The Rodeo Grounds and the Assembly Center

The Salinas Sports Complex on North Main Street, where the California Rodeo Salinas has run every July since nineteen eleven, served a different purpose for two months in the spring and summer of nineteen forty-two.

In April of that year, Executive Order nine zero six six, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February, had set in motion the forced removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast military zones. Japanese Americans in the Monterey Bay Area, including farmers who had been cultivating Salinas Valley soil for a generation, were ordered to report. The Salinas Rodeo Grounds became a temporary detention facility, one of fifteen such hastily constructed assembly centers up and down the West Coast, in which Japanese Americans were held while permanent incarceration camps were built inland.

Between April twenty-seventh and July fourth of nineteen forty-two, three thousand six hundred and eight people were confined at the Salinas Assembly Center. Most were American citizens. They had been charged with no crime. There was no trial, no hearing, no individual determination of risk. The facility was operated by the Wartime Civil Control Administration, and one hundred and forty-two buildings were erected next to the racetrack to house the detainees.

When the assembly center closed on July fourth, the Salinas inmates were transferred primarily to the Poston incarceration camp in Arizona, where they remained for much of the rest of the war.

The economic dimension of the internment had been aggressively promoted by a man named Austin Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Valley Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, who traveled to Washington shortly after Pearl Harbor to urge the removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from the coast. Anson told the Saturday Evening Post in nineteen forty-two that the growers wanted the Japanese gone for selfish reasons. By nineteen forty, Japanese Americans and their American-born children grew almost forty percent of California's vegetables. Their removal transferred that land and that agricultural knowledge to competing growers.

The Salinas Assembly Center was designated California Historical Landmark number nine thirty-four in nineteen eighty. A marker stands at the sports complex site. In the summer of nineteen forty-two, this was not a sports complex. It was a place where American citizens were held behind wire for the crime of being the wrong ancestry at the wrong moment in history.