On Remembering and Cultural Struggle
A dispatch from L.A., with thoughts on the importance of personal risk
Greetings from downtown Los Angeles, homeland of the Tongva and originally the site of Yaanga, the largest Tongva village.
Most of this past week I stayed on the edge of Little Tokyo, just south of the LA Plaza. This part of town is a collection of layered erasures: marked as the founding site of the original pueblo that grew into Los Angeles, for a long time the multi-racial identities of those settlers were whitewashed, and their diversity was only brought back to the foreground in recent decades. For many years the park at the plaza was called Junipero Serra Park. It was just renamed Yaanga Park in 2023.
This back-and-forth over how to represent the history of one small portion of a giant city is a good reminder that the attempt to remove “DEI” from all public spaces by the current administration (by which it seems to mean not so much inclusion initiatives but any representation of accomplishment or existence by those who are not white men) is not new. The attempt to tell the multifaceted and many-peopled history of the places in what we now call the U.S. has always been something requiring struggle. Daily I meet people who seem astonished that we have to work at this. But here’s the reality: culture is work. It is a human creation, and one of the unasked-for tasks we are given when we are born into human life. We can create it with more or less intention. If we want the world of our highest ideals—democracy, peace, the beauty of wildly diverse communities—we must put our energy into it.
I’ve been here in Los Angeles this past week for the AWP conference, a major gathering for writers and publishers. It was my first, and I was beginning to feel dubious about attending, at a moment in which there is so much organizing work to be done. Now, on the other side of it, I’m glad to have shared space with thousands of writers and artists dedicated to culture creation, many of whom are committed to speaking loudly and freely in support of an equitable and inclusive society and currently grappling with the failure of the institutions in which they work to do the same.
My time here also coincides with holidays honoring organizers who understood the intersection of political and cultural work, and often did so at great personal risk.
March 28th was Minoru Yasui Day, at least in places like Oregon and Denver, CO where Yasui had a strong presence. If you are unfamiliar: Yasui, from Hood River, OR, was the first Japanese American admitted to the Oregon Bar Association in the late 1930s. He had difficulty finding employment given discrimination by law firms at the time, but he had no trouble putting his creative legal skills to work. As curfews and restrictions on the movement of Japanese Americans were put into place in the 1940s, Yasui went looking for someone willing to commit civil disobedience and violate these laws in order to bring a case to challenge them. When no one else did, he himself went out and forced his own arrest to press the matter.
The case he brought to then contest his own arrest was unsuccessful—the courts said that the government had the right to restrict the movement of its citizens during wartime. But his example was not, as many saw that there were avenues to resistance as a result of his action. Yasui’s conviction would be overturned years later, at a time when the redress movement of which he was a part was also bearing fruit.
And today, March 31st, is Cesar Chavez Day. Chavez’s legacy is complicated: he is of course famous for helping launch the United Farm Workers union, but also opposed its democratization. It’s become a common practice to name schools and streets in his honor; many a city I have lived in has not only its MLK Boulevard but its Cesar Chavez Avenue. Like MLK, though, these symbolic honors have often come hand-in-hand with a narrowing of their public image, one that ignores the fact that both were heavily tracked by the FBI for ostensible ‘communist’ ties. They were not seen as friends of the state, and they were not treated as such.
We might use such symbolic gestures, though, as prompts to honor the fullness of their legacy, which includes their knowledge that personal risk was necessary to build a civic culture that opposed economic and political oppression. Yasui, Chavez, MLK: all knew that the right response to a repressive regime was not obedience, or the curtailing of one’s efforts in fearful moves for personal safety. For when regimes see that their repression is successful, they see what else they can get away with, and obedience in fact brings greater loss down the line. Effective opposition, instead, comes from resisting early and often. The time to take risk is now, before the orders to send more people to internment camps, before the big businesses have so much power there is no ability to push back, before the right to vote is permanently stripped. It’s always now, not later.
That we can use these days marked to remember the diverse civic heroes of our past is itself a result of cultural struggle—many other nameless faces have worked to ensure that we continue to remember such figures, the movements of which they were a part, and stories of successful resistance. We are facing a political administration that strives to deprive us even of that memory, removing any public reminders of the achievements of such figures. And not just those they disagree with, but those whose very presence they wish to banish, to forget.
It is our job, as creators and writers, as organizers and community members, but most of all just as humans, as beings with culture, to push back against that forgetting. To resist by remembering, and speaking, early and often.
Thanks for being here, for reading Unsettling, and for being part of a community dedicated to such remembering.
Until next time,
Meg
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