLV has changed since he first started working here, including the university's increased interest in faculty research to become a Top Tier institution. Subjects discussed include: Puerto Rico; University of California Berkley; University funding; Tier 1 research institutions.
Oral history interview with Kevin Chung conducted by Cecelia Winchell, Stefani Evans, and Jerwin Tiu on December 18, 2021 for Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. Kevin Chung discusses his upbringing in Southern Vietnam and how he and his family were forced to leave the country during the Vietnam War. Chung talks about his family's migration to Minnesota and how they adapted to American culture. He shares his educational background, his professional pursuits as a teacher, and the reasons he and his wife decided to move to Las Vegas. Chung reflects on the importance of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) in education with an emphasis on the arts and shares his teaching philosophy. He also gives details of his family's lives and talks about the importance of bringing together his Vietnamese and American cultures to connect the different generations of his family.