By Regina Luz Jordan, Founder & Editor In Chief
Hollywoodland News
At the opening of Cruising J-Town, JANM board member William T. Fujioka’s voice rang out over a packed crowd at the ArtCenter College of Design: “This is so we don’t repeat 1942.”
And just like that, I was cracked wide open and I haven’t really recovered.
Because here’s the thing, we already are.
As a Mexican, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ woman living in Los Angeles, everywhere I turn, I feel the sharp sting of what’s happening outside of the safe spaces I’m privileged to be in as a white-passing Latina. And you know what I’m talking about: ICE raids, family separations, individuals just disappearing and the fear that’s so thick it silences entire communities.
This is what cultural erasure in America looks like. It doesn’t start with violence. It starts with silence. It starts when we decide whose stories are worth remembering and whose are easier to forget.
What Cultural Erasure in America Actually Looks Like
Cultural erasure doesn’t always look like violence. It looks like timing. It looks like the same country that once locked your family in a camp turning around to name a street after you, once it’s safe, once you’re dead and especially when the photo op feels noble instead of guilty.
That’s the formula. America strips a community of rights, dignity and visibility. Then once enough time passes, it brings out the folklórico dancers, cherry blossoms, dumpling workshops and the soul food festivals. It pretends it’s always been proud of what it tried to crush.
That’s what happened to Japanese Americans. After the executive orders and surveillance, came the internment. They built on that with silence but followed it up with memorials and museums and, then, we called it progress.
The thing is that cultural erasure in America doesn’t just live in the past tense. It keeps evolving in new ways.
Cultural Erasure looks like President Biden naming Indigenous Peoples’ Month in October while tribal lands still face environmental destruction, water theft and underfunded healthcare.
Then it looks like Donald Trump reversing that recognition and reinstating Columbus Day because white supremacy always needs a holiday.
It looks like Juneteenth being made into a federal holiday while Black Americans are still five times more likely to be incarcerated than white people, according to The Sentencing Project. We throw barbecues while ignoring prison bars. We hand out “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” t-shirts while refusing to fund their kids’ schools.
Erasure continues because we celebrate without making actual change. We’ll make acknowledgement without accountability. Making something visible without protection is a kind of erasure. We celebrate culture while criminalizing the people who carry it. We throw parades while we issue deportation orders. We want the flavors, the fashion, the rhythm, the “representation” but not the actual people.
America wants the mariachi, but not the migrant.
It wants sushi on every corner, but not a neighbor who speaks Japanese.
It wants a Juneteenth mural, but not a bail fund.
It wants land acknowledgments, but not land back.
That’s what makes this erasure so insidious. It smiles at you and pretends everything is just fine because it hasn’t painted the entire picture.
The Immigrant Narrative:
Who Builds It, Who Breaks It
Immigrants have always built this country.
This is a buzzword style phrase that every politician loves to use but what does it even mean beyond the Chinese building the railroads?
It means that immigrants are Americans who raised families, opened businesses, launched art movements and shaped American culture block by block.
In America, the immigrant story rarely belongs to the immigrant because politicians rewrite it. Institutions and books sanitize it. Museums cherry-pick the most palatable pieces and artifcats. Meanwhile, the truth, the pain, the contradictions and the systemic abuse gets buried under slogans like “hardworking” and “grateful.”
At the Cruising J-Town Exhibit, there was a sign on the wall that told the story of Fred Jiro Fujioka who believed in the American dream.
He came from Hiroshoma to California at the turn of the 20th century, raised a family and built a thriving business. He helped launch the Japanese Auto Club and sold cars to his community. His life stood as proof that immigrants could find success here.
Then America punished him for it.
After Pearl Harbor, the FBI literally arrested him for no reason They froze his assets and labeled him a threat. They separated him from his family and sent him to a Japanese concentration camp. When he finally reunited with his wife and children at Heart Mountain, he wasn’t the same. His story was still American, but now it was inconvenient. He would have died in Hiroshima because of America but instead, that country took everything he had built because of America.
This is the immigrant narrative as told by power. It builds you up when it needs you. It breaks you down when you threaten its illusion.
Right now, the same thing is happening to other communities. Latinx families live under constant surveillance. Undocumented workers keep entire industries running while politicians debate whether they deserve to be here. Queer migrants seek asylum and get locked in detention centers. Asian Americans still get asked where they’re “really from,” even when their families have been here for generations.
America lifts up non-white stories only when they fit the myth. If you’re a war hero, a business owner, or a Nobel winner, they’ll name a street after you. If you’re undocumented, disabled, queer or just trying to survive, they’ll find a way to write you out.
This is not about broken systems. This is about systems working exactly as designed.
The American narrative demands heroes, but it can’t handle truthtellers. It loves immigrants who keep quiet. The rest get labeled as difficult or dangerous. When I was invited to a Latinas in Media event last month, I was so excited to go as a new, tiny and independent media organization and I got dressed up cute, ready to network. I told someone I was going and they asked me if I really wanted to go to a Latinas in Media event in Los Angeles because that felt like double indemnity to get locked up in America right now and I chose to stay home.
Who Tells the Story Controls the Legacy
Cultural erasure doesn’t always rely on violence. More often, it works through control. When institutions hold the microphone, they decide which stories get told, how they’re shaped and who gets left out. That control becomes its own kind of silence. Immediately I start thinking of the line in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: “Who Lives, who dies who tells your story.” I really need us all to take a moment and reflect on what that really means.
