Evergreen Cemetery in East LA

The cemetery that I visited for Dia de los Muertos was an especially interesting cemetery. Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1877 and is one of LA’s oldest. Many LA scions and pioneers have prominent stones here, names you would recognize from streets and towns like Van Nuys, Lankershim, Bixby, and Hollenbeck. Joseph W. Robinson (department store founder) is here, as is George Ralphs (grocery store founder). But this cemetery represents LA in all its facets. It is notable for never having banned African-Americans from being buried here, unlike many other cemeteries of its time. I visited the grave of Biddy Mason, a remarkable woman I’ve written about before who began life as a slave and ended it as a wealthy philanthropist who co-founded the First AME Church in LA. And I visited James Banning, an aviation pioneer who was the first black pilot to fly coast-to-coast. Many Japanese are interred here, including the Garden of the Pines, a section for the Issei (first-generation immigrants), and an impressive monument to the Japanese heroes of the 442nd Regiment in World War II. Many Armenians are here, and from the dates on their stones, I could see that many were from their first generation of immigrants fleeing the WWI-era genocide in their homeland. Many generations of Mexican-American families are here. The only marginalized group were the Chinese-Americans, who were forced to use a corner of the “potter’s field”, a large area on the east end of the cemetery where indigent people were buried in mostly unmarked graves. They were allowed to build a small shrine in their corner of the potter’s field, which from 1888 is the oldest surviving structure of Chinese settlement in LA. In 2005, when the Metro Gold Line extension was being put through along 1st Street, the excavations uncovered skeletal remains of 174 people who forensic analysis determined were all Chinese. The remains were interred near the shrine, and a memorial was erected, with 174 stones containing messages in Chinese, English, and Spanish of remembrance and blessing. This whole sprawling cemetery is such a great capsule of our city’s demographic history. (See full album of photos.)