Manzanar: Ten Thousand People in the Desert

You are on US Highway Three Ninety-Five, in the Owens Valley, approximately ten minutes north of the Death Valley junction at Olancha. The flat ground between the road and the Sierra Nevada, the ground that may look empty to you, held more than ten thousand people from March nineteen forty-two to November nineteen forty-five.

Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten camps the United States government operated to incarcerate Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The people sent here were farmers, fishermen, business owners, teachers, and students. Many were American citizens. Some were elderly people who had lived in California for forty years. Some were children born in California hospitals, whose only country was the one that imprisoned them.

They came to Manzanar in the spring of nineteen forty-two. They built the barracks themselves, initially, from green lumber that warped and cracked in the desert heat, leaving gaps in the walls through which the dust storms blew. The camp crowded families into small shared rooms within each barrack, some housing as many as eight people apiece. Temperatures in the summer reached into the hundreds. Winter nights dropped below freezing. The Sierra Nevada was visible from every barrack window: a wall of stone to the west, spectacular and indifferent.

While the incarcerated residents of Manzanar were detained, their farmland in the Owens Valley and the San Joaquin Valley passed to other hands. Crops left to dry. Equipment sold or taken. When the camps closed in late nineteen forty-five, the people who returned found little of what they had left.

The National Park Service interpretive center at Manzanar, which opened in two thousand four, is among the most honestly designed federal commemoration sites in the United States. The NPS does not soften the word incarceration or the fact of it. The exhibits use primary documents, photographs, and first-person accounts. A reconstructed guard tower stands at its original location.

The site is on your left, if you are driving north, identifiable by a stone sentry building at the entrance. The orchard that internees planted still produces apples. The cemetery obelisk, white concrete, is visible from the road.