That line isn’t just poetic. It’s a warning. In this country, storytelling has always been political. Power decides what becomes history and what disappears. It decides whose trauma gets studied, whose culture gets celebrated and whose community still gets treated like a threat.
At this very moment in Los Angeles, Japanese American culture is finally getting long-overdue visibility. The art exhibits, film retrospectives and street festivals reflect decades of survival and creativity. These events matter. They represent progress in a city that once locked up this community.
This summer in Los Angeles, there’s at least five exhibits that come to mind celebrating Japanese culture. You can visit Cruising J-Town at the Japanese American National Museum. You can attend Nisei Week in Little Tokyo.. You can see Takako Yamaguchi’s solo show at MOCA, watch Studio Ghibli under the stars at The Ford, or take in a full Kurosawa retrospective thanks to American Cinematheque. You can stand in spaces built by survivors and witness the cultural beauty that endured despite government persecution.
But if this is what remembering looks like, then why are we still repeating the same harm?
As Japanese American stories fill our galleries and public spaces, Latinx families across the same city face the threat of ICE raids, detention and deportation. ICE is literally raiding elementary schools. Entire neighborhoods carry the weight of fear in silence. While one community gets parades and preservation, another is still being disappeared, quietly and efficiently. Nobody wins.
Someone is going to call this “whataboutism” but suffering through the American experience isn’t a competition. This is a defined and obvious pattern of selective memory and every non-white American knows it.
We say “never again” about 1942 but what does that mean if we let it happen again, just with new names and a new legal framework?
Ask why you don’t know that Los Angeles’ Griffith Park was named after a man who was convicted of shooting his wife in the face?
Cultural erasure in America doesn’t just live in the past. It adapts, evolves and rebrands, like Michigan cutting vaccination protections and then clutching its pearls when measles starts tearing through Osceola County. Even something as ridiculous as Hollywood tabloids becoming fact over time or creating conspiracy theories, branding an African American actress as a tan tootsie.
When institutions control the narrative, they often soften it. They celebrate the resilience without naming the harm. They package the trauma without questioning the system that caused it. They remove the urgency. They make injustice feel historical, even when it’s still happening.
That’s the danger. When history becomes a curated experience, it stops being a warning and no one is learning anything from it. Instead, we’re okay with Alligator Alcatraz because it’s not hurting any white people.
The Truth Lives Outside the Archive
If we want to understand how cultural erasure works in America, we can’t just look at what’s being preserved. We have to look at who’s doing the preserving. Most of the time, it’s not the institutions. It’s the families, the friend and the neighbors who witnessed it happen.
My Uncle Arthur Eppley remembered exactly where he was when Japanese American families started disappearing.
As a Mexican and Pachuco growing up in Los Angeles, he went to a Japanese run Catholic church with his family every Sunday. He shared how Chinese students at his school started wearing pins that said “I’m Chinese” so they wouldn’t be mistaken for Japanese and targeted too. That’s how fast the fear spread as the government literally erased these people and the community was expected to move on.
This is what cultural erasure looks like in real time. It’s the quiet horror of watching your classmates vanish and knowing you’re not allowed to ask why.
That’s why community-based storytelling matters and why organizations like the Japanese American National Museum need to continue with exhibits like Cruising J-Town. The truth doesn’t sit behind plexiglass or wait for a funding cycle. It lives in memories like my uncle’s and travels through oral histories, passed down across kitchen tables and family reunions. It survives in the words of people who were never given the mic.
At Cruising J-Town, that truth showed up in the details: in the pride behind a polished lowrider, in the archival photos of Nikkei car clubs, in the story of Fred Jiro Fujioka or in the pictures of Japanese women dressed in the fashions of the 1930’s and looking just like everyone else. It wasn’t just about showcasing Japanese American history but about showing what never should have been erased in the first place.
When institutions step in, they often offer a polished version. A safe version. They celebrate resilience but sidestep responsibility. They offer curated trauma, but not full truth. And in doing so, they repeat the very pattern they claim to challenge.
But when communities tell their own stories, when families like mine pass down what they saw, that’s when history becomes undeniable. That’s when it stops being decoration and starts being reckoning.
Cultural erasure in America thrives on silence. The only thing that disrupts it is truth-telling, especially from the people who were never meant to be heard.
What We Choose to Remember Says Everything
America doesn’t erase people all at once. It does it slowly while it thinks no one is looking. It builds exhibits and archives, but leaves the living story out. Silence becomes part of the machinery when we don’t speak up.
The truth is, the immigrant experience will never fit inside a single frame. It’s not something to be “honored” once it’s been stripped of its urgency. It’s ongoing, messy and often dangerous, now, more than ever.
If we want to stop repeating 1942, we have to stop pretending it ended. We have to recognize how quickly history becomes policy, how policy becomes silence and how silence becomes harm.
Celebration without protection is not justice. Representation without accountability is not progress.
The stories we tell, not the stories or the exhibits, but the ones we still refuse to tell, will decide what kind of country we actually are.
We need the truth. So when organizations and individuals tell you, it’s your job to listen, to remember and to share.
Read more. Speak louder.
Stand with those still being erased.
If this story made you pause, don’t let that feeling fade.
Start by asking yourself whose history gets told in your community—and whose doesn’t. Support the people and organizations doing the work of preserving real stories, especially when they challenge the version of America we’re used to hearing.
You don’t need permission to pass down truth.
You just need the courage to share it.
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