VanPort Mosaic Festival Fights Cultural Amnesia

Ten years ago, the VanPort Mosaic Festival launched as a grassroots oral history project to preserve and publicize the stories of a bustling city in North Portland that existed for only six years.

As the multi-day annual event grows, an increasing number of former residents and their descendants gather for what organizers refer to as “memory activism.”

Laura Lo Forti, co-founder and director of the VanPort Mosaic Festival. (courtesy VanPort Mosaic Festival)“Sometimes people look at oral histories and they say this is ‘about’ people – this isn’t ‘about’ people. We do this with people,” organizer LaVeta Gilmore Jones told The Skanner.

The last few days of the festival are particularly poignant, as May 30 is the 77th anniversary of the flood that quickly destroyed Vanport, killed 15 people and displaced thousands.

This year’s festival began on May 17 and runs through June 1. So far, events have included an annual reunion for Vanport residents, flood survivors and their descendents; a Malcom X Day walking tour; a celebration of Malcolm X's birthday; storytelling events; a Fair Housing Council of Oregon-hosted bus tour about Portland's history of discriminatory housing policies and a screening of short oral history documentaries from VanPort Mosaic's archives.

Events this Saturday include a Birdwatching & History Walking Tour hosted by Birdhers at a location within the former Vanport, and VanPort Day of Remembrance at Delta Park. On Sunday, the We Are Still Here event presents a curated chorale music performance and a variety of exhibits honoring the thousands of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during internment. The venue, the Portland Assembly Center, is the site where thousands of Japanese Americans were temporarily imprisoned before being transferred to larger internment camps.

“I like to call it collective memory-making,” Gilmore Jones said of the festival.

A City Disappeared

Former Oregon State Sen. Jackie Winters, pictured with her dog and other evacuees, at Jefferson High School after the VanPort flood on May 30, 1948. (courtesy VanPort Mosaic Festival)VanPort sat between what is now North Marine Drive to the north and Columbia Slough, bordered by I-5 and North Portland Road. It was built as a company town of sorts for Kaiser Shipyards, which manufactured maritime vessels for the U.S. military during World War II. An executive order from Pres. Roosevelt in 1941 prohibited military contractors from practicing racial discrimination in their employment practices, attracting many Black workers to Vanport – a significant development in a state where exclusion laws were on the books until the mid-1920s.

At its height, Vanport housed about 40,000 workers and their families. After the war, as the population dipped, Portland’s housing authority sought to attract more residents by establishing a college within Vanport  to appeal to veterans pursuing education opportunities under the newly minted G.I. Bill. That college would eventually become Portland State University.

Now, one of the few physical remnants of VanPort is a slab from the foundation of its old movie theater. Some former Black residents recall that Black and White patrons attended the same screenings, but that Black moviegoers were required to sit in the balcony.

It is stories like these that VanPort Mosaic has collected over the past decade with professionally produced videos of former residents, many of them recalling childhoods in the unique city. Some describe a tightly knit community where housing was segregated but Black residents, who at one point comprised nearly half of Vanport’s population, shopped and worked alongside White neighbors.

Not-Too-Distant Past

One of the voices VanPort Mosaic recorded is that of the late Jackie Winters, the first Black Republican elected to the Oregon legislature, who died in 2019.

“It was not a ‘Black community’ – you had Caucasians, your schools were mixed. Joe’s Supermarket that we all shopped at, it was integrated,” Winters said in a recorded interview. “I probably had more adopted aunts and uncles in that kind of a community experience than I think individuals have today. Because individuals then took care of each other.

"So those relationships lasted for decades, from Vanport into Portland – those relationships continued.”

Winters recalled grabbing her dog, Tippy, and her doll, when they were evacuated. “That was my total possessions coming out of the flood,” she said, adding that when they gathered with other Vanport residents at Jefferson High School, the normally docile Tippy guarded the pot roast Winters’ mother had brought along.

“That was a lot of kids and people to absorb in Portland at one time…Albina became Albina because it was a conscious decision that was made to draw those lines so that the individuals would not move all over Portland, but there was a concentrated area for those coming from Vanport,” Winters said. “That was done by design.”

Reclaiming Memories

Gilmore Jones’ mother, grandparents, aunt and uncle lived in Vanport. 

“I think the trauma of the flood really sat with them,” she said. “They didn’t talk about it. For my mom, it wasn’t until (Hurricane) Katrina happened that it actually brought all of that back to her. And when Katrina happened, that’s what really broke open those memories.”

When Laura Lo Forti, multimedia storyteller and co-founder and director of VanPort Mosaic, launched the oral history project, Gilmore Jones said her mother and aunt were ready to remember. 

“They were ready to really talk about their experiences with Vanport and the joy and the suffering they experienced,” Gilmore Jones said. 

In this way, the festival also serves as a response to what can feel like cultural amnesia about Vanport’s existence. 

“In 1961, an ordinance was signed to change the name from Vanport to Delta Park. That was deliberate,” Gilmore Jones said. “It was deemed necessary for the peace and the preservation of Portland…They didn’t want anything associated with the flood, with this public housing project.”

The erasure makes no sense, she said. 

“Why wouldn't Oregon want to really focus on the fact that there were, at its height, 40,000 people in Vanport, and that workforce built over half of the ships (the U.S. used) for World War II? Why wouldn’t we want to lay claim to the building of those ships that helped the war to end? They brought supplies to people, they brought food, they brought help to people – so why wouldn’t you want to own that?”

VanPort Mosaic hosts a number of gatherings for Vanport residents and descendents throughout the year. While funding for culturally specific programs faces unprecedented threats at the federal level, organizers say they will work to continue the festival. 

“We’re in an age where people are saying we need to erase history, we need to erase the difficult parts,” Gilmore Jones said. “And we cannot erase people’s lived experiences, and so let’s not silence our histories, let’s embrace the resilience and the joys in our histories.

“And let’s understand that this is not about their history, it’s about our history – the history of Portland, it’s the history of Oregon, it’s part of the history of the United States…Segregation was in place but people still lived in a very close-knit community. They worked together. They did life together.”

For more information about the VanPort Mosaic Festival and this weekend’s schedule of events, visit https://www.vanportmosaic.org/2025-festival-program.