Today’s newsletter is presented by Advanced Exteriors.
Good morning, San Diego ☀️
Here’s what we have for you today:
- A first-time starter lifted San Diego FC to a big win in the club’s first home match since the Men’s World Cup.
- Keep staying cool if you can — a heat effect remains in effect around San Diego through Monday night.
- Meanwhile, gas prices around the county have increased for 12 straight days.
Brooke Binkowski
News editor
Top story
Luis Valdez’s play ‘Valley of the Heart’ takes on new life as immersive, educational multimedia
The past is never truly past – that was the lesson inherent in today’s feature story, which I spent a long time researching. The past is also revolutionary, and always offers clues about how to deal with the present and with an uncertain future.
For these reasons, and many more, I love researching history and I loved writing our featured story today. I was lucky enough to be able to speak to vaunted playwright Luis Valdez and discuss his play “Valley of the Heart” with him, which has been made into an educational curriculum to teach students about Japanese-American internment during World War II. The story, which is set in the Central Valley, tells a love story between a Japanese-American woman and a Mexican-American man, and what happened and why.
I wanted to write about this story because first of all, it’s by Luis Valdez and involves the group he founded, the great Teatro Campesino. I also wanted to spotlight San Diego’s role in the shameful history of this country’s treatment of Japanese-Americans.
It is true that San Diego was part of it, and in fact even passed a resolution describing Japanese people as “enemy aliens.”
But San Diego, in its own way, has always forged its own path. A San Diego librarian named Clara Breed refused to allow the city, or for that matter, the country to tell her who was and wasn’t the enemy. She corresponded with “enemy alien” children who were sent to the camps and saved every single one of their letters.
She wrote articles and letters for newspapers and elected officials defending the children and demanding their release, and refused to allow the public to forget what its government had done.
If it was not for people like Breed and Valdez, histories such as these would be far easier to forget. It’s a shining testament to the importance of storytellers and information; no society can function without its librarians and playwrights and poets.
They tell our stories so that we will never forget the things that we should remember.
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Stories you should know about
🩺 UCSD School of Medicine accused of ‘racial discrimination’ by Trump administration: The department alleges that the university discriminated against white and Asian students in favor of “lower-credentialed” Black and Hispanic students.
💥SDCC announces 2027 dates, plans to increase programming at Comic-Con Museum: The museum will launch Con-style panel programming that will take submissions from fans, said Senior Director of Programming Eddie Ibrahim.
🎒 California school boards grant themselves hefty pay raises following new law: Trustees in the Beverly Hills, Oceanside, Orange, Carlsbad, Escondido and Antioch school districts increased their pay by 400%.
💰An ‘exponentially different level’ of billionaire spending in California: California’s mega-wealthy are using their resources to pave the way for them to expand their futures in the cryptocurrency and AI industries with as little regulation or pushback as possible.
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Step back to time…
Can you guess what neighborhood this photo was taken in? Reply first to get a shoutout in tomorrow’s newsletter!
