We have been asking people about their own remembrances, and what they've heard from family and neighbors......the stories are coming out faster than we can write them down. "You should go ask.....they have lots of stuff!!" is what we are always hearing.
We'll try to get good at writing down stories just the way people tell us. Hear are a few:
"I went to talk to an old lady named Mariana and she told me something about the history of Guadalupe. She knows that in Guadalupe some Japanese people had to go live in encampments and they had to sell or leave their properties to other people. She said that she likes to live here and she would not like to move to another place because when she was 12 years old she came from Mexico to live in Guadalupe."
Kid's Peace Murals(about 60k)
"I went to the Masatanis and they told me that their house used to be a school, and that the first catholic church that was hear was knocked down in 1952. It was built in around 1875. The Masatanis have had a store in town for many years. It used to have hotel rooms in it. Many of the Japanese had their own farms and businesses when they came here."
"Louise Tonascia said that one of her Mom's neighbors was Japanese, and when they were sent to the camps, her Mom took care of her jewelry store so that when the war was over, it was waiting there for them. Not all families were that lucky."
"I talked to Mrs.Lopez the computer lab teacher. She has lived all her life in Guadalupe. She said that in September for the Mexican's day the storeowners would decorate the windows of the stores with colors red, white and green and they would close the school because the kids wouldn't go to school, and that this lady would teach some girls to dance Mexican dances and then they would dance in the parade.
The most beautiful house in Guadalupe was the white house almost in front of the Chevron gasoline.It had a fish pool and a nice garden. Mrs Lopez used to live next to where the LeyRoy park is. She used to go to the nice house and she would go to play there cause they had a big backyard."
"Mrs. Meraz said that the streets in much of the town are named after people and families that lived here (the new houses are on streets that have beach and sand dune type names). If you look in the cemetary, you find the same names there."
"In 6th grade we did an archaeology trip to the cementary to see what stories the stones would tell us. Lots of different types of names, people from different countries, show up at different times, almost like different waves. But alot of these families still have relatives in Guadalupe."