Amongst the buzzing Student Success Center of the D building, Director of External Relations for the PCC Armenian Student Association Andre Dionysian shares how the purpose of the club has changed since he became a part of its leadership this past fall.
“Since we’ve taken over, the Armenian Student Association has had a major refocusing effort,” Dionysian says. “In the past, the ASA at PCC and other community colleges were more focused on sharing Armenian culture with the community of the college. We wanted to change it up a little bit to do that as well, but also focus on building and strengthening our community, particularly the Armenian-American community domestically. Having experienced genocide and the current instability that happens in our ancestral homeland, it hits the community here in the United States very hard. However, we have a lot of issues domestically in the United States, which are different and independent from what happens overseas and we wanted to help address that.”
This basis has informed much of the club’s recent activities, including hosting the second annual SoCal Armenian Student Association Regional Summit last Saturday.
Taking place in the Creveling Lounge, the event invites local Armenian Student Associations from colleges in southern California to come and discuss intra- and inter-community issues such as homophobia, reckless driving, domestic solidarity, and Armenian fragmentation.
Vice President of the PCC Armenian Student Association Zholi Minasyan articulates why she and Dionysian as co-chairs of the regional summit felt the need for the event to take place.
“We thought of starting something to bring these topics up that we don’t talk about because of the stigma and taboo,” Minasyan explains. “We’re trying to break that because it’s not okay. Everyone deserves to feel as welcome in their community as another human being that just so happens to have a more traditional mindset. Everyone is welcome, everyone should feel welcome, and everyone should be loved, adored, understood, and cared for in their cultural community as well as in the international community. We need to be nice to everyone for the sake of being nice to everyone, not for the sake of gaining something, but for the humanity of it.”
Speaking to this idea of inclusion is Erik Adamian, the president of the board of directors of the Gay and Lesbian Armenian Society (GALAS), who shared his experiences as a gay man in Armenian spaces and discussed with the delegates from local colleges what can be done to be more inclusive to the LGBT+ community in their clubs.
Specifically affected by this issue is PCC ASA’s own treasurer, Ajax Naskhulyan.
As a first-generation Armenian-American and member of the LGBT community, Naskhulyan discusses his experience with these identities and what having this event means to him.
“Personally, I’m a part of the LGBT community so it was very important to me,” Naskhulyan says “It makes me feel very included because Armenian culture and that identity is being merged into one so I’m enjoying myself. In my case, my identities butt heads so I often felt like I had to choose between one or the other. I’m glad this event is happening cause then it’s like, ‘You can be both.’ I’m like, ‘What? Can you say that again? I didn’t hear you correctly.’”
Naskhulyan also emphasizes the general inclusivity that they feel as a part of PCC’s ASA.
“I think the club is supportive because it’s all first generation, more or less, Armenians, who are like, ‘Armenians can be anything they want!’,” Naskhulyan explains.
Shifting to a different issue that affects the community is Burbank Police Commissioner Romik Hacobian, the second Armenian person to hold this office, who discusses the impact of street racing on Armenian culture.
One recent case that has greatly affected this community was the deaths of Cerain Baker, Jaiden Smith, and Natalee Moghaddam due to a street-racing-related collision on Aug. 3, 2021.
“In Burbank, we had an incident a few years back, where three children were coming home from a party and were struck by two vehicles racing on Glen Oaks going 137 miles an hour. Guess who they called when the report came in with Armenian last names attached to them? The Armenian police commissioner.”
He further explains how young Armenian adults are also perpetuating unsafe driving behaviors and causing harm to the community’s reputation.
“We’re seeing that a majority of traffic citations coming in related to street racing and speeding have Armenian last names attached to it,” Hacobian discloses. “The impression that they put on the community is that they are reckless, they don’t care about the people that are around them, and that’s the impression that you give of what the culture is. It’s always the loud ones that give a name to everybody else. 99 percent of everybody else are good, wonderful people and it’s the one percent that can really tank the perception of what we’re trying to accomplish in the community, especially in a community like Burbank where being Armenian wasn’t fully accepted 15 years ago.”
As Hacobian stated, he believes that incidents like these fuel existing Armenaphobic sentiments from outside the community.
These sentiments result in hate crimes such as the recent posting of flyers that called for Armenia to be “wiped off the map” in response to peaceful protests led by the Armenian community to end the Artsakh blockade in Beverly Hills on Jan. 29.
Presenter Edward Barsoumian, Director of Coalition and Community Development of the Armenian National Committee of America, Western Region, showed the audience pictures that were taken the day before the regional summit on March 31 of flyers he saw in Glendale that spewed the anti-Armenian belief of denying the Armenian genocide.
Barsoumian draws the comparison of the persistence of these anti-Armenian actions to similar hate experienced by the Jewish community last year and how they reached out to other communities to help solve the issue versus how the Armenian community responded.
He explained that, as a small minority group, Armenian people often choose to become more isolated in response to incidents like these rather than reaching out to the communities around them.
Further, he articulated how this actually harms the community by not allowing them to connect to groups that have similar experiences and prevents Armenian people from building coalitions to help fight against hate when it happens.
Beyond tackling the existing disparities that happen between the Armenian community and other marginalized communities, there also exists great fragmentation within the community on the basis of language, place of birth, and other differences of cultural upbringing, according to UCLA Armenian language scholar Harut Kavtyan.
Beginning his speech in a British accent and then switching over to his real American one, Kavtyan uses this example to draw the question of how Armenian culture exists in many different forms and how it should draw the community together but often tears it apart.
“It doesn’t matter where you are, it can bring you together if you let it,” Kavtyan says. “The key thing is letting it. Are we going to be able to let it? Believe it or not, Armenians are very closed-off people. It’s really funny. We’re incredibly social, especially when it comes to family life, everyone is in everyone’s business and everyone is very nosy, but do we actually set the correct boundaries? Do let each other exist in the ways that we want to? Do we let each other support things that we feel are important? Or do we judge them? Do we put them down? Because all of a sudden you feel like they are threatening you? Why is that? We’ve already established that there are so many different accents, regions, and subcultures that we come from, all of which should ultimately serve to enrich the totality of the Armenian lived experience.”
He further invited the crowd to share their experiences within the community as Armenians and asked how to build bridges between what are often treated as very isolated experiences but actually aren’t.
One of the people who participated in the discussion was PCC Armenian Student Association President Tony Ordoukhanian who shared his experience as a Persian-Armenian.
He further emphasizes the need for building bridges in the fragmented community and shares his belief in the potential of the Armenian people when working together.
“I think the impact that I want to leave on my community is very simple: We’re not done,” Ordoukhanian states. “We’ve only begun. No matter what it is that we’re working on, towards preserving our heritage, advocating for human rights, or bringing communities together. We’re not done. There’s so much potential left for Armenian-Americans or Armenians across the world to work together, to cooperate on issues that matter to us, or to celebrate the cultural aspects that have impacted us on a personal level. There’s so much potential left on the table that not even one ounce of it should be left.”
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