Interviews

1. Commonalities

2. Understanding Gidra's Context

3. Gidra's Content

4. Emergence of Graphics in Gidra

5. Youth and Gidra

6. Gidra Production

7. Prisoners and Poetry

Yoshimura,Evelyn

Community Activist

Gidra Production

There wasn’t really a division of labor, per say. Some people were better at things than others, obviously the illustrations you know, was pretty specialized, but the production of the paper, which meant receiving an article typing it into the format that we used, generating the columns, proofreading them, making corrections, making the physical corrections on the lightbox and then putting ‘em together again and then laying out a page even, everyone did those things.

I know it’s hard to imagine, but if you look at Gidra, you can tell that because some, some of the pages, are pretty bad.

There’s one where someone went crazy with that black tape, we just discovered that. So they put black tape all over and that was their design. But that was also a part of the movement of the time, and was like, “you don’t have to be an expert to do something, just try it." You know there was a lot of that kind of feeling, too, at Gidra we put that into practice.

Date: September 28, 2011

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Kris Kuromitsu, John Esaki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Born in Denver where her family had resettled after leaving the WWII concentration camp at Poston, Arizona, Evelyn Yoshimura was still a child when the family moved to the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. Growing up in a predominately Black community during the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s, she witnessed firsthand the Watts Rebellion of 1965. After graduation from Dorsey High School, she attended Cal State Long Beach, where she helped to develop its fledgling Asian American Studies program. During this period, she was one of the founders of Amerasia Bookstore, a cultural institution in Little Tokyo for two decades, and was a staff member of Gidra, the innovative Asian American publication that featured a provocative mix of journalism, graphic art, and social, cultural and political commentary.

Evelyn was active in the Redress campaign and served as a key community organizer for the Los Angeles Hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians that took place in 1981. She is currently Community Organizing Director at LTSC (Little Tokyo Service Center), where she has worked on many projects including building connections with Arab American and Muslim communities after September 11th 2001. (August 2012)