Creating a Community in Confinement

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Relocation disrupted existing social networks, first through displacement and then through separation between the ten primary internment centers. Evidence revealed through archaeological study of one such site—Amache, Colorado—highlights the strategies of individuals living in these haphazard arrangements for creating more cohesive social groups and contributes to the disciplinary conversation about the critical role neighborhoods can play in community formation among the relocated.

Epilogue

The epilogue explores how the natural world has become a critical element of Japanese Americans’ wartime memories and the public commemoration of the incarceration. It examines pilgrimages to the former camps, National Park Service programs for the preservation of the confinement sites, and private efforts to restore gardens. These diverse acts of remembrance are linked to both the environments of the Pacific Coast and the former incarceration camps. The epilogue also examines a campaign to protect the Manzanar viewshed from solar development. There, the remains of the built environment—barracks, guard towers, barbed wire—coupled with the surrounding terrain and views were critical to efforts to encourage visitors to imagine what confinement must have looked and felt like.