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

Evelyn Yoshimura

Community Activist

Gidra's Content

The people at Gidra, we took ourselves seriously, and we took what we were doing seriously, but not that much sometimes. So I think that’s reflected in the paper too. Things like how to make a hat, you know, recipes for how to make, umm, I think it was oxtail stew was a really popular one, you know some of those things which were also political in a way in that it was kind of taking control of your environment and trying something different and you know, you don’t have to go to the department store to buy clothes, you can make your own - you know that kind of idea so people used to kind of call it hippie stuff.

There was a little kind of influence like that I think, I think that because of that was connected to the other more political issues, the war, you know, civil rights, Black Power, that it made more sense, it wasn’t a thing within itself, you know, those things weren’t separate from those other issues too, it was all questioning and challenging and trying to create something new and something better than the way it was.

communities governments identity politics

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)