Photos by MIKE CHIEN Jared Peo, a
fourth-year theater student, performs at an open mic night in
Kerckhoff Hall Thursday.
By Matt Goulding
Daily Bruin Contributor
As the incessant screaming and yelling of 19,000 UCLA basketball
fans was just beginning to register on the Richter scale Thursday
night, 40 students inside Kerckhoff Hall were busy making some
noise of their own.
Culminating a week’s worth of events sponsored by the
Undergraduate Students Association Council external vice
president’s office, organizers converted the Kerckhoff Art
Gallery into a forum where students could use the open microphone
to provide listeners with insight into their emotional, spiritual
and political views.
“I think it was great for personal expression,” said
third-year psychology student Patrick Voller, who christened the
event under his MC alias Loose-id. “It’s definitely
important for students here to have a place where they can speak
their mind.”
Though both the crowd and organizers of the event welcomed the
artistic freedom of poets speaking out, the night was designed to
educate and inform those students present about EVP’s
week-long campaign that stressed “education, not
criminalization.”
As a part of the United States Student Association, UCLA’s
EVP office meets with other university representatives throughout
the year to determine national campaigns. The topic during week six
at UCLA concerned increasing education among youth in order to
curtail an increase in criminalization.
“The intentions were to provide a forum where we could get
people thinking of these issues,” said Arash Davari, a
second-year comparative literature student who helped organize the
event. “We wanted to do it in a way that wasn’t
traditional, that wasn’t pure political rhetoric.”
 EVP chief of staff Portia Pedro sees hip
hop as a way of important expression for today’s youth. With the
fusion of poetry, spoken word, and hip-hop performances, the event
was anything but your typical political platform. Active
participation was the medium, art the vehicle.
In a poem she read during the event, fourth-year international
development studies student and EVP Chief of Staff Portia Pedro,
conveyed both her personal beliefs and the motif that seemed to
resonate in Kerckhoff Thursday evening: prisons continue to fill up
while many struggle to receive an effective education.
“We’d forget about why the cage bird sings,
That we’d forget about our brothers and sisters in their
cells,
Or actually think they deserve that hell, do you?
Realize we should sing as well,” she read.
Pedro said she felt the voices of the incarcerated often go
unheard and that the lack of educational opportunities for many on
the outside is confining in its own respect.
“Many of the policies and propositions out there are
gradually increasing the prison population and are decreasing
access to education,” she said.
Pedro referred to legislation like Proposition 21, which allows
for juveniles to be tried as adults, and Proposition 227, which
eliminated bilingual education in California, as testaments to this
trend.
Davari said he felt corporate interest in the privatization of
prisons continues to grow as it provides many companies with cheap
labor.
“I don’t think the privatization of prisons is
concerned with justice and that should be the purpose of our
prisons,” he said. “The funds used to build the prisons
to facilitate the younger prisoners could be going to support
education.”
Because of hip hop’s popularity, Davari and Pedro see it
as an important vehicle of expression for today’s youth. The
varying styles of hip hop that were performed at Kerckhoff serve as
effective ways to present ideas to students, organizers said.
“We really stress having alternative means of education
and experience, and because a lot of students are really into hip
hop right now, we can use it to educate,” Pedro said.
“From Tupac, to Common, to the Roots, they are talking to the
youth and can connect their experiences to our political
institutions in an everyday language.”
Whether through the eloquence of a poet’s measured meter
or the spontaneity of an MC’s always wandering freestyle,
performers made both key points and purged their emotions.
The success of the event left spectators, like fourth-year
economics student Mike Tsai, eager for similar opportunities on
campus.
“You don’t see many events like this around campus
and when they’re provided, we need to take advantage of
them,” Tsai said. “It can have a more profound impact,
as a form of art and music, on our youth today than most
traditional forms of communication.”
Davari and Pedro said they plan on using the momentum from
Thursday’s turnout to turn the open mic night into a regular
event at UCLA.
“We’re definitely going to be having it more
regularly,” Pedro said. “It’s necessary to have
something like this as often as possible on campus. It’s an
emotional and political catharsis.”
For information on the EVP’s next open mic night contact
Arash Davari at [email protected].