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

Youth and Gidra

You know, we had a high school program too. Umm the Neighborhood Youth Corp. It was like a national program where the government was paying high school kids to work in community organizations. So we got some NYC kids, and they helped work on Gidra and then they also spread the word out to their friends.

And coincidentally at that time, I think it was the early 70’s, there was a drug epidemic in our community. And because of that, a lot of people, a lot of the community groups that were forming were aimed at working with young people, to try to prevent it. And you know a lot of people realized that it was related to a confusion and lack of identity, a sense of clear identity. And feeling ashamed of you know, who you were people used to talk about well my parents are immigrants and they never hug me.

Well, that’s because people don’t do that but, on TV you see the Brady Bunch and you know, people hugging so those kind of things, you know, were never explained to kids. So we, there was a lot of work done with young people. And I think that started being reflected in the newspaper too.

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)