Ana Iwataki
Ana Iwataki is a cultural historian, writer, and curator from and based in Los Angeles. She is also a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation examines the cultural and spatial politics of 800 Traction, a former warehouse in the Arts District where artists, many of them Japanese American, lived and worked until their eviction in 2018. She has contributed writing to Los Angeles Times, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zócalo Public Square, among other publications.
Stories from This Author
A (Yonsei) Editor’s Note: Seeing Ourselves Across Generational Lines
March 24, 2024 • Ana Iwataki
In 1988, when Gene Oishi’s memoir was originally published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, the camps had been closed for more than forty years. This was also the year that the Redress Movement achieved its greatest victory, with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granting $20,000 in reparations for each camp survivor, as well as a presidential apology. I was born in 1989, long after the camps, a year after redress and reparations. What was to Oishi a childhood …
