This Day in History - May 20, 1942: “S.F. Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs”

Clem Albers (Photographer), Evidence of the Forthcoming Evacuation of Residents of Japanese Ancestry, San Francisco, March 29, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library 

From May 1942 to January 1945, in the name of national security, nearly 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry occupied ten permanent camps in isolated inland areas for the duration of World War II. Their forced evacuations and relocations following the bombing of Pearl Harbor were not secret: there was much controversy over the government’s action, and a number of photographers officially documented the event.

Nevertheless, it was not until the 1970s that individuals and institutions—within and outside Japanese American communities, where they were a source of shame—began to open a wider window into this egregious chapter of American history.

On this day seventy-five years ago, as the San Francisco Chronicle recorded, “for the first time in 81 years, not a single Japanese is walking the streets of San Francisco.” Today, we remember the incarceration of Japanese Americans through the work of one press photographer whose “professional eye,” scholar Arielle Emmett notes, “captured contradicting realities between the government and public perceptions of the Japanese and the people themselves.”

Clem Albers (1903–1990)

 

Courtesy http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html

Under contract by the War Relocation Authority’s Information Division, San Francisco Chronicle press photographer Clem Albers photographed the incarceration of Japanese Americans, primarily in northern to southern California. From March to late April/early May 1942, with his 4-by-5-inch Speed Graphic press camera, he documented relocations to and arrivals at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Poston camps. After his brief assignment, he was a warrant officer at the U.S. Maritime Service, returning to his job with the San Francisco Chronicle after the war.

Clem Albers, Impounded Japanese American automobiles,

Manzanar Relocation Center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, A truck packed with Japanese American residents of San Pedro, California, leaves for a temporary detention center, April 5, 1942

Courtesy extranewsfeed.com

Clem Albers, While military police stand guard, this detachment watches arrival of evacuees at Manzanar War Relocation Authority center, April 2, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library

One of Albers’ photographs contrasts a young girl wearing simple clothes and a kerchief around her head with a sign that calls her barracks “Manzanar Mansion.” As Arielle Emmett writes in a study of internee portraiture, he “depicted the emotional extremes of evacuees in a full range of facial expressions, including frowns, grimaces, and even the ‘beguiling’ smile that he may have encouraged in his quick, ‘get it done’ newspaper style.”

Clem Albers, “Manzanar, Calif.—In the doorway of her barrack apartment at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry,” 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

As we now know, the U.S. government impounded not only cars of Japanese families, but also
photographs taken of the incarcerations, such as the military’s oversight of camps and residents. As the New York Times has observed, “Photographs of barbed wire, machine gun-wielding guards or dissent within the camps were forbidden . . . photographs of resiliency and civic engagement in the camps were encouraged.” And as Karen J. Leong notes, “particularly those depicting the reality of armed guards supervising the evacuees” were censored.

Such images by Albers and other internment photographers, notably Dorothea Lange, were reviewed by military commanders and branded “Impounded.” Housed at the National Archives, where they were rediscovered only in the last decade, they have lost their restricted status.

Clem Albers, Military police officers checking their weapons at

Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, Dressed in uniform marking service in the First World War, 
this veteran enters Santa Anita assembly center for persons of Japanese ancestry 
evacuated from the West Coast, 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Today, internment photography continues to have wide-ranging impact: from connections made between the internment and the current administration’s call for Muslim bans and registries, to studies about prison photography, to representations by contemporary artists of minority populations and their roles in the histories of communities, cities, and nations.

One example is Albers’ haunting and perhaps most iconic image depicting the mass relocations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. His 1942 photograph of two-year-old Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa awaiting evacuation at Union Station in Los Angeles found relevance nearly forty years later in L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a mural by Chicana artist Barbara Carrasco.

Clem Albers, A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before

leaving by bus for an assembly center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives

Ironically, Carrasco’s mural, featuring scenes of the marginalization of Los Angeles’s minorities among more celebratory historic events, itself was censored. Objections to less laudable depictions of the city’s history were, perhaps, unwelcomed during Los Angeles’s bicentennial (1981) and Summer Olympic (1984) festivities.

Detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, 1981 (Censored 1981)

California Historical Society/LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes; photograph by Sean Meredith

Even how we speak about the internment era is undergoing change. Organizations such as Densho suggests internment terminology conforming to the Resolution on Terminology put forth by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which has recognized the limitations of the wartime-era terminologies in today’s world. For example, “relocation” is suggested as “imprisonment, incarceration, internment, detention, confinement.” “Relocation camps” are better described as “internment camps, detention camps, prison camps, or concentration camps.”

At a press conference on October 20, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called relocation centers “concentration camps,” despite the War Relocation Authority’s denial of the term’s accuracy. Seventy-five years later, we have come full circle.

