America for Americans by Erika Lee

Author:Erika Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

AFTER THREE WEEKS on a US Army transport ship, the Shibayamas arrived in New Orleans in the spring of 1944. They were taken to the INS facility, where they were forced to remove all of their clothing and stand naked in groups while they were sprayed with insecticide. They were also officially processed by US immigration authorities. In what one INS camp commander later acknowledged as legal “skullduggery” made possible only during wartime, the INS classified the new arrivals as “undocumented immigrants” or “illegal aliens” who were entering the country without valid visas and passports.51

Japanese Latin Americans were then sent by train to one of six “enemy alien” camps run by the INS. The largest were in Texas at Kenedy, Seagoville, and Crystal City. The others were at Kooskia, Idaho; Missoula, Montana; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Art Shibayama’s family was sent to Crystal City, the largest detention camp located about 120 miles southwest of San Antonio. Known as the family camp, it eventually held 962 families, most of whom were Japanese, who lived in shared temporary housing units with one, two, or three other families. In total, there were three thousand to four thousand people in the camp.

As “interned foreign nationals,” internees could claim some protections and minimal standards in treatment and conditions in the camps under the Geneva Convention. Each housing unit had cooking facilities, cold running water, and basic furniture and furnishings. There were stores, schools, a hospital, and churches. A 1943 US government film about the Crystal City camp profiled healthy, active detainees living peaceably in Texas where “the sun shines practically every day of the year with a cool breeze from the Gulf in the evening.” With roomy accommodations, bountiful gardens, and healthy and plentiful food, the film’s narrator explained, the wartime detainees “lived, worked, and played under traditional American standards of decent and humane treatment.” The camera caught children playing in the camp swimming pool, smiling delivery men bringing fresh milk, and an armed guard waving from atop the guardhouse.52

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