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

Emergence of Graphics in Gidra

There was a Saturday school where some pretty famous African American artists used to have this class where they would teach kids who didn’t have the opportunity to go to art school, art, who had some talent, and they would meet every Saturday. And these kids came from all over and many of the kids that graduated that, the Japanese American kids, or the Asian American kids, came to Gidra, because we knew them or they also got affected by wanting to be a part of the change.

So they wanted to use their art to make change and then Gidra was a good opportunity because it was a vehicle, a publication where they could contribute and those people brought, a sensibility that really changed the paper. I think if you look at it issue by issue you can see how much of a change, when those guys kind of got involved in it because then we had the tools to do that, to make ideas illustrated in a way that many people could understand it.

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)