This week we’re hearing from Ma’o Tosi in Anchorage. Tosi is a property manager at the Northway Mall and a community advocate.
TOSI: When we first moved here, we ended up moving into a family’s house in Eagle River and we stayed there for about a month. That was my first experience around just white people. It was very uncomfortable for me and my older brother that at Gruening Middle School when it was lunchtime, I would just go sit in the bathroom stall. It was funny, one time I went and sat in there and I realized my brother was right next to me and so it’s just how uncomfortable we felt.
We ended up moving into Mountain View, and it almost seemed like we moved back into San Diego. Mountain View is the most diverse neighborhood in the country. And one of the best things about this diversity and us being all different is to try to find the commonalities that we have. Maybe your kid now is on the basketball team with my kid. So there are always interests that can bring us together. There’s always something.
The further away from Anchorage we go the less diverse we are. And if that is so, then it’s very important that I always take teams of diversity into rural communities, into the Valley, into all of Alaska to show them what we look like… but if this is their first experience with a Sudanese, a Samoan, a Hmong, then let it be the best one. Because if this is the only hour they get to see us, then if it is a good one, they will be open to the next experience.
Not every Polynesian, not every Samoan, is going to be an NFL player. I would like to see more judges and doctors that are Polynesian, that are Sudanese, that are black, that are of our community. So that hopefully if they succeed, they don’t forget where they came from and can come back and do what they can.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
