What's at stake?
As part of an initiative by Central Valley Community Foundation and Fresno DRIVE, advocates from multiple communities joined Fresnoland reporter Julianna Morano to discuss how highway construction in Fresno forced out multiple communities, transforming both the city and the people.
Community members lined rows of seats during Thursday’s ArtHop to hear from the communities displaced by the construction of Fresno’s highways in an event co-hosted by Fresnoland.
Facing Fresno is an initiative by the Central Valley Community Foundation and Fresno DRIVE to engage with the community to explore racism and its history within Fresno. Julianna Morano, who serves as Fresnoland’s labor and economy reporter, hosted Thursday evening’s event and was joined by panelists Gwendalynn Morris, Van Der Mugrdechian and Kathy Omachi.
On the walls of the venue, monitors showed the transitions created by urban planner Dan Zack of neighborhoods and landmarks that stood before the highways and displacement wrought upon multiple different communities.
Morris, who represents the San Joaquin Valley Black Communications Network and was born in Fresno in 1951, remembers the landmarks from before the concrete roadways were erected.
“They got rid of the housing and the businesses long before they put the freeways in,” Morris said, adding “so, the blight happened before the freeways came, and then, the destruction of the communities.”
Der Mugrdechian, who is part of the Armenian Cultural Conservancy and was also born in ’51, explained his own father’s strong opposition to the highways and experience trying to find a jobduring Van’s childhood.
“It took him five years from 1950 to 1955 to get hired on because he was Armenian and those are the kind of times that we grew up in and were aware of,” Der Mugrdechian said during the event.
Regardless of the hardships experienced by the multiple communities, Omachi, a representative of Fresno Chinatown Preservation, Inc., said that the bonds between the people then are what kept those communities going.
“The Armenian community was significant in assisting the Japanese American community when they were forced to relocate,” Omachi said, adding “but when they came back home, the same with the African American community, you could not have asked for better friends and better protection.”
