Incarceration -- United States -- Texas -- Crystal City
The Freedom of Information Times, the personal website of Major Arthur D. Jacobs, USAF (Ret.), focuses on Jacobs' research into internment within the United States during and after World War II (Dec. 7, 1941-July 1948). Although the bulk of his research concerns German American internees, some of his material addresses the experiences of Nikkei internees:
Light and Darkness: The comparative analysis of the facilities provided the internees and the treatment accorded them by the American-operated Crystal City Internment Camp (Crystal City, Texas) with that offered by the Japanese operated Civilian Assembly Center at Weihsien, Shantung, China, during World War II.
"Editor's Note: Star-Bulletin reporter Craig Gima visited Crystal City, Texas, this summer in search of his family's history. The city is the site of the World War II internment camp where his father and other family members were held."
Recently republished, Adios to Tears is a personal story of a Japanese-Peruvian internee in United States concentration camps. The book documents the little known story of kidnapping, exile and imprisonment of Peruvians of Japanese ancestry, as human pawns for wartime trade.
Excerpt: "An internment camp site in Texas, known as Crystal City, demands attention because of its unique place among the other internment camps: it housed more than one race—Japanese Americans, Japanese Latin Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, and Indonesians. Also, the only designated ‘family internment camp,’ Crystal City proposed to reunite interned fathers with their wives and children (most Japanese women and children internees were voluntary)<10>, most of whom had not seen each other in two years. Finally, the Department of Justice established Crystal City instead of the WRA, which was created to regulate the relocation sites and the ten internment camps situated throughout the southwest United States. Crystal City is an ideal camp with which to examine the transformation of Japanese ethnicity because of the close community formed there."
"Although much has been written about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents, in camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), less research has been done on the camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In Schools behind Barbed Wire, Karen Riley helps to fill this gap by telling readers the story of the schooling that took place at the Crystal City Family Internment Camp, located in south-central Texas, near the town of Crystal City."
Daniels reviews two books: Riley's Schools Behind Barbed Wire, and Yoon K. Pak's Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle's Japanese Americans during World War II (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002).