my AAS100 essay sounds like a theatrical trailer: (unfinished)

The San Fernando Valley, my how it has changed. Imagine a time when there was no Northridge, no Jack-in-the-box, no CSUN, just farmland as far as the eye could see. A land where the wind blew carefree and the people took after it. This was the time back before World War II. This was that the time the Japanese Americans enjoyed and worked on the land.

Back when Northridge was North Los Angeles, much of that land was tilled by the people from “The Land of the Rising Sun”. They once owned the land and put their heart and soul into their crops. The land they lived in was mostly a flat, fertile basin that we call the San Fernando Valley today. Not much civilization, it was just the early times of the Valley. They thought to themselves, who would want to live here? They came to America for opportunity and a chance, but what they got was discrimination and a hair’s width of dignity from the jobs they would have to take.

Forced into lower-class jobs by the predominantly white middle class, the Japanese would not be beaten so easily. They started farms, hotels, outposts, general stores, and fisheries. They grew tomatoes and asparagus and lettuce and corn. They raised their families and educated their children. If America didn’t accept them, it would have to assimilate them.

Laws came and laws went, mostly hindering all their efforts. They couldn’t own land if they weren’t citizens, and if they were citizens on paper, in the eyes of America they still were “Japs”. The culmination of this racism was their internment into the camps in 1942.