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Sources

Tim Chambers, “Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of FDR’s Concentration Camps,” https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

Chronology of WWII Incarceration; http://www.janm.org/projects/clasc/chronology.htm

Arielle Emmett, “Silent Soliloquy: An Unknown Photographer Chronicles the ‘Inscrutable Laughter’ of Japanese American Internment,” Visual Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2, 2013; http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hvcq20/20/2

James Estrin, “A Lesson from the 1940s: ‘America Is Capable of Being Un-American,’”

Feb. 23, 2017; https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/a-lesson-from-the-1940s-america-is-capable-of-being-un-american/?_r=0

Karen J. Leong, “Envisioning a Usable Past,” in Todd Stewart, Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

Resolution on Terminology, “Civil Liberties Public Education Fund; http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html

“S.F. Clear of All but 6 Sick Japs,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 1942

Patricia Wakida, “Clem Albers,” Densho Encyclopedia; http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Clem%20Albers/

WWII Japanese American Internment and Relocation Records in the National Archives: Introduction; https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/internment-intro

Read more about Japanese internment on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/it-cant-happen-here-executive-order.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/this-day-in-history-precedent-for.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-this-day-february-19-1942.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/day-of-remembrance-2017-75th.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-quiet-civil-rights-hero-mitsuye-endos_27.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/day-of-remembrance.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/this-day-in-history-california.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/12/day-of-infamy-75-years-later.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/04/ms-mondayppie-part-2-anti-japanese.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/05/uncovering-history-through-art-and.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/08/this-day-in-history-august-10-us-rights.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/11/70-years-ago-today-world-war-ii.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/12/this-day-in-history-bombing-of-pearl.html

Barbara Carrasco’s mural is part of CHS’s forthcoming exhibition and publication ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Art under Siege. Read more on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/murals-creating-legacy.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/honoring-cesar-chavez-march-31-201.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/new-grant-for-murales-rebeldes-la.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/10/murales-rebeldes-contested-chicanao.html

Honoring César Chávez, March 31, 2017

Mural detail, Emigdio Vasquez, The Legacy of César Chávez (1997), Santa Ana College, California, http://chicanoartmovement.com 

César Chávez died with an art book in his hands.

This final image of the great visionary is appropriate and poetic — because he and his struggle for justice were intimately intertwined with creative expression by Chicano visual and performing artists.

—Max Benavidez, “Chávez Legacy: He Nurtured Seeds of Art,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1993

The life of civil rights activist and labor leader César Chávez is well documented and recognized every year on March 31. However, his legacy is also honored in art and murals throughout the region.

In recognition of César Chávez Day and of the many Chicana/o muralists who have preserved his legacy in their works, we offer a few examples from our forthcoming book, ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals under Siege, copublished with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in collaboration with Angel City Press (September 2017). The book tells the stories of eight Chicana/o murals that were censored, whitewashed, neglected, and even destroyed and examines the impact on the artists and the Chicana/o communities in which they were painted—and, more broadly, on Los Angeles’s cultural and historical heritage.

Emigdio Vasquez, Memories of the Past and Images of the Present (1978), 1995

Photo: Gloria Ortiz; courtesy Emigdio Vasquez family

In 1978, Emigdio Vasquez, winner of the prestigious Maestro Prize, painted Recuerdos del pasado y imagines del presente (Memories of the Past and Images of the Present) on the wall of the Iberio American Market in Anaheim. The mural traces Mexican history from Zapata to César Chávez (far right). At 13 x 106 feet, it is the largest of nearly two dozen murals the celebrated Chicano fine art painter and muralist created in the barrios of Orange County where he lived. This mural, which still exists, illustrates the foreword of the book by Orange County journalist Gustavo Arellano.

Mural detail, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, Fountain Valley Mural (1974–76)

Courtesy Private Collection of the O’Cadiz Family, © O’Cadiz Family Private Collection

The logo of the United Farm Workers, co-founded by activists César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, was represented on one of the approximately twenty-five scenes that made up Sergio O’Cadiz’s 6 x 625-foot mural in Fountain Valley’s Colonia Juarez. The mural, which told the history of Mexican Americans, was destroyed in 2001, when a bulldozer razed the wall on which it was painted and a higher wall was built in its place. The UFW logo was conceived by Chávez’s brother Richard in 1962, when Chávez and Huerta founded the UFW.

Mural detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Photo: Sean Meredith; LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes/CHS

Barbara Carrasco’s mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective was censored due to the artist’s inclusion of controversial aspects of the city’s history, particularly regarding its minority populations. In this section of the mural, César Chávez (far right, featuring the United Farm Workers logo on his shirt) is grouped with other city leaders and activists, including Mayor Tom Bradley, Jane Fonda, fellow muralist Yreina D. Cervantez, and Dolores Huerta, with whom he cofounded the UFW. 

Mural detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Photo: Sean Meredith; LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes/CHS

Carrasco first met Chávez (far right) as a 19-year-old university student. “I immediately volunteered my services to him,” she recalled in an oral history. “I would work with him for fifteen years,” creating drawings, flyers, and banners for UFW conferences.

Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org

Sources

• Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, eds., Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993)
• Max Benavidez, “Cesar Chavez Nurtured Seeds of Art” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1993; http://articles.latimes.com/1993-04-28/entertainment/ca-28278_1_chicano-art
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral history interview with Barbara Carrasco, conducted by Jeffery J. Rangel, Los Angeles, CA, April 13–26, 1999 (Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999)

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¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

For more information on ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege see: https://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions.html

For more information about Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, see: http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/

https://getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/pst_lala/index.html

This Day in History August 29: National Chicano Moratorium

Willie Herron and Gronk, Moratorium—The Black and White Mural, 1973

Courtesy of Nancy Tovar Murals of East Los Angeles Slide Collection

Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles

Forty-six years ago today, a rally to protest the Vietnam War turned deadly. Sponsored by the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, an antiwar activist group, the Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles drew up to 30,000 people eager to give their voice to the war’s injustices. Community members, families, artists, and students marched through East Los Angeles from Belvedere Park to what was then called Laguna Park.

During the rally, stores burned, over 100 people were arrested, many were injured, and four people were killed, including the prominent Chicano Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar.

The moratorium has been considered the largest anti-Vietnam War demonstration by a minority group and the largest demonstration of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. And while the moratorium resulted in loss of life, it also gave birth to continued expression of Latino political power, including a murals movement that still resonates today.

Below we look at images of the Chicano Moratorium and examples of Chicano murals that were created in its wake.

Sal Castro (Photographer), Chicano Moratorium March, 1970

Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection

Sal Castro (Photographer), National Chicano Moratorium, 1970

Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection

Rioting Following Chicano Moratorium Committee Antiwar Protest, 1970

Courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections,

Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

Guy Goodenow (Photographer), Harbor College Mural, 1973

Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

 David Botello’s Dreams of Flight at Estrada Courts, East Los Angeles, 1973–78

Courtesy of UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies http://publicartla.blogspot.com/2014/07/week-4-estrada-courts_6248.html

El Congresso de Artists Cosmicos de las Americas de San Diego’s We Are Not a Minority at Estrada Courts, East Los Angeles, 1978

Courtesy of Los Angeles Conservancy; photo by Adrian Scott Fine

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Initiatives Manager

skale@calhist.org

____________________________________________________________________________________

Together with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, the California Historical Society is developing an exhibition and related publication about contested Chicano Murals, part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA project sponsored by the Getty and Bank of America.

September 4, 2017 - January 29, 2018

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes
501 North Main Street
Los Angeles, California

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art

Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Today the J. Paul Getty Foundation announced that 43 museums and cultural institutions from Santa Barbara to San Diego will be creating exhibitions focused on Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. The program—Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA—will take place in the fall of next year, and we are very pleased to announce that we are participating in this collaboration of arts institutions in Southern California!

In partnership with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a cultural center focused on the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles and Southern California, CHS will present ¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art. The exhibition will look at the way in which Chicana/o murals in the greater Los Angeles area have been contested, challenged, censored, and even destroyed.

Murals became an essential form of artist response and public voice during el movimiento/the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly after the Chicano Moratorium’s formation in 1968 and the powerful march in East Los Angeles in 1970. .Murals were a means of expressing both pride and frustration at a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican-American community.

The exhibition will explore murals by Barbara Carrasco, Roberto Chavez, Sergio O’Cadiz, among others. Through photography of the murals, sketches, related art works, and ephemera, the exhibition will tell the story of the mural from its genesis to its end.

Mexican-American artists developed imagery to communicate their struggles, assert their rights as citizens, and as author and co-curator Guisela Latorre writes in Walls of Empowerment, “aid in the formation of a Chicana/o nationalist identity.” While asserting cultural identity via this evolving visual vocabulary, artists also used murals as public platforms to protest against the injustices of institutionalized racism, including police brutality, educational inequality, inferior working conditions, and persisting colonial legacies.

It is difficult to underestimate the personal, political, and artistic significance of the creation of murals in the vast Los Angeles region, as LA has proven fertile ground for thousands of murals. Chicana/o murals have often been sites of controversy. The ways in which their creators provoke the dominant cultural norm and challenge the assumed historic narrative have often resulted in the desecration, whitewashing, or destruction of these works of art. Outright neglect and mistreatment of murals, as well as dismissal of their artistic and historical value, also threaten the survival of these works.

In this exhibition in the historic heart of Los Angeles, LA Plaza and CHS will examine the iconography, content, and artistic strategies of key Los Angeles area Chicana/o murals that have made others uncomfortable to the point of provoking a contrary response, delving into the murals’ complicated creation and subsequent disturbing history of censorship.

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art will open on September 4, 2017  and will be on view through January 29, 2018 at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

Stay tuned for updates on this exciting project!

Jessica Hough
Director of Exhibitions
jhough@calhist.org