This article describes how the author teaches 8th graders to imagine the experiences of people from another time in history and make connections to today. Through a role play, the author teaches the hidden story of Japanese Latin Americans during WWII. The role play engages students in exploration of a little-known piece of history--the deportation of people of Japanese origin from Latin American countries to U.S. internment camps and back to Japan as POWs. Most importantly, through their discussions and writing, students began to reflect on how race affects their own lives, often incorporating the history of their own families to see how racism is not just an issue for some groups, but is an issue of human rights for all people. (Contains 6 resources and 1 note.)