I saw this interesting notice in a 1954 New Mexican newspaper in which the State Purchasing Department offered fifteen “Barracks Buildings” for sale. These “barracks buildings,” the advertisement went on to explain, could be inspected at the “former Jap Camp on West Alameda.” The casual racism in an official government notice was apparently unremarkable in those days.
The advertisement reminded me of Santa Fe’s part in a shameful episode of American history – the imprisonment of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, during World War II. Three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which directed the War Department to evacuate all persons of Japanese ancestry, citizen or not, from the western coast of America (denominated as a “military area”) and relocate them in Assembly Centers or Relocation Centers somewhere in the nation’s interior.
They were not prisoners of war. Most were first generation Americans of Japanese descent, living ordinary lives in California, Oregon and Washington State as shopkeepers, accountants and doctors – until the War Relocation Authority rounded them up and put them in detention camps for the duration of the war. In the hectic days following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, most government leaders quickly accepted the need to “relocate” these Japanese Americans as a wartime necessity.
I say most because a few dissented, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who went along with the plan anyway, and three Supreme Court Justices who saw it as legalized racism [see the dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944)]. Interestingly, FDR publicly declared his opinion at the time that Japanese “skull patterns” were less developed, accounting for the unusually aggressive nature of the Japanese. Decades later, in 1983, Congress established a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to study this matter. The Commission’s report, titled Personal Justice Denied, found no military necessity for the incarceration of Japanese Americans but found the policy was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Congress then authorized payment of $20,000 to each of the internees and President Ronald Reagan issued a public apology.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story is about Santa Fe, which occupied a very special place in the history of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Here’s the short version. Just months after Pearl Harbor, in early 1942, the Department of Justice (not the War Department) bought 80 acres from the New Mexico State Penitentiary. The property, in northwestern Santa Fe next to the river, was an old CCC camp originally built in 1933. New housing was added for the incoming Japanese, basically wood and tarpaper barracks, surrounded by a sturdy fence.
The Santa Fe Camp was not a Relocation or Assembly Center; it was a Justice Department detention camp, specifically designed to house kibei, those Japanese Americans who had been educated in Japan or who had renounced American citizenship – those thought likeliest to cause trouble. Once completed, the Santa Fe Camp received and held 826 Japanese American men, all from California and all of whom were transferred out by the end of summer in 1942. These were quiet times. The internees were considered so docile that they were used by the City of Santa Fe to help groom the local golf course. In exchange, the internees were allowed to play golf on the course – a privilege only a few Santa Feans enjoyed. For the rest of 1942, the camp was home to several hundred German and Italian nationals who happened to be in the United States at the outbreak of the war. This group also included several South American Japanese, most from Peru.By the end of 1943, the Camp held about 2100 Japanese Americans, some of whom were considered troublemakers in other camps.
By 1944, internees across the nation began to chafe at their condition and began a series of protests, some of them quite violent. In March 1945, some internees at the Santa Fe Camp staged a noisy but otherwise civil protest when they were ordered to turn in sweatshirts decorated with rising sun motifs. The protest leaders were forcibly removed and the protest turned into a full-fledged riot. No one was injured but rocks were thrown and a few buildings were vandalized. Eventually, tear gas and clubs were used to quell the riot. Over 300 internees were put in stockade or simply removed from the Santa Fe Camp and transferred to even more restrictive camps. There were no more riots at the Santa Fe Camp for the duration of the war.
When the war against the Japanese was decisively ended in August 1945, the Santa Fe Camp was used as a holding and processing center for other camps and the Santa Fe Camp remained active until about May 1946 when the last of the internees was transferred out. Interestingly, most Santa Feans I’ve asked about those days of the Japanese Internment Camp recall very little about it and the local newspapers of the time rarely mentioned the camp. But there remains tangible evidence of Japanese presence in Santa Fe. Rosario cemetery has graves for two Japanese American men who died during internment. One named Sudo, the other Yoshikawa.
And, in 1999, despite protest from some Bataan Death March veterans, the City of Santa Fe authorized the installation of a bronze plaque, set in a large granite boulder at the Frank Ortiz City Park, to mark the site of the Santa Fe Detention Camp. The installation ceremony, in 2003, was attended by some former internees and the descendants of many others.
By the way, the barracks buildings were ultimately removed and the remainder of the 80 acres was cleared to build the Casa Solana subdivision, a neighborhood of pleasant, sturdy homes spread over the site of what was once Santa Fe’s notorious “Jap Camp.”
