Hidden Hues of History

His brown hands wrinkled but steady, Leo Castro rifled through an envelope of memories. There, near the snapshot of his segregated Anaheim school, he found what he sought.

Dusty with silt from the flood of 1938 was his parents’ marriage certificate. Less than a decade after fleeing the Mexican Revolution, on Sept. 22, 1922, Pedro Castro wed Victoria Marquez.

The document marks the beginning of the 71-year-old welder’s personal history. But because his family was common, poor and of an ethnic minority, stories like his haven’t made it into the annals of Anaheim history.

Until now, that is.

Using a $10,000 state grant, the Anaheim Public Library on Sunday gathered city residents of Mexican, Japanese, Chinese and Native American descent to add their personal histories to the city’s.

The Shades of Anaheim project is an extension of a state effort to document the daily lives and cultural contributions of California’s diverse communities.

Jane Newell, the Anaheim library’s local history curator, sought the grant from the California State Library after surveying her 17,000-image photographic collection. Just 1% of the images featured ethnic minorities.

“The images don’t reflect the whole community,” she said. “It’s really just the European settlers.”

The desire to widen that representation drew more than a dozen families, like the Castros, lugging photos and keepsakes to the museum Sunday.

Across the room from the Castros, Frank and Mary Hirahara were dressed formally for the event. Frank wore a navy suit, and his wife chose an ivory dress and pearl-drop earrings. The couple spread out scrapbook after scrapbook. They fingered certificates of commendation for their volunteer work with the YMCA and the Optimists Club and displayed photographs from Frank’s career as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry.

As the Hiraharas and their grown daughter Patti detailed their forebears’ voyages from Japan, volunteers took copious notes. Wearing cotton gloves to protect the delicate artifacts, volunteers selected for immediate reproduction a black-and-white snapshot of a young and seriously beautiful Mary.

The Hiraharas told the volunteers of their backgrounds--to a point. Asked about his internment in Wyoming and the discrimination they faced when house hunting, Frank, 73, looked down and shook his head.

Later, Mary explained that her family believes in showing only your best face in public. “I think maybe our photographs show all the things that people of Japanese descent gave to Anaheim years and years and years ago,” she said hesitantly. “Is that a proper thing to say?”

For Sunday’s one-time-only gathering, curator Newell focused on the first four ethnic groups that arrived in Anaheim, helping usher it from a sleepy grape-growing colony to a thriving city with a professional baseball team and Disneyland. She would like to seek corporate sponsorship to help reach Vietnamese, Korean, Jewish and other communities.

Between 300 and 500 selections culled from the photographs gathered Sunday will be displayed before the end of September at the Anaheim Public Library and the museum. They will tell stories like the Castros’, who lived through wars, a flood, earthquakes and discrimination.

“We are very proud Americans--Americans of Mexican descent,” Castro said, sitting with his wife Helen at a folding table in the Anaheim Museum. “Not Hispanics, not Latinos. But Americans--living the American dream.”