Ipo Hemaloto, Salt Lake City, UT: an interview by Savani Aupiu, 17 January 2009: Pacific Islanders Oral History Project, U-1975

Transcript (42 pages) of an interview by Savani Aupiu with Ipo Hemaloto on 17 January 2009. Part of the Pacific Islanders Oral History Project, Everett Cooley Collection tape no. U-1975

Ipo Hemaloto (b. 1968), daughter of a Samoan man and a Japanese, Hawaiian and German mother, grew up in American Samoa. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother, a teacher and ultimately a PhD in history. Her family is Mormon; she believes her grandparents on both sides were converted. Her parents met at BYU-Hawaii. Ms. Hemaloto remembers growing up somewhat better off than her fellows, perhaps because her mother was from Hawaii and expected certain American amenities, she thinks. Ms. Hemaloto remembers growing up speaking English and associating with the few other English-speaking children at school, a separate and, in hindsight, somewhat envied social group. Her father suffered discrimination in the US due to his accent and did not want his children, for whom he and their mother had high educational expectations, to suffer also. Ms. Hemaloto, one of eleven children, moved to Utah with her family when she was in junior high and finished high school at Jordan High in Sandy. She recalls some racism, and remembers being thought of as too white in Samoa and black in Utah. However, she focuses on her father´s negative experience more than her own. She married briefly, returned to Samoa for a time, and then, regarding Hawaii as a second home, attended college at BYU-Hawaii and took a degree in English. She met her Tongan husband Sepho there, and at the time of the interview had six children with him, lived in Orem and attended Utah Valley University. Ms. Hemaloto misses Samoa terribly, and hoped at the time of the interview to shortly return to Samoa with a nursing degree. Project: Pacific Islanders. Interviewer: Savani Aupiu.