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Students lead mission to memorialize Japanese Americans incarcerated at Tulare Fairgrounds during WW2

Assembly Center survivor and Tulare native Alice Ichinaga Nanamura greets Mission Oak history teacher Michael Paul Mendoza.
Joshua Yeager
/
KVPR
Assembly Center survivor and Tulare native Alice Ichinaga Nanamura greets Mission Oak history teacher Michael Paul Mendoza. The high school class is leading a mission to erect a memorial at the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where thousands of Japanese were incarcerated during World War II.

Students at Mission Oak High School in Tulare are not just learning history – they’re making it.

The class is spearheading efforts to memorialize thousands of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at the Tulare County Fairgrounds during World War II.

Senior Kimberly Teixeira had no idea that the fairgrounds served as one of the country’s ten assembly centers, the first stop for many Japanese Americans who were sent to concentration camps.

“It was really eye-opening, it was crazy; it put it more at home and made it more real,” she says. “So before it was just a story, and now it's more history.”

It’s a chapter of history that is often overlooked, says Cultural History teacher Michael Paul Mendoza.

“These students are among a class that learned about this history all this year, and were inspired to bring this history back to the forefront (and) out of the shadows, so to speak, because it's not something that's taught widely in American history,” he says.

Students in Mission Oak High School's Cultural History of the United States class meet Japanese Americans who survived the Valley's assembly centers and their relatives at the Tulare County Fairgrounds.
Joshua Yeager
/
KVPR
Students in Mission Oak High School's Cultural History of the United States class meet Japanese Americans who survived the Valley's assembly centers and their relatives at the Tulare County Fairgrounds.

While Fresno and other fairgrounds that served as assembly centers have memorials that recognize their historical significance, Tulare’s does not.

The class hopes that a planned new memorial will serve as an opportunity for the Tulare County Fair’s 100,000-plus annual visitors to learn and discuss the painful history that happened on the fairgrounds 80 years ago.

“Kids when they come here, I want them to know,” says Mission Oak Graduate Raven Borges. “Of course, kids maybe won’t understand it fully, but they can look and then they can ask their parents, ‘oh, what was this,’ and it's just like a continuing learning experience for people.

“It kind of hit me to just not want to let it fall on flat ears again.”

Borges and his classmates presented their findings about the Tulare Assembly Center’s history to the fair board, which unanimously approved the memorial in April.

The students are now working with assembly center survivors and their relatives on potential designs. Fair officials hope a completed bronze monument will be unveiled within the next two years.

“Students are very much leading the efforts on this,” says the fair’s CEO, Dena Rizzardo. “They're invested in this, and I think that's what's going to drive the community to get invested.”

Prior to the students’ presentation, Rizzardo says she didn’t know much about the history of the grounds that she was hired to lead in 2020.

“I’m not from here. The kids educated me from being out of town,” she says. “But I also think there are people from here that don't realize the history of the fairgrounds being an internment camp.”

As more and more time passes since the concentration camps opened in 1942, that history becomes harder to preserve. Alice Ichinaga Nanamura believes she is the only survivor of the camps who still lives in Tulare.

“I'm the only one here in Tulare that's alive; everyone else is gone,” the 90-year-old Tulare native says. “They have, you know, grandkids and great-grandkids. But I'm the only one that was alive at the time, or young at the time. So that's why I'm glad that (the students) are doing this.”

Alice’s family ran a successful restaurant in Tulare before they were ordered to go to the Fresno Assembly Center in May 1942. She was just 11 years old at the time.

“That was a time when the United States didn't trust us, because we were Japanese. We were on the West Coast; they thought maybe we were sending messages to Japan. So that is why everybody on the West Coast had to leave. So we were not very happy about that,” she says.

She described the cramped and dirty conditions within the camps.

“It was just barrack after barracks after barracks. We had two rooms, that’s all, for 12 of us. It was hard for a while.”

The Ichinaga Nanamuras enlisted a neighbor to watch their car and home before going to the Fresno center. From there, they were sent to Jerome, Arkansas.

“In Fresno, we couldn't send out stuff,” she says. “People could come to the gate, and we would go and say hi or whatever. But they couldn't come in, they couldn't give us anything, you know, bring us anything. That was a bad part.”

The experience was isolating, she adds.

“You couldn't buy anything. You had no money, so that was a hard part for my parents. But they survived… They really survived,” she says.

Last week, Ichinaga Nanamura sat on a panel with other Japanese Americans who lived through the concentration camps and their descendents at the Tulare History Museum. More than 150 people filled the museum to hear first-hand accounts about the Central Valley’s assembly centers.

Mendoza, the Mission Oak teacher, likes to remind his students that history is very much alive. He pointed to the planned memorial and the work his class has done to preserve this history as a perfect example.

“Explaining this class to students at Mission oak, I always end it with a tagline: We don't just learn history, we make history,” he says. “This monument and the work that we're doing in this event at the museum … is an example of how we're helping to make history.”

Joshua Yeager is a Report For America corps reporter covering Kern County for KVPR.