I was finishing up my last days in the New York City offices in early January before shipping out for our East Los Angeles Historias stop, when I received a phone call from Shifra Teitelbaum, director of a youth organization in South Los Angeles named “youTHink.” She was interested in getting her youth involved in Historias, our initiative to collect stories from Latinos. After a few hours, we had made a plan to record for a day at Southern California Library — a people’s library dedicated to documenting and preserving the histories of communities in struggle for justice.

Recently those plans became a reality. At the library, students from youTHink came with family members and friends to talk about their experiences living in Los Angeles. Iabeth Briones came with his brother, Eliseo Monclova, and talked about the time he spent living on the streets with his mother.

“I remember we lived in a car for a while and we were parked across [from] my favorite taco spot [called] ‘Chavelitas’, and we were there for one or two weeks. I was the smallest one and I slept in the back seat with all of that space and I think it was a way that [mom] was still trying to give me the best that she could by trying to keep me comfortable. I’ve always been with my mom, but I never really grew up with a father and I always looked at my mom as a pillar of strength. She kept us going and we kept each other going.”

Iabeth is currently a junior in high school and he’s also a poet. He has recently begun attending workshops with Street Poets Inc., an organization dedicated to the creative process as a force for individual and community transformation.

I want to give a special thanks to Shifra Teitelbaum for bringing this wonderful day of recording together, and to the Southern California Library for allowing us to record and for answering all of my questions about this very unique independent library!

Pilar Hernandez de la Rosa arrived at our East Los Angeles MobileBooth nervous about what to say. It’s a normal feeling for participants to have when we usher them into our slightly cramped—but charming—recording studio. Yet, it wasn’t long before Pilar began reminiscing about her native Tepec, Mexico telling her daughter, Loana del Pilar Valencia, about her mischievous childhood activities, her mother’s strict code of conduct, and growing up in a family of eight.

The conversation took a turn when Loana asked her mother about her love of music.

Pilar said, “Empezó cuando escuché a Elvis Presley por primera vez en Acapulco, MX.” [It all started when I first listened to Elvis Presley in Acapulco, MX.] “Mi mamá me decía, ‘¡Pilar, ni entiendes lo que está cantando por que no entiendes inglés!’ Y yo le decía que no me importaba. ¡Me gusta la música!” [My mom would tell me, 'Pilar, you don't even understand what he's singing because you don't understand English!' But I would tell her, 'I don't care. I love the music!']

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StoryCorps Historias launched its East Los Angeles, California stop with a vibrant outpouring of support from host radio station 89.3 KPCC and local supporters Farmers Insurance Group. With a picturesque backdrop of sun-drenched lawns and the glistening East L.A. Public Library pond, guest speakers took to the podium to talk about why Historias is an invaluable initiative for the Latino community in Los Angeles.

Guest speakers included KPCC reporter Patricia Nazario; Southern California Public Radio President and CEO Bill Davis; Center for the Study of Los Angeles Director Fernando J. Guerra, of Loyola Marymount University; UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Director Chon Noriega; East L.A. Public Library Chicano Resource Center Librarian Daniel Hernandez; our inaugural StoryCorps Historias participant in East L.A., Luz Herrera; and your blog post writer and StoryCorps facilitator Alejandro De La Cruz.

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Teofil Schintee and his friend, Jordan Sugar

The year was 1979. The place was Romania. Teofil Schintee made a decision to leave. He did not tell his parents. He did not tell his friends from the University. He did not tell a soul. Secretly he began to practice swimming. After work, on the weekends, any spare moment he had, Teofil would swim in the Danube near his childhood home in Caransebes. Late one evening, Teofil watched from the river bank as the Romanian border patrol boat chugged upstream and out of sight. He dove into the Danube. “As a child I would swim in the Danube and I would always look at the other side and I was curious to see what was on that other side.” More than three hours later Teofil crawled ashore to the former Yugoslavia. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, all of his savings in a plastic bag, and a Bible.

Jordan Sugar, a close friend of the Schintee family, brought Teofil into the WestBooth to record the story of his escape. After many months, and many close calls with the authorities in Yugoslavia, Teofil was able to come to the United States as a refugee. He credits his journey to the grace of God. During the months spent in refugee camps and in those cold moments paddling across the Danube in the dark he never stopped believing. He never lost faith.

Ron Yoshino and his daughter Brooke visited the StoryCorps Booth is East Los Angeles to talk about Ron’s upbringing on the Yamato Colony, a Japanese American Christian farming community in central California that was founded in 1904. On the land, they harvested grapes, peaches, and other fruits, until Japanese Americans across the country were forced into relocation during World War II. Unlike most Japanese Americans, who lost their land, businesses, and homes during the war years, the Yamato Colony was able to keep their title due to a loop hole in the Alien Land Law, and returned to farm the land after the war.

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Last week MobileWest pulled into sunny southern California and parked at the East Los Angeles Public Library. The trailer sits in an idyllic spot next to a pond where Angelenos fish, toddlers waddle after ducks, high school students turn up the radio, and one can always find a cart selling elote (corn-on-the-cob) or shaved ice.

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We kicked off our stay in East Los Angeles with two powerful stories. Miyo Ukita brought her mother, Nellie Mitani, into the booth to share her experiences in the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II.  Nellie was living with her husband in Fresno, California and remembers the moment she heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  “That was the saddest time in my life.” Nellie and her husband were ordered to evacuate Fresno and sent by the government to an internment camp in Arizona.  “Here we were, citizens of the country and we were treated like enemy aliens.”

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On Wednesday, StoryCorps facilitators Brianna and Yuki recorded at Keiro, an assisted living facility for the Japanese American community located outside Little Tokyo. Many of the residents are second generation Japanese Americans born in the Los Angeles area, who were relocated to desert internment camps during World War II. Robin Nakabayashi (pictured first in slideshow, with friend and Keiro Administrator, Beverly Ito) is a long-time volunteer at Keiro. He was ten when he and his family were sent to live in a camp built on the Colorado Indians’ reservation near Poston, Arizona. They lived in long barracks made of wood and tar, and grew small gardens in the desert ground in between the rows. When Robin returned to Poston for a reunion many years later, he was surprised to find that the desert landscape where the camps stood was quite lush. The Colorado Indians told him they had learned from the Japanese how to cultivate the dry soil and over the years had created a green landscape out of the once barren area.

Facilitators Brianna Hyneman and myself opened the West MobileBooth’s doors in MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of downtown L.A. Westlake is currently the most densely populated neighborhood in Los Angeles, with most of its community originating from Central America. In the 1980s and 90s, MacArthur Park was notorious for its high crime rate and gang activity. Now the park is a much safer place where people bring their children to play. Soccer fields (just outside our booth) attract hundreds of players and spectators on the weekends, and the police station that once stood watch in the park is no longer in use.