Crystal City: The Family Internment Camp Nobody Talks About

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two is among the most documented civil liberties failures in American history. Less known is that the federal government also interned German Americans, Italian Americans, and Latin Americans of Japanese, German, and Italian descent, and that the main facility for family internment was not in California or the Pacific Coast states. It was in Crystal City, Texas, population around six thousand, in the middle of the South Texas brush country.

The Crystal City Family Internment Camp operated from December of nineteen forty-three through February of nineteen forty-eight, longer than the war itself. It was the only camp designed to hold entire families, and it held people from all three Axis-nationality groups together. At its peak, more than three thousand people were confined here, including a significant number of people brought from Latin American countries at the request of the United States government, which pressured Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and other nations to round up and deport their Japanese-descended residents so they could be held in the United States and used as exchange hostages in prisoner swaps with Japan.

The camp had schools, gardens, swimming pools, and rudimentary amenities compared to the more severe prison camps, but it was still a prison camp: the families inside could not leave, could not communicate freely, and had been stripped of their property and livelihoods before arriving. Some of the interned Latin Americans had never been to Japan and did not speak Japanese. After the war, many were pressured to go to Japan rather than return to the countries that had expelled them.

The site today is a public park with a historical marker and a water tower that dates to the camp period. Descendants of former internees have organized reunions here, and researchers have worked to document the Latin American deportee story in particular. A National Historic Landmark designation was added to the site in two thousand eighteen. The camp's operation under the Justice Department rather than the War Department means it fell through the cracks of the Japanese American internment narrative for decades.