Sense of History Enriches Tribute to Another Era

On Saturday, I drove to Boyle Heights for a garden dedication and saw an aspect of L.A. that most people don’t know exists, something so different from the media stereotype that I wished everyone in town had been there.

It should have led every newscast and been on every Page 1 so the event could burn into the consciousness of a city frightfully ignorant of itself.

The event was the dedication of the restored Japanese garden at predominantly Latino Roosevelt High School. It was the product of Latino students who felt a kinship with the Japanese American students who tended the garden in another era--until they were incarcerated during World War II.

This is not the picture the media usually presents of the vast part of town east of the Los Angeles River. The rest of the world sees the view from television news, which is hopelessly addicted to pictures of drive-bys and other forms of gang killings. TV is not alone. Radio and we print people are also suckers for murder.

It’s tough to get any of us journalists across the river unless we’re promised blood. The result is a one-sided, stereotypical picture of the historic, culturally rich and multifaceted East L.A. Latino community.

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A friend, Art Goldberg, had told me about the garden dedication. “This is the real L.A.,” he said.

The garden had originally been built by Japanese American students in the 1930s.

At that time, the Roosevelt student body was a mixture of Japanese Americans, Jews, Latinos, a few blacks and members of other ethnic groups in Boyle Heights. Boyle Heights was L.A.’s melting pot and every group contributed to its rich mixture of sports, culture and Depression-era left wing politics.

But in 1942, just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorities sent Japanese Americans, including 450 Roosevelt students, to distant prison camps. Not even the Boyle Heights melting pot was immune from anti-Japanese hysteria. Vandals destroyed the Japanese garden.

The story was unknown to Roosevelt’s present generation until some of them began researching the school’s history.

They learned the story in a history project directed by Roosevelt faculty member Will James, who teaches Japanese language classes. About 150 Roosevelt students, all of them Latino, take Japanese classes at the high school. “I get them all, from gang members to Harvard-bound students,” James told me. “They speak it well because the pronunciation is close to Spanish. And it makes them unique in school. Teenagers feel a need for uniqueness.”

Students examined old yearbooks. They visited the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. They interviewed Japanese American alumni, compiling an oral history of Roosevelt.

“As we got into it more and more, we learned they had been taken out and put in prison camps,” said Katie Barrera, 17.

The story sounded familiar. They had heard it at home, from old relatives and family friends who had been hustled out of California during the Depression and sent back to Mexico.

The young Latinos felt a bond with the Japanese Americans who preceded them. “When I found out,” said Gloria Antunez, 17, “I was proud they were there before us.”

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Interest spread. A student public service group, sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, came up with the idea of rebuilding the old Japanese garden.

Landscape architect Yosh Kuromiya volunteered to do the design, working from photographs of the destroyed garden. Ko Endo supervised the work, with his employees doing the heavy construction. Other landscape contractors and architects also helped. Students did the planting. Teacher Jeff Avila supervised the project.

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On dedication day, some of the old alums returned to the campus.

They watched while the Rev. Alfred Tsuyuki scattered white petals and clapped his hands sharply in an ancient ceremony. Then he called some of the alumni to join him at the altar.

Two of them wore their veterans’ organization caps and they strode to the altar as briskly as they did when they went off to war with the American Army, leaving their families in prison camps, more than half a century ago.

Then everyone posed for group pictures--the Latino high school students, the Japanese American, Latino and Anglo alums, the contractors and architects, the teachers, all of them proud of what they had accomplished.

It was a great story.