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PW: In November 1994, anti-immigrant legislation was on the ballot. Tell me a little bit about how Buena Vista organized pushback against, specifically Proposition 187.

MY: Yeah. We had heard that, and because we were doing organizing both with the CARE group, and also with OAA, and because we were connected to other groups through our church network and other organizing networks, people were asking us to bring it to the city council and asked them to oppose it, actually take a position to oppose it. And so this effort was really led by Juan Saavedra, who was a pastor at the Court Street Methodist Church, and himself an immigrant. And we organized kind of a vigil at the church and then a march over to city council in which our ask of the council was to take a public position against Prop 187 for all the reasons why it needed to be done. And it was a very, very raucous night, and Juan had the plug pulled on him when he was speaking at one point, which was very, very strange. But the long and short of it is that one of our members, George Chin, also spoke. And to me, it was really nice for me to hear him talk about his experience of coming to this country, and his paper status as a Chinese American. And he spoke so eloquently about what it meant for him to come to this country, and if circumstances has been different, he might have not been allowed in because he was technically illegal, according to what the standards would have been at the time we were dealing with this issue. But the council did vote to vote "no" on it. And I can't remember if it was a five to nothing vote or if it was four to one, but it was a major victory, I think, for us, even though the statewide ballot prevailed. But I think it set some stages for the intersection of different issues, that here we were as an Asian congregation kind of taking the lead on this and bringing other folks together in coalition, and beginning to work more in coalition with other groups as well around different issues.

PW: I also find it significant because Japanese Americans very broadly did not have a lot of successive generations of immigrants that come to the country, so kind of tend to consider that we immigrated a long time ago, so there's not always an apparent support system for ongoing immigration to the United States and their feelings about that.

MY: Yeah. And our immigration history gets lost, it kind of gets put way on the back burners of our heritage, right? People forget about it.

PW: Was that ever something that got discussed in the church around that? Because again, it's...

MY: I think one thing in the congregation that people were always very sensitive to the immigrant experience. I don't think this particular congregation ever lost that. And even though during my time all the Isseis passed away, I can't remember when the last one passed, but there was a sense of honoring their experience. So because they were still present in the congregation, they were emblematic of the immigration experience because they lived it, it was their own experience.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.