Commentary: How Boyle Heights, on L.A.’s Eastside, became a model for grass-roots American democracy (via latimesopinion)
Fourteen-year-old Mollie Wilson was furious that her four best friends were being taken away from her just before they were scheduled to start high school together in 1942. The precocious African American teenager had just heard that the U.S. government had decided to send her Japanese American classmates, along with their families, to incarceration camps in the interior of the country and away from their Boyle Heights neighborhood.
Mollie lived on Boulder Street, on a block with families from 10 different ethnic backgrounds, all living harmoniously together.“My mother learned to cook from Jewish people because she had not been taught by her own mother,” Mollie later remembered. “It often amazed me how my mother could communicate with Mrs. Koris or Mrs. Akashi, because neither of them could speak English and my mother couldn’t speak Greek nor Japanese.
Yet this widespread targeting of the Boyle Heights population was met with stoic resistance and impassioned counter-organizing. Jewish immigrants — who made up about 40% of Boyle Heights in the 1920s and 1930s — brought with them an East Coast labor-organizing tradition and a radicalism from Eastern Europe that led Los Angeles-based trade unions to set up shop in Boyle Heights, where they organized Mexicans and Italians as well as Jews.